Deep River Burning

by Donelle Dreese

  We need the coal, he wrote. It’s the only way to keep the energy bills down so that the people in my community can afford it. We would have a better lifestyle and a greater sense of purpose if we could maintain our livelihood and utilize the resources we have been blessed with. I have been watching my community slowly crumble in recent years and I can barely hold back the tears as I write this letter.

  Denver closed the magazine and allowed her body to recline back onto the carpeted floor. She had heard Daniel’s story before but didn’t have an answer. The clock read 2:14. She picked up another magazine from the floor and held it over her face. The issue was entirely dedicated to coal mining, and when she turned to the table of contents, she found that each article focused on a coal mining community that had been impacted by coal.

  She saw articles about towns in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania mostly, and there on page sixty-one was a short article about Adena. Seeing the title of the article, “The Downfall of Adena,” reminded her of the time, about six months ago, when Twyla gave her the magazine. “There’s an article in here about your hometown,” she said. “You should read it. I didn’t know all of this happened while you were still living there!”

  Denver read the three-page article that didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know about Adena, except for one thing, the fire was still burning after all these years. Apparently, there was no way to stop it, so Adena would be an even more unstable and noxious place when she returned than when she left. She wondered if Josh knew. That night, she never fell back asleep.

  When the moon was almost full, she got into a rented car early in the morning and began driving north, looking to Virginia first, then Pennsylvania. She thought about how going backward can sometimes feel like moving forward; how sometimes being alive can feel like diminishing, how opposites overlap and reflect one another the way the sun is reflected on the moon.

  With each passing mile she went deeper into the past to a land with no sand or seagulls, no crabs or lighthouses, no sultry and salty air. She was returning to corn and lakes, red-winged blackbirds, raspberry bushes, rolling hills, and coal. She wouldn’t have imagined that the drive would go by quickly, but the hours gave her mind the chance to go where it needed to go and to live there for a while again, even though much of the world was passing by her as a roadside spectacle. Horse farms, diners, cattle clustered on hillsides, and small white houses that were still holding onto sagging Christmas lights. Somewhere shortly after crossing the Pennsylvania border, she felt the air change. Even though it was July, it felt cool to her.

  Late in the afternoon, Denver arrived in eastern Pennsylvania stiff and road weary. She checked herself into a hotel that was located ten miles outside of Adena on a highway where there were plenty of places for her to eat dinner. When she had left Pennsylvania, this stretch of highway was all forest and empty fields, but as the traffic increased, so did the development. None of the native trees were left standing. The hotels and restaurants were framed by small, ornamental trees that looked fake.

  She was hungry after her long drive. She looked for a locally-owned restaurant and found one about three miles west of her hotel called Buddy’s Place. As she ate dinner, the only thing on her mind was the fact that tomorrow was the full moon. She was glad that she had arrived early so that she could take the time to recover from the drive and reacquaint herself with the place she used to call home. The restaurant wasn’t crowded. It was quiet. She had a table by the window, and the sun went down.

  The next day, she woke up early and went to visit Blanton University. The campus was beautiful during the summer with the sidewalks and streets lined with draping trees on both sides and ivy growing up the walls of the old red brick buildings. A new student center had been built, and although it was a nice building, it looked out of place amidst the other older buildings.

  She sat at a small table on the terrace that had a railing lined with blooming petunias and she listened to a group of students talk about their classes and a test. She had a view of tennis courts and a grove of maple trees that she remembered were stunning in the fall. She spent hours walking around campus and downtown Blanton where it seemed that little had changed, except for her, except for her perception, except for the other people who were evolving every day but perhaps didn’t notice. Leaving home and then returning can make the space more apparent, like looking into a gorge, like looking at a photo of yourself that you don’t recognize.

  She arrived at Waterfowl Landing after sunset but before dark, during that hour of uncertainty when the theater curtains of the day are almost closed. It was good to arrive late when the darkness would hide the rawness of Adena, the rawness she felt in the air with the window halfway down, the same rawness that was magnified by silence and a gentle fog moving in from the river. She wanted to speak to her father. She wanted to hear his voice again call from the back yard, or hear her mother’s laugh float through the evening air.

  As she drove around the desolate and deserted streets, darkness fell quickly, but an unexpected lightness came over her. It might have been the smell of the honeysuckle reminding her that there was still life blooming and going on despite the look of human failure that marred the landscape, but the fragrance didn’t last long before the smell of sulfur gradually began to creep into the car window. She wasn’t sure if the tufts of mist she saw hanging on the road were clouds of fog or fire steam.

