Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Dennis moves to go into the living room, and Claire stops him with an arm across his chest. She looks at him, and suddenly she misses the bewilderment, because it has been replaced with a resignation he isn’t old enough for, an expression that says this is no less than he expected, that this fits right in with what he knows of the world. Claire wants to lie to him, tell him everything will be all right, but she goes to Wesley instead, kneels beside him and puts a hand on his thigh. Wesley, she says.

  He ignores her. His eyes are on his strings now, his bow, his fingers that won’t obey.

  Wesley.

  The bow sawing desperately, the motion hardly intentional anymore, nearly a seizure. A sound to set your teeth on edge.

  Wesley, please.

  He makes an awful sort of pained sound deep in his throat, and Claire reaches forward and curls her hand over the scroll of his fiddle and pulls it down, away, and finally he relinquishes its weight to her and quits. Half drops and half throws his bow to the floor. It clatters dully on the hardwood, a blunt coda to his ruined song.

  We thank You for our sorrows and trials, for they make our joys shine ever brighter.

  What happens first? Does Dennis start to act like his father, or does Wesley begin to fear he will?

  The third time Dennis runs away he is fifteen, and he stays gone two days. He has always come back by dark before. Wesley spends every moment of those two days scouring the hills, trawling the streets of Black River and Elk Fork in his pickup, walking the banks of the river and reluctantly searching its currents. (He denies the last when she asks, but Claire has seen him from the porch, hands in his pockets, head bowed to the water.)

  He’s okay, Wesley tells her again and again.

  She nods. Again and again.

  He’s a smart kid. Knows how to look after himself.

  Dennis turns up Wednesday evening, dirty and smelly and looking a little frightened but a lot pleased. Wesley is home for a brief supper, his truck keys waiting beside his dinner plate, coat unzipped but still on. Claire meets her son at the door and folds him into the tightest embrace she can muster, is relieved to feel him squeeze her back. Wesley stands with her, waits until she lets Dennis go.

  You all right, boy?

  Yeah.

  You ain’t hurt?

  No.

  Then you apologize to your momma, and you apologize to me.

  She sees her son’s mouth twitch—she can’t tell if he’s angry or amused, and oh, it’s an unpleasant sight—but he pulls himself straighter yet, dutifully meets her eyes and says, I’m sorry if I scared you, Mom.

  She’s almost glad he doesn’t sound like he means it. Shane always sounded like he meant it when he told her he was sorry.

  I’m just glad you’re safe, she says.

  Wesley waits long enough to be sure Dennis isn’t going to say anything else.

  Apologize to me, he says again.

  Dennis looks at him.

  Wesley’s been looking for you, Denny.

  Didn’t ask him to.

  He had to trade two shifts.

  Didn’t ask him to do that, either.

  Wesley steps carefully around her and pushes Dennis against the wall. It’s a controlled movement—the heel of one hand against Dennis’s breastbone, just enough pressure to put him against the wall and keep him there—but Dennis grunts and the back of his head connects solidly with plaster. Claire can’t decide if this is something she should object to, if this is violence she is seeing. Later, when she plays the moment back in her head, she still won’t be able to decide.

  You’re going to stand here, Wesley says, until you apologize. Dennis tries to force his way off the wall, but Wesley leans into him—he only moves an inch or two—and Dennis stays where he is. He puts his hands around Wesley’s wrist, and Claire sees fingernails digging into flesh, but Wesley doesn’t flinch and doesn’t move.

  So Dennis stands against the wall. Wesley sits back down, inches of space between his spine and the back of the chair. Thank you for dinner, Claire, he says, without looking away from Dennis. I’m finished.

  They are still there when she has washed and dried the dishes. Wesley stares at Dennis; Dennis stares at the empty space over Wesley’s head. Dennis’s hands are in fists against the wall, and there’s a worrisome smudge of something on his wrist, mud or blood. Wesley’s hands are resting on the tabletop, loose and open, the kind of casual that can only be dangerous. The skin over his knuckles is flushed, and Claire can imagine the heat of the pain he never mentions but is always etched on the periphery of his expressions, evident behind the careful modulation of his voice. She rests a hand at the place where his neck joins his shoulder, leans close to his ear. Maybe it would be best to deal with this tomorrow, she says. When you’ve both had—

  Good night, Claire. I’ll be in as soon as I can.

