For a second, Earl couldn't move.
He looked at the torn bank and the brown water and the tie hanging over it, and every bad call he'd answered in twenty-nine years came up at once and stood in front of him.
Then he made himself look at the tie again.
Not the water. The tie.
It wasn't snagged. It hadn't blown there. It was tied around that branch on purpose, with a hard square knot a careful man would make, and the long end hung down and out, pointing downstream like a finger.
Earl thought about the blizzard of 1978.
Floyd had told the story at the Liars' Table a hundred times, mostly to annoy Pete. That January, the drifts on the county roads had been eight and ten feet high. Floyd had carried the mail anyway, the first carrier out after the storm, and he'd found the mailboxes buried so deep he couldn't see them.
So he dug them out one by one, and at each one he tied a strip of red rag to the nearest fence post. That way the plow driver behind him would know where the boxes were and wouldn't knock them flat.
You always mark it for the next man, Floyd liked to say. Somebody's always coming along behind you.
Earl looked at where the end of the tie was pointing. Then he started walking downstream.
Sixty yards down, the creek widened and went shallow over a gravel bar. A line of flat stones crossed it, the old ford the farmers had used before the county built the bridge in the 1950s.
On a fallen log on the far bank, in an orange knit hat and his good gray suit, sat Floyd Eckert.
He had a bunch of yellow mums in his lap, wrapped in wet newspaper. His left shoe was off. His left ankle was the size of a softball.
He watched Earl come out of the brush.
"Took you long enough," Floyd said.
Earl let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding since 7:05.
"You all right?"
"I'm sitting on a wet log in November with a bad ankle. I'm eighty-four years old. Define all right."
Earl crossed the ford. The water came up over his boots and was cold enough to make his teeth hurt. He knelt beside the log and looked at the ankle without touching it.
"Slipped on the third stone," Floyd said. "Got across, but I couldn't get up that bank on one foot. Phone doesn't work down here. I figured somebody would come looking eventually, so I went back and marked the path."
"With your good tie."
"Rose bought me that tie for our fortieth. It's the only thing I had on me that anybody in this county would recognize."
He looked at Earl. "Did you get it?"
"I got it."
"Good. Then it worked."
Earl called Tyler from the top of the bank, where he could get one bar, and told him to bring Pete's side-by-side around through the Lutz farm lane. Then he went back down to the log.
"Let's get you out of here," he said.
"No," said Floyd.
"Floyd."
"I came out here to see my wife on her birthday, Earl. She's right up there." He pointed with his chin at the hill above them, where a few old gray stones showed through the bare trees. "A hundred yards. I've come two miles. I'm not going home without seeing her."
Earl looked at the hill. Then at the ankle. Then at the old man in the orange hat who had carried the mail through the worst blizzard in Ohio history and had never once in nine years missed his coffee.
"All right," Earl said. "But you're leaning on me, and you're not arguing about it."
"I never argue."
"You argue every morning."
"That's not arguing. That's correcting."
It took them twenty minutes to go a hundred yards. Floyd held the good cane in his right hand and Earl's arm in his left, and they stopped every few steps so Floyd could breathe and complain about it.
Rose Eckert's stone was near the top, beside the little white chapel with its windows boarded. Rose Ellen Eckert.
1946 to 2021. Under her name, there was a space where Floyd's would go someday.
Floyd stood on one foot and laid the mums against the stone. He didn't say anything for a long time. Earl looked away, down at the creek, and gave him the time.
"Eighty," Floyd finally said. "She'd have hated that. She hated birthdays with a zero on the end."
"June was the same way."
Floyd looked at him. "You go see June much?"
Earl thought about the cemetery behind Grace Methodist, six blocks from his house. "Not as much as I should."
"You should," Floyd said. "They don't care if you come. But you do."
Tyler and Pete got there at noon with the side-by-side and two wool blankets. Pete couldn't stop apologizing until Floyd told him to hush or he'd tell the Liars' Table about the deer Pete missed in 2019.
The doctor at the urgent care in Marietta said it was a bad sprain and no break, and that Floyd was a stubborn old man, and Floyd said that was the nicest thing anybody had said to him all day.
The next morning was cold and clear.
At 6:58, the bell over the diner door rang, and Floyd Eckert came in on his walker with his ankle wrapped and a new tennis ball on the left leg. He sat down in his chair at the Liars' Table. Dot poured his coffee without asking.
He was wearing the blue tie with the little gold ducks. It had dried overnight on the hook by the milk can, and you could still see the crease where the knot had been.