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an hour up Brices Creek, as
he usually did. When he finished he changed into his work clothes,
warmed some bread rolls from the day before, grabbed a couple of
apples and washed his breakfast down with two cups of coffee.
He worked on the fencing again, repairing the posts. It was an Indian
summer, the temperature over eighty degrees, and by lunchtime he
was hot and tired and glad of the break.
He ate at the creek because the mullets were jumping. He liked to
watch them jump three or four limes and glide through the air before
vanishing into the brackish water. For some reason he had always
been pleased by the fact that their instinct hadn�t changed for
thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of years.
Sometimes he wondered if man�s instincts had changed in that lime
and always concluded that they hadn�t. At least in the basic, most
primal ways. As far as he could tell, man had always been aggressive,
always striving to dominate, trying to control the world and
everything in it. The war in Europe and Japan proved that.
He stopped working a little after three and walked to a small shed
that sat near his dock. He went in, found his fishing pole, a couple of
lures and some live crickets he kept on hand, then walked out to the
dock, baited his hook and cast his line.
Fishing always made him reflect on his life, and he did so now.
After his mother died he could remember spending his days in a
dozen different homes. For one reason or another, he stuttered badly
as a child and was teased for it. He began to speak less and less, and
by the age of five he wouldn�t speak at all. When he started classes,
his teachers thought he was retarded and recommended that he be
pulled out of school.
Instead, his father took matters into his own hands. He kept him in
school and afterwards made him come to the timber yard where he
worked, to haul and stack wood. �It�s good that we spend some time
together,� he would say as they worked side-by-side, �just like my
daddy and I did.�
His father would talk about animals or tell stories and legends
common to North Carolina. Within a few months Noah was speaking
again, though not well, and his father decided to teach him to read
with books of poetry. �Learn to read this aloud and you�ll be able to
say anything you want to.� His father had been right again, and by the
following year Noah had lost his stutter. But he continued to go to the
timber yard every day simply because his father was there, and in the
evenings he would read the works of Whitman and Tennyson aloud as
his father rocked beside him. He had been reading poetry ever since.
When he got a little older he spent most of his weekends and
vacations alone. He explored the Croatan forest in his first canoe,
following Brices Creek for twenty miles until he could go no further,
then hiked the remaining miles to the coast. Camping and exploring
became his passion, and he spent hours in the forest, whistling quietly
and playing his guitar for beavers and geese and wild blue herons.
Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things manmade,
was good for the soul, and he�d always identified with poets.
Although he was quiet, years of heavy lifting at the timber yard
helped him excel in sports, and his athletic success led to popularity.
He enjoyed the football and track meets, and, though most of his
teammates spent their free time together as well, he rarely joined
them. He had a few girlfriends in school but none had ever made an
impression on him. Except for one. And she came after graduation.
Allie. His Allie.
He remembered talking to Fin about Allie after they left the festival
that first night, and Fin had laughed. Then he�d made two predictions:
first that they would fall in love, and second that it wouldn�t work out.
There was a slight tug at his line and Noah hoped for a large-mouth
bass, but the tugging eventually stopped and, after reeling his line in
and checking the bait, he cast again.
Fin ended up being right on both counts. Most of the summer she
had to make excuses to her parents whenever they wanted to see each
other. It wasn�t that they didn�t like him�it was that he was from a
different class, too poor, and they would never approve if their
daughter became serious with someone like him. �I don�t care what
my parents think, I love you and always will,� she would say. �We�ll
find a way to be together.�
But in the end they couldn�t. By early September the tobacco had
been harvested and she had no choice but to return with her family to
Winston-Salem. �Only the summer is over, Allie, not us,� he�d said
the morning she left. �We�ll never be over.� But they were. For a
reason he didn�t understand, the letters he wrote went unanswered.
He decided to leave New Bern to help get her off