Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

And he’d look hard at Art, the man he’d known for twenty-five years, in England in ’42 and then through the landings on D-Day and on to France and Belgium to the salt marshes and flooded fields of Holland, to the leave in Paris where Marie introduced Claude to Hélène and on to a maybe happenstance, casual, or deliberate meeting with Art in a dead-end bar in what little was left of Vancouver’s Japtown four years ago in 1956.

  “…save you.”

  Is what he’d say.

  To which Art would have nothing to reply.

  JOEL STOOD QUIET BESIDE AN OLD FIR TREE and stared across the bulldozed ground at the back of Rotmensens’ store. McAllister’s trailer was hidden in the trees high above the road, the light from its two lamps a far-off glimmer in the forest behind him. Joel stared at the doorless lean-to built onto the back of the store. The roof was nailed on badly with wide-spaced two-by-fours and hand-split shakes, the low-grade, rejected cedar shards curled and knotted. He knew the spaces between the shakes would be homes for wasps and spiders, mice and rats, and he wondered if Alice was afraid of what might live in the dark above her.

  Joel had been in the store drinking a Coke the first time he’d heard of the Indian girl coming to the village. It was at the counter in the back where the Rotmensens sold Export and Player’s cigarettes, soft drinks and beans and chicory coffee, baloney and processed cheese sandwiches made with Bimbo bread two, three days, sometimes a week old depending on the last shipment, stale potato chips, penny candy, jawbreakers, candy hearts, chocolate bars, licorice pipes, dried-out Halloween caramels and licorice allsorts left over from a year or more ago, the sugar layers hard as rock, the licorice stiff and grey, Oh Henry! and Sweet Marie bars, their chocolate marbled from months on the shelf. He’d listened close as Imma told Claude she and Piet had got a girl to work for them. So far as Joel could find out in the days following her coming to the store, she was from the Cariboo and she was called Alice. He never heard but that.

  Alice.

  Imma said that the Brother at the residential school thought maybe she was one of the Toosey people. He’d told her some Sisters found Alice when she was left sitting in the shade under a wagon at the Williams Lake Stampede. There was no one around so they figured she didn’t belong to anyone. The nuns grabbed her and took her to Kamloops.

  “Who knows if any of that stuff is true,” Imma said. “Those Brothers will lie quicker than a snake. Indian people don’t know how to care for their kids. They grow up ignorant is what we all know. Anyway,” Imma had said, “they grabbed her at the Stampede. End of story. She needs to learn our ways,” she said. “I’ll be teaching her.”

  Claude had asked Imma why they’d got an Indian if they were so much work and she said such girls as were Indians trained best. “They’re not the same as white girls, Claude. Indians don’t run off ’cause there’s nowhere they remember to run to and they don’t talk back ’cause talking at best is not what they can do much of or seem to want to.” Imma dragged her fingers through her bleached hair as Joel watched. Anyway, she said, “This one’s young. We’ve got her for two years. She’ll do what she’s told or else.”

  Claude had laughed and asked: “Or else what?”

  “Or else she’ll find out what,” Imma said. “They get lazy easy. They’re born to it. Indians need a hard hand. I know, Piet and me, we’ve did with them before. A good strapping once in a while will keep her in line.”

  “Isn’t she too old for that?”

  “She’s a child in her head. She needs treating like one.”

  Joel wondered if the lean-to would be warm enough for Alice once winter came. The walls were rough-sawn planks, the lumber used to build them scavenged from junk piles on the waste ground past the sawmill. Rotmensen never paid for anything he couldn’t get for free. The Dutchman had got Mike Obetsky, the cleanup man on the second shift, to haul the oddments of lumber up to the store in a company pickup truck. Joel had ridden in the back. He’d helped Mike load and unload, not knowing then what the room they were building was for.

  It was only later he found out they were building a cage to hold her.

  The wall boards had been lapped and spiked onto two-by-four studs by Obetsky and Reiner. The high window was crudely cut with a chainsaw and covered over with a pig-wire screen crimped down with fence staples. It sure didn’t look like either of them knew the first thing about building an add-on room. But the whole time Reiner kept bragging about how he was the one making the room they’d be keeping the girl in.

