Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Wes didn’t say anything.

  “Can you still play?”

  He looked at Scott. The kid rubbed a thumb over his nose, across his freckles, and looked about five years younger than he had when he got into the truck. His eyes were on Wes’s hands, hooked over the yoke of the steering wheel.

  Wes didn’t answer him.

  He and Dennis shared dinner that night, the first time they’d sat down together rather than stood over the counter in the kitchen. The table was a small cherry wood square, set against one wall of the living room. Tonight Dennis sat on the side nearest the kitchen, where Wes always used to sit, and Wes sat opposite, in Claire’s old place. It put his back to the door, but that was better than sitting the way they used to, the way they had on that last night.

  Dennis spoke while Wes’s head was still bowed, grace running silently in his head. “I hear you gave Scott a ride into town today.”

  Wes thought his Amen, looked up. “Seemed like he needed it.”

  “Didn’t rip off your truck’s stereo or anything, did he?”

  “Do you really got to do this tonight, Dennis?”

  Dennis held up a hand. “Fine, sorry.”

  Wes watched his stepson push a single pea back and forth with his fork, a millimeter one way, a millimeter the other. Wes wasn’t sure if this edginess was because of his presence or because that was just who Dennis was. Everything he did, every move he made, it was like he was trying to hold back, keep from exploding. It gave him an odd aura of stillness, but with a great deal of force behind each minute movement. “Seriously,” Dennis said finally. “What’d you think of him?”

  “Why ask me? Ain’t like you’ve ever bothered with my opinion before.” Hell. Hell. Why say that? Must be this house. This damned table.

  Dennis dropped his fork onto his plate. “Jesus, Wes. Do you have to do this?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean nothing by it. Let it go.” He took a long swallow of water, set the glass down harder than he meant to. “Scott. I don’t know. Seems like a nice enough kid, I guess. Not real happy to be here.”

  “You blame him?”

  “No.” Wes set his fork down, pushed his plate away, most of the food still on it. No appetite since Claire died. “I’ll tell you one thing, though: that kid don’t seem especially interested in horses.” Dennis looked up, and Wes saw he wasn’t saying anything his stepson didn’t already know. “Which I suppose means he must really like you.”

  Dennis smiled, not at Wes. “And you find that hard to believe?”

  He noticed Dennis’s nose all of a sudden, the way it ruined his profile. Wes broke it eighteen years ago, at this table, the one and only time he’d ever laid a hand on him in anger. Hadn’t strictly meant to, but he still wasn’t sorry for it; Dennis had deserved that and more. What he thought he might be sorry for was the afterward. The leaving. It was a new idea, that he might be sorry for that. And he thought again about Scott, the anger that poured out of the kid so you could almost smell it on him, sharp and sour. “Dennis,” Wes said, looking back across the table, “I don’t think I know you well enough anymore to say.”

  He stayed up late that night, later than Dennis, though he had church in the morning. He walked around the silent house, treading close to the walls to keep the floorboards from creaking. Still a house he could move through in the dark. Still a house whose shadows he knew, the cast of moonlight through the uncurtained windows familiar as it fell.

  The walls were most different. Gone, of course, were the things he and Claire had taken with them when they’d left: the cross Wes’s father had carved from a knotted piece of deadfall; the wooden calendar with a painting of a goose Claire ordered another year’s worth of pages for every November; the small poster from the last time the band played Harvest, a few weeks before the riot. Gone, too, were the things they had left behind: a handful of pleasant but generic art prints, a collection of haphazardly framed family photographs. The walls of the house now were nearly bare, cool white almost everywhere he looked.

  The exception was the space over the mantel, where Claire’s wide mirror used to be. When he was fifteen and in the midst of one of his rages, Dennis threw a book at the mirror and cracked it. All the way across, from one corner of the frame to the other, a finer spiderweb of fractures at the point of impact. Now there were a handful of photographs in its place, each carefully matted and framed. A yellow stand of aspens in low sun; a distant image of a broad-antlered bull moose; a horse running blurred, scattered sharp catches of image standing out: the glint of a steel shoe nailed to a hoof, the bristly texture of a tangled mane, a taut line of muscle powering a stride.

