The Bull Creek Summer

Arthur sat on his porch, the morning sun warming his arthritis-knotted knees. His daughter Mary had left another bottle of vitamins on the kitchen counter—orange-labeled, promise-filled capsules that represented her love in its most practical form. At eighty-two, he took them without complaint, though secretly he believed the real medicine was sitting here, watching the mist lift off the land.

He closed his eyes and was twelve again, swimming in Bull Creek behind the family farmhouse. The water had been cold as mountain runoff, clear as glass, hiding who-knows-what in its depths. His sister Elsie would scream from the bank that she'd seen a water moccasin, though they never found one.

That summer—the summer of 1952—his father had bought a bull. Old Bessie had been a gentle creature, but this new bull, a massive black beast they called Thunder, had arrived with a temperament as stormy as his name. The day Thunder broke through the fence and charged toward the creek where Arthur and Elsie swam, their father had leaped from the porch like a man half his age.

Arthur remembered watching, dripping wet and terrified, as his father stood between them and the beast. Not with a whip or a gun, but with a bucket of corn and a voice so calm it soothed the animal's rage. 'Easy now, Thunder. Easy.' The bull had snorted, lowered his massive head, and eaten.

'That's the secret,' his father had told them later, while their mother wrung her hands and made them all swallow vitamins from a brown bottle. 'Most things that seem like bulls, they just need feeding. Most troubles just need patience.'

Now Arthur swallowed his daughter's vitamins with water from the same well, though the bull was long gone and the creek had dried up in the drought of '89. His father was gone, Elsie too. But here he sat, feeding the patience his father had planted, watching the sun rise over land that held them all.

Mary came out with coffee. 'You took your vitamins?'

'I did,' Arthur smiled. 'And I'm still swimming, honey. Just swimming through different waters now.'

She didn't understand—how could she?—but she squeezed his shoulder and went back inside. The bull had been right to stand his ground, Arthur thought. Some things were worth guarding. Some lessons worth swimming through time to keep.