  “I’m building it and I got the key,” he said to Joel as he hammered on the shakes with his claw hammer.

  Mike Obetsky had just laughed at that, saying, “The key will be hanging on a chain around Imma’s neck.”

  Joel looked across the deep back lot to where the dirt and gravel sloped by the store. There was only a narrow path beside the wall but it was wide enough for the cedar round he’d placed there, its dusty bark draped with threads of dried bluegrass and blown fir needles. He’d carried the round to the clearing early on after he’d first tried to climb up so he could see through her window and couldn’t. Before he got the round he’d had to reach for the sill with his clutched fingers and pull himself up, but when he did she’d heard him struggling there, his boots banging, and cried out for Piet. Desperate, he’d dropped onto the gravel and run across the clearing and hid behind the rusted tractor where the dog was, his hand held tight around its muzzle to keep it from barking. He’d brought it meat he’d saved from the cookhouse to keep it quiet. Two nights later he’d taken the biggest cedar round he could find in Oroville Cranmer’s woodpile and carried it to the back of the store. It was tall enough for him to stand on so his eyes could reach the wire.

  Behind the lean-to stretched bulldozed gravel with wild grass and shrubs growing. An old Reo truck, its tires gone, the axles resting on boulders, was off in the corner of the lot. Aspen leaves fallen from the thin trees littered the ground beside it, the truck box bent and broken by the heat and cold of the years, the dry winds that swept up the narrow valley from the desert around Kamloops.

  The dog lay now under the tractor’s curved fender, locked on a twenty-foot chain to the iron steering wheel, the black rubber that had been the grip long ago rotted off and hanging in shreds. The hound lagged its long tongue as it stared across the gravel at him. It didn’t bark or howl. Many times these past weeks Joel had filled a Chevy hubcap with water from the tap on the side of the store, or he’d carried leftover pork and steak bones from the cookhouse. The dog knew who he was. It trusted him. Someone else was feeding it too because he’d find chewed bones from moose under the tractor. He didn’t know who else was feeding the dog. It didn’t matter so long as it didn’t starve from Piet’s neglect.

  Joel had gone to meet the train the Rotmensens brought her in on that early July day. He knew he’d never forget her getting off the train. It was like he’d never really seen a girl before as pretty as her. He stood off to the side just watching, not being able to believe his eyes when he realized she was going to be living in the village.

  It seemed like the whole village had watched Piet pull her along, Imma marching behind, all the men talking as she passed by on the crushed gravel and cinders, watching her every step, this girl from nowhere, this girl. Carl Steiner, the station agent, had acted his usual important self, saying this and that when the three of them got off the train, the conductor bowing as Piet took her elbow in his fist.

  It was Carl who said he thought the girl was pretty enough for an Indian. “They’re pretty if you catch them young,” he said. “They don’t stay that way long, though. You know—Indians.”

  Molly Samuels and Carl’s wife, Etta, were standing behind him when he said those things. “That’s evil thinking,” Molly said to him. “They’re people too. They’re just the same as us.” Carl started saying to Molly how she hadn’t caught his meaning exactly and that what she’d just said was what he meant exactly.

  Etta had stepped in then and told him to shut up ab
out what he thought he knew. “I don’t know where I found you,” Joel heard her say as she dragged her two kids into the station. When Carl tried to say something more she leaned out the door and said, “Alberta is where, on a road without a correction line. I must’ve been drunk or blind to pick you out of the poor lot that was there. God only knows why I’m still here. I’d leave if I wasn’t trapped by you and the kids.” And at that she clapped the door shut.

  Carl was still going on about the girl, but Joel didn’t care. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He barely heard the end of their talking as he turned and followed Piet and Imma and the girl up to the store. He stayed twenty feet behind, his eyes on her as she stumbled along, her suitcase banging against her leg. Imma kept telling her to hurry and Joel could see she was trying to keep up. He would’ve done anything to help but all he could do was watch as they stumped up the steps at the store and took her inside.

