Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  A fisherman’s lantern flickered downstream near the bend of the river.

  “Are we still planning to leave in the morning, or do you need to talk to some more people?”

  “No, I’ve got enough,” Allen said. “Now it’s just a matter of writing the thing.”

  “So what time do you want to leave?”

  “The sooner the better. Lee wants a thousand to fifteen hundred words. If you don’t mind, I may let you drive so I can work on it going back.”

  “Sure.”

  “You want to aim for nine?”

  “That sounds good,” I said.

  A breeze rose up off the river. Only the sun’s rim showed above Whiteside Mountain. The temperature would fall quickly now. No matter how warm the day had been, it would be blanket weather tonight. For a few minutes the only sound was the river rubbing against rocks. Then from the deep woods near Chestnut Ridge came something else, a sound like a crying child.

  “What’s that?” Allen asked.

  “A bobcat would be my guess, though Billy might argue it’s his cougar.”

  “You want me to go get my tape recorder?” Allen asked.

  “If it comes closer. Right now it’s too far away to pick up.”

  “When were cougars last here—I mean, verified?”

  “One was killed with its two kittens in 1908.”

  “Do you think Billy really saw one?”

  “I don’t know. When you’re a kid you can see most anything, I suppose. Billy believes he saw it, I don’t doubt that.”

  The day’s last light momentarily settled on Sassafras Mountain before its slide down the mountain’s west slope. We listened until that light was extinguished, but what had cried out in the deep woods stayed silent.

  This is as good a time as you may get, I told myself, then spoke. “I did an Internet search on you this morning. I hadn’t known what had happened.”

  I couldn’t see Allen’s reaction, but he paused a few seconds before speaking. “Nobody at the paper knew except Hudson. I wanted it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Because other people don’t know how to deal with it. They’ll be talking about children or spouses and suddenly switch the subject as soon as you show up. Everybody in the office sees family pictures but you. If that’s not happening it’s the opposite, which is worse. They believe you need to spill your guts to somebody, usually themselves, but if not them some psychiatrist or therapy group they know of. Either way, it just makes things worse.”

  “I won’t do that to you,” I said.

  “Good. I do want us to be open about it. I almost said something at supper.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I’m still not sure what I feel—what I should feel—about Claire. That and I wasn’t sure how you would react.”

  “How so?”

  “It might make you leery of me.”

  “I don’t scare easy,” I said, trying to sound surer than I perhaps was.

  “Good.”

  Below, a trout snatched something off the surface. Another splash came from farther downstream, a sure sign mayflies or caddis flies were hatching.

  “And what about you?” Allen asked. “Have you been married?”

  “No.”

  “Come close?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I was semi-serious about a guy in Laurens, but he decided I had major character defects.”

  “What defects?”

  “Self-righteousness. Shutting myself off from others. Emotional frigidity, to use his term. When I’d told him my past had a lot to do with that, he argued I’d have been the same if Ben and I hadn’t been burned, if Momma hadn’t died. He said I liked the way I was. Having someone or something else to blame just made it easier for me not to change.”

  “Do you think he was right?”

  “I didn’t at the time.”

  “That’s a pretty open-ended answer.”

  “Let’s leave it open-ended. That way you can decide on your own.”

  “What about your relationship with Luke?”

  “Luke’s not the marrying kind.”

  “But you loved him?”

  “Yes. But it was a naïve kind of love. I didn’t realize someone could take your love but not necessarily love you back.”

  “I see,” Allen said, and I felt his hand settle on the small of my back. He brought me close and we kissed. We stayed on the bridge a while longer, then drove back to the motel. I went to my room and changed into my pajamas. I got comfortable in the bed, Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders in my hands, but instead of reading I thought about earlier that evening when dark blurred the river with the bank and trees. I remembered how the river was only a sound whispering below us as Allen and I stood on a bridge connecting two states, and how, at least for a while, I did not think of Ruth Kowalsky’s body a mile downstream waiting to be raised, or think of my father dying a little more as he sat in his house alone.

  I wondered if I might hear a light knock on my motel room’s door, and if that knock came what I would say, what I would do. But Allen Hemphill did not knock on my door, so I lay the book on the night table and cut off the lamp.

  Part Two

  “I’m going up to Lou’s a minute to get some cigarettes,” Daddy had said. “You look after your brother till I get back.” Mama had gone with Aunt Margaret to buy canning jars in Seneca, leaving Ben and me with Daddy, telling him to watch us and the pot of beans she’d left simmering on the stove. But Daddy needed his cigarettes, so he left us there in the front room, Ben on the floor playing with a toy train and me in a chair doing math homework. After a few minutes Ben said, “I’m hungry,” and got up while I added a last column of figures and wrote down the answer. Only a few seconds passed before I followed him into the kitchen, but Ben’s hand was already on the handle, his arm trembling as he pulled the two-gallon pot of beans off the eye, my arm reaching out for the handle but too late as scalding water and beans poured onto Ben’s face and my left arm and leg. For a few moments I didn’t know the water had scalded me as well, because it was like I’d cast every sense and emotion out of myself and across the two-foot space between Ben and me, done this because sight alone wasn’t enough to comprehend what had happened to my brother. How could it be otherwise when only the eyes Ben had closed at the last instant were saved.

