River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

“Looks like he’s christened it,” Arthur says with a laugh. “Now all it needs is a name.”

  I don’t even give it a thought. “How about we call her The Bess?”

  For a long time, Arthur doesn’t say a word. He just keeps looking up at that flag. His eyes close for an instant. Then he opens them and says, “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is,” I tell him.

  This may not seem like much, this story I’m telling, but you have to understand what it is to be me—a man who has always been afraid of himself. You have to know the rest of my story, the part I can’t yet bring myself to say. A story of a boy I knew a long time ago and a brother I loved and then lost. I’m sorry, but for now I’m afraid all I can give you is this picture of me moving through the twilight as I fetch a can of red paint from my basement. I hand a brush to Arthur and he takes it, his eyes meeting mine, both of us unashamed of how sentimental this all is. He kneels down along the prow of this ship—the house of Stump—and with great care he paints the first stroke, the bristles of the brush folding back with a slow, steady grace that stirs me on this evening near to winter. I know this is as close as I’ve come in some time to living by heart, and what shakes me is the understanding that this is as close as I may ever come—this moment already beginning to fade—here on dry land.

  2

  IT ISN’T LONG BEFORE THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER, THE DAILY Mail, gets wind of Stump’s ship, and one morning a reporter calls, a young man—at least he sounds young to me on the phone—who says he’d like to do a story about this ship I’ve built for my dog.

  Stump paws at my foot as if to say that should I see fit to hand him the telephone, he’d be glad to tell this reporter how much his new ship suits him. “It sounds awesome, Mr. Brady,” the reporter says. “Just the sort of human interest story our readers would enjoy.”

  “Oh, it’s not that interesting,” I say, but I can’t deny I’m flattered.

  “I was hoping I could stop by this afternoon. Snap some photos. Ask you a few questions. We’d like to run something in our It’s Us section.”

  “In the newspaper?” I ask, although I know the section he’s talking about; every Friday it offers profiles of people with unusual hobbies and whatnot.

  “Like I said, Mr. Brady, it’s an interesting story. Right up our alley. Shall we say one o’clock?”

  I’ve always taken an interest in those features, looked forward, even, to the Friday paper and what I might find out about someone: the man who built a pioneer village on his farm just outside town, built with his own hands a jail, a saloon, a one-room schoolhouse, a library, and blacksmith, pottery, and candle shops; the woman who runs a foster home for injured or orphaned albino squirrels, our claim to fame in this town we bill as The Home of the White Squirrels (a twenty-five-dollar fine if you run over one with your car, and there’s an ordinance the City Council keeps trying to pass that would require all cats—notorious squirrel killers—to wear collars with bells so the squirrels would always have fair warning that they were in danger); the blind man who forty years ago gold-plated a Coca-Cola glass but never could convince the company to patent the idea, so there it was, one of a kind and he couldn’t even see it. I went to the auction they held at his house after he died and bought a box of odds and ends—old tins of shoe polish, a hair brush, a collapsible drinking cup—and wouldn’t you know it, there it was buried down deep in the box, that gold-plated Coca-Cola glass, tossed there like it was a piece of junk. I keep it in my basement, afraid to leave it out in plain view in case someone might take a notion to make off with it.

  “Those photos,” I say. “Would you take one of my dog?”

  “The two of you together. And that ship. We’ve got to see that ship.”

  The notion of a photo of me and Stump and his ship tickles me. I might even clip it from the paper and carry it in my wallet so when we meet someone while we’re out on our evening walks, I can take it out and say to this someone, “Look, it’s us.”

  Or maybe I’m just pretending. Maybe I’d never be able to do that at all.

  “Better make it two-thirty,” I say. “Stump always likes a nap right after his lunch.”

  INDEED THE REPORTER TURNS OUT TO BE YOUNG, A TALL, lanky boy with arms too long for the sleeves of his corduroy sport coat. His hair is cut short in what we used to call a burr; his scalp shines beneath the bristle and I try to imagine what it would feel like to rub my hand over his head.

  “Mr. Brady?” He uses the eraser of his pencil to push his eyeglasses, which have too much play in them, up on the bridge of his nose. “I’m from the paper, sir. We spoke on the phone.”

