scott flinchum

Scott Flinchum lives in Southwest Virginia with his wife and children. He is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.

an excerpt from “THE canoe”

The old man’s skill with an oar was still unquestioned. His strokes were swift and definitive. The power his old arms generated was enough to get them moved off the bank and into the current with little wasted movement. No mean feat for any person half his age. Let alone a man of eighty. But there were hidden stories in the tan leathered skin of his hands.

Tales that told of countless hours in the Little Pigeon River-way. Long days on the water as a boy not much older than his grandson — who sat and watched the old timer work now. Days spent searching for pirate treasure. Lone quests undertaken to save fair maidens. Perilous journeys to rescue fellow watermen from sirens calling from their treacherous rocky outposts. Nights spent sleeping under the stars. Eyes fixed heavenward, gazing up at celestial multitudes too numerous to comprehend. Ghost lights as infinite as Abraham’s lineage was said to be.

The old man saw all these things in his mind’s eye moving like an inner zoetrope. Rushing years like a spinning axis, where each turn of the wheel added a new number to his individual chronology and subtracted additional tomorrows from his personal tally sheet. All these recollections were little more than a flash that faded with each stroke of his oar.

All of his youth and young manhood had passed in a similarly instantaneous manner as far as the old man was concerned. Even his middle years had seemed to move with the propulsive force of some untended rocket being shot into a void from which return was not just unlikely but preposterous to consider. He knew about such things — the unlikelihood of survival — because he had been in the business of combat for the majority of his working life. He had devoted himself to a definitiveness of thought, of action. Death had been his life’s work.

What time he had been given was not enough from his perspective. Would never be enough. Still, he remained thankful for the time he had had. The life he had led. By his own reckoning there wasn’t much more of it he would be afforded. Each second was a precious gift that he aimed to unwrap and use before the unseen claws of death took hold of him for good. Which is exactly why he was on the water now. To put what good he had left in him to some use.

“I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a tale from my youth. It’s not a nice story . . . the most interesting ones never are.”

His movements had slowed considerably now. The pass of his oar through the water less workmanlike, more contemplative now — as if movements could be said to hold within themselves the quality of the person enacting them, which, by the old man’s measure, they certainly could, otherwise how could you explain the foresight an animal had when you turned your gun hand just so? Or, a person, for that matter.

The boy watched him from out of a trance. The rhythmic motions of his grandfather’s arms — hairy, save for the barren patches of alien looking white keloid scars that decorated them — moving in time with the burbling current. Each stroke of the oar as it sluiced through the water appeared to the boy to be moving aside in deference. His grandfather like a living Moses reborn, giving the Red Sea a bit of a nudge so as to halve itself that much quicker for the coming of the Lord’s wrath.

The strangeness of that thought and the image of the old man, whose wild thinning gray hair stood in all directions as the wind passed over it, made him want to laugh. He opened his mouth to do just that but was surprised to find that he couldn’t manage it. In fact, it was hard to do much more than turn his eyes up to the old man’s pinched and wrinkled sun-blotched face.

The boy blinked heavy lidded eyes up at this fey boatman, feeling as if he were dreaming but somehow aware he was not. A torpor laid over him for which he could not account. The two of them drifting along. A lone craft on a Stygian tributary.

His grandfather had roused him from a nap a short while ago. He may have only been twelve, but he was not prone to napping. His mind felt muddled now. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, just . . . different. He also seemed to be curiously aware of his body. The ghost-like twitching of his limbs. The gauzy vision. The sound of his heart that thrummed in his ears like an out-of-sync cycle on a washing machine. He lingered over this last thought. He imagined the corpuscles that made up his blood as tiny articles of clothing spinning around inside him. Once again, he attempted to laugh. He still couldn’t manage it.

“Now this story I’m about to tell you,” his grandfather’s voice said, sounding at once near and far away, “is from before your father was born. It’s from before the town you live in now grew up to the curious concrete scar that it’s become.”

The old man picked his oar up from the water and seemed to relax. He took in their surroundings. The dark water. The muddy banks. The herd of lowing cattle that patrolled the fence line on a nearby field. All of it felt familiar. Peaceful. Then, he remembered why he was out here, and took up his story again with a grimness of the recently condemned.

“Most of it was still river bottom and forest,” he called over his shoulder to his grandson, “with mountains propped up over all of it.” He grunted and then set the oar in motion once again. “Now the river’s polluted. The forest has been developed as they say. Them mountains,” he said briefly taking the dripping oar out of the water to waggle it towards collapsed looking rock spires far in the distance, “have million-dollar homes perched on top of them.”

The old man paused to look over his shoulder. The boy looked as docile and placid as the cows languidly staring at them from behind their rusted wire boundary. He kept the wooden tool in his hands working through the water as he watched his grandson. “It’s a damn shame is all I’m saying.”

The boy blinked. The slow crawl of his lid’s closing momentarily broke the glossy eyed stare that held the old man in front of him. A thin line of drool had begun to form at one corner of his half-opened mouth. The old man nodded as if the boy had agreed with him, then turned back to his work and the telling of his tale.

“The last I’d seen of this place was in nineteen hundred and sixty. As soon as I turned eighteen, I went downtown — wasn’t more than a couple traffic lights and ten or twelve buildings at that time — and marched my way into the recruiting center. Got my physical, filled out my paperwork, and signed on the dotted line.” He picked his oar up again and took in a deep lungful of air. “Shipped me off in eight weeks — which was shorter than they had been doing for basic training — and went di-rect to Viet-nam.”

The boy moaned.

The old man glanced over his shoulder again. He scowled.

The boy’s dark eyes tracked him. He tried to moan again but found it hard to muster the energy it required. The old man turned away once more, likely realizing the same thing. He passed his oar to the opposite side of the canoe. “Won’t be too long now son…” The old man’s words had softened. “. . . may have given you more than I intended. For that,” he half-turned and flapped a hand behind him, “I’m sorry.” He shifted back around to better navigate a half-submerged tree. “Had to be done though…had to be.”

Read more of “The Canoe” in Solum Journal Volume IV.