Deep River Burning

by Donelle Dreese

  She shifted several times on her cot trying to find a comfortable position while Jimmie handed her a pair of earplugs, which she gratefully accepted. At some point, she may have fallen asleep for a short time, but she wasn’t sure. Dream and reality merged together in a swirl of strange images. Christ, candles, and the crucifix merged with blinding rain, an angry sea, and battered trees. Earlier, Jimmie told her that he saw a group of hurricane chasers out on the beach.

  “You should have seen it, Denver. One guy was trying to snap a photo of the other guy who was standing in front of a big wave with a huge, ominous black cloud in the background, but the wind kept blowing his hood across his face, and he couldn’t stand up straight, and he kept trying to look intense into the camera but the rain stinging his face made him wince, and then some of their stuff started to blow away. Some people are crazy,” he concluded. Some people are fearless, Denver thought to herself, but she was not one of them.

  Around 2 am when the storm was all anyone could hear or think about, a woman, who had been nervously flipping through a thick book all evening, and using a small flashlight to see the pages, stood up and turned an otherwise tolerable evening into something close to a nightmare.

  “We’re all going to die, you know,” she announced. Every eye in the room turned in her direction. “You are all such fools, sitting there with your headsets and potato chip bags and blueberry muffins, pretending this is only an inconvenience in the grand scheme of your life when this is just the beginning of the hell you are all going to have to endure.”

  Father Allen quickly approached the woman and said, “I understand that this is very stressful, but—”

  “Don’t you talk to me priest,” she interrupted. “You are the biggest sinner of us all. I listened to you all evening lie to these people about the presence of God being with us, about having faith in God’s love to provide protection, about God’s light shining through even the darkest night. They are all lies. God has forsaken us because we have forsaken him for too long, and this is only the beginning of how we are all going to pay. If we survive this hurricane, it won’t be because of God. When are you going to realize that God doesn’t care about us anymore? He doesn’t care that we are bottled up in this musty church room listening to the ocean try to swallow us whole. And yet, you sit there in your holy collar and pray as if someone or something is actually hearing you. You make me sick.”

  “Maybe we can talk about this elsewhere,” Father Allen suggested, “so the others can sleep. Will you come with me?”

  “No, I won’t go anywhere with you. The others deserve to know the truth: that we are all sinners being punished for our sins, and you, priest, are the false prophet who will lead us to hell and damnation. It is time. The time has come. I can feel it.” The woman looked around the room and up into the ceiling where the wind could be heard pounding the main floor of the church. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “That’s the sound of God’s rage coming forth to punish his children. We are all in the hands of an angry God, trembling in his palms, and now he is ready to open those hands so that we fall into the underworld where our souls will live out eternity in a state of tormented hell. Oh, there is a God, you can be sure of that, and he is ready to unleash his wrath upon the world, and he is starting right here, right now. It’s too late to repent. It’s too late for us all!”

  “Fine,” an old man said. “If the world is going to end, the last thing I want to hear on my dying day is your fanatic regurgitation of the revelation, so please just shut up.”

  “All right,” the woman resumed. “I’ve said everything I needed to say. You’ve all been warned. I forgive you. I am at peace. You all will come to know the truth . . . in time . . . you’ll have no choice.” The woman slowly slinked back to her cot and sneered back at a guy who whistled the cuckoo call. She had black hair that hung down the middle of her back in a long braid with strands of gray woven throughout. She had a wide face and a nose that slightly hooked at the end. Her top row of teeth were somewhat squared off at the sides, giving her mouth a boxed look. What Denver noticed about her, was that her eyes were a dull blue, flat looking, as if nothing lived behind them, like the eyes of the dead.

  Father Allen walked over to Iris and quietly spoke to her. By this time in late summer, his dark hair was gold-streaked from the sun and his face was lightly tanned. It didn’t seem to her that he had aged at all since she first met him. She liked that he was serious. She liked that he was deliberate in his words and actions, and she liked that he was contemplative. He lived a mindful life, an awake life, and it seemed that the evil in the world never found a crevice where it could seep into his soul. If there are dark forces in this life, they are wasting their time on people like him. He was immune. The woman with the long, black braid seemed to have no soul at all, but Father Allen seemed to be all soul. No wonder the woman hated him.

  Others in the room were not immune to negative influence. A child began crying in annoyance at his mother who had been holding her hands over his ears when the woman spoke. Through some strange work of cause and effect, the stirring inside increased the stirring outside, or perhaps it was the other way around, but a sudden round of debris pummeled the boards on the small windows and the rain lashed the church with greater intensity. The sneezing and coughing started again as Iris, who had a stunned look on her face, passed out more water bottles to those who wanted more water. The woman with the long black braid mumbled something that only those who were near her could hear, but they were happy to ignore her. There were a few people who slept through it all.