  When she came to a stop sign, a flash of light illuminated black spray paint that scribbled out the white letters on the sign entirely. So she didn’t stop, she kept going. But it was the heat lightning that revealed the past to her in flashes, snapshots of memory that lasted only a second, and then they were gone. In one flash, a thin, ragged dog appeared standing still at the side of the road. She wondered if it had run away once, and then when it finally made its way back home, found that everyone was gone. The dog’s blank stare hung over the road and when she drove on, she felt the emptiness pass through her.

  She went to the river. When she pulled up to the landing, a truck was parked close to the river bank facing the river through the trees. A flash of lightning exposed a shadow in the truck. Tree limbs reached over the river and moved slightly in a soft breeze. She stayed in the car with the engine running until she saw Josh step from the truck and begin walking toward her headlights. She rolled down her window as his older but unforgettable face leaned in and smiled at her with tender recognition.

  “When did you become a photographer?” she asked.

  “When I saw the Grand Canyon.”

  He helped her out of the car, and they held each other for a long time. There was nothing she could possibly say or do that would let him know how much she missed him and how happy she was to see him, so she remained quiet. She was overwhelmed by his presence, the sound of his voice, and the gold streaks in his hair that shone when the lightning flashed.

  “Do you know that old Mr. Pilner is still living over on the island, content as can be, scurrying around like the old gray squirrel that he is?”

  “Is he?” Denver asked, gazing over the dark expanse of the river.

  “Yeah. I took a trip over to the island last night and I saw his fire through the trees. I thought about talking to him, but I figured he would be happier without me around. He was singing and talking to something in the air near him. He’s not the least bit lonely.” They looked at one another and then looked away. The passage of time and the circumstances that led to their parting left a space between them so wide she thought it would echo if she screamed into it.

  “I can’t wait to hear how you’ve been and what you’ve been doing since we last saw each other,” Denver said to break the silence.

  “I want to hear about you too, but there’s something I need to tell you first.” He turned to look at her with a mix of softness and sadness in his eyes.

  “What is it
?”

  “It’s about Helena. I tried to reach her because I wanted her to meet us here tonight.”

  “What happened? Where is she?”

  Josh paused and the lightning flashed a look on his face that she would never forget. “She’s gone, Denver. She killed herself about six months ago.” None of the thoughts she had that followed this news were going to give her any answers to the flood of questions that rushed to her mind. How bad must it have gotten? She thought Helena was indestructible, an immortal little powerhouse. Denver was the one who fell apart. Denver was the loner with the broken heart who was always on an endless search for something that even she could not identify. Helena was always able to fold the world away at the end of the day, or wave a hand at anything or anyone who tried to bring her down. What was the last moment? How did she do it? Could Denver have saved her if she would have stayed in Adena? Did Helena feel abandoned by Josh, her husband, Adena, by Denver?

  “She took pills. Her mother told me,” Josh said half talking, half whispering.

  “I shouldn’t have left,” Denver said feeling the guilt radiate from her chest and move down her arms.

  “It’s not your fault, Denver.”

  “Yes it is. I could’ve helped her.”

  “If it’s your fault, then it’s mine too. I also left.”

  “Do you remember that silly little pact we made a long time ago when we were kids? That silly, childish blood pact where each of us put a drop of blood on a rock that we buried somewhere over on that island?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Maybe so, but I never forgot it.”

  “We had to leave.”

  “Did we? Why?”

  “You know why.”

  “Yes,” she conceded while looking down at the ground.

  “We were doing what we had to do.”

  “I know, Josh, but that wasn’t the agreement. Everyone for themselves was not the agreement. We are here to help one another and we couldn’t even do that. Don’t you see? When someone commits suicide, it’s everyone’s fault!”

  They sat for a while on some rocks on the riverbank watching the force of the river quietly move in the night hour. In the dark, it seemed to slip away without them noticing. Even in the silver light of the full moon, she couldn’t see what it was carving or taking with it. She could only feel the full force of its current with an undefined part of herself, with her own wholeness, and then the rest was imagination.

  “She left a note to have her ashes scattered over the river down by the train trellis,” Josh said finally. “She’s thousands of miles out to sea by now. Perhaps that’s what she wanted.”

  “Did she say anything else in the note?” Denver said, still in disbelief. “Or did her mom say anything to explain why?”

  “The last thing she said to her mom was that she felt she didn’t belong.”

  “Where . . . didn’t belong where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  The following day, Josh and Denver took a dozen roses, of all different colors and shades, over to the train trellis and slowly dropped them one by one into the river. It was early morning so they saw a few fishermen in the distance, casting their lines in the glow of a morning sun, and then waiting for the line to tug with only a slight turn of the head once in a while.

  There was nowhere else they wanted to be. The train trellis was where people smoked their first cigarette, got drunk their first time on Vodka and orange juice, and then tried to walk across the trellis without falling in the river, practice for being able to walk the white line. It was the place where people made plans to do things they didn’t want to talk about in daylight. It was also a place for first kisses and where some even fell in love.