  Neither of us screamed. Ben just whimpered and then not even that while I didn’t make a sound because it was like watching a movie, no more real than that because Ben’s ruined face couldn’t be real. The room tilted and a wave of blackness rushed in. When the floor leveled again and the room lightened, Ben and I were holding on to each other in the kitchen corner, as if the beans spilled on the floor could still hurt us. Ben’s pain was dimmed by shock, but my arm and leg now burned as though I was on fire, a fire that spread to cover my whole body, invisible flames that never quit burning. “The wicked are their own wick” was how Reverend Tilson described hell the morning he lit a candle in church and had us pass it around as he preached. That was exactly what I felt, what I saw when I closed my eyes—a candlewick inside an unquenchable flame. If older or in less pain I might have been able to clear my head enough to telephone Uncle Mark or Billy’s parents. But that was beyond me. All I could do was watch the clock on the stove, because the red second hand proved that time still moved and that meant Daddy had to come back and Ben and I wouldn’t be huddled in that corner forever. But it was forever. Daddy had been talking with Lou Henson and forgotten about us being alone. I counted out loud each time the second hand passed the twelve, telling myself that before the hand reached that twelve again Daddy would be back. I had reached twenty-seven before I heard Daddy’s truck.

  “What kind of mess have you made, girl?” Daddy said, when he saw the spilled beans and Ben and me huddled in the corner. Saying those words to me as he stared at the beans and the pot, not really seeing us until Ben heard Daddy’s voice and turned his face and Daddy saw. Then a few more moments or minute
s lost because we were no longer in the house but in the truck and Ben not making a sound, so quiet I believed he was dying. Each time the road curved we slid back and forth across the front seat and the pain leaped up and covered my arm and leg whenever I bumped against Ben or the door. All the while thinking, My brother is dying, and finally saying it out loud, and Daddy saying, “You shush now,” and not saying anything else as he jerked the steering wheel with one hand and shifted gears with the other. As we swung through those curves the dropoffs fell away below us for what seemed miles, and I thought between surges of pain that we were going to fall into the sky and never stop falling.

  The road finally straightened when we came off the mountain. I looked at Ben and his eyes were barely open, his lashes flickering, and I suddenly knew certain as anything in my life that if he did close his eyes he’d never open them again. “Don’t close your eyes, Ben,” I said, and his eyes looked back at me but unfocused, like I’d just woken him up. I kept telling him to keep his eyes open even as the hospital orderlies lifted him and me out of the cab and they took him toward one room and me to another, Daddy going with Ben and leaving me alone until Momma got there. The doctor had my arm and leg bandaged by then and Momma thanked him and took me not home but to the waiting room. “I’ve got to see how Ben is doing,” she told me.

  “I want to go too,” I said, but Momma just shook her head. Grown-ups I did not know sat in the chairs that lined the walls, dressed as though in a church, and as quiet. Not one of them looked like they wanted to be there. The woman across from me stared at the bandages on my arm. She whispered something to the man next to her and he stared at the bandages as well. They did not smile at me or look sad or sympathetic. They just stared. To be left in this room is part of your punishment, I said to myself.

  I rode back with Daddy because Momma was staying with Ben. Once home I walked alone out to the far pasture, my arm gauzed, no blazing pain now, just a low simmer. I looked at the mountains and felt at ten what I would find a word for only years later—claustrophobic. Because it felt as though the mountains had moved closer together since we’d been at the hospital, and would keep on moving closer until they finally suffocated me.

  CHAPTER 6

  Under a darkroom safelight everything is gray. Your hands are drained of life. Stop bath settles in your nostrils and stomach like formaldehyde. Maybe that’s the way it should be, because what a photograph does is embalm something or someone into a boxed and stilled forever.

  A darkroom is a place where your failures come to light: a wrong combination of f-stop and shutter speed, a misjudgment of depth of field or right exposure. Or you make new errors. You don’t check the temperature of the chemicals; something spills; you turn the white light on too soon.

  But sometimes, everything happens just as it should. You rinse the print in the darkroom’s gray light, and there in your hands is the photograph you hoped for.

  And that is what happened on Monday afternoon when I lifted the five-by-seven from the print dryer and stepped out of the darkroom with the other pictures worth showing to Lee. I sat down at my desk to study the photograph more closely. Everything was right—light, shutter speed, symmetry.

  Wolf Cliff Falls dominated the frame, the backdrop all water and rock. Herb Kowalsky stood slightly to the right. No one else was in the photo. My shot angled upward out of the pool, ending not far above Kowalsky’s head. Such a perspective usually makes a person seem larger than life, able to dominate a scene. But in this photograph the angle only emphasized Kowlasky’s powerlessness, juxtaposed as he was next to the falls that held his daughter.

  Nevertheless, you could make out that Kowalsky was staring into the water, and you could see the index finger raised to brush away a tear that had not existed until this moment.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Lee said, when I showed him the photograph. “That’s the father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, man, this is good, Maggie. This is real good.”