  What happened, I wonder, to proper introductions? Hello, my name is…

  “I’m Sam Brady,” I say, and I stick out my hand.

  The boy tries to meet my offer with his own hand, so we can shake, the way gents do when they first meet, but he fumbles his pencil and it drops to the floor of my porch. We both bend over, reaching for the pencil, and our heads touch—not with a bang, but with a gentle brush of skin on skin, my own skull shiny and bald—and I’m delighted to know that his bristly hair isn’t bristly at all, but has the feel of velvet.

  “It’s two-thirty,” he says, as if that will do as an introduction, this reminder of our agreed-upon meeting time.

  “And you are?” I say.

  I see him grimace. A tightening of the lips, for just a moment, an involuntary frown he hasn’t intended for public display. Then he says, “Duncan.”

  “Duncan how much?” I say the way that men my age do in this part of the country.

  Again, the boy momentarily grits his teeth. Then he says it, as much as I can see he hates to. “Hines,” he says. “My name is Duncan Hines. There. Now we’ve got that out in the open. Just like the cake mix. That’s me. Go ahead. Take all the time you need to laugh.”

  It’s another bright day, one of the last before we make the final turn to winter. From where I stand on the porch, I can see the prow of Stump’s ship, and it excites me to think that folks are about to take notice. The old Duncan Hines slogan comes to me, and I can’t stop myself; I blurt it out. “So rich. So moist. So very Duncan Hines.” Then I’m embarrassed because what kind of thing is that for a grown man to say to this boy I don’t know from Adam?

  If he takes offense or thinks it odd, he doesn’t show it. “Let’s just say, my parents had a sense of humor. Now about this ship you’ve built for your dog.”

  I tell him to follow me. We come down the porch steps, and I open the gate into the side yard. Stump is there, and he yaps a couple of times before I tell him to keep the sass to himself. “This young fella’s about to make you famous,” I tell him, and Duncan Hines gets down on his knees, not giving a snap about his nice khaki-colored slacks and what the grass and the dirt might do to them.

  “Well, lookey, here,” he says, giving Stump a scratch behind his ears. “You’re some dog.”

  “Sometimes I think he knows it,” I say.

  “Why, sure he does. You betcha. What I wouldn’t give for a dog like you.” Duncan Hines gets up from his knees, and he lifts his arm toward Stump’s ship. “That’s something,” he says. “Boy, it sure is.”

  “That’s a carvel hull,” I say, trying not to toss the term around too smugly, like I’m a know-it-all.

  “A carvel hull,” Duncan Hines says, and he writes it down on his notepad.

  Then I’m telling him all about how I built the ship, built the hull and the promenade and the mast and the crow’s nest. “See those cannon ports?” I say. I glance over and see him write down the words, cannon ports. “Won’t those come in handy,” I say, “if Seaman Stump ever comes under enemy attack?”

  “You don’t mean to say, there’s actually a cannon in the hold of that ship.”

  For a moment, I consider letting him believe it’s true, but I confess that I’m only joking. He rubs his hand over his velvety head and I see a blush come into his face. I imagine I can tell him anything and he’ll believe m
e. That’s the sort he is. The perfect sort for the human-interest profiles he writes. A curious, eager boy—he’s only nineteen, I find out, a student at the community college who writes the It’s Us stories for the Daily Mail—ready for the world to amaze him.

  I tell him I’m thinking of installing a heating system in the hold of the ship so Stump can spend winter days and nights there if he takes a mind to. Duncan Hines writes it all down, what I plan to do, the story of how I got the idea—that kid’s playhouse—the way I puzzled out how to build it.

  “You did this all by yourself?”

  I want to say, yes, yes indeed, I did. But just then Arthur comes out of his house and waves his arm in greeting. “Ahoy,” he says, and starts toward us.

  “My neighbor,” I say. “Arthur. He helped me.”

  For a good while, I don’t have to say a word because Arthur is only too glad to tell Duncan Hines all about the time he spent in the Navy and what he knows about nautical history and how he was glad to contribute his expertise to the building of Stump’s ship. I get the feeling that I could disappear, sink right into the ground, and neither Arthur nor Duncan would notice.