  And his wife. A photograph Wes had never seen before. Dennis must have taken it during one of Claire’s last visits before she became ill. She had never liked having her picture taken, and Wes was suffering the consequences of her aversion now; he had so few photographs of her. Soft light on her skin, highlighting her profile as she turned from the camera, her hair in a thick, heavy braid over her shoulder, a shy close-mouthed smile curving her lips. A beautiful portrait. But her eyes were aimed a few degrees away from the viewer, and no matter where Wes stood, he couldn’t pretend she was looking at him.

  The Black River Presbyterian Church was a block off Main Street, in a wide building whose geometric shape had probably seemed innovative (rather than ugly) when it was built. The sign by the road had been replaced, but that was the only obvious change Wes could see. Same kinds of trucks in the lot. Same kinds of people walking in.

  He waited until three minutes to nine before he went inside. The usher looked distantly familiar, but he smiled through Wes and handed him a program with a rote greeting. The town had grown in the last eighteen years, but the sanctuary was emptier than he remembered it, no more than half full, and the sign outside listed this as the only service of the week. Wes took a seat in the second-to-last pew, near the windows, dotted today with a scattering of raindrops making a slow descent toward the ground outside. The stained glass spanned the entire left wall of the sanctuary and reflected a typical Presbyterian austerity: no figures of Christ or saints, just thin bars of color: pink, gold, blue, green. As a young child, Wes thought the windows looked like they were made of sheets of hard candy. Knew it was mere fantasy even then, but as he and his father filed out of the pew one morning, he’d leaned close and touched the tip of his tongue to the cool glass.

  When Wes was a boy, church was for him and his father alone. His mother bowed her head at the dinner table, and on the bookshelf at home there was a small Bible with her name in script on the dedication page, but she stayed home Sundays. Later, when he was an adult, Claire stayed home, too. She had never come with him to church, not in Black River and not in Spokane. Not even to the chapel in the hospital. But she never laughed at him, never belittled his commitment, though she knew the strength of his doubts.

  The pastor today was new to him, a younger man with a voice that was stronger than his thin face and slight frame suggested. Wes passed judgment on him over the course of the hour and decided he was a good pastor for a town of corrections officers, hitting the Old Testament heavily, making plentiful references to justice and duty. During the litany of sorrows and misfortunes that made up the weekly prayer list, Wes heard Claire’s name. It rang in his head, seemed a strange convergence of his own thoughts and the outside world. Claire Carver, Claire Carver. Claire Carver, dead and gone, pitied and prayed for. It took Wes a minute to find Arthur Farmer in a pew near the front; he’d gone bald beneath his hat. He’d have put her name on the list. He’d have thought it was his business. The ringing of her name died, the service went on. Wes bowed his head for the prayers and recited words that were good by virtue of their familiarity, offered up notes in a low voice for the hymns. He put a twenty in the collection plate when it passed. Didn’t take communion. Never did.

  When Wes was fourteen, his father switched from evening watch to day watch at the prison. It was a change he had waited years for,
but it meant he was now inside the gate Sunday mornings. They began attending evening service, and it was a habit Wes held to as an adult; he was sorry to see it had been done away with. At evening service, the sanctuary was peopled mostly by men who sat alone, wide gaps between them in the pews. The pastor’s voice was tired but unyielding, and the hymns took on an appealing strangeness when sung only in low men’s voices. It was during that spare, solemn hour, in the largely empty sanctuary, the bright candy windows dark, that Wes came closest to believing.

  His father died on a Sunday. It was autumn, but the long arctic summer evenings lingered, and the sun was just beginning its slow sink below the mountains when the service let out. His father sent him to walk home alone, said he had an errand to run in town. When he thought back on it later, Wes realized this was a mere veneer of a lie; everything in town was closed on Sunday evenings. He hadn’t recognized it then, though, and for years he felt guilty, wondered if his father had been intentionally clumsy with this untruth, hoping his son would catch him in it. But Wes had accepted it easily, and his father had smiled and said, “Help your mother.” Another warning there, maybe, a deeper meaning, but Wes missed it, too, and when he arrived home, he didn’t go straight for his fiddle as usual but went instead to the kitchen and helped his mother chop carrots and peel potatoes.