  Lee went to his door and shouted for Phil.

  “Check this out,” Lee said, handing the photograph to Phil. “Maggie’s kicking your ass.”

  Phil laid the picture on Lee’s desk as though reading an article.

  “Hell of a photo,” he said. “This is one to nominate for awards, Lee.”

  “Damn straight,” Lee said, nodding his head for emphasis. “You’re telling me nothing I don’t know. You’d have to be blind not to see this is a great photo.”

  He turned to me.

  “You shown it to Hemphill yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why don’t you? Maybe it will inspire him to get his article done. He’s got less than a day and I haven’t seen word one.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I left Lee and Phil and took the elevator to the second floor.

  “Lee thought you might want to see this,” I said, handing Allen the photograph.

  He stared at it with the same intensity Phil had.

  “That’s a hell of a picture,” he finally said.

  “Of course it’s just a photograph,” I said teasingly. “As someone I know once said, ‘There is always something more that lies outside the camera’s framed, mechanical truth.’ ”

  Allen grimaced. “Where did you come across that youthful indiscretion?”

  “Part of my background check.”

  “I got a lot of well-deserved grief about that comment,” Allen said, looking embarrassed. “A photographer friend e-mailed me a bunch of Susan Sontag quotes. Another guy sent me a book of photos taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson.”

  “So have we won you over?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a lot less sure about most things than I once was.” He handed the photograph back to me. “But I do know this is a damn good photo.”

  “It’s yours as much as mine. You set it up.”

  “What I did was like giving a writer a possible topic. What the person does with the material makes it good or not.”

  I looked around Allen’s office. Sparse. The walls bare. A few books on the shelves, mainly style manuals and dictionaries. On his desk the computer, beside it pens and pencils sprouting from a coffee cup. A legal pad and his tape recorder. No photographs.

  “It must be nice having this kind of space,” I said. “Sometimes my cubicle feels like I’m inside some kid’s ant farm.”

  Allen pointed at the print in my hand. “A few more photographs like that one and Hudson will probably give you his office.”

  “As they say in Oconee County, that’s about as likely as a toad growing wings.” I glanced at the legal pad. “So how’s your article coming?”

  “I’m still typing.”

  “If you don’t have time for supper tonight, I understand.”

  “No,” Allen said. “I’m close enough, just two more paragraphs. As a matter of fact, I was going to take a coffee break before I finished up. Why don’t you take it with me?”

  We rode the elevator to the main lobby and were almost to the door when someone called Allen’s name. Thomas Hudson stood at the doorway of his office. He waved Allen over.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” Allen said.

  I walked out into a day that was a sure precursor of what the next four months would be. Unlike in the mountains, Columbia’s air already had a weight to it, a weight made up of equal parts heat and humidity. The first time I’d gone running after moving downstate I was sweat-soaked and gasping after a half mile. It had felt like I was exercising in a sauna. Ninety-one degrees, the Bank of America sign declared.

  I glanced through the glass doors and saw Allen still with Hudson. I crossed Main Street. I didn’t go into Starbucks but walked three doors down to the Capital Newsstand. I wanted to see if the latest LensWork or Black and White was in.

  When I came back out, Allen was waiting across the street. I waved to get his attention but he didn’t see me. He turned to go back inside. I yelled his name and stepped off the curb. A horn blared as a flatbed truck passed
close enough that I had to jump back and grab a parking meter so as not to fall. Close. But not so close as to warrant Allen’s expression. As I regained my balance, my eyes still on his face, I wondered if Herb Kowalsky had looked much the same as he watched his daughter sweep down the river.

  “I’m okay,” I said, but as we sat down with our coffee a few minutes later it was clear Allen wasn’t. “Lee would say I wasn’t aware traffic could pass in two different directions at once.”

  Allen did not smile. I put my hand over his.

  “Hey, it wasn’t as close as it looked.”

  “It was close enough,” Allen said. He shut his eyes for a few moments. When he opened them they looked sad, resigned.

  I lifted my coffee cup and drank. Allen’s cup remained untouched.

  “Hey,” I said, smiling but also a little exasperated. “That’s all there is to it. I promise I have no Sexton or Plath volumes on my bedside table. I don’t listen to Joni Mitchell CDs with my hands full of sleeping pills. I was just coming to get you and was careless.”

  Allen stared at the table. His free hand lifted the coffee cup from the table as though checking its weight, then placed the cup back without raising it to his lips. He cleared his throat.

  “Claire was coming to get me at Dulles when she and Miranda died. The flight had been eighteen hours, and I was tired and irritable. I waited thirty minutes and then called the house, figuring she’d forgotten. The answering machine picked up. I called again fifteen minutes later and left a message this time. I told Claire I was getting a cab. I also told her that if she weren’t so damn self-involved she might remember when her husband who’d been gone five weeks was coming home.”

  I held my hand open between us as if to deflect his words.

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” I said.

  “I know,” Allen said, “but I think it’s better if I do.”