  Then I realize that Duncan has asked me a question, one that I didn’t fully register and I have to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that. Come again?”

  “I asked you if you’ve always lived in Mt. Gilead.”

  “Sammy grew up in Rat Town,” Arthur says. “Didn’t you, Sammy?”

  “Yes,” I say. “That’s right. Rat Town, but I’ve lived here in Orchard Farms a long time. Arthur and I have been neighbors a good number of years.”

  “My family came from Rat Town,” Duncan Hines says. “My mom’s side anyway.”

  “Who were your people?” I ask.

  “My grandmother was a Finn. She married a man they called Grinny, but his real name was Norvel. Norvel Hines.”

  All the while I’m posing with Arthur and Stump for the photo Duncan takes, I’m stunned. I didn’t even know there were any Finns left hereabouts. I can’t imagine what I look like, standing here on one side of the ship’s prow, Arthur on the other side, and Stump on deck at the point between us.

  “Perfect,” Duncan says, but I don’t feel that way at all, recalling the story of Dewey Finn, a boy who lived next door to me in Rat Town, a boy I’ve done my best to leave behind me for good. I stand here now, the thought of him more than I can bear, wondering exactly what Duncan knows.

  3

  DEWEY FINN DIED ON A FRIDAY EVENING IN APRIL. THIS WAS in 1955, and now this boy, Duncan, has brought back the feeling of what it was like to get the news.

  By the time the word reached Rat Town, the rain that had been falling three days straight had let up, but we knew there was more on the way. The river was rising, and we feared that overnight the floodwaters would spill over the streets and spread across the yards. I was with my father, helping him build a sandbag levee around our house, when the sheriff, Hersey Dawes, pulled his patrol car to the side of our street, opened the door, and came up onto the sidewalk.

  My father stuck his shovel into the sand pile and leaned on the handle, one foot resting on the blade. “Someone in trouble?” he called to Hersey, and Hersey came into our yard and told us what he would soon have to tell Snuff and Betty Finn. Dewey was dead. This boy with wild red hair and freckles across his nose. This skinny boy with green eyes and long lashes and a smile that always put me at ease. Dewey Finn.

  Hersey was a sturdy man, broad-shouldered and big-chested, and for years it had been his job to deal with the sort of business that would bring most men to their knees. I could see, though, that this was something that shook even him, and he was relieved to have this excuse for putting off for just a while what he would eventually have to carry to the Finns.

  “Jesus, Bill,” he said to my father, and then he bit his lip and shook his head. He closed his eyes for a second, and I knew he was trying to forget wherever it was he’d just come from and what he’d seen. “Right now, I’d let you have this job for a song.”

  My father was a good-natured man with black hair that he combed straight back and held in place with Lucky Tiger tonic. He worked in the mill room at the Kex tire plant, and he carried a buck knife in a leather scabbard clipped to his belt. At work, he used that knife to cut slabs of rubber as they came off the mill drum, but on this night he was using it to slice lengths of twine that I tied around the gunny sacks we were filling with sand.

  “I wouldn’t want it, Hersey,” my father said. “Not for a million dollars. I can’t even imagine doing what you’re going to have to do.”

  Hersey took a breath and drew back his shoulders, and I understood he was practicing on us before he went on to the Finns.

  Just after six, he said, the B & O National Limited passenger train took the curve north of town, and there at the trestle—too late for the engineer to apply the brakes—lay Dewey on the tracks as if he’d stretched out for a nap.

  “You wouldn’t want to see what a train can do to a body,” Hersey said. “I can tell you that.”

  “No, I don’t imagine,” my father said, and then we all stood there, not saying a word.

  Finally, Hersey looked toward the Finns’ house—that square house with the asphalt-shingle siding and a little peaked roof over the front step. Dusk was coming on, and someone had switched on a light inside. I saw one of Dewey’s sisters—Nancy, I thought it was—pass by an open window. A radio was playing. That snappy tune, “Hey, Mr. Banjo,” by the Sunnysiders. It was date night, and soon the boys would be coming for the Finn girls.

  “I’ve said too much.” Hersey shook his head. “I shouldn’t be talking like this. Not in front of Sammy.” He turned to me, then.

