Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Halfway up Lookout Pass, the radio surrenders to static. Claire lets it hiss for a few minutes, then reaches into her purse and pushes the cassette she finds there into the player in the dash. She left most of the tapes at the house in Black River—though she’s not sure Dennis will want them, wonders if he hasn’t already thrown them away—but she kept this one for herself. It is one of the first they recorded, no more special than any of the rest: just an afternoon, a token of what she once had in abundance. The warm-up scales, then “Fire on the Mountain” and “Jerusalem Ridge,” “Horses in the Canebrake” for Dennis (she can hear her son laugh in the middle), “Abide with Me” for her, and, as ever, “Black River” for himself. The tape has started to warble a bit; each time she plays it, Claire worries it will spill from the dashboard in a tangle of soundless ribbon. Still she presses Play.

  She pilots the truck up the steep curves of the pass, welcomes the embrace of the mountains and listens to the way things used to be.

  Her son is outside when she arrives, leaning on the pasture gate. It was off its hinges when she lived here, but now it hangs straight and there is a black horse on the other side. The horse is leggy—young, Claire thinks—and skittish; he spins and trots to the center of the pasture as she steers past the fenceline. Dennis watches him go before he turns toward her. He is seventeen but seems older, his expression inscrutable in a way that is new to her. He is wearing the red shirt she has always liked on him, but she cannot remember ever telling him it is her favorite. As he walks toward the truck, his steps betray a shade of reluctance, and Claire thinks he’s trying on the idea of being angry with her. She has prepared herself for this—maybe even longs for it—but when she gets out of the truck he is there to meet her. Hugs, a shy smile, a few clumsy words spoken atop each other. He loves her still.

  Dennis does not offer to cook dinner, and Claire is glad. She has yearned to be back in this most familiar kitchen, and even the broken left front burner on the stove sparks a feeling of nostalgic fondness. Dennis has shopped in anticipation of her coming (the vegetables in the refrigerator are dotted with the artificial dew of the grocery shelves), but the pantry still reveals what seems to Claire a painful sparseness, a dedication to only the barest essentials. She is pleased, at least, to make Dennis a strong meal tonight. (And yet, she cannot help but wonder what Wesley will eat when last night’s leftovers run out.)

  Dennis does most of the talking at the table—Claire eats slowly but finishes while he still has half his meal on his plate—and he tells her about the unusually gentle winter, and a wolf he glimpsed last month down by the river, and most of all about the black horse in the pasture outside. His name is Rio, Dennis tells her, he is four years old, and someday he is going to be his horse. Claire thinks this is probably a wish, the sort of dream that is both necessary and destined to remain unfulfilled (it is not callous to think so, is it?), but her son surprises her.

  He’s twenty-five percent mine right now, he says, around a bite of potatoes.

  How’s that?

  Uncle Arthur’s letting me pay a little bit at a time. Right now I’ve got him paid up a quarter of the way, but he’s still mostly Uncle Arthur’s. Dennis grins then, and Claire’s heart swells with the sight. I told him I thought that ought to do it, since Rio’s a Quarter Horse and he’s a quarter paid for and all. He thought that was pretty funny. Said it was a nice try but I still owe him the rest.

  I’m glad you have something you love, Claire says. Immediately she wishes she had phrased it differently, or not spoken at all. The words linger uncomfortably.

  Dennis cocks his head, gives her a peculiar look that seems to Claire to waver between a plain yearning for solace and a resolve to comfort her. I still miss you, her son says.

  The summer after Claire moved to Black River—the summer after she met Wesley—they went camping together. He had three days off from the prison, and they left the five-year-old Dennis with Madeline and Arthur and then drove north into the Seeley-Swan Valley. They were almost to the campsite, following a winding logging road high into the mountains, when a deer bounded into the road and out again, and Wesley yelled, Watch it, as though the deer might listen. He braked hard and the truck skidded on dirt and stopped at an angle. He squinted into the woods and said, Ah, would you look at that. It took Claire a moment to find the deer—a small doe—but then she did, there in a stand of trees, and she saw what Wesley had seen. There was a hole in the side of the doe’s face, wide and ragged and red, and a glimpse of glistening bone through the torn flesh. Wesley shook his head. They take a shot at her out of season and can’t even do her the service of killing her, he said. And then, to her: Stay here.

