When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin Read Free Book Online

Creek when Charlie asked, "You see the dam yet?"
    "Five or six more pulls."
    "We're getting slower. We'd better pick it up if we're gonna try to win the Burton Rally this year. I hear those Atlanta guys are coming back."
    The Burton Rally was a bridge-to-dam race that Charlie and I had competed in for the last four years, placing third the first year and second every year since. Our nemesis was a duo of exOlympians from Atlanta. They were good, but we were gaining. Or at least they were letting us think we were. Their advantage, aside from the fact that they were just better, was a Kevlar boat that weighed about half as much as ours. But we liked our boat. For one race a year, the HMS Emma managed just fine.
    Charlie pulled hard and jolted us forward.
    I asked, "You feeling rested this morning?"
    Charlie leaned in closer and placed one finger in the air. "I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do."
    I smiled. What Shakespeare did for me, Helen Keller did for Charlie.
    Gliding atop the water is a freeing experience-it's all future, all possibility, where the record of the past lasts only a few seconds and then is gone forever. At the dam we sat up, coasted, and drank the air. The only sound was the alarm on my heart-rate monitor telling me I was outside my target zone. Charlie heard the alarm and smiled, but said nothing because his alarm was sounding too. I turned us as sunlight began to light the water and burn off the morning steam. Spirals like miniature tornadoes rose in swirls all around us, forming little clouds and adding to the warm sweat that draped us like a liquid blanket.

    It was a common sight, and one that reminded me that, despite all the ugliness and all the horror, beauty survived, and Emma would have loved it. It reminded me of another such morning, when I woke early, boiled the water, brought her a cup of tea, and then helped her down to the bank. She sat with her knees tucked into her chest, hugging me with one arm and her cup with the other. I wrapped her feet in a fleece blanket while she just shook her head at the sight in front of her. Taking a sip of tea, she kissed me, leaned her head on my shoulder, and whispered, "That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."
    At the time I had not read Wittgenstein, but I have read him many times since.
    Charlie felt me pause and whispered over his shoulder, "A pretty morning."
    "Yeah." I paused, drinking it in again. "She would've loved it."
    Charlie nodded and sipped from the air as the water and history slid beneath us.
    Back at the dock, he climbed out of the scull and felt his way along the sides of the boathouse until he got his bearings.
    "You got it?" I asked.
    "Yup, I'm good. Just seeing where I am."
    Charlie sees mostly with his hands and ears because his eyes are useless. Other than lightning during a storm, fireworks on the Fourth, or looking directly into the sun, he's as blind as a bat. That too happened five years ago, but we don't ever talk about it. The reason for his sudden blindness is well-known between us, but the reason behind the reason is not.
    And this explains Georgia. She's a seeing-eye dog that I got for him as a Christmas present, once we were certain his sight wasn't returning. I tucked her under the tree, and Charlie agreed to keep her, quickly falling in love. She's supposed to lead him, but it seldom works out that way. Charlie also owns a walking stick, a white one with a red tip, but he rarely unfolds it. It stays in the corner of his house or folded up in his back pocket. As blind as he is, he's just not that blind. As for me: No, I'll not weep: I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or ere I'll weep.

    Charlie found the edge of the dock and lowered himself to the guide wire. Starting to pull himself across the forty yards of water to his home, with Georgia swimming