  “Do you know any reason why Dewey would go and do something like this? Put himself in the way of that train?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  Then Hersey asked me whether I’d been with Dewey after school. Everyone knew we were friends, he said. Had I been with Dewey? Had I talked to him? Had I picked up on anything that might explain why he’d feel so miserable that he’d put himself across those tracks and wait for that train?

  “No, sir,” I said. I held a burlap sack open while my father tipped a shovel of sand into it. The sack sagged with the sand’s weight, and I felt the strain in my forearms. “I never saw Dewey today,” I said. “Just at school. That’s all.”

  The truth was I’d seen him just after supper head off for the B & O railroad tracks that ran behind Rat Town. It was where the two of us often went in the evenings just to get off by ourselves, to be away from our houses where there was always too much going on: Dewey’s sisters fighting over who got to play the radio, my mother yapping at my father for drinking too many Falstaffs and never taking her uptown to bingo at the fire hall and later a piece of pie at the Verlene Café.

  Some evenings, Dewey and I sat on the railroad trestle and talked about everything we wanted once we got old enough and rich enough to have it. Dewey wanted a Chevy Bel Air with a chopped top, frenched headlights, and lake pipes. Then, he said, he’d get the hell out of Rat Town. Never look back. “I swear, Sammy. Just go. That’s what I’ll do. Just go wherever I take a mind to.”

  I wanted to be a singer. It makes me laugh to remember that now, but then I thought it would be swell to be a singer in a white dinner jacket and a bowtie, my hair, like my father’s, shiny with Lucky Tiger. Dewey and I sang together those nights on the trestle, even though neither of us had a voice. We sang songs we’d heard on Your Hit Parade: “Sincerely,” “Moments to Remember,” “The Shifting, Whispering Sands.” We were miserable at it, but we didn’t care. Who could hear? It was just the two of us, legs swinging back and forth as they dangled over the trestle. Across the fields, we could see the houses we’d eventually have to go back to, but for the time being we felt far away from them, and we lifted up our voices and sang.

  “This is the place I feel the best,” he told me once. “Right here with you.”

  I
got this funny feeling in my stomach, then—funny in a good way, the way it was when I was riding in Cal’s ’49 Ford Coupe, and he took a hill too fast and we came down the other side with a dip that made me say, Oh, doctor—and I told Dewey, “Me, too.”

  The evening he died, my father and I watched Hersey Dawes go into the Finns’ house, and we listened as the radio went dead. Such an eerie quiet, and I knew Hersey was filling it with his news. Soon he came out of the house and drove away in his car.

  My father and I finished building the sandbag levee. Then he took me next door to the Finns, to pay our respects.

  The oldest sister, Marge, let us in. Mrs. Finn was sitting on the couch between the other two girls, Jo Ann and Nancy. They were all huddled up, sort of slumped into a heap, and they were crying.

  I could smell the perfumes on the sisters. I could smell the sprays they’d been using on their hairdos when word about Dewey had come. By this time, the boys who’d come to escort the Finn girls to the Arcadia Theater had been turned back with the news. I knew they were uptown at the Verlene or sitting in their cars around the lake at the state park, smoking Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields or Pall Malls and telling the story of what had happened.

  Snuff Finn was in the doorway leading into the kitchen. He was leaning against the jamb, his arms crossed over his chest. I’d always been a little bit afraid of him because the rumor was he sometimes beat men who didn’t pay their gambling debts. To make a little extra money, he worked for the mobs that ran the juke joints along the river, the bootleg gangs that had reported to Al Capone during Prohibition and now had illegal gambling operations in all the dance halls and supper clubs.

  “I don’t know a word to say.” My father’s voice, though he kept it low, seemed too loud a noise for the quiet house. “I guess there’s not words made for this. You need any help around here, you let me know. River’s up. I’ve got sand and gunny sacks and twine.”

  Snuff nodded. Then he looked up, and his eyes found me. “How come you and Dewey weren’t together?” His voice was hoarse as if he hadn’t had water in a long time, or maybe he’d shouted himself dumb. “You two were always like that.” He raised a hand and crossed his fingers. “Something went on between you, I reckon. Else wise, you’d been with him. You were always with him. Something went on, only I don’t know what.”