  What surprised Claire was his speed. He was out of the truck and had the rifle at his shoulder in a moment. He fired and the deer fell and the echo came back from the far mountains and Claire still hadn’t released the breath she held on first sighting the animal. Wesley staggered down the hill, the rifle held out at his side. He walked to where the doe lay still and looked down at her and came back to the truck. I’ll call it in when we get back to town, he said.

  Later, at the campsite, when the gold and green of the fields and the blue and silver of the lakes had yielded to darkness, after Wesley had built a fire that lit the edges of his features and sent sparks rising into the air, she said, That deer today.

  He looked at her.

  Was it hard for you? To kill it?

  It was the right thing.

  Claire waited, but he seemed to think he had answered the question.

  She goes back to Black River for two weeks every year. It seems paltry to her, two weeks out of fifty-two, especially when she lives just four hours away. (Always there is a moment, at the end of the trip, right before she leaves, when she thinks she will not get in the truck.) But soon Dennis is no longer a child by any measure, and Arthur is always there for him. Dennis calls twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, and Claire sends him envelopes now and then: coupons she has clipped from the Sunday paper, recipes simple enough for him to try, photographs she has taken during walks in the park in which Wesley always seems to be just leaving the frame.

  Still Claire has not found the words Wesley has asked her to offer Dennis on his behalf. Sometimes she tries, on a quiet evening during a visit. Dennis begins to fidget as soon as she mentions Wesley’s name, will walk away if she doesn’t change the subject. She follows him once, outside into the chill night, and he turns on her, his words sharp and much too loud (she will remember the hard bark even after she has forgotten the words themselves), and then he staggers backward, fists clenched, and orders her not to follow. He does not come back to the house that night, and she does not sleep.

  In Spokane, Wesley works. He is a security guard at the mall, a job Claire thinks is beneath his dignity, but when she once gently mentions disability benefits, the look he gives her is so desperate she changes the subject at once. So he works, and just as in Black River, he comes home and showers and changes before he talks to her, and then he talks of anything but his job. There are lines at the edges of his eyes she has not noticed before, and sometimes she has to say something two or three times before he hears her. He sinks into his easy chair with a new caution, as though he does not believe he will be allowed to stay there long. Arthur Farmer makes a point of calling now and then, and Wesley makes a point of not being available when he does.

  She can talk about Dennis if she wants to. Wesley will listen. At first she mentions her son only rarely, tentatively, when he is so much on her mind she thinks she will shatter if she cannot speak his name. But Wesley does not storm out, does not scorn her. (She wonders sometimes if he even hears her, he is so silent, but if she stops talking, Wesley will very quietly tell her, Go on now.) She tells him about her worries when Dennis quits school, about her pride when he starts his horseshoeing business, about the way he is almost another man entirely when he is with the horses. She talks, and Wesley listens, and he never says anything but, Go on now,
and that is both enough and not enough.

  There is a point, some years after the journey between Spokane and Black River has become familiar, that Claire begins to notice the exits. It happens in the middle of the drive, usually just shy of the climb toward the pass. She lets her eyes drift from the centerline and sees all the places she could get off the interstate, all the signs she could follow. All the roads she could take that would lead neither to her son nor to her husband.

  But of course she doesn’t take them. Doesn’t want to do that, doesn’t want to see where they go. Not really.

  And Claire’s blood and bone marrow turn against her. She accepts the medications, and all they bring with them. Once, twice, three times health seems within her grasp before it is again overtaken by disease. A match is found; she endures the transplant. She comes home; she hopes; Wesley prays. Now it is three days since she learned that those detested cells are back again, unvanquished.