  She goes to bed. She does not sleep. She listens to the silence in the living room, to her husband not moving, to her son not speaking.

  Dennis never does apologize. Sometime after three, Wesley will tell her, Dennis’s eyes roll to the whites. It’s not the standing. It’s not; he’d skipped meals in the two days he’d been gone. Claire scrambles out of bed when she hears him begin to fall, but when she gets to the living room Wesley has already caught Dennis in his arms.

  And we thank You, Lord, for the certitude that You are with us as we walk through this life . . .

  Wesley is a good man.

  Dennis is a good boy.

  Why is this not enough?

  . . . and for the knowledge that You will never abandon nor forsake us.

  Her son is sixteen. He has been suspended from school four times this year—for fighting each time—but still has straight A’s. He never plays his fiddle anymore (Wesley sold it last year, for two hundred dollars, and gave the cash to Dennis), but he spends weekends working at Arthur’s. He’s good with the horses, Arthur says. Has a natural affinity.

  Her husband is forty-two, and for the first time in his life he is beginning to look old. He’s working day watch again, and when he comes home now it is an hour before Claire dares talk to him. Not because she is afraid of him—he has never given her cause to fear—but because the sound of her voice, too soon, seems to pain him. He tries so hard to show her that he is fine. He hasn’t sold his own fiddle, but he doesn’t touch it, either.

  That night—the last night—Wesley says grace, and Claire and Dennis watch each other while they listen. When Wesley is finished, Claire immediately starts talking. (During the day she plans what she will say, careful to choose topics neither of the boys in her life will care about: gardening, what Hallie Christiansen told her at Jameson’s that morning, a story from the radio program she has taken to listening to while she cooks.) Dinner has become performance art, a one-woman show in which she must provide all the conversation while also consuming a meal and guarding against dangerous silences that might tempt Dennis or Wesley to fill them. It’s going well until Wesley interrupts her.

  What happened to your face?

  There is a bruise at Dennis’s hairline, faint enough that Claire had hoped Wesley wouldn’t notice. (What doesn’t he notice?)

  Nothing.

  You been fighting again?

  Wesley, let’s—

  No.

  No? Wesley catches Dennis’s wrist, turns it so the light falls on the blackening scabs over his knuckles. If I call up the school tomorrow and talk to your principal, he gonna tell me “no,” too?

  Do whatever the fuck you want. See if I care.

  Claire puts her hands to her face.

  What did you just say, boy?

  Fuck, Wes. I said fuck. F-u-c-k, fuck. Want me to say it again?

  And Wesley is standing, and he is not Wesley her husband, he is Wesley the officer (abruptly, Claire realizes she has always thought of them as separate people; just as abruptly, she understands they are one and the same), and his voice is suddenly hard and sharp and much deeper than usual. Get up, he barks. Up!


  (He is not his father, she has told Wesley.)

  Dennis doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t move, but Claire can see the bravado bleeding away. His hands are in his lap, his shoulders hunched. He is trembling, just slightly.

  (He is not your father, she has told Dennis.)

  Get up, Wesley commands again, and he grabs the back of Dennis’s shirt collar. And then—it is as though time jumps forward a few seconds, as though Claire doesn’t see it happen at all—Dennis is on his feet and Wesley still has hold of his collar and there is a gun in her son’s hand and a gun aimed at her husband’s face.

  Claire just has time to see that Dennis’s eyes are black with fury, that he has both hands on the grip of the revolver and that it’s shaking anyway. Just has time to see Wesley’s features go blank, the anger that was there a moment ago gone, gone, gone, replaced with nothing at all. Then Wesley moves, so fast, and he grabs Dennis’s wrist and hits him hard in the face, twice, and her son is on the floor and there is blood on his face and his clothes and the rug, and the revolver is in Wesley’s hand now and his hand isn’t shaking and she doesn’t know if his finger has the strength to pull the trigger or not, but the gun is leveled and steady and ready to put a bullet in her child.

