The River Widow

by Ann Howard Creel

  PRAISE FOR ANN HOWARD CREEL

  “The River Widow grabbed me from the first page. Ann Howard Creel’s elegant and vivid prose brings to life a remarkable woman’s struggle against oppressive forces during one of the darkest periods of American history. Haunting and ultimately uplifting, The River Widow is one of the best books I’ve read this year.”

  —Olivia Hawker, author of The Ragged Edge of Night

  “The River Widow by Ann Howard Creel shows a mother’s fierce love for a child of her heart.”

  —Laila Ibrahim, bestselling author of Yellow Crocus and Mustard Seed

  “The River Widow paints a vivid picture of life on a 1937 tobacco farm under the shadow of one family’s corruption and exploitation of others. A page-turner from the start, the story draws you in with a simple but compelling question: After murdering her husband in self-defense, can a young woman save her c hild from the cruelty of her in-laws?”

  —D.M. Pulley, bestselling author of The Buried Book

  “Ann Howard Creel’s accomplished, fluid storytelling makes for a pacey, page-turning read.”

  —Gemma Liviero, author of Pastel Orphans and Broken Angels

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANN HOWARD CREEL

  The Magic of Ordinary Days

  While You Were Mine

  The Whiskey Sea

  The Uncertain Season

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Ann Howard Creel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com , Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904699 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503904695 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503903340 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503903346 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin

  First edition

  For Neil

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Chapter One

  1937

  Her hands were lined and scarred and looked older than her thirty-one years. They had read cards and cooked and scrubbed and carried wood. They had turned the pages of books, touched love, and been betrayed by it.

  These hands now dragged her husband’s body to the river to let the flood take it away.

  Now they had touched death, too.

  D ecember had been as mild as autumn, but in January, winter blew in cold and icy. A n ominous haze lay on the horizon, iron clouds streaked across the sky, speared icicles hung from the barn eaves, and frost on the ground spread like a savage web.

  The sleet and rain started and wouldn’t let up, day after day, and then the flood warnings came. By the time they heard, the Ohio River had overrun its banks and inundated their lowland cornfields. She and Les raced with his daughter to Les’s folks’ farm on higher ground near Lone Oak, left Daisy there, and then came back to free the livestock and salvage what they could from the house, as everything inside was sure to be ruined.

  While Les aimed for the livestock barn, Adah Branch ran through the driving rain up the creaking, peeling front steps to the house, flung open the screen and the door, and then stood inside looking around her loveless home while holding a big burlap bag in her hands. They should’ve evacuated days earlier; it was almost too late. Paducah was flooding, and swollen creeks had made many of the icy roads impassable. This would be their last chance to salvage anything before the water rose, perhaps high enough to submerge the house and everything else along the Ohio.

  Eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness—the electricity was out—she perused the room while her thoughts spun. The fraying rag rug wasn’t good enough to save, the old blown-glass lamps too fragile, the sagging furniture too big. Their best piece, a polished oak secretary, was too heavy, as was the potbelly stove. What did one take from a house that had seen so little happiness?

  She grabbed their old Atwater Kent radio and then headed to Daisy’s room and gathered her stepdaughter’s stuffed bear, Shirley Temple doll, some clothes, and her other pair of shoes into the bag, then hurried into the bedroom she shared with Les. Everything about that room a reminder of moments that sickened her. She stripped the bed and pushed the sheets into the bag, which was almost full. Lastly, from the closet she took the folded Lone Star quilt, the only thing she had left of her parents. Her mother had stitched it by hand, and every time Adah gazed at it, s he longed for love so deeply it felt like the hunger she could only imagine came from starvation.

  She dragged the bag to the front door, hoisted it up on her hip, and then p lunged back outside into rain pellets, lightning forks that illuminated the fields and fences and trees with quivering bursts of blinding brightness, and wind that rattled the wood-frame house as if foretelling the arrival of a blustery demon or the lowest sinner. Blinking and gasping, she slipped across the saturated soil and flung the bag into the back of Les’s black Model A truck and grabbed another, now-drenched burlap bag and fought the slant rain back inside to get Lester’s and her clothing.

  When she trudged outside with the second bag, Les was loading the back of the truck. She could barely see through the rain but discerned enough to gather that he’d carried tackle, saddles, and tools up from the livestock barn. The milk cow moved past them, trotting faster than Adah had ever seen her move before. The only hope for the livestock was for innate sensibility to drive them to climb higher and farther inland from the river. Maybe when it was over, she and Les would find at least some of them. One of their Plymouth Rock hens fluttered by. Then she noticed something else—the first burlap bag she’d packed sat sagging on the muddy ground beside the tools Les had yet to load.