  They said later that his father didn’t jump from the trestle before the train hit him. How they knew this with such certainty went unsaid, but Wes was old enough to imagine. He took a macabre pride in the knowledge. Wondered if he, too, would have the fortitude to stand his ground with a freight train bearing down on him, no railings restraining him and the river black and heavy far below, the water offering a chance, however distant, of rescue, reversal.

  Wes had been up on the trestle twice. Once was days afterward, when he made a white-knuckled climb of the iron scaffolding and walked between the rails in a frightened crouch. At the midpoint, the river evenly split below, he found a dark stain on one of the wooden ties that might have been blood or might have been grease. The other time was years later, the night his relationship with Dennis had shattered. A harder climb, not for age but because even then his hands were halfway to useless. There was a chill breeze blowing on the trestle that he’d been sheltered from at the bottom of the canyon. It lifted his short hair and cooled his skin almost to the point of pain. Wes walked straight that night, his arms held slightly out from his sides, maybe for balance, maybe to better feel the movement of the air around and against him. The height was seductive, and he didn’t stay long.

  Late Sunday afternoon the storm broke into pieces and drifted apart, and Wes and Dennis decided to go up the mountain. The suit he’d brought stayed on its hanger in the closet, and he wore his good jeans and a green shirt instead, the one Claire bought for him because she said it matched his eyes.

  He found Dennis outside, tying the black horse to a heavy hitching rack beside the shed. The red horse was tied too, already saddled. Wes crossed the yard, mud pushing up from beneath the gravel and squelching over the sides of his boots. The red horse skittered sideways at his approach, jerking its head up and startling itself all over again when it hit the end of its rope. Dennis reached out to the animal, laid his palm flat on its neck. “Easy, Serrano,” he said, voice low.

  “The hell is this?”

  “It’s a long way up,” Dennis said, without looking at him. “We’ll ride.”

  “You couldn’t have told me this before?”

  “Didn’t see any reason to.” Dennis ran a bristle brush over the black horse’s back and laid his free hand over its withers. “I’ll put you on Rio. He’s a good horse.”

  Wes didn’t say anything. He could ride. Didn’t especially like to, but his father had kept a couple horses, chunky animals with coats that never shed all the way out and hooves that chipped on the rocks in the pasture. He’d used them to pack elk out of the mountains, and for a few seasons Wes went along. Fine. He’d do it Dennis’s way, this once. For Claire.

  He watched Dennis smooth the blanket over Rio’s back and swing the saddle up so it settled easy. His stepson moved with the kind of speed and confidence a person exhibited only when he didn’t have to think about what he was doing. Wes watched his hands. They expertly tightened the cinch and knotted the latigo, moving swiftly over leather and metal and still finding time for a gentle glide over muscle and hair. “Let’s get Mom’s ashes set up here,” he said.

  Dennis’s hands crowded each other when he held the small box. The brown paper wrapping was still on, and it rustled as Dennis gently settled the box into the bottom of a leather bag. He tied it to the skirt of Rio’s saddle so it lay against the horse’s flank and rose and fell slightly with the animal’s breath.

  Dennis turned away from the saddlebag too quickly. “Ready?”

  Wes nodded.

  Rio took the bit readily when Dennis offered it, closing his eyes as Dennis guided the leather straps of the bridle over his ears and fixed the buckles. The reins were split, and without so much as a glance at Wes, Dennis balanced them out in his hands and knotted them together. He started to lead the horse toward a bale of hay near the fence, but Wes stopped him. “I’m good.” He took hold of the saddle horn, set his foot in the near stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. He could often force his way through a single action—mind over matter lasted that long, at least—but his hand punished him good when he tightened his grip on the horn. A sweet pain on a day like this. Tangible.

  “Can you hold those reins all right?”