  She stands up and screams, Stop! Or means to scream, but it comes out a whisper, and she says it again and again, trying to make the word louder, but it is still a whisper: stop stop stop stop stop. She sees Wesley hear her, sees the subtle change in the way he holds himself. But he keeps the gun aimed at Dennis a half second longer before he drops his arm and turns around and goes outside. She expects the door to slam but it doesn’t.

  Later, after she has brought Dennis back from the emergency clinic, his nose packed and splinted, but before Wesley has returned from wherever he has gone, she will clean up the dishes. One fork is on the floor, a smear of sauce there on the rug beside the blood, but otherwise everything is so ordinary. She will know, scraping the food into the trash and scrubbing the plates and drying the glasses, that she will not do these things here again. That there will be no more meals together. No more family. No more grace.

  She will remember the way her son’s rage made her see his father in him for the first time. She will remember the way Wesley hesitated before lowering the revolver, the way she knew, in that moment, that what he kept from his face was fear, and that fear was more dangerous than anger.

  And the next day, when Wesley says to her, A person shouldn’t have to share his home with someone who wants him dead, she will not disagree.

  Amen.

  On Monday, September gave way to October. Big cardboard crates of pumpkins appeared outside the doors of Henderson’s Feed and Farm, displacing the weathered old bachelors who usually stood there, one boot sole against the wall, spitting into the gravel. The diner across the street painted cartoonish bats and ghosts on its windows. And the banner Wes had been half waiting to see went up across Main Street, down by the old prison. Looked to be the same one they’d hung when he lived here, faded and frayed. It was tied fast to two streetlamps, knot upon knot, and half-moon slices had been cut into the material so when the wind barreled through the canyon it wouldn’t tear the banner down. BLACK RIVER HARVEST FESTIVAL, it said, and below, in smaller letters, THIS SATURDAY.

  “You going to stay for it?” Dennis had asked that morning. Wes pretended he’d forgotten. Pretended to think about it. Then he’d said yes, and let it go at that, because he still hadn’t told Dennis about the parole hearing, and now he could put off telling him for another week.

  He hadn’t forgotten about Harvest, of course. Wes had first stepped onto the Harvest stage when he was six years old, a skinny kid with a ¼-size fiddle. Folks had been prepared to listen politely, applaud dutifully. And then he’d played “Devil’s Dream,” a showoff of a tune most of them had heard before, but never so fast and never so good. Harvest was where he’d first played for an audience, where he’d met Claire, where he and Lane and Farmer were the headliners seventeen years running. Time was, no one left Harvest until Wes played his fiddle.

  When Claire told him she wanted to come back to Black River, he’d immediately calculated the time to Harvest. It hadn’t seemed so many days. He’d imagined driving with her there in the truck, slowing to ease over the ruts when the asphalt gave way to oiled dirt a half mile outside town. He’d imagined parking at the end of a long ragged line of pickups, imagined taking Claire in his arms the way he had when he’d carried her, giggling, over the threshold of the house after their wedding. He imagined her wrists overlapping at the back of his neck, her head against his chest, the plain scent of her hair beneath his nose. He’d imagined carrying her to a seat midway back from the stage, on the side nearest the river, sitting there with her in the cool autumn sun and watching the musicians as they took their turns up on the stage, neither he nor Claire listening, both of them hearing the same long-gone music instead.

  Harvest was held in a wide fallow field east of town. By late morning, when Wes arrived, parked cars and pickups lined both sides of the road and spilled into the dry lot opposite the field. It was the best day you could ask of October: sunny and cool, only a few clouds in the sky casting rounded shadows onto the mountain slopes. There was a hint of wildfire smoke in the air, a niggling sting at the back of the throat, and though it was from a distant blaze, it mingled uneasily with the scents of fried dough, beer, straw.

