by Lee Martin
If I want to I can pretend there’s nothing uncommon about the day at all. Here’s the man who lives on the corner. He’s out for a walk, and he waves and says hello. Here’s a group of boys coming home from school, their bright voices chattering. One of them—the one I know as Enis McMeanus—is telling his pirate joke. “Arrgh,” he says, “and it’s driving me nuts.” The boys burst out laughing and go running down the sidewalk.
A car comes down the street, and it’s Vera’s. Maddie’s in the passenger seat, and as Vera pulls the car to the curb, Maddie leans out the window and calls to Duncan, “We’re going shopping for a prom dress.” She holds her arms up in the air, and tips back her head. “Whoo-hoo!”
I’ll have to tell Vera and Maddie that Cal is dead, and once I start I know I’ll tell them the whole story of Dewey and me. I’ll have to if I want to have any chance of thinking well of myself as I head into the last years of my life. I’ll have to tell that story even though it may very well cost me what I’ve come to need most, the love of good people like Maddie and Vera.
I don’t know how to explain it, but now that it’s done—now that Duncan knows everything there is to know, from that kiss Dewey gave me in the alley, to the evening I left him there at the tracks, to the moment along that river road when the flames filled Cal’s Explorer—I feel the way I often do at the end of a story, even those old shoot-’em-ups Arthur and I used to watch on television. I feel like I’m a different man from the one I was when the story began. A little wiser, a little worn out with carrying the lives people live, but glad for them, too, and eager to see what might be around the corner in the here and now. Just a made-up story, Arthur sometimes said after a show was over, and he was getting ready to go home, not a word of it true.
That’s the way it seems sometimes, like this world we’re moving through is something invented. Good Lord, surely people don’t do the things we do in the real world, the one God intended.
Stump has gone up on the deck of his ship. He sits in the bow, a dignified captain staring out at the course ahead of him.
Times like these, I try harder than ever to believe there’s a kinder world going on somewhere else beyond this one, and, if there really is, we’ll all find it one day. We’ll cross over. Maybe we do it a little bit at a time and we don’t even know it, times like when Vera rubbed my back at the Seasoned Chefs, or when Cal and Maddie danced to “Blue Suede Shoes,” or the evenings Dewey and I sat on the railroad trestle and sang. Maybe that’s what the dead would tell us if they could: from time to time we touch that other world, their world, where no one betrays friends or brothers, and there’s no one to hate, not even yourself, and nothing to regret, and no reason to live in shame. We touch it, this paradise. A kiss in an alley, a chili con carne cooked with a little zest that’s very Vera, the pleasure of seeing Stump sitting now in the sun.
“It’s too much,” Duncan says, and he says it like all his breath has left him.
I know he’s talking about the fact that he can stand here on this glorious April day, close to being destroyed by the fact that I could do the ugly thing I did, and despite that, here’s this girl who looks at Duncan now as if he’s the most wonderful thing in the world. In a few weeks, he’ll take her to the prom, and I know she’ll feel lucky to have survived all she has and to have the life she has now. Truth be told, I feel the same. Here’s Stump on the deck of his ship. Here’s Vera and Duncan and Maddie.
“Say something to her,” I whisper to him, afraid that if he doesn’t, he’ll lose himself, as I did for years and years.
He calls out to her in a voice loud enough to carry to my neighbor, still making his way west on the sidewalk, and to the Enis McMeanus boys gathered now to the east. He says it, not caring who hears. “I love you, Maddie.”
The Enis McMeanus boys giggle. They push at each other, and some of them say, “I love you, Maddie,” and then make kissing noises with their mouths on their arms.
My neighbor calls out, “Tell her again, son. I’m not sure she heard you.”
Oh, but she has. Maddie puts her hand to her lips and throws Duncan a kiss.
“Catch it,” I tell him.
It’s nothing I can trust to last—they’re just kids, and heaven knows what they feel for each other might change tomorrow—but for now it’s enough. In fact, it’s exactly what I need: to stand as witness, to watch Duncan snatch at the air, close his hand into a fist, and then press it to his heart.
Please don’t misunderstand. I claim no pardon for my wrong turns and tumbles, but considering all that’s gone on and all that’s yet to come, I’m content to feel the warmth of this love beginning, to call it the best thing that could have happened next in the story of my life.
Then my feet move over the grass, to the gate, and out to the street where Vera and Maddie wait to see why I’m coming out to join them. I realize that everything that’s happened since Cal came back to Mt. Gilead has been leading me to this point where I no longer have him to hide behind. He can’t save me now. Really, he never could. The story is mine, and mine alone to tell. It has been all along.
I’m not sure how I’ll start, but once I do I know I’ll tell it all. Once there was a boy named Dewey. I’ll tell Vera and Maddie everything. Then when the last word falls away, I’ll keep quiet, knowing the next words will be theirs, one after another until so many pile up we won’t be able to make our way back over the trail of them to where we began, and then everything will change for better or worse. I’ll wait, my heart in my throat, scared to death, unable to stop what’s coming, ready to give myself over, at last, to whatever bears down on someone—a man like me—from the other side of the darkest truth he can tell.
Acknowledgments
I OWE A GREAT DEAL TO SALLY KIM AND PHYLLIS WENDER, who so often saw the possibilities that I didn’t. A portion of this book appeared under the title “Sea Dogs” in Glimmer Train Stories, and I’m grateful to the editors, Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown, for their interest in my work. Thanks to The Ohio State University, The Ohio Arts Council, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council for their support during the writing of this book, and, as always, my immense gratitude to my wife, Deb, who keeps me afloat.
About the Author
LEE MARTIN is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Bright Forever; a novel, Quakertown; a story collection, The Least You Need to Know; and two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, a Lawrence Foundation Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prize. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he directs the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.
Also by Lee Martin
The Bright Forever
Turning Bones
Quakertown
From Our House
The Least You Need to Know
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Lee Martin
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Shaye Areheart Books with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Material from chapter one is adapted from a piece that originally appeared in Glimmer Train, Summer, 2006.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martin, Lee, 1955–
River of heaven : a novel / Lee Martin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Secrets—Fiction. 2. Bachelors—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A724927R58 2007
813'.54—dc22 2007015007
eISBN: 978-0-307-40733-7
v3.0
Lee Martin, River of Heaven