Growing up on the Belle

Jeff Thomas

Te Belle River was mostly mud. Sure, a couple okay spots for fshing, some creek bed ofshoots with ringneck pheasants, deer and rabbits hiding on the banks, but what stayed with you was always the mud. Mud in your boots, on your skin, under your fngernails. The wet clay smell in your nose hairs, the grey-brown favor coating your teeth. My childhood was covered in dirt. I wonder if they still let kids wander around with loaded shotguns the way I used to. I might have been the last eight year old in Michigan to get in on that action. I grew up in a modular home. We had ten acres on the north side. After eleven years, my parents bought fve acres one road over. My dad built a house and we all moved to the south side of the river. After Hurricane Katrina, insurance companies started requiring us to have food insurance which drove my dad crazy. He told the insurance man “I’m paying for food

insurance and 11 months out of the year I can walk across the fucking thing.” He soured on it, he soured on a lot of things.

One Wednesday in August 2015, a gorgeous summer day, seas of green leaves swaying on trees, a warm summer breeze gently blowing outside our home on the south side of the Belle. I was working a warehouse job, getting of at 10:30 every morning. Riding home that day I ran my fnger across the dirt road dust that had settled in the car, drew stripes on the dash. That same day my cousin Eddie called in to work. He drove over to his parents, my Uncle Ed and Aunt Lola. At their house, he had breakfast with them in a small living room, decorated with nicotine stained 90s wallpaper. They sat together on Lola’s brown leather sofa fipping through whatever was on TV. Around noon Eddie asked to borrow his dad’s Remington 870 and hit the road.

He went to the end of Schultz Road, on the northside of the river where we all used to live. He parked his car, got out with that old 12 gauge, went and sat down on the big fat rock at the bend in the river. He was there for about an hour and forty fve minutes before our old neighbor Trudy heard the gun go of. Eddie had rested the barrel at an angle under his chin. It was so ugly the police had to bring my dad and my cousin Mike in to identify him.

Eddie didn’t want anybody to feel bad, he’d been sitting there sending messages to his teenage son, his siblings, his friends, he even made a post on Facebook about how much he loved all of us. I had the strangest urge that day to take a drive down by our old house to see how our old yard looked. Just something I would do from time to time. Nothing stays the way you remember it. The new owners painted the barn Eddie and dad built red. The white pine we’d all sit under was cut down by DTE. I miss the shade.

I didn’t go of course. Regardless I don’t think it would have changed anything. I went home, had lunch, and was in bed taking a nap when that gun went of a quarter mile from my bedroom. Laying there I doubt I even finched.

My dad had barbecue chicken, potatoes, and sweetcorn on his plate that night when he answered the call. He asked “what” and then “who” twice. He dropped the phone into his food, stood up, and stared out the window for what seemed like forever. The stillness broke and he moved like a wounded man, propping himself against walls, clutching at his face and chest, struggling towards his bedroom.

I was in there with the old man, sitting next to him on the edge of the bed while his voice cracked and he gasped for breath. After a few waves of it hit him he just kinda checked out, still hasn’t really checked back in