  Joel tried not to think about Imma Rotmensen giving the money to the Brother at the residential school, counting out the ironed bills from that big leather wallet of hers with its polished steel clasps. Or about her saying to Claude that day in the store when Joel was listening, “Come and have a look at her once she gets here. That Brother Whelan said he was sorry to lose her and I can imagine he was.” She’d looked close at Claude with those hen-like eyes of hers, the lids coming down on them like half-flushed shutters.

  And Claude had said that a good look at a young girl never hurt anybody. Imma didn’t say anything to that, just squeezed her eyes down even thinner as if she was adding up something complicated, her mouth tight, her head turned a bit away from Claude like she didn’t want him to see how she was thinking.

  Joel walked along the trail just below the road. It was the middle of the night and there was no one on the road that led up from the mill and probably no one on the high road north to Little Hell’s Gate or south to Mad River. Beyond them was Jasper or Kamloops and after them the world. Joel listened to the night. No one was out prowling, only the grizzly he’d heard banging at a burning drum, and a tick-tormented moose he saw in early rut run across the railway tracks down by the river meadows. The cupped rack of its horns seemed light as curved black feathers under the glow from the last of the moon. He watched until the animal disappeared into a grove of alders.

  Wordless, Joel crossed the barren lot, climbed the gravel slope behind the store, and knelt by the round of cedar by the lean-to. He’d counted the rings the first time he’d placed the round there, afraid to climb up so he could see her sleeping, wanting to, but instead of looking, kneeling in the dirt measuring the tree’s life, his fingernails stepping ring by ring to the sapling at the heart. He’d counted to himself from the outside ring as a child might in a whisper: thirty-one, thirty-three…forty…and at forty-four got up off his knees thinking about how the tree the round had been cut from was almost three times as old as he was. Finally he’d placed his right boot on it and laid his hands flat against the lapped cedar wall. He’d balanced himself like a moth on bark, pressed close to the wall, and then he raised his left boot careful up, for a moment rocking there, almost, but not falling over, toes angled out, knees slightly bent, the window at the level of his stetson just above his eyes, the brim pushed back on his head, and then slowly, straining, straightened, his arms outspread on the clapboards as if on a cross, his face risen at last to the pig-wire window.

  That night there had been a sickle moon too. It had cast a rim of light on the bed where she lay, he was sure, sleeping. He had not, now he was at last there to see, been able to move. There was the arch of one foot partly out from under the sheet, the toes, all five of them at the sheet’s hem looking like impossibly small, naked mice peering out from sun-bleached summer grass, and the curve of her slender ankle disappearing under the tattered cotton. Then her hidden calves, her thighs, and the high curves of her small buttocks covered over, her waist and back, most of her hidden, the sheet fallen from one shoulder, the skin so clean from where it showed from under the pale nightgown she was wearing, and her left arm curled out from the edge of the flat pillow. Her right hand touched her cheek, the fingers curled slightly, lightly. Her face was turned away from him, her black hair undone, splayed across the pillow, the hair loose and long, a flare of darkness that was as much blue as black, glinting as if made from some fragile metal fallen from the moon, and so just to see her breathe, and him, somehow with her, breath for breath, his fingers hooked in the pig-wire, staring down at her sleeping there, Alice.

  For how long had he been there, the moon almost gone, the frail light of the false dawn come, the smoke haze from the southern fires that had put the stars out one by one, Venus left behind, a blue diamond gleaming, and Jupiter bright as a drop of wet solder in the east, the planets he knew because his mother had told him once of all things in the heavens their light was sure, unlike the vagrant, blinking stars.

  Down the road by the tracks a logging truck started, its engine rumbling, some logger wanting to be the first truck at the log landing up the canyon in hopes of getting three loads if he pushed it hard enough and maybe if he was lucky, the roads dry, the truck not breaking down, maybe, just maybe, four loads maybe for sure, and the power diesels not yet starting up, the lights not coming on in the mill, the millwright, Eddy Draper, sleeping toward the first day of the weekend.