  When Dennis calls in the evening, Claire cannot talk to him. She has been in bed all day, though what she feels is not exactly illness, not exactly physical. She looks healthier, in fact, than she has in some months, like someone whose trials are close behind her, yes, but behind her nonetheless. But now she knows better, and when Wesley brings her the phone, a hand cupped over the mouthpiece, Claire shakes her head. It must surprise him—she has never missed the chance to speak to Dennis—but he just presses his lips slightly tighter before he nods and goes back down the hall. Claire closes her eyes and tries to drift back into the refuge of half sleep.

  Tired is all, Dennis, Wesley says from the other room.

  This ain’t worth fretting over.

  Don’t you go thinking that way.

  Claire hears him repeating the things her doctor said to them on Thursday, but they sound different coming from Wesley’s mouth. Where the doctor said, It’s your choice, Claire, though you should know the outcomes at this stage are guarded at best, Wesley says, There’s plenty of folks come out okay from situations like this, and your momma’s stronger than most.

  The doctor said, There is a cocktail that has shown some very limited success in post-transplant relapse cases, and Wesley says, There’s a new treatment sounds real promising.

  The doctor said, I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you. Wesley says, You just rest easy, boy.

  His voice is closer, and when Claire opens her eyes she sees Wesley in the hall. He leans against the bathroom doorjamb, eyes cast downward. He puts a hand to his face, swipes it beneath his eye, and Claire sees the dashed glimmer of a tear wiped before it can fall. The sight of it shocks her, and his voice as he continues to speak to her son is so calm, so steady, she can almost believe she imagined it.

  I ain’t worried, Dennis, he says.

  (At the clinic, when they got the labs back, Wesley had gasped, a defeated, deflated sound, almost gentle. It was so soft and small Claire thought only she had heard it, so sudden she wasn’t sure Wesley even knew he’d voiced it.)

  And if I ain’t worried, he says, you shouldn’t be, either.

  Claire listens as Wesley offers Dennis gift after gift. She’s strong. Just a bump in the road. I got no doubts. She closes her eyes, and though she knows he is not saying these things for himself, is not saying them for her, just for tonight she lets herself be persuaded.

  Does she know that this trip to Black River will be her last? She has started the chemotherapy again (again!), and though she and Wesley are dredging their last reserves of hope, she knows they are close to empty, and so does he. When she is ready to leave, he glances first at the kerchief in her hair (odd that she thinks of it that way, in her hair, when she wears it only to cover what’s gone), then at her.

  Maybe this ain’t a good idea, he says. You going so far just now.

  It’s only for a few days, Wesley.

  I know it, but I hate to think . . .

  Afterward Claire will wonder why she does not fill the silence that follows Wesley’s words. Maybe fatigue is to blame; she is so often tired now. Maybe fear, or even anger, buried so far down she doesn’t recognize it. Maybe she suspects, deep in her bones, that any reunion, any tenuous bond between the two men she loves that is brokered only on her behalf will not sustain. Because Claire knows, in that moment in the driveway, that if she asks Wesley to come with her, to drive her to Black River and stay there with her while she visits Dennis, he will say yes. If she asks, he will go.

  But she does not ask. He does not offer. There is a long silence between them, so weighted Claire is later certain Wesley comes as close to offering as she does to asking. Then a car drives past, and Claire blinks, and Wesley looks just slightly away from her. And she says, I’ll call you when I get there.

  Dennis is more like Wesley than he would like to admit. He, too, knows how ill she is, and Claire thinks he, too, would deny it if asked. He might even believe the denial, but she can see the truth in the way he keeps his voice softer than she knows it to really be, the way he checks his sharper edges and treats her with the gentleness he usually reserves for animals.

