My brother didn’t make it, and I watched him go. He tried. It didn’t seem that far. Dewey Lake was only thirty, maybe forty, yards across and shallow near its banks. We thought by tying a rope to an upper limb of that old cottonwood we could swing out over the cove and drop into the shallows on the opposite side. But it never got shallow there, and he drowned just yards from the shore.

He fought hard but neither of us were strong swimmers, just a couple of farmer’s kids dallying our way through summer that year, two mulberry stained mop heads munching wild onions while we built our hideaway in the woods. He was eleven and older than me by two years.

Only moments after he let go the end of that rope he was beneath Dewey’s shimmering skin, and it seemed like forever before his face broke the surface again. He erupted gagging and coughing. His arms flailed and splashed. He looked back at me with bulging eyes, and that’s when I became like a rabid dog. I skittered up and down the bank looking for something, anything, I could throw to my brother to save his life. If only I could’ve found something.

He didn’t cry out for help, and I guess it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The nearest house was miles away. We said our good-byes in those moments while I watched. The water pulled him under twice, and twice his face exploded onto its surface, gasping for that precious commodity.

It ended suddenly, too peacefully. Ripples tapped my ankles, telegraphing what fools we’d been. The water became tranquil beneath a bleach white sky. The humidity closed in, a locust called, and I stood dazed and shivering in my rag-tag jean shorts.

At first I thought it was all a joke. I studied the opposite bank, my surroundings, expecting him to jump out from behind a tree and surprise me at any moment. I cupped my hand around my mouth and called his name again and again. Finally, I found a watermelon-sized boulder at the water’s edge, slime oozing from its crevices, and sat on it to pray. A dove cooed four or five times. I guess she probably saw the whole thing.

A half hour later I began stumbling back through the swarms of gnats and noises those woods sustained. I followed the trail my brother and I had left just hours earlier and met our footprints, embedded in the mud, walking toward me. That was the first time I was ever afraid in those woods. Every sound, every shadow, was cause for me to stop and stare into the surrounding, green-gray hue. Light came in the form of spears hurled at me from openings in the canopy overhead. I quickened my pace once before breaking to run and never stopped again until I reached St. George around noon.

I came first to the only store our town had, a place called Graham’s Mercantile, and found Vern Graham where you’d expect to find him on any hot day in August, sitting on the limestone steps in front of his store, chewing tobacco and spitting. Nobody in St. George liked Vern and if there had been another store in town everyone would’ve gone there. Word had it he’d lived in Chicago for a time. His lofty disposition suggested he thought that made him worldly instead of pompous, which is what we took him for.

The story went that he was passing through town, liked its quaintness, the simplicity of its people, and decided to stay. No one knew what he was doing so far from home. Rumors of spousal abuse and a nasty divorce dogged him for the first couple of years he lived in St. George. He bought an abandoned, three-story warehouse, the tallest building in town, cleaned it up and turned its ground floor into a mercantile. The upper floors became his home and his silhouette, back lit by a table lamp and framed by muslin curtains, stared down at us each evening from his third floor bedroom.

I believe he thought by challenging our small town beliefs he could change us forever. Remarks and innuendos made at the point of sale were designed to arouse our curiosity and make us ask. At that point he’d attempt to educate us to his way of thinking.

Daddy once told me, “Any man who thinks he can change anyone is a damn fool,” and, of course, Vern Graham changed no one. He sat on the front steps of his store, waiting for customers while he chewed tobacco. Stray dogs would stop to lick the juice at his feet, and his face would twist into a wry grin. His teeth yellowed and his hair fell out while he waited for his following.

I could see him from blocks away as I approached, hunched over the sidewalk with his tomato stained apron hanging between his legs. His head rested on his fists, the skin on his face was squished up around his cheekbones. I made my way to him, slowing the last twenty yards or so, proceeding cautiously while I tried to catch my breath. Word had it he hated children, and he neither looked up nor acknowledged my presence as I drew closer. It was evident from the saliva pool beneath him he’d been there for some time already. For a while, neither of us spoke.

Finally, he lifted his head and stared at the tracks on the opposite side of Main Street, where the old steam locomotives had once run. “It’s gonna’ be a hot bastard again today,” he said. “I suppose the lake’s already filled with all you little runts. Pisses me off. A man can’t even go there anymore without havin’ to listen to a bunch of you brats out there screamin’ and hollerin’.” He looked at me, and his voice grew louder. “And don’t tell me you haven’t been there because you smell like a damn fish!”

I began to cry, and his eyebrows peaked, as if he were surprised his words might have affected someone. Clearing his throat, he told me I was too old to be crying over something as little as what he’d said, and, hell, he hadn’t meant anything by it anyhow.

“I don’t cry over nothing you got to say, mister,” I told him.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “That so? Then what’s the problem?”

“I think my brother drowned.”

His gaze shifted to the puddle beneath him. I could see his mouth working the tobacco. “Splat,” the juice hit the sidewalk. “What makes you think so?”

I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my wrist. “He went under Dewey a while back and never came back up.

He shook his head and sighed and there was a feint humming in my brain, like I’d just walked into a hive of bees. I longed for someone to tell me everything was going to be okay, even if it was only Vern Graham.

“You told anyone else?” he finally said

I said I hadn’t.

He stood, and the cowbell on the front door of his store clanked when he went inside. He plucked the phone off the counter and dialed, and I could barely hear his muffled voice through the plate-glass window. He set the handset back in its cradle and stared at me through the glass. He walked to the back of the store and returned in a couple of minutes with a bottle of grape soda and a box of Cracker Jacks.

“Here.” He handed them to me. “You’re supposed to wait here until the sheriff arrives,” he said, and sat down on the stoop beside me. We waited as long as I can remember ever waiting for anything.