  And strange too, another truck so late in the long night, a pickup coming hard out of the dark behind him with its lights off, the glint of metal, black paint barely touched by the sliver of moon behind a cloud, and him only catching a glimpse of it, two men inside, the box piled up with stuff. He couldn’t tell who the two men were, the truck gone past in shadowed dust, the wall of the store cutting it off, and then gone up the hill to the high road.

  The power diesel’s heavy pounding would start in a couple of hours, the cleanup and maintenance men stumbling out of their bunks and heading down to the cookhouse for coffee and breakfast and then to the mill to finish off the work of the week, the shadows of dawn beginning. Monday morning was far off, Saturday already here in the dark. There was a whole day and then the dance at the Hall tonight. And maybe, just maybe, with Imma and Piet gone to Kamloops, Alice would somehow get out of her locked room, if Claude Harper let her out, and go to the dance. And he had to learn how to dance better, today somehow, in case she did come, in case she was there, if he asked her, if he knew how to ask her, because he knew Cliff Waters would be there and for sure he would ask her to dance, Reiner too if Cliff let him, and Cliff knew how to jive and waltz and everything. Joel had seen him dancing with other women before.

  “Please, would…could you, maybe, like to, want to…dance…with me, please.”

  Joel pressed against Rotmensens’ lean-to wall, his fingers hooked on the wire, his stetson fallen from his head, and how many times, how few, had he seen her move under the sheet, the moment a week ago when she rolled on her side and he saw, caught, glimpsed, just barely, her naked neck, the wing of a collarbone, and the soft skin below that swallow curve of bone, one small breast swelling, and him balanced there thinking of that breast and not thinking, and slowly turning his head away from her to the mountains across the river, the night still long, and he couldn’t remember stepping down off the cedar round, picking up his stetson from the gravel and running wild along the path saying to himself over and over:

  “She is what else I want.”

  * * *

  —

  WANG PO WAS AT PEACE when the mill shut down. The night shift crew had gone, the last cleanup man a shadow on the road, behind him the groan of the great chain as it slowed to a stop in the flume, the last wince of steel licking steel and then the quiet, the kind of silence creatures know when they touch each other at the end of violence, at rest at last. It was at that moment Wang Po emerged from his room and walked alone to the river. The slow susurration of the waters by the big eddy took him back to the Nanjing he knew as a boy by the Qinhuai River, he and his friends sailing lotus lanterns on the riv
er to help the hungry ghosts find their way back to the underworld.

  His father had taught him how to make a lantern, the folding and refolding of the paper until it was strong enough to bear a candle and yet light enough to float. There was happiness then around the table, his mother steaming red bean buns, the smells coming from the kitchen. Wang Po was so young then when all was well. They would drink tea and eat and then they would go out to the river and light candles in the lanterns and send them down the river to the Yangtze, him running with the other children along the riverbank in the early night. They followed the lanterns until most of the tiny boats wavered and burned, a few continuing on, their frail lights vanishing in the far waters.

  Wang Po sat alone on the smooth white back of a fir tree that had washed high up on the riverbank during some spring flood years ago. This was his eddy in the river, beyond it the beginning of the rapids. It was his night place and though he knew he was not always alone there, his companion did not disturb him. The boy was not always there. Emerson’s usual place to watch the river was from a jumble of black rocks high above the shore where the cliffs began. Wang Po looked for him, but he wasn’t on the rocks this night and Wang Po missed him. When he turned back to the river the boy had appeared as if from nowhere. Emerson was sitting at the end of the beached tree where the stubbed roots splayed out in search of the place in the earth they had been torn from. It was a comfort to have him there. Wang Po felt they were like any two animals come to rest awhile from the confusions of the day.

  Across the river were hidden cabins back in the trees. Art had told Wang Po of them and told him too of the one cabin with glass in its windows, glass that someone had packed in from what would have been Fort Kamloops a century or more ago. Such a short time. Everything was so new in this country where he lived and where he would someday die. He had thought of his death and had at times wondered if he would have his ashes sent back to China, but each time he thought of Nanjing he knew he would never return, alive or dead. Where were his parents’ ashes? How could he rest in a place where his parents’ spirits wandered without cease?