Down the River

by Khoi Pham

Uncle Bob loved boats. In his small apartment, on the second story of an apartment building, there used to be wooden and metal ship models all over the shelves. That’s what I remember most about him.

When I turned five, my parents became the owners of a small local snack bar. They worked for most of the morning and the whole afternoon. After kindergarten, they often left me with Uncle Bob until late in the evening, when they came to take me home.

Back then, Uncle Bob worked as a mason at all sorts of construction sites in the area, wherever he was needed. That meant he didn’t have fixed working hours and would often stay at home during periods when the weather didn’t allow construction to continue. He was a tall man with a large frame and a thick black moustache that would later remind me of a French poet.

Every afternoon, as far as I remember, he would lie on the sofa with his arms spread out, and he would tell me: “Come, Jimmy, come and sit.”

After I sat firmly on his belly, he would take a deep breath and exhale as strongly as he could. That made his belly move up and down like the waves in a river, and I would laugh merrily.

The second thing I remember about his apartment was a window overlooking a large river. The lives of people in our town revolved around the river. Every morning, boatmen would wake up before sunrise to catch the earliest bream and herring. That made a lot of noise because our house was right next to a small dock.

Every autumn, when sudden storms came and went, the whole road along the riverside would be covered in water. Over the years, the water left a brown mark on the walls of many houses in the low-lying area.

My grandfather didn’t like Uncle Bob. Once or twice, at Easter and Christmas, Uncle Bob would visit our house, where my grandparents lived, to join us for a family dinner. Once, when I was eleven, after I was told to go to my room to sleep, I heard them talking. The discussion then turned into shouting.

I heard my grandfather talking about starting a family, but Uncle Bob didn’t want to. Then my grandfather threatened to burn Uncle Bob’s entire collection of wooden models the moment he was away: “You’re wasting your life away.” I heard Uncle Bob cursing, the first time I heard him do so. Then someone went out and slammed the door shut.

I didn’t see Uncle Bob for the next seven years. My father told me he had moved to the city, far down the river, where there were a lot more tall buildings and more construction work. I stayed in our house and trained under my father to take over the snack bar, which now served hot meals to the returning fishermen. I was too attached to my hometown, the river, and the run-down house with water stains to ever think of leaving for another place.

The next time I saw Uncle Bob was in a small room with a single bunk bed and a wooden desk, on top of which he had placed an unfinished model of a large ship, the kind you see in pirate movies. It stood among some woodcarving knives and a carpenter’s plane. By then, he had grown a long beard. When he saw me, his gray eyes lit up. “Come, Jimmy, come and sit.”

I jokingly told him, “You look like a famous poet.” He chuckled, his beard shaking.

After exchanging pleasantries, I asked him why he had left the town years earlier. There was something flickering in his eyes, something hard to put into words. “Has your grandfather told you?”

“Told me what?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing.”

“Are you building a ship?” I looked at the desk.

“The best one.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Sail it down the river.” He laughed. “I’m joking. I wanted to open a woodcarving business. I might use this as a display model.”

“Have you talked to Granddad?”

“I can’t. Could you tell your dad to lend me some money?”

I came home and told my dad and my mom the story. My dad’s brow furrowed. My mom said the business was struggling. The older fishermen had retired, and their children had moved to the big cities to attend university and pursue office jobs.

“What’s the deal with Uncle Bob?” I asked my dad.

“He was in prison. That was years ago. He was released before you were born.”

I was in total shock. “What did he do?”

“He fought a man. The police said it was over a woman. The poor man fell into the river.”

“How terrible.”

I returned to Uncle Bob with the bad news. He was sitting at his desk, working on the wooden pirate ship, with his back to me. His voice didn’t sound sad. It almost seemed as though he had expected the answer. “Thank you, Jimmy.”

“What will you do with the boat?”

“Do you like it? I’ll give it to you as a wedding gift once you’ve found your girl.”

And I did find her, four years later. Lydia was a nurse working in a local hospital. We met each other at a neighborhood gathering and, four months later, we stood beside each other in front of the priest in the local church, where I kissed her hand.

