Down River

by John Hart

  I woke alone in cold and gray, put my feet on the floor. There was blood on my shirt so I left it; but the pants were okay. I found Robin at the kitchen table, staring down at the rusted bars on the gun shop windows. The shower smell still clung to her; she wore jeans and a pale blue shirt with turned cuffs. Coffee steamed in front of her.

  “Good morning,” I said, seeking her eyes, remembering the dream.

  She studied my face, the battered torso. “There’s Percocet, if you need it. Coffee. Bagels, if you like.”

  The voice was closed to me. Like the eyes.

  I sat across from her, and the light was hard on her face. She was still shy of twenty-nine, but looked older. The laugh lines had gone, and her face had thinned, compressing once full lips into something pale. How much of that change came from five more years of cop? How much from me?

  “Sleep okay?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Strange dreams.”

  She looked away, and I knew that seeing her had been no dream. She’d been watching me sleep and crying to herself.

  “I stretched out on the sofa,” she said. “I’ve been up for a few hours. Not used to having people over.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Are you?” The mist seemed to blow off of her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  She studied me over the rim of her mug, her face full of doubt. “Your car’s outside,” she finally said. “Keys on the counter. You’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like. Get some sleep. There’s cable, some decent books.”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  “No rest for the wicked,” she said, but did not get up.

  I rose to pour a cup of coffee.

  “I saw your father last night.” Her words pounded into my back. I said nothing, couldn’t let her see my face, didn’t want her to know what her words were doing to me. “After I got your car. I drove out to the farm, spoke to him on the porch.”

  “Is that right?” I tried to keep the sudden dismay from my voice. She should not have done that. But I could see them there, on the porch—the distant curl of dark water and the post my father liked to lean against when he stared across it.

  Robin sensed my displeasure. “He would have heard, Adam. Better he learn from me that you’re back, not from some idiot at the lunch counter. Not from the sheriff. He should know that you’ve been hurt, so that he wouldn’t wonder if you didn’t show up today. I bought you some time to heal up, get yourself together. I thought you’d appreciate it.”

  “And my stepmother?”

  “She stayed in the house. She didn’t want anything to do with me.” She stopped.

  “Or with me.”

  “She testified against you, Adam. Let it go.”

  I still didn’t turn around. Nothing was happening as I’d hoped. My hands settled on the counter’s edge and squeezed. I thought of my father, and of the rift between us.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  A moment’s silence, then, “He’s aged.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was something in her voice that made me turn around. “What?” I asked, and she raised her eyes to mine.

  “It was a quiet thing, you understand, very dignified. But when I told him that you’d come home, your father wept.”

  I tried to hide my dismay. “He was upset?” I asked.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I waited.

  “I think he wept for joy.”

  Robin waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t answer. I looked out the window before she could see that tears were rising in my eyes, too.

  Robin left a few minutes later to catch the seven o’clock briefing at the police station. I took some Percocet and pulled her sheets around me. Pain tunneled through my head; hammer blows at the temples, a cold nail at the hairline. In all of my life, I’d seen two things make my father cry. When my mother died, he’d wept for days; slow, constant tears, as if they welled from the seams of his face. Then tears of joy, once.

  My father had saved a life.

  The girl’s name was Grace Shepherd. Her grandfather was Dolf Shepherd, the farm’s foreman and my father’s oldest friend. Dolf and Grace lived in a small cottage on the southern edge of the property. I never knew what had happened to the child’s parents, only that they were gone. Whatever the reason, Dolf stepped up to raise the girl by himself. It was a trial for him—everybody knew it—but he’d been doing well.

  Until the day she’d wandered off.

  It was a cool day, early fall. Dry leaves clattered and scraped under a dull, heavy sky. She was barely two, and let herself out the back door while Dolf thought she was upstairs, sleeping. It was my father who found her. He was high in one of the pastures when he saw her on the dock below the house, watching leaves spin on the surging current. I’d never seen my father move so fast.

  She went in without a splash. She leaned too far and the water just swallowed her up. My father hit the river in a loose dive, and came up alone. I made it to the dock as he went back down.

  I found him a quarter mile downstream, cross-legged in the dirt, Grace Shepherd on his lap. Her skin shone as pale as something already dead, but she was round-eyed and wailing, her open mouth the only slash of color on that bleak riverbank. He clutched the child as if nothing else mattered; and he was weeping.

  I watched for a long second, sensing, even then, that the moment was a sacred thing. When he saw me, though, he smiled. “Damn, son,” he’d said. “That was a close one.”

  And then he’d kissed her head.

  We wrapped Grace in my jacket as Dolf arrived at a run. Sweat poured down his face and he stopped, uncertain. My father handed the child to me, took two quick steps, and dropped the girl’s grandfather with a single blow. The nose was shattered, no question, and Dolf bled there on the riverbank as his oldest friend trudged, wet and weary, to the house up on its hill.

  That was my father.

  The iron man.

  CHAPTER 3

  I slept some of the pain away, and woke to a thunderstorm that rattled the old windows and put jigsaw shadows on the wall every time the lightning flashed. It swept through town, dropped sheets of water, then boiled south toward Charlotte. The pavement still steamed when I went outside to get my bag from the car.