  Wes walked alone along the shoulder of the road behind parents tightly clutching the hands of children, a group of teenagers laughing too loudly, a man he didn’t recognize carrying a black guitar case. He let himself be funneled along with the rest of them through the entrance to the festival, marked with stakes and twine punctuated by triangular plastic flags. The field had been mowed, the stubble tamped down by dozens of boot soles. Along the periphery a couple of old pieces of farm machinery—a harrow, a rake wheel—sat rusted and folded up like the giant husks of dead insects. Down on the far end of the field was an oversized metal shed where the county kept three snowplows and a two-story load of coarse sand. Tucked way off beneath the mountains was the river. Hard to see unless you walked straight to it, but if you got up on the stage it stared you right in the face.

  Wes wandered slowly through the crowd, pushed his way along the corridor formed by the rows of food booths. Folks packed tight, lined up to wait for booze or ice cream or elephant ears, or, if they were really brave, for Rocky Mountain oysters. Signs tacked to every available surface reminded everyone that the profits went to the Corrections Officers’ Welfare Fund. Wes stood in line at one booth and thought about the unpaid bills stacked on the kitchen table in Spokane, the unopened statements that must be scattered on the floor below the mail slot, the notices still making their way through the postal system. He thought about the fact that Claire had reached her annual maximum benefit cap in May, that he hadn’t paid the mortgage since July, that all four of his credit cards were maxed out. He thought about his depleted bank account and the crushed manila envelope in his duffel back at Dennis’s, not quite a thousand dollars in cash inside. Then he thought about the welfare fund and how they’d picked up what the insurance wouldn’t after the riot. When he got to the head of the line, he bought a beer he didn’t want, paid with a fifty and didn’t wait for the change.

  On the far side of the food corridor the festival forked apart: crafts in one direction, games in another, the stage straight ahead. Wes found a spot to stand near the back of the crowd, behind the rows of straw bales that served as seating. It was a good stage for a small-town event like this. Not real big, but high, and bound overhead by an upturned squared-off horseshoe of metal latticework, speakers on either side, lights above. A few more bells and whistles than he remembered. There was another banner across the front of the stage, as tired as the one on Main Street, and a few pumpkins and cornstalks arranged near the speakers. A bluegrass band was playing now. Wes didn’t recognize them, but they were young. A guitarist, a bass player, banjo and mand
olin pickers. A fiddler.

  He wasn’t bad, the fiddler. Kept a good chop going, played a fast break. But he was getting by on the speed of his fingers. That was enough for most folks in any given audience: a quick melody, a fast bow, fingering that was so far beyond anything they could imagine doing themselves they thought that made it good. But the thing about a fiddle was that it was more like the human voice than any other instrument in the world. You could make it sing. You could sustain a note for as long as a breath, longer. You could draw that bow across two strings at once, or slide it from one string to the other in a single downbow, and in doing that you could sound a piercing cry and a low sob at once, joy and sorrow made one.

  There were open seats up ahead, but Wes stayed where he was. The band rounded off one song, launched into another. “Salt Creek.” Wes knew it, of course; it’d been one of his band’s standbys. His fingers tried to tap out the notes against his thigh, but they crossed and tripped over each other, and he pulled them into a painful fist. Forced himself to be still and listen. A strange thing to stand here and listen to a man who was a good fiddler but nowhere near as good as Wes had been. Wasn’t sure if it was a rare pleasure or an especially exquisite torture. He liked hearing this familiar music played well, with familiar scents in the air and familiar ground beneath his feet. There was something right in that. But it also just about killed him to be so close to a stage he’d stood on so many times in his life, a stage he’d commanded, and know he’d never stand on it again.

  Lane had changed the name of the band at least once a year. Lane Gregory and the Lockdown Lads, or Lane Gregory and the Prison Posse, or something equally ridiculous. A fluid series of names for a fluid band. Lane, Arthur and Wes had played together for nineteen years. Others drifted in and out: there had been a couple mandolin players, a second guitar for a while, a standup bass for a few short weeks. They played an even balance of bluegrass and old-time, with a little straight-up country mixed in for good measure.