Grasshoppers flitted back and forth in the tall weeds across the road, sounding like zippers on wet dungarees. The sun baked down like a great dehydrator, drawing the sugary moisture off my lips the moment I lowered the bottle from my mouth. On any other day grape soda would have been a treat. Then, the flavor was bland.

The wind gusted down Main Street and a dust devil drew itself up suddenly, whirling and throwing dirt around.

It got to within twenty feet of us when Vern reached over and pulled my head against his chest, shielding my eyes with his hand. “Go on! Get out of here!” he hollered. “This boy has had enough!” The devil crumbled in the street. It wasn’t so hard to understand then, that the devil would hear Vern Graham and be afraid.

Every now and then he got up and walked to the middle of the street to look for the cloud of dust that would tell us the sheriff from the next county over was nearing. We didn’t have a sheriff in St. George, hardly ever needed one.

Eventually the sun took its toll and I laid my head on Vern’s soiled apron and dreamed. In my dream, my brother didn’t drown, but was able to draw oxygen from the water like a fish. I was standing on the bank, holding Vern’s hand, when he rose from the depths of Dewey Lake. He stood upon the surface of the water, beckoning me forward.

I would’ve gone in too, if Vern hadn’t held me back. “Go on! Get out of here!” he hollered. “This boy has had enough!” Grinning, my brother sank slowly beneath the surface.

The sheriff finally arrived with my parents and when daddy saw me he ripped me off Vern’s lap, out of my sleep. Vern stood and fidgeted like he wanted to say something, but everybody ignored him on account of they were all paying attention to me, asking me questions, and mama started to cry.

We rode in the sheriff’s car. Mama looked small, daddy irritated, the sheriff bored. No one said anything except the sheriff, who looked back in the rear view mirror once and asked, “You folks okay?” He never did turn on the siren.

I led them to where my brother had drowned. By then his body had surfaced and was floating in the shallows among the cattails. Dragonflies were flitting over his face. Mama cried out when she saw him, and daddy held her tight against him to keep her from dropping.

The sheriff drew his hanky from his back pocket, wiped the sweat from his eyes and blew his nose before wading out. “Seems like this water gets one every couple years,” he said. He grasped my brother’s wrists and pulled him onto the bank. I sat on the same slime coated rock I’d sat on earlier that morning, thinking my brother was as big and white as I’d ever seen him. The ambulance arrived and the men in white loaded him onto the gurney, then slid him inside before driving away.

St. George was never a large town. I looked back once during the funeral service and saw my brother’s entire fifth grade class sitting in one pew. The boys looked nervous, clawing at white, starched collars and black ties cinched around their necks. The young girls sniffled, dabbing at their eyes with lacy handkerchiefs the way they’d seen their mamas do.

Daddy made sure we were all too busy to talk in the weeks following. In late September it started to rain and didn’t stop for weeks. Work in the fields halted, and we all spent more time inside.

One evening at supper, daddy turned and looked me square in the eyes. “What did you and Vern Graham talk about that day?”

I shrugged. “Nothing.”

“He must have said something.”

I blinked and looked down at my plate of corn bread and black eyed peas, trying hard to remember that day. “He scared a devil,” I finally offered. I could feel Daddy glaring at me until my cheeks stung.

“He talked down to you, did he? Is that what he done?”

“He didn’t talk down to me,” I mumbled.

Daddy shoveled some peas into his mouth and frowned while he chewed. I watched the muscle on his jawbone mash those peas to pulp before he swallowed, hard. He pointed his fork at me. “I guess that’s okay, you going to him under those circumstances, but here after you come to us, understand?” He waved his fork between mama and himself.

“Why?”

Daddy snorted. “Never mind why. What the hell’s the matter with you, boy? Just do as you’re told!”

And I didn’t know. I didn’t know what the hell the matter with me was, but I’ve done as I’m told ever since.

Sometime later, I went into Graham’s to buy a soda. I felt like I was being watched, and looked up to find Vern smiling. Maybe he thought we’d be friends after all we’d been through together. Maybe he thought one afternoon made up for a lifetime. I walked out of his store and never went back. Daddy would’ve approved.

We moved away from St. George not long after that. In time I graduated from high school and entered college, where I discovered I wanted to be a journalist. After receiving my degree, I was offered a job working for a newspaper in Chicago. I gave myself to the paper, advancing as I grew older. When I turned sixty-four, I retired. I never married.

Who was it that said a single life is a lonely life? Well, whoever it was, they’re wrong. These days I stay plenty busy, visiting the library, reading books, drinking coffee with my friends. I keep my sixteenth floor apartment clean as a whistle and raise goldfish in an aquarium on a table by the window. Chicago is a gray city.

Last year, I read a book titled Ghost Towns of North America. It said St. George had become one, so I went back to see if it was true. I went back to those woods where my brother drowned. Dewey Lake was all dried up, but I found a small boulder that may have been the one I sat on back then. Pieces of it had broken loose, were strewn about, so I tucked one into my pocket to take back home with me. Those woods are still humid, and while that’s good for the foliage and mosquitoes, it wasn’t for me. I sweated too much.

I drove into town and sat on the same limestone steps Vern Graham used to sit on, outside a warehouse that’s crumbling and not much good for anything now. I thought a lot while I was there, praised God Vern’s life wasn’t mine, thanked him for the morals and values I was raised on. Those tobacco stains are still on that sidewalk, forever I think.

The devil came down Main Street right on schedule. Spit dust in my eyes and snapped my hat off my head. I tried to run after it, but it was already gone. I grabbed that piece of rock in my pocket and threw it after it as hard as I could. I know I’ll never see that hat again. It’s true what the book said. St. George is a ghost town, and I think I’m going to cry.