CHICKASAWHATCHEE

For Brett Eubanks Rooks

Down in Southwest Georgia
there is a creek with a name
a boy has to grow into.

Chickasawhatchee.

It does not hurry.
It slides through the Basin,
past cypress knees and pine timber,
and somehow always finds the Flint.

Brett comes from that country.

Brett Eubanks Rooks.
Ms. Nina’s baby boy.

I suspect he knew those woods
and that water
the way some men know scripture.

By heart.
Without trying.

I did not grow up on its banks.

I grew up beside Brett.

Preschool.
Kindergarten.
Then every field and court
the county had.

We knew each other
before we knew much of anything else.

Before driver’s licenses.
Before girls.
Before anybody expected us
to become responsible men.

We played ball together.

Won some.
Lost some.

Learned how to get knocked down
and how to get back up
without making a speech about it.

Some seasons, we worked at Eubanks and Son.

Brett’s grandparents’ place.
Ralph and Mama Crit.

Brett’s middle name
was on the business.

Kale and lettuce
when the weather turned cool.

Cantaloupe and watermelon
when it most certainly did not.

Bent over the rows at daybreak,
heat coming off the ground
before the sun was all the way up,
red clay to the shins.

Nobody complains much
when your best friend is two rows over
complaining for you.

At the end of it,
Ralph and Mama Crit
paid us in cash.

I have been paid a good many ways since.

None of it ever felt
quite like that.

We learned about girls
the way boys learn most things.

Badly.
Together.
Mostly from each other.

Which explains a great deal.

When something went right,
he was the first one I told.

When something went wrong,
he was the one who did not need telling.

And we had the kind of friendship
that did not require talking.

A tailgate at the edge of a field.
Two boys.
A whole evening could pass
with nothing said
and nothing missing.

Then Athens.

The University of Georgia.

Roommates.

Apparently, all those years
had not been nearly enough.

Brett had Christa and Wey,
and in time all three Rooks children
found their way between the hedges.

Somewhere along the way,
our childhood became adulthood.

Then I met a girl.

And I did what a young man does
when the ground moves under him.

I went and found Brett.

He listened to all of it.
Every doubt.
Every circle I drove myself in.

Then he leaned back and said,

“Choose brunette.”

That was the whole sermon.

There may have been a blonde.
History is quiet on the matter.

He was right.
He has been right
for more than thirty years.

So when Christy and I stood up
to begin our life,
Brett stood with us.

Of course he did.

He had helped write the first line.

There are people who know
the man you have become.

And there are a precious few
who remember the boy
you used to be.

Brett knows both.

He remembers a version of me
my children never met.

And I remember his.

We have lived long enough now
to learn that time
does not treat everybody the same.

Some people leave.
Some are taken.
Some simply drift.

And some stay.

Not because life holds still.

Because the friendship
was never built on convenience
in the first place.

I think about that old creek.

How it bends through the timber,
goes dark in the swamp for a while,
and keeps moving
whether anybody is watching or not.

It does not need a straight line
to know where it belongs.

Neither do we.

Brett and I have traveled
a good many miles
from those first school days.

But somewhere in the Basin,
the Chickasawhatchee
is still running.

And somewhere beneath
all these years,

two little boys
are still walking toward a classroom.

They know nothing yet
about melon fields or Athens,
about brunettes,
weddings,
children,
or all the things
life will ask of them.

They only know
they have found a friend.

And half a century later,

that is still enough.

Boutwell Jones