  They do not discuss it. They talk at lunch and in the evenings, about the news and town gossip and television programs they have both seen. They go to Arthur Farmer’s house for dinner one night, and he serves meatloaf Claire recognizes as her sister’s recipe, and he calls her sweetheart, the way he did when she was young. Claire goes with Dennis to his horseshoeing appointments, and she sits in the truck with the door open and the heater on and she watches her son work. It is not the life she would have chosen for him—no diploma, outdoors in all weather, work that will break his body in the end—but she can see that what he does with these horses is a reprieve. Here he is focused, he is skillful, he is calm and sure. Here he is all the things he is not in the rest of his life.

  I want to go riding, she says on her last day. She can see Dennis working to formulate an objection, so she quickly adds, I was born and raised in Montana, and I’ve lived my whole life in the West, and I’ve never been on a horse.

  He is silent a moment more and then says, Okay.

  He gives her Rio. She stands beside the hitching rack while Dennis goes back to the pasture to get the other horse, and she lets her fingers glide down the long bones of Rio’s face and through his mane and up the edge of his ear, along the gentle curve to the tip, where the short hairs stand soft and delicate.

  He doesn’t usually like people to touch his ears, Dennis says from behind her. Claire takes her hand away, but Dennis says, All I said was he doesn’t usually like it. Seems like he’s good just now.

  A horse’s back is higher than Claire expected, and she wraps both hands tightly around the saddle horn. She knows it’s a mere few feet of added height, but the house looks different from here, the trees, the pasture, the mountains. She can see the dark glimmer of the river. Dennis mounts the other horse and Rio follows him as he starts off across the pasture at a walk. Claire feels that the slightest breeze might cause her to tumble to the ground, but Rio walks steadily and Claire lets herself settle into the rhythm of his steps. (She will never tell Wesley about this; he would worry even after the fact.) Dennis takes her around the big pasture twice, then leads her through the aspens at the far end, beside the riverbank. They stop at the water’s edge, the horses’ front hooves just wetted.

  So, do you feel like a cowgirl now? Dennis asks.

  Ready for the rodeo, Claire tells him, and she is rewarded with the smile she had hoped for. She leans her head back to look up the sharp angle of the slope on the other side of the river. Do you ever ride up in the hills?

  Dennis nods.

  Next time we’ll go up there, Claire says.

  Next time, Dennis agrees, but the words grate a little leaving his throat.

  Claire looks at him, and he looks at the water. She had hoped that being with the horses would keep that smoldering anger at bay, but Dennis seems unable to keep from feeding it, fanning it. She considers not saying what she means to say, but she should do it now. She
must. You know I wish you and Wesley could be family again, she says.

  Dennis turns to her so sharply his horse tosses its head and stamps a foot in the water, sending drops into the air. They land back in the river as widening circles that the current steals away almost before Claire can fix her eyes on them.

  I won’t ask you to go to him, she continues. I know you can’t do that, not now and maybe not ever. But Denny, if he comes to you, will you let him?

  Dennis doesn’t seem to move, but his horse sidesteps one way, then the other, then turns a tight circle at the water’s edge. And then he guides the horse past her and his features are set like stone and he does not look at her, but she hears the words as he passes, as faint as if they had been borne on the breeze from some distant place.

  I will try.

  On her way back to Spokane, she pulls off the road at the top of the pass, nudging the pickup into line beside the long-haul truckers cooling their rigs’ engines. She gets out of the cab and walks to the edge of the road, steps just beyond the heavy guardrail. Here she can see for miles both ahead and behind. Always Claire has been aware that whether she is with her husband or her son, she is not with the other. She has tried to think of both places as her homes: Washington and Montana, Spokane and Black River, her husband’s house and her son’s. But instead of feeling that she has two homes, too often she has felt she has none.

  Only here do both seem close. Only here are they not unequivocally divided by this landscape that magnifies and emphasizes distance. There, beyond those peaks, is her son, who does not know how to reconcile and may not want to. There, beyond those others, is her husband, who does not know how either, but (Claire has always believed and still believes) does know that it is right. Dennis, there, and Wesley, there. Both hers.