  What agonized Denver was not the coughing, or the crying, or the cold-eyed woman with the long, black braid, but the feeling of being trapped. She hated being holed-up somewhere with all the connections to the outside tightly closed. It’s the reason why she often had a hard time during the winter months, because she hated being closed in. She wanted to appreciate all of the seasons alike, but she couldn’t always fight off the affect the colorless landscape had on her, and the cold, the ice, and the heavy clothes made her feel tired, tense, and claustrophobic.

  Her aversion to winter was somewhat eased living in North Carolina where the winters were shorter and more mild than in Pennsylvania, but a winter beach has a cold sting all of its own, and if it snows, it might be a week before the roads were clear. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that the most important things that have happened to her in her life seemed to happen when she was outside or when the temperature was gentle against the skin. This may not be true. This may just be how she chose to remember things.

  Early morning was approaching and the wind had died down. With the first light of dawn, people were anxious to go outside, to see how the world had changed, and to see evidence of the strength and power of the storm. Father Allen, Jimmie, and Denver went outside first without telling the others in order to get a sense of the damage. She looked up to the sky and saw a small patch of blue trying to peek through fast-moving clouds. The streets were littered with debris and leaves from shrubs were scattered everywhere. Jimmie noticed that in the immediate vicinity, all of the utility poles were standing and there didn’t seem to be any broken wires dangling. Denver felt a surge of gratitude rise up from her heart that flushed into her face. Father Allen brushed her hair away from her eyes. “You survived your first hurricane, Denver,” he said smiling at her. She smiled back and uttered a small, nervous laugh.

  As it turned out, the strongest winds of the hurricane made their mark inland. The category-four storm weakened as it reached the shore line but then picked up speed again after moving over the coast. Towns 50 to 100 miles inland along the I-95 corridor received more damage than the coast and were flooded with waters from the Tar River, which reached near the rooftops of one-story homes and buildings. Pig farms were devastated as the animals and their debris had been washed several miles downriver. Denver had a hard time imagining it, p
igs and all their waste being swept away in a torrent of water. It sounded like the ideal conditions for an infectious disease outbreak.

  Jimmie and a few others from the church traveled inland to help with the cleanup where mosquitoes flew in droves and bacteria were looming thick in the trees and in the muddy grasses and shrubs. The sanctuary sustained little damage except for beach erosion, but the sound of the wind had seeped into a part of Iris’s heart where fear sits very close to its marrow. Not long after Bernita, Iris moved away to live with family in northern Alabama. She was never the same after the hurricane. Iris had been through several major storms during her fifteen years in North Carolina, but there was something about this hurricane that made her feel unsettled. It was expected to do serious damage to places like Isabel Beach, but the small coastal towns that were supposed to be leveled by the storm were spared. Maybe it was Bernita’s unpredictability. Maybe it wasn’t fear at all. Maybe the hurricane was one of a number of forces coming together at one time to stir inside of Iris a need for change. She was such an important part of the seascape around the sanctuary, so it was difficult for Denver to watch her leave. She was a loving woman who didn’t judge people, and Denver hoped to learn that lesson from her. Iris could forgive anything. Other than Father Allen, Denver had never met another person who so fully embraced and loved humanity, the good and the bad.

  One day, just a few days before Iris moved away, Denver sat on the staircase in Iris’s house and watched her filter through boxes she hadn’t touched in many years, reminiscing, asking in her mind, “where did I get this, who gave me that?” Denver had been helping her pack and organize her belongings so that they would be easy to load into the moving truck. She wondered what Iris thought of her life, the part of it she had boxed and shelved, filing through it, making decisions about what to discard and what to keep. Did she find evidence of old interests she had left behind? Did she find regrets stuffed in the bottoms of torn boxes crushed under a heavy stack of notebooks with every line filled? Did she find the artifacts of old love affairs looking back at her with only a vague sense of conflicted recognition?

  In the corner of the living room, Denver saw a guitar propped up against the wall. “I didn’t know you played the guitar,” Denver said.

  “I don’t,” Iris replied. “I used to,” she added. Other than a few small things, Denver tried not to hold on to much of anything. To her, the past was gone. She believed that keeping things that were of no use to her in the present seemed to be a waste of space. If she ever decided to move out of her apartment on Topsail Avenue, she would have very little work to do.

  Iris found an envelope of letters, old and yellowing. She read a few and a soft smile came over her face. Iris gazed upward and her eyes dimmed. She looked up at Denver and then looked quickly away, and Denver felt sorry that her presence was an intrusion, but she never forgot that soft smile on Iris’s face, even long after she had moved away. It was the kind of look you might have when you think no one is looking, when a love story reveals itself through tiny, involuntary movements of the face.

  Chapter 20

  Letters from Colorado

  Dear Denver,

  I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. I had to go. I hope you understand. Please go to Waterfowl Landing at midnight, the night of the July full moon. I took this photo of a poppy field in California. It reminds me of you.

  Love,

  Josh

  Postmarked in Colorado, the letter arrived in North Carolina the following spring. Denver looked at the photograph, and she wondered when Josh had become such a good photographer.