  Les lifted a saddle and threw it into the truck bed. “What the hell were you thinking? My guns is in the house. Why’d you go and pack clothes and pillows?”

  Adah wiped her face. “Daisy’s toys are in there, too, and my mother’s quilt.”

  Rain sluicing off his worn brown hat and falling on his shoulders, every inch of him except his face sopping, he yelled, “You ain’t taking them. Get yourself back inside and get my shotgun.”

  Adah dropped the bag she held and pushed her drenched hair away from her face.

  “Get the frying pan and some of the dishes, those good ones the old folks gave us. Are you some kinda idiot? Everything you brung out here is made of cloth, it’s going to get ruint by the rain.”

  “We can cover it with a tarp or dry it later.” She stumb
led toward the first bag on the ground. She would just grab Daisy’s doll and her mother’s quilt, then put them in the truck cab. Les always got his way, and despite the true words she had said—of course they could dry those things—there was no use arguing for the rest of it.

  She dug into the bag for both items and then stood and turned.

  A flash of Lester’s fist, and then a beam of light cut across her pupils, bringing on a familiar feeling rooted in her groin, the blow expelling the air from her lungs. Time lengthened and then froze. Something liquefied the bones of her knees and numbed her legs and mystified the world in front of her, all of it nothing but a moving periphery. She held on but swayed, vision blurring. Then the world turned upside down and on top of her at the same time.

  “Ain’t you heard what I said? You leave that junk be and go git some things that matter.”

  He was behind her now, pulling up her head by her dripping ropes of sodden hair. Visions inside her eyelids, small streaks and spots of light, shooting stars or fireflies, strange sparks and flames. He jerked her head—hard—and then a shot of pain, a hot, throbbing stab over her left eye, where he must have landed the blow. H er heart thumping high in her throat, her breaths ragged, bile rising in her mouth.

  He dropped her back into the mud, and then came brutal kicks to her side, each blow delivering its own excruciating pain to her ribs. S he lifted her head, and there, within her grasp, the pile of tools he’d gathered. She lunged. A heavy iron shovel in her hands, she scrambled to her feet and then struck out with all her might.

  When Les staggered back, swayed, and then fell face-first into the muck, it took a moment to register. She had hit him. She had landed a good blow. She’d never fought back before; he’d probably kill her now.

  Run. She should run. But where? She wouldn’t dare take his truck.

  Lester wasn’t moving. Heaving and swiping at the wet hair plastered on her face, pressing rain out of her eyes, she slumped down on the ground and nudged him. He still didn’t move. She rolled him over.

  Crouched beside his body in the mud, she must have blacked out for a moment. And then, as the rain pelted the earth like falling bullets, she came to. Though still swimming upward back into the moment, not believing where she was or what had happened, struggling to make herself see straight, she did, however, know this: his temple was not shaped the way it had been shaped before, and Lester was not breathing.

  Dear God, what have I done?

  She had endured his tirades and temper, his foul mouth and coarse hands, his slaps and fists and shoves for three years, and now something had cracked open inside her on this storm-soaked, wild night. Now she had murdered her husband, and either she would go to jail or his family would kill her.

  Later she would have no notion of how long she sat there, her body filling with stunned, conflicting emotions: she had loved Les, she had hated Les. She had killed him, she was free of him. Better, perhaps, that she had died. And yet an inborn instinct to survive still burned.

  Get rid of the body.

  She lifted him from behind, under his shoulders, and, hunkering low to the ground, dragged his body toward the swollen river into utter blackness, feeling her way with her feet, backing downhill until she heard the raging and foaming snake of a river already over its banks and bleeding onto the land.

  She was already composing a story. She could say Les went too close to the river or some such, and then he was just . . . gone. The truth would never do. It wouldn’t matter that he’d hit her so many times she’d lost count, that she had to cover her bruised body with long sleeves even in the summer, that she wore makeup from Kresge’s Five and Ten Cent Store to mask discolorations on her face. It wouldn’t matter that she was pretty certain he was widely known as a bad man, that his family were equally well known as menacing people. She had killed Les, and someone would make sure she paid.

  And yet there was hope. Hope was something she always kept close, held in her hands, and spread over her body like a balm. It had saved her from despair. And now the flood, this gift, would provide her with a story.

  R iver roaring in her ears now, trees snapping, the smell of soil and death rising from the muddy water surging forward with surf like the ocean. Her next step was into shin-high freezing water pushing her and trying to suck her down. She dropped Lester and trudged to his feet and began to push. He didn’t budge. The water was swirling around him, but it wasn’t deep enough to take him away. She slogged back to his head and pulled him up again by the shoulders, stepped back a few more feet into thigh-high rushing water, almost lost her balance, checked herself, dropped Lester again, and then sloshed her way back to his feet, knelt down, and shoved.