  I laid my fingers on gouged paint and traced the word.

  Killer.

  Back inside, I stalked the small rooms. Restless energy burned through me, but I felt at odds with myself. I wanted to see home, but knew how the seeing would hurt. I wanted to speak to my father, but feared the words that would come. His words. Mine. Words you can’t take back or forget; the kind that scar deep and heal thin.

  Five years.

  Five damn years.

  I opened a closet door, closed it without seeing what was inside. I drank water that tasted of metal, stared at books, and my eyes passed over it without seeing it; but it must have registered on me. It must have had some impact. Because as I paced, I thought of my trial: the hate that burst against me each day; the arguments built to hang me; the confusion among those who knew me best, and how it was compounded when my stepmother took the stand, swore her oath, and tried with her words to bury me.

  Most of the trial was a blur: accusations, denials, expert testimony on blunt force trauma and blood spatter. What I remembered were the faces in the courtroom, the ready passions of people who once professed to know me.

  The nightmare of every innocent man wrongly accused.

  Five years ago, Gray Wilson was nineteen years old, right out of high school. He was strong and young and handsome. A football hero. One of Salisbury’s favored sons. Then someone bashed a hole in his skull with a rock. He died on Red Water Farm and my own stepmother said I did it.

  I circled the room, heard those words again—not guilty—and felt the violent thrust of emotion they put into me: the vindication and relief, the simple conviction that things could go ba
ck to the way they’d been. I should have known that I was wrong, should have felt it in the dank air of the slam-packed courtroom.

  There was no going back.

  The verdict that should have been an ending, was not. There was also the final confrontation with my father and the short, bitter goodbye to the only place I’d ever called home. A forced parting. The town didn’t want me. Fine. Just dandy. As much as it hurt, I could live with that. But my father made a choice, too. I told him that I didn’t do it. His new wife told him that I had. He chose to believe her.

  Not me.

  Her.

  And he told me to leave.

  My family had been on Red Water Farm for more than two hundred years, and I’d been groomed since childhood to take over its management. My father was easing back; Dolf, too. It was a multimillion-dollar operation and I was all but running it when the sheriff came to lock me away. The place was more than a part of me. It was who I was, what I loved, and what I was born to do. I couldn’t stay in Rowan County if the farm and my family were not a part of my life. I couldn’t be Adam Chase, the banker, or Adam Chase, the pharmacist. Not in this place. Not ever.

  So I left the only people I’d ever loved, the only place I’d called home. I sought to lose myself in a city that was tall and gray and ceaseless. I planted myself there, and breathed in the noise and the flow and the pale white fuzz of endless, empty days. For five years, I succeeded. For five years I pounded down the memories and the loss.

  Then Danny called, and blew everything apart.

  It was on the fourth shelf, thick and spine-out. Pale. White. I pulled it from the shelf, a heavy sheaf, bound in plastic.

  State v. Adam Chase.

  Trial transcript. Every word said. Recorded. Forever.

  It was heavily used, smudged, and folded at the corners. How many times had Robin read it? She’d stood by me during the trial, sworn that she believed me. And her faith had almost cost her the only job she’d ever cared about. Every cop in the county thought I’d done it. Every cop but her. She’d been unflinching, and in the end, I’d left her.

  She could have come with me.

  That was truth, but what did it matter? Her world. My world. It could not have worked. And here we were, all but strangers.

  I let the transcript fall open in my hands; it did so easily, spread itself to the testimony that almost damned me.

  WITNESS: A witness called by the The State,

  having been first duly sworn to tell the truth,

  was examined and testified as follows:

  Direct Examination of Janice Chase by the

  District Attorney for the County of Rowan

  Q: Will you please state your name for the Court?

  A: Janice Chase.

  Q: How are you related to the defendant, Mrs. Chase?

  A: He is my stepson. His father is my husband. Jacob Chase.

  Q: You have other children with Mr. Chase?

  A: Twins. Miriam and James. We call him Jamie. They’re eighteen.

  Q: They are the defendant’s half siblings?

  A: Adopted siblings. Jacob is not the natural father. He adopted them shortly after we were married.

  Q: And where is their natural father?

  A: Is that important?

  Q: Just trying to establish the nature of these relationships, Mrs. Chase. So the jury will understand who everybody is.

  A: He’s gone.

  Q: Gone where?

  A: Just gone.

  Q: Very well. How long have you been married to Mr. Chase?

  A: Thirteen years.

  Q: So, you’ve known the defendant for a long time.

  A: Thirteen years.

  Q: How old was the defendant when you and his father were married?

  A: He was ten.

  Q: And your other children?

  A: They were five.

  Q: Both of them?

  A: They are twins.

  Q: Oh. Right. Now, I know this must be difficult for you, testifying against your own stepson . . .

  A: It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  Q: You were close?

  A: No. We’ve never been close.

  Q: Um. . . . Is that because he resented you? Because you’d taken his mother’s place?

  Defense Counsel: Objection. Calls for speculation.