Our dads and moms were smiling happily in the front row. My grandparents had both passed away; my grandmother had followed my grandfather one year after he died. Uncle Bob wasn’t there, and neither was the pirate ship he had promised. No one had heard from him in all those years.

Before I knew it, more years went by. In the town, most of the younger generation had made careers elsewhere. My parents had moved to a city miles away to live near a relative, and we were the owners of the snack bar now.

Every few months, to the melodious sound of music, there was a funeral, and we would follow someone we had known since childhood to their final resting place. Those who were born weren’t numerous enough to replace those who were passing away. More houses were left dilapidated, and the water would eat into their walls.

Just as the town was growing emptier, the government decided to turn the country road cutting through our town into a small highway. With the highway came more traffic and, eventually, they decided to build a glass factory on the riverside, on the land where the apartment used to stand where I had stayed with Uncle Bob. The building was torn down to make way for the new facility.

They said they chose the location because there was sand beneath the river, which had now largely dried up as the years became warmer. On the riverbank, on the hottest days of summer, one could sometimes see black and white pebbles on parts of the now-exposed riverbed.

Lydia was a resourceful woman. Together, we converted our snack bar into a café that served drinks and hearty meals to the construction workers, and then to the factory workers. The business was booming; we even hired a full-time waiter and a cook so that we could spend more time with our five-year old daughter.

In those days, I would sometimes think of Uncle Bob. There were certainly many jobs he could choose from, and we could now lend him some money to open the woodcarving business he had once dreamed of.

Three months ago, I received a message from my dad: “Uncle Bob is hospitalized in the city. Come if you want to see him. This might be the last time.”

I left Lydia in charge of the café and drove to the city. It was one of the last days of summer. It had rained heavily for days, which had rarely happened in the last decade. The river was brimming, and the water murmured just as it had when I was a kid.

The nurse let me into his room. There he was, lying in a bed with white sheets. The long beard had been shaved off, and his short hair had become streaked with gray. He must have recognized me, because his gray eyes lit up. It was like when I had last seen him nearly a decade ago. His lips moved, but there was no sound. I thought I heard him mumbling: “Come, Jimmy, come and sit.”

I sat beside him and heard him breathing heavily. His chest and his belly were moving up and down like waves on the river. I remembered sitting on his belly. Now I was far too heavy for that, of course, and he had become very fragile. I held his hand and felt his pulse, which was weak and faint. His body trembled slightly and, from the corner of the eye facing me, a tear welled up and flowed down onto the pillow. It was like a river flowing down his cheek.

I leaned close to him and said, “Please rest, Uncle Bob. I am here.”

Uncle Bob passed away four days later. My parents had his body brought back to our town. I closed the business for a day to attend the funeral. We followed him to the new graveyard that had been built on the other side of the river. From that place, he could see the factory where his apartment used to stand.

We received a package at our house the next week. It was a large package carefully sealed with Scotch tape. I opened it with my box cutter. Inside was the ship model, the very same pirate ship I had seen on Uncle Bob’s desk years earlier. The hull was painted with colorful circular patterns in red, blue, and purple. A beautiful piece of white fabric with the same circular patterns was used as a sail.

Now that I thought about it, Uncle Bob had always been talented at things like this. He might have been the best woodcarver in the area, and the site of the glass factory might have been his workshop in another timeline. There was no letter in the box. Had he sent it to us shortly before he was hospitalized? We wondered why he hadn’t tried to contact us in all the months he had lived in the nearby city.

I brought the ship to the river. It was the first day of October. The leaves on the riverbank had all turned golden, the dry ones crumbling under my shoes. The river was still murmuring. I climbed onto the bridge, tied a thin string to the mast, lowered the ship into the water, and cut the string.

The ship spun around and around, moved straight ahead a little, then plunged beneath the surface. A breeze sent ripples across the river where it had sunk. I guessed it had never actually been meant to travel down the river as he had once said. But what did it matter anymore?