  The photo was a stunning blend of color with a blue sky and just a few ballooning white clouds over a hillside covered with green and vibrant orange poppies. But when the images of Adena flashed through her mind like a band of running torches, her answer to his request was “No” and she folded the letter and put it in her desk drawer. She couldn’t go back. She had her fill of smoke and ashes. Too much time had gone by. She wasn’t the same person she was back then. The sea had extinguished that fire and washed most of it from her consciousness, so that only a few memories remained, and even those were like strings of seaweed, dried and withered on a sun-drenched rock, waiting to be blown away with the next swift wind. She was surprised at how little she thought about Adena, and she had no desire to visit old haunts. The past doesn’t exist except as a story, as a narrative, and she could choose the shape of that story in her mind, and extract from it only what was useful to her.

  She was happy about the fact that at some point, her life had slipped imperceptibly into a comfortable routine. In addition to her volunteer work at the sanctuary, she transferred as many of her college credits from Branton University as she could to UNC Wilmington, so that she could finally complete her degree. She registered for a few courses in Marine Biology and loved learning more about coastal ecosystems.

  In the meantime, she got a full-time job as a waitress at a nearby crab shack. She had been working part-time at a few odd jobs in retail, but she liked the high energy atmosphere of the crab shack. The owner, Ray, also known by the locals as Stingray, liked to play songs like “Barracuda,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Octopus’s Garden” for the customers, and sometimes on Friday evenings when the beer began to flow, some of them would sing out loud, especially the chorus for “Yellow Submarine.” In the summer, tourists would come in to experience their first crab shack and in many cases, their first taste of crab. There were always a few perverts who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, but Ray told her to “give them what they deserved.” So, if that meant a quick slap and cold beer in the crotch, then that’s exactly what they got.

  Working at the crab shack would give her the money she needed, but it wasn’t going to smooth the dilemma that had been growing inside of her ever since she had moved to the coast. What she knew about ocean pollution and commercial fishing practices was almost enough to cause her to quit her job and give up eating seafood altogether. She no longer thought in terms of specific oceans, such as the Atlantic or Pacific or Indian, but rather, she saw one large, nameless ocean, one body of water, which cradled all of the continents, so what was happening in the coastal waters of Japan was just as important as what was happening in coastal Carolina. She rationalized that the job at the crab shack was only temporary, but every day the feeling gnawed at her that she wanted to work on the side of saving sea life, not serving it to hungry tourists.

  She also began to build a little family of her own. It was a cool day when she walked into the Isabel Beach Animal Shelter and looked around at all the animals. Most of the animals in the shelter were in cages and a few cats were out walking around or sitting on shelves or countertops. She went into a separate room for cats that were so morbidly obese they couldn’t move. She spoke at length to a woman at the shelter named Mary Ann, who explained that some of the animals were not properly cared for by their owners, and when the owners could no longer manage them at all, or were not willing to provide the cats with healthcare, they brought them to the shelter.

  She asked Mary Ann to show her the animals that nobody wanted, the ones that were older, the ones that required special care. In less than an hour, Denver was on her way home with a four-year-old dog that was an undernourished stray named Shelly who liked to bite into seashells, and a long-haired three-year-old cat that lost all of its hair due to a food allergy. When the shelter started the cat, Alexi, on a special diet, all of her long, silky tan and white hair came back. Her previous owners didn’t believe in taking pets to see the veterinarian. They thought it was a waste of money.

  As Denver opened the door of the pet carrier in the living room of her apartment, it dawned on her that these two creatures may not like one another and her apartment was too small to host a family feud, but for the first hour or so, Alexi and Shelly sniffed each other and everything in the apartment curiously, no matter how big o
r small. Shelly started with the love seat and worked her way down to a paper clip on the floor. Alexi tentatively explored each room, starting with a sniff, followed by a paw, then another paw, until she finally checked out the whole room and stopped in the middle of the floor to take a break to clean her face. The two new additions to the household kept a close eye on one another, but they didn’t seem to object to being in the same room.

  Denver took Shelly for a walk along the beach while Alexi napped on a blanket bundled on top of Denver’s bed. Even though it was chilly outside, Shelly pulled Denver down to the surf and she wagged her tail and held her snout up into the wind until she tired herself out, and then Denver took her back home. Denver got less sleep at night, but Shelly and Alexi learned to love each other like sisters, like best friends. They slept together, played together, ate at the same time, and wherever Denver was in the apartment, her two girls were there beside her. They knew Denver’s routine and whenever she came home from class or from the crab shack smelling like hush puppies and cole slaw, they were there to welcome her home.

  Most days, she went to the sanctuary to speak with Father Allen and Jimmie after her work shift was over, so it was a surprise to her to find that one day Father Allen wasn’t feeling well. He looked tired and pale and was developing a persistent cough.

  “Are you okay?” Jimmie asked.

  “Yes, I’m just feeling a little light-headed,” Father Allen answered.

  “You feel a little clammy as well. Do you want to go to the hospital?”