Creeker

Kale Hensley

Once, my dad had a big, ugly truck. I didn’t like it when he took me to school in it. The sides were spray painted different shades of blue. The horn, attached to the top, looked like it was meant for the Jolly Green Giant’s bike. The only time I liked the truck was when we drove on Route 10. On the way home from my mamaw’s, my dad would let me slip the clutch—show me what gears we needed to be in. If I asked, we’d drive real fast. If you think 100 mph is fast. He’d press his tennis shoe to the gas and we’d roar through the mountains. Outside the windows, the world began to look like it must’ve when some greater hand began the strokes. A green so hazy it bled to blue. The way the creeks here do. 

As far as I know, it’s creek. Maybe my dad said crik, but it’s been ten years since I’ve heard his voice. He’s closer to worm poop than he is to God by now. I know people on the fringes of the mountains, specifically those cousins in Virginia like to claim it’s crik. But in the same breath they say shit like I’m from appa-lay-sha (side eye) and avoid all those ugly stereotypes in the process. If you want to know which stereotypes I am referring to, just go read that nasty tweet made by Bette Midler in the midst of a pandemic. I am sure it is still there. People are too eager to log their ignorance on the internet rather than swallow their rotting teeth.

But I understand, Bathhouse Betty. I used to sing in the bathtub too. 

—

Sometimes, my sister was in there with me. Easier that way. We liked to lay on our stomachs and see how high we could push the crests of the water, launching ourselves like torpedoes with matching bowl cuts. As my mother dried me off, she would always sing the same song, “You Are My Sunshine.” My mom used to curl her hair while I studied my reflection in the faucet of the tub, humming some hymn I imagine. I wish I had realized it sooner. 

The bathtub is really a womb with a view. The mildewed palm trees of our shower curtain ached toward the spackle. Pareidola is the ability to find a face in the inanimate. I used to lie on my back till the water grew cold, searching for a pair of kissing faces in the ceiling.

—

Maybe many mouths ago, it was crik. When the census documented a relative of mine in Mingo county named Pyrrhus, but pronounced Paris. Language is more chameleon than we care to admit. And isolation did not breed this language, family did. Let’s go ahead and dispel the nonsense that mountains isolate their people. No, they celebrate them. They raise them physically, spiritually. And the creeks, well, they lower us. 

I wish I could show you how badly I wanted a creek baptism. I’d do a whole routine—twirl blood-red ribbons and for good measure, I’d throw in a cartwheel too. I want to be convincing. As convincing as the water. When you went under and came back up, you could feel it in your jowls that something changed.

—

The first time I was baptized, I did not have to go down alone. My friend Makayla, two years younger, donned the silk white robe with me. I wore nothing but my panties and I see them mostly clearly in the memory—white with pink fringes and rainbow polka-dots. 

This detail is the clearest because it made me the most vigilant. Once the water touched my robe, all was transparent. My dumb twelve-year-old boobs because they didn’t look the way I believed they were supposed to.  My gut that I’d been told by my grandpa was far too big, brooched with a deep button. And my panties, a sight which should have been only for me. 

Once the water swallowed me, I was on display for everybody in the congregation. This must have been before the church had work done. The carpet still that bright, impish green. The seats an unremarkable tan, boasting butterscotch candies if you did not mind the task of searching. 

But there was a woman waiting for me at the edge of the pool, a green towel to swaddle me. As if she were my mother. 

She could have been my mother.

—

It is possible that God did not give me a creek baptism for my childish atrocities I committed in smaller streams. When I attended a Freewill Baptist church up Striker, I’d climb in a van with the other poor kids for Monday night youth group. The man who drove the van was named Ronnie. He could drive with his elbows, and I would tell him about how I didn’t like being called fat by my family. His day job was loading vending machines and told me he could relate. 

Before the service would start, the kids would play games like red-rover, red-rover or wall ball in the parking lot. The rules of wall-ball go like this: someone supplies the mutant-colored tennis ball, someone throws the tennis ball against the chalky stone of the church (this does not have to be the same person who supplies the tennis ball), and whoever caught it next got to throw it. It was gloriously simple. 

If we did not have a tennis ball, we played in the ditch out back, searching for frogs but usually only finding fingernail-sized tadpoles swimming in dirt. I’ll tell you of my awful. I used to squeeze them between my finger and thumb. A curiosity that only bred death. Like God and his whole “earth in seven days” schtick. 

Come on, we both knew how it would end. And we did it anyway.

—

Like the companies who moved in and let their run-off into our water. I used to swim in it up Decker’s Creek. I’d skimp around in my swimsuit with my gut hanging out, as pawpaw would say, slip on the same stones that still caught me, teeter over the waterfall and consider jumping but lack the guts. 

Atop the creek water floated these manmade clouds, the color of sherbet, the color of the dollar push pops my mom would bring home from Speedway after a long work day at the bank. I paid to mind to it at first. But the next morning I woke up and my skin was so soft. And my coworker said oh so casually, “Yeah, because of the mine run-off.” 

It makes the skin so soft. 

—

The creek has this magic over me. 

Once, it made me shit myself. I must have been six or below, give or take. I think we were looking for crawdads. My uncle’s first wife held my hand to keep me from falling on the rocks. Because for some reason, children tend to fall on the rocks. And as one does, I felt that warmth in my stomach. And my feet felt fifty degrees too cold. Numb except for the locomotion of my guts. 

Luckily, my uncle’s wife was a mother. And she hosed me off in the shower, only filled the tub up halfway with warm water, washed me only with VO5 shampoo. I liked taking baths at my mamaw’s house because she had a plastic sliding door on her tub. For a moment, a little girl could distort the entire world. She could remove her and her bathwater and her reflection in the faucet. She could belong only to herself, to that echo made by water brushing faux porcelain. 

—

I am far from these creeks now. Or criks, whatever. I think the primadonna of mountain speech is the intrusive r. When my mom says I’m gonna warsh up those dishes. Warsh some laundry. 

Look what warshed up.

I can hear it almost as well as I can smell it. Distinctly dirty. Metallic. But earthy too, damp. When I swallowed too much, it tasted just fine. I know my body would say otherwise. But I had a mother who didn’t sing of moderation. She sang of trees, planted by the water.