  Another blow, and her first thought was that Les had arisen from the dead and was well enough to strike her again, but instead it was shockingly cold water, the river raging like a beast of purest evil, taking her away from her sin and into the very bowels of the place the killer in her deserved to go, into a frigid and water-ravaged version of hell.

  Chapter Two

  Bitterest cold and blackness and no air and the powerful force of a river turned furious. Unable to gain purchase on the slippery ground below her, not knowing which way to go, she clawed at the water and kicked and flailed, and it made no difference. The river had her in its almighty grip, as if God had ventured down with the rain to make certain she would never gain redemption. Her head above the surface for a moment, she screamed, but only a wave replied, filling her mouth with putrid water, the current pulling her in deeper.

  The river would not let her go. She would drown.

  There hadn’t been much for her in the world anyway, and she’d felt only snatches of happiness since being left at Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowery, in New York City, when she was but thirteen years old. Her sweet, loving parents had perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1919, and her only living relative, an aunt, couldn’t take her in and had instead taken her to the church. Then there was a year of learning from Father Sparrow, and it had been magical, a book always in her hands.

  Happiness disappeared after his death. Not even during a brief period of adoption by a barren couple was it better; that family lasted only until what they felt was a miracle happened—the woman was finally pregnant—and they didn’t want another mouth to feed. After that, Adah lived among thousands of other young people who worked and prowled and slept in street corners, eking out meager existences often within sight of New York’s famous Broadway. They roamed Manhattan’s Lower East Side and earned a few coins working as newsboys, trinket peddlers, flower sellers, and shoeshine boys, among assorted other pitiable occupations that Father Sparrow had once said didn’t require any learning or expansion of bright, young, and impressionable minds.

  One summer day at the railyard, she met two brothers, Chester and Henry Nash, and some exciting moments followed as they jumped trains together, but it lasted only until her newfound friends made their way to a town in Virginia, where relatives took them in.

  Adah continued hopping trains alone until she reached Kentucky, where the land was green and spongy like the reaching fingers of a massive crawling creature, and she began to see that maybe this was what she’d been looking for. A place grounded and verdant and unending, growing so abundantly that she could reach down, touch it, and pull it up by the roots for examination.

  Now the river she also loved was killing her. She was slender but strong—hard work on the farm and housework had given her muscles—but she was no match for this water.

  Back in Louisville, Adah had kept company with some carnival types, and a kindly woman named Jessamine made Adah finish her high school education and also taught her how to read the tarot cards, a way to make a living. Jessamine said that a smart young woman with a New York accent, serious eyes, and pleasant looks could glean coins from country yokels looking for work in Louisville, as well as from city people down on their luck and seeking prosperous predictions to keep their spirits afloat. Adah discovere
d she had a knack for reading people. She took that God-given talent and further developed her observational skills. Everyone had a tell, and she used that more than anything else to survive by fortune-telling. Jessamine had taught her the ropes before she, too, died suddenly, and Adah picked up the practice, going around the city and its outskirts with a band of peddlers and other misfits, setting up gritty little camps in parks, empty lots, and open spaces.

  People began to fascinate her, not as scientific objects of study but as vessels of soul and desire and spirit, each as unique as an individual leaf or a sparkling stone. She learned that a person’s emotional needs were as important as physical ones. Never disingenuous, she tried to dole out hope, even a glimpse of it.

  In Louisville, she met Lester.

  Three and a half years ago, he had pushed aside the flap of canvas that made the door to her fortune-telling tent and stepped in for a reading. Adah’s eyes had traveled from the dungarees up to the leather belt at his waist, to the shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, to his neck, Adam’s apple dominant, to his face, nicely boned. He was approaching thirty, she guessed, not tall, but built compactly like a boxer, with a cinched waist and steel-rail limbs. His hair was thick, black, and curling; it would never thin out, but instead would turn into distinguished silver. One long lock spooled down his forehead. His eyebrows were curly, too, but looked as if they had been combed in one direction, out toward the temples. An attractive man.

  For a moment, she remembered herself as the girl who had once wanted to become a teacher or a nurse—someone who might appeal to such a handsome man. She had never intended to make the reading of cards into an occupation. But she was alone, and the Depression had changed everything. One had to make a living any way one could. And during tough times, the demand for fortune-telling was on the rise.

  People doing well rarely came to her, and sometimes she stretched hope to its limits for the downtrodden, painting as rosy a picture as possible and even declining payment from a few.