  Q: Withdrawn.

  A: She killed herself.

  Q: I beg your pardon.

  A: His mother killed herself.

  Q: Um . . .

  A: I’m no homewrecker.

  Q: Okay . . .

  A: I just want to be clear on that up front, before his lawyer tries to make this out like something it’s not. We were never close, that’s true, but we’re still family. I’m not making this up and I’m not out to get Adam. I have no agenda. I love his father more than anything. And I’ve tried with Adam. We just never got close. It’s that simple.

  Q: Thank you, Mrs. Chase. I know that this is difficult for you. Tell us about the night that Gray Wilson was killed.

  A: I saw what I saw.

  Q: We’ll get to that. Tell us about the party.

  I closed the transcript and replaced it on the shelf. I knew the words. The party had been at midsummer: my stepmother’s idea. A birthday party for the twins, their eighteenth. She’d hung lights in the trees, engaged the finest caterer, and brought a swing band up from Charleston. It started at four in the afternoon, ended at midnight; yet a few souls lingered. At two A.M., or so she swore, Gray Wilson walked down to the river. At roughly three, when all had left, I came up the hill, covered in the boy’s blood.

  He was killed by a sharp-edged rock the size of a large man’s fist. They found it on the bank, next to a red-black stain in the dirt. They knew it was the murder weapon because it had the boy’s blood all over it and because it was a perfect match, in size and shape, for the hole in his skull. Somebody bashed in the back of his head, hit hard enough to drive bone shards deep into his brain. My stepmother claimed that it was me. She described it on the stand. The man she’d seen at three o’clock in the morning had on a red shirt and a black cap.

  Same as me.

  He walked like me. He looked like me.

  She didn’t call the cops, she claimed, because she did not realize that the dark liquid on my hands and shirt was blood. She had no idea that a crime had been committed until the next morning when my father found the body halfway in the river. The way she told it, it wasn’t until later that she put it all together.

  The jury debated for four days, then the gavel came down and I walked out. No motive. That’s what swung the vote. The prosecution put on a great show, but the case was built entirely on my stepmother’s testimony. It was a dark night. Whoever she saw, she saw from a distance. And I had no reason in the world to want Gray Wilson dead.

  We barely knew each other.

  I cleaned the kitchen, took a shower, and left a note for Robin on the kitchen table. I gave her my cell number and asked her to call when she finished her shift.

  It was just after two when I finally turned onto the gravel drive of my father’s farm. I knew every inch of it, yet felt like an intruder, like the land itself knew that I’d surrendered my claim upon it. The fields still glistened from the rain, and mud filled the ditches that ran beside the drive. I steered past pastures full of cattle, through a neck of old forest, and then out into the soy fields. The road followed a fence line to the top of a rise, and as I crested the ridge I could see three hundred acres of soy spread out below me. Migrants were at work in the field, baking in the hot sun. I saw no supervisor, no farm truck; and that meant no water for the workers.

  My father owned just north of fourteen hundred acres, one of the largest working farms left in central North Carolina. Its borders had not changed since the original purchase in 1789. I drove through soy fields and rolling pasture, crossed over swollen creeks, and passed the stables before I topped the last hill and saw the house. At one point it had been surprisingly small
, a weathered old homestead; but the house I remembered from childhood was long gone. When my father remarried, his new wife brought different ideas with her, and the home now sprawled across the landscape. The front porch, however, was untouched, as I knew it would be. Two centuries of Chases had stood on that porch to watch the river, and I knew that my father would never allow it to be torn down or replaced. “Everybody has a line,” he’d said to me once, “and that porch is mine.”

  There was a farm truck in the driveway. I parked next to it, saw the watercoolers in the back, their sides wet with condensation. I switched off the ignition, climbed out, and a million pieces of my old life coalesced around me. A slow, warm childhood and my mother’s bright smile. The things my father liked to teach me. The calluses that grew on my hands. Long days in the sun. Then the way things changed, my mother’s suicide, and the black months fading to gray as I fought through its aftershock. My father’s remarriage, new siblings, new challenges. Then Grace in the river. Adulthood and Robin. The plans we made all blown to bits.

  I stepped onto the porch, stared over the river, and thought of my father. I wondered what was left of us, then went in search of him. His study stood empty and unchanged: pine floors, overflowing desk, tall bookshelves and piles of books on the floor next to them, muddy boots by the back door, pictures of hunting dogs long dead, shotguns next to the stone fireplace, jackets on hooks, hats; and a photograph of the two of us, taken nineteen years earlier, half a year after my mother died.

  I’d lost twenty pounds in the months since we’d buried her. I’d barely spoken, barely slept, and he decided enough was enough and it was time to move on. Just like that. Let’s do something, he’d said. Let’s get out of the house. I did not even look up. For God’s sake, Adam. . . .

  He took me hunting on a bright, fall day. High, blue sky, leaves not yet turned. The deer came in the first hour, and it was unlike any deer I’d ever seen. Its coat shone pale white under antlers wide enough to carry a grown man. He was massive, and presented himself, head up, fifty yards out. He stared in our direction, then pawed the ground, as if impatient.