  Denver wasn’t sure why Helena wanted her ashes scattered there. Perhaps she had made other pacts that she and Josh didn’t know about, but there under the trellis, in the early morning orange sun, was a deep river burning. It was narrow, rocky, and swift, so she could only assume that Helena was in a hurry.

  “I am so angry I could scream,” Denver said suddenly.

  “Angry? Why?”

  “I can’t believe she did this! She took the easy way out. You can’t give up and check out like that. You have to fight. You have to figure it out! How many people really feel as if they belong in this world? No one that I know. We’re all lost! She wasn’t special. She was screwed up like the rest of us.”

  “I don’t think she had a strong person she could look up to, and her mom didn’t pay any attention to her.”

  “Yes I know. There should be a law against having children you don’t want.”

  Denver and Josh sat on the train trellis and cried while their feet dangled over the rushing water. They were silent for a long while. The roses had floated far down river. The trees on both sides of the river were thick and dark green, a mid-summer green of complete bloom. Denver looked at Josh and noticed how he had such a handsome face. She asked him about the day he left. He looked up from the water and gazed into the distance as if the memory lived out there somewhere in front of him and he needed to locate it, sitting on the water perhaps like one of those fishing boats, or hanging in the trees like a bird disguising itself in a veil of leaves.

  “I needed to go. We all needed to go. There was nothing here anymore. And I thought I had lost you,” he said, looking down again.

  “You didn’t lose me. I lost me.”

  “Eventually, I came to understand that, but it took me a while. I packed a few things and walked to the westbound highway and hitched a ride to anywhere. I went wherever the drivers went. I ended up in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and Alaska for a while. I spent most of the time in Montana. I spent a night in jail for trying to steal a car.” He laughed at himself. “But then I got some work on a ranch and earned enough money to buy the truck. When it felt like it was time, I tried to find out where you were. Nobody knew. It seemed as if you had just slipped off the face of the earth.” He paused for a while. She waited until he was ready to speak.

  “You can’t run away from anything in this world,” he said. “It will follow you. It will find you. When I was in Alaska, I met this couple who lived entirely off the land. Their story was about oil, and how its excavation was affecting the people there, so I told them about Adena and old king coal. We had a lot to talk about. But they were still happy. They made it work somehow. Everything is bigger out west. The sky is bigger, the spaces are wider, the lakes are deeper, and the mountains are higher.

  “In Montana, I lived near an old ghost town, where I met a man named Jack Weleda who let me travel with him for a while. He was from Michigan. We explored old ghost towns together. He knew I was drifting from place to place so he let me stay with him. He lost his wife to cancer a few years ago. We found one town where a few people still lived in houses on the outskirts, but the people didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them.

  “But you know what I learned by visiting all these ghost towns? That in some ways the story of Adena is an old, old story. A story so common it is almost cliché. Most of the ghost towns we visited were once mining towns that attracted settlers because of silver and gold, and once the minerals were exhausted, the people moved away. We saw old brothels and other buildings that were barely recognizable, and in one town. We heard stories about the old days, when the towns were self-sufficient and thriving. But there is still energy there, Denver. Out west. There is a strong presence that never dies, no matter how the land has changed or how the lives of people have changed. You can still feel that past, alive and strong, vibrating in the hearts and eyes of people. I tried to write about it and all of the places I had been, but the words seemed small when I finished.”

  “When did you decide to return?” she asked.

  “There wasn’t one precise moment when I made the decision. It h
ad been slowly building for a while. I believe it may have started one day when I was on the ranch gathering wood and a shadow passed over the ground that I knew must have belonged to a very large bird. When I looked up, an eagle had landed on a lower bough of pine tree near where I was standing. We looked at each other for a moment. It reminded me of you.”

  “Why?”

  “I heard someone say once that birds flock together but eagles fly alone. You’re an eagle, Denver. And I mean that in only the most spectacular sense.” The sun began to rise higher in the sky and the heat quickened the dragonflies skimming the water. “And what about you? How did you end up in North Carolina?”

  Denver told the whole story about how she got on a bus that was heading south, how she wanted to go someplace where there was more light, more summer, someplace that had nothing to do with coal. She told Josh about how she fell asleep on a beach and was woken up by a priest who changed her life. She told him the story, as much as she could remember, as much as she wanted to tell, and he listened with a smile on his face most of the time.

  “I’m sorry to bring you back here,” he said.

  “No, I’m glad you did. I needed to come back, and seeing you again has made every moment worth it.”

  They left the train trellis that morning knowing there was much more to talk about. They needed to get to know one another again. They said goodbye to Helena and to the innocence they once rounded into small blood droplets and blended on a stone that would remain underground on Desert Ring Island. Josh never told Denver where it was buried, and she never told him about the vision she had at Pilner’s old cabin.