  “They’re fine.” He cradled the knot in his palm and let the reins drape over his fingers. He wondered if Dennis had thought it out beforehand.

  “Sit back on your pockets a little more,” Dennis said, then turned away to bridle the red horse.

  They started up through the access lane that ran between Dennis’s land and Farmer’s, Dennis in front. The red horse was a firecracker, but Dennis rode him with a natural calm. His spine was absolutely straight, and Wes suddenly remembered this about him, this perfect posture he’d always had, even as a teenager, when most boys slouched like they’d slipped a few notches back on the evolutionary scale. Rio settled easily into step behind the red horse, his head and neck swaying slightly. Wes drove his heels toward the ground, remembering that single piece of advice from his father, and tried to let his body follow the rhythmic movement of Rio’s. It was a strange sensation, made so by the distance of time, but strange in another way, too, a way that made him recall the hitch he’d seen when he watched the horse in the pasture a few days back. Rio’s hind legs moved stiffly, with an up-and-down jerkiness, like pistons short on grease. “This horse has got arthritis,” Wes said.

  Dennis turned in the saddle, and Serrano started jigging. He watched Rio for a minute, and the muscles at the sides of his mouth tautened. “He’s old,” he said, the words like a sigh.

  “This ride going to be too much for him?”

  “No,” Dennis said, but he didn’t sound sure. Wes reached forward and grazed the knuckles of his free hand against Rio’s neck, received a backward flick of a single ear in return.

  At the base of the slope they reached the end of the access lane and turned onto an old logging road. A handful of aspens, their leaves winking gold to white in the breeze, stretched their branches past the pines. The incline was gradual, but the waterlogged ground slowed their progress. The road was wide enough to ride abreast, but Wes and Dennis made their way single file instead so they could ride down the center, where grass tall enough to brush the soles of Wes’s boots held the soil more or less in place. Even so, the horses’ hooves sucked at mud, and the rain had carved deep rivulets that crossed the road and interrupted their gaits.

  Twice during the ride Wes reached back to touch the leather bag that held his wife’s ashes. Still didn’t sit right with him, Claire reduced to a few handfuls of coarse powder. Seemed disrespectful somehow. He wanted her to have a casket, flowers, her favorite clothes, a restored body. He
wanted the embalming, the prayers, a service in a church and another at a graveside. She would have done those things for him.

  Dust to dust, love, she’d said.

  He would do this thing for her.

  And then they were there, and Dennis was stepping off the red horse. “Just bring the reins over his head and drop them,” he said. “These two ground-tie.”

  Wes had to give Dennis this much: the man had an eye for beauty. The place they’d stopped was less a clearing than a space where the road ran too close to the edge of the mountain to support trees. Roots burst from the earth and dangled in open air, and fallen forms of trees lay scattered on the slope below. They faced west, looking out over the join of canyon and valley. Below, the Wounded Elk flowed black through the shadowed corridor of the canyon and then curved into the open plain of the valley, where it greeted the setting sun and turned to quicksilver. The black grid of the train trestle spanned the border between light and shade. Across the valley, a lone rain shower was making its way across the Bitterroots, the outline of the mountain behind softened at the edges, like the face of an actress in an old movie, made gentler and flawless with the aid of a blur lens. The sun, dimmed by the clouds, was about to touch the highest crest. Wes glanced back over the other side of the ridge, east, and though Black River was still in plain sight—he could just make out the gray roof of the house—the new prison was hidden beyond the slow curve of the canyon. And ahead, behind, surrounding: endless folds of forested mountain, then white-dusted peaks rising up beyond, too distant to seem entirely real.

  Dennis took Claire’s ashes from the saddlebag and pulled the brown paper off, real careful, the way a person might unwrap a Christmas present if he wanted to reuse the paper next year. The urn was smooth brushed metal, and it had her name on it. Wes hadn’t thought about the screws. Dennis had a jackknife on his belt, though, and he used its blade to coax the screws from their homes. And then he held it like that, lidless, in cupped hands, looking like a little boy with a robin’s egg in his palms who’s just realized he can’t put it back into its nest.