And Bobby wouldn’t go, he was stuck in California, between there and Oregon, hauling strawberries or cows or mattresses or something. It fell to me to go back, as I’d always known it would.

It wasn’t cold that day. January in Mississippi sometimes has all these sunshiny weeks, that false spring when you think it’s all over. You can catch catfish in the river, or crappie in the spillway. I guess anything wears off after a while.

The cold I’d gone through that morning was only a memory, and when I got out of the truck and stepped into the woods I knew I was going to hear it, just like Bobby’s daddy had known that the machine guns wouldn’t kill him on the beach at Iwo Jima.

I don’t remember walking up there. Suddenly I was leaning on a tree close to my stand. I stood my rifle against the tree and stepped upon the picker spindles high enough to look at it and see what kind of shape it was in. It was covered with leaves, and the squirrels had sat there and cut their hickory nuts and acorns, leaving their tattered scraps behind for me.

oooooooooh pleeeeeeese helllllllllllp meeeeeeeeeeee

The wind soughed through the naked branches and I saw that winter wasn’t gone, that the nights were still cold. I turned my wooden feet toward the sound, and I followed it. Down through the hollow, over two ridges, and down again, into a little seepy place that I’d never seen before. I stood there for a long time, just at the edge of it, before I went in. I knew there was nothing in there that was going to hurt me. I leaned the rifle against a bush.

The ground was soft, spongy. The spring came out of the side of the hill and the water lay over the ground in a thin coat. A thin sheet of ice in the winter, on those mornings of three degrees. A place that would crack and break, give way beneath old, trusting feet, beneath eyes and judgment that weren’t as good as they used to be.

When a turtle dies, his shell lies close to the ground. Over the years the scales come off one by one, the tortoiseshell panes falling, the leaves of the years covering them, until only the naked white dome of bone remains to be seen. People pick them up for ashtrays, but first they turn them over with their feet, as I did this one.