The River Widow

by Ann Howard Creel

  “Sit down,” she said to the handsome man.

  He slipped into the chair, clearly comfortable in his own presence. But he kept his hands folded beneath the table, where she couldn’t see them.

  “Your hair is unusual,” said Lester. “Right pretty, it is.”

  Adah fingered wisps of it on the nape of her neck. Her hair was short because lice from hand-me-down clothes had taken up in her once-long chestnut-brown hair, and she’d had to shave her head a few months back. At first, she’d worn an old flapper hat to cover her baldness, but now her hair was coming back in, fingery about her head, and she’d given up the hat. Her hair was still short enough to set her apart, but Adah didn’t care. It gave her a bit of a spooky look. Good for business.

  “Thank you.”

  From a person’s eyes and clothing, from their skin and hair, Adah could often come up with revealing details. But the most telling features had always been a person’s hands. Not the palms, as one might guess, but the backs of the hands and fingers. The condition of their skin could tell her a person’s line of work, and the size and cording of the veins was a good indication of age. But more importantly, the way a person held their hands, how they managed them during conversation, how they moved and quieted, gave her clues.

  Adah gathered the cards, forming one pile. “You must cut. Use your left hand to cut twice, leaving three stacks.”

  “Why the left hand?”

  “I assume you’re right-handed.”

  He nodded.

  “The right hand is the hand of labor, our occupations, our business with the outside world. The left hand is more akin to what goes on in our personal lives and minds.”

  “I see,” he said, looking a bit amused.

  Lester cut the cards as Adah had requested, and she finally saw a working man’s hands—weathered, chafed, and callused, but clean. Then he settled his hands back below the table and looked at Adah as if he were sitting back in the theater, waiting for a play to begin.

  Adah pushed the cards back together to form a single stack and then scooped them silently before her in one fluid movement. Her hands were fast and efficient with the cards, her skin was still young looking and unblemished, but her cuticles were chewed up out of anxiety, ragged and inflamed in spots. Her hands gave her away, too.

  The cards were mainly props, but they sometimes gave her insights, and she read them as best she could.

  In this case, the first two cards she turned for the handsome man showed favorable things. But now she rested her hand on the most important card, the third one, the card that would pull all three together and focus the reading into a cohesive picture.

  She turned it, and a stone dropped into the vat of her stomach. She had to hold herself from instinctively drawing away.

  The hanged man, reversed. Upright, the card showed a male figure hanging upside down by one foot, tied by a leather strap to a living wood gallows. The man’s hands were bound, but his expression as he faced outward was peaceful, not in apparent pain. Even upright, the hanged man was the most confusing and mysterious card in the deck. He could represent any number of things, but reversed, he signified selfishness of the worst kind, self-interest of the greatest magnitude.

  Adah looked into the handsome man’s lovely doe-brown eyes, then gazed back at the three cards before her, and finally, steeling herself, perused his face again. There was something there below his skin, something seething beneath the surface, a secret, something not exactly frightening, but unsettling anyway. His face was peaceful, yet there was a twitch on the outside corner of his left eye, one he didn’t seem to notice, or else ignored. Jessamine had once told her that everyone had a secret, and sometimes the cards revealed it. What was this man’s? What secret could command such power?

  As she studied him, her back instinctively stiffened, and the stone inside her stomach dug in deeper, but she didn’t hesitate to tell him what she saw.

  She centered her head and her gaze. “Nothing is as it seems here. All the rest, all the previous things I’ve related to you—the comfortable life, the healing, the happy home—it’s but a façade. I think you’re quite miserable. And as for your future—I’m sorry I can’t say . . .”

  He held her stare. Then, slowly, a smile began to form at the corners of his delicious mouth, spreading to encompass his entire face. He had a thoughtful face, a compassionate face, and this confused Adah. He had pulled the hanged man, reversed, as his final and most important card. It had never before come up this way. A reading had never affected Adah this way before, either. Once in a while she’d felt moved—as though something true and helpful had been revealed—but not normally. This reading, however, was powerful. A gut reaction told her the bad signs were true.

  The man’s face became relaxed, the skin looser, as if he was relieved instead of angered by her reading. He said, “You’re right.”

  She had hoped she wasn’t. Adah let her eyes fall to the tabletop and pushed the three cards together.

  “Is that it?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  He hadn’t moved. Adah glanced up. “Please don’t ask for another reading. I can’t do another one until some time has passed.”

  His voice was mild, quiet, summer wind–like. “Why would I ask for another reading if I believe the first one?”

  “Many people do.” She glanced around the interior of the tent she had worked in since Jessamine died, then faced him again. “Times are tough for most people, and I hate to give out dire predictions. On the other hand, I relay the truth. Often people don’t like what they hear, so they ask me, sometimes even beg me, for another reading.”

  His eyes softened. “I’m fine. I’ll just pay you and be on my way.”

  In her confused state, Adah had almost forgotten to ask for payment. Normally she requested a nickel or a dime, but she wanted more from him. “Twenty-five cents, then.”

  Lester stood, reached into his right hip pocket, and left on the table a crisp and neatly folded one-dollar bill.

  She breathed out gratitude that he was gone. He was a different breed of man—part self-assurance, part curiosity, and part pure animal need, which unnerved her.

  Adah always made note of her transactions in a ledger, and after this one she listed: Handsome man, many secrets. $1.00.

  Later that night as she looked over her ledger, her eyes fell on the line occupied by the man she would later know as Lester, and she underlined his entry with a wavy stream of ink. Something about him called to her with a hooked finger and an alluring smile.

  If only he had never come back.

  In deeper water now, she could no longer reach the bottom and went under again. Her head surfaced for a moment, and she pulled in a desperate breath, then was sucked under once more. Beneath the surface, it was as if all the muddy, swollen streams were joining in and magnifying the flood—her muffled, thick grave. She pushed back up with her arms and legs and found air, just as something hit her hard in her bruised ribs. Debris, logs, branches, pieces of metal, plywood, tires, and railroad ties flew along the surface; she grabbed for something to hang on to, held tight for mere moments before it got free of her and then vanished like some phantom friend.

  Hit again, this time on her shoulder, she clutched a slablike thing that seemed to be a door and clung to it. She worked to slide up on it at least partway, the air hitting her trembling body with a blast of cold that took her breath away. But she was above the water now, and though still flying downstream in the deluge, she had a chance. She could hear people shouting, either nearby on the banks or also caught and flowing with the river to nowhere. Maybe they would all eventually end up in the Mississippi and then the broad, wild sea.

  She shimmied farther up on the door that had become her lifeline and thought the frigid air on her wet body would surely freeze her to death. At one point, something slammed into her door, and she teetered to the side, but Adah held on, trying to keep heading lengthwise down the drowned valley. Exhaustion poured
out of her marrow, and it took all her might to keep clenching on and blinking and breathing. Sticks flew into her face, and she pushed them away until she realized she had just passed the top of a tree. She was over what used to be dry land. If only she could work her way to the edge of this monster and out of its reach.

  More and more branches and twigs slapped her as she swept past them. She clambered all the way on top of the door and began to paddle to her left, hitting treetops. Maybe she was passing what had been a riverside orchard or a wood. Sitting on her feet, she dragged both arms through the water, trying to get out of the current, but it was of no use. The river would take her to a painful death, whether by trauma from a passing object or by drowning in that roiling, cold, and clotted abyss for all eternity.

  The door slammed into something that held it in place for a few moments, and Adah reached out into branches and felt bark. Something large and steady and strong. She put one arm around what was indeed the trunk of a tree, held on, and gathered her wits about her. Don’t let go of the door.

  Without movement, her body stiffened and numbed; she would surely die of the cold. The tree had thick, long arms reaching out, and she found a way to control herself by grabbing its branches and moving along until she reached some kind of structure. Probably another farmhouse near the riverbank. She was working her way out of the river surge and farther onto the floodplain, where the flow had quieted to an insistent whisper and birds shrieked overhead. She could paddle and steer the door somewhat now, making her way into more slowly moving water and into what seemed to be a lake. Then paddling for what felt like hours, miraculously going in the right direction until the door slid to a stop.

  Adah put her foot in the water and found land. Nothing had ever been so life sustaining and hopeful as finding that muddied but firm earth beneath her feet. Still holding the door afloat beside her, she got off and walked into shallower water until she was completely out of the flood’s grasp, on soaked but solid ground. She left the door floating and walked into darkness, bleak and cold.

  And then she remembered what she had done.

  Even on land and with smudged moonlight offering some scant visibility, she saw herself as lost to humanity, forever doomed to wander alone. With little awareness of her surroundings, she plodded onward until a murky mass loomed ahead out of the gloom, one of man-made dimensions. Likely some kind of farm structure. Drawn closer, she reached a barn, doors open. Inside, she collapsed into what felt like hay and covered herself with it. Then she curled up and prayed to whoever might be listening.

  It looked as if her life might be spared. But why? She, of all people, probably deserved to die. If Lester had not taken away her cards almost as soon as they’d married, would she have been able to read the signs and know this was coming? No, she could never have foreseen this.

  Freezing cold, hiding in an old structure that might still become flooded, its walls lashed by wind and rain, somehow, some way, she drifted off to sleep.

  After their first encounter in Louisville, Lester had returned a week later to her tent and taken her out to dinner. He presented himself as a moderately successful farmer despite the Depression, a man whose wife had died six months before, leaving behind a baby girl. He explained that his misery had come from losing his wife and from loneliness. His elegantly boned face, which summoned imaginings of actors and singers rather than farmers, gave him a special charm. And how he had turned it on! His laugh was deep and rolled like thunder. His hands, which he’d stopped hiding, moved like lightning through the air when he talked. So it was no surprise that love struck with the strength of a sudden storm.

  After a swift courtship, he offered her a comfortable life in a comfortable home.

  But the cards! Over the years, she had learned that at times they revealed pasts and predicted the future correctly. Yet Lester assured her they were nothing but hocus-pocus, and Adah had known them to be wrong at times, too. By then she was fiercely in love, and so she ignored her doubts, grasped her chance, and married Lester in a church. She and Lester stood before God and pledged their lives to each other. The wind was still, like a wild thing holding its breath, but a chill strapped the morning air, and the sky refused to surrender to blue. Outside, a strange bird called out with a high-pitched caw that seemed to ask a question rather than announce an event.

  On her wedding day, she stood as thin and strong as a strip of rawhide, wearing a trembling white dress and carrying a bouquet of wildflowers—lupine, daisies, and Indian paintbrush. After the wedding, she moved to the farm, where she met and began to care for Daisy, who was then about seven months old. Daisy, who fit perfectly in the curve of Adah’s arm. Daisy, whose innocent trust and need for Adah made her believe for a short time that this was exactly where she was supposed to be. But it wasn’t long before Lester endured some bad harvests, and he took up drinking and gambling in between banging her around. Love left in spurts with each push, shove, slap, and hit.

  Once, she had thought there were a thousand good things ahead of her. But after she married Lester, her dreams, which had at one time seemed so close she could stretch out her fingers to touch them, drifted away like dying stars—shining brightly, then blinking and blinking slowly away into nothingness.

  She should’ve believed the cards.

  Chapter Three

  Icy spears of torture, surges of pounding pulsations, coming one after the other, increased, then grasped on to Adah as iron fangs that released venom into her body and invaded every cell. Waves of blood-stilling cold rocked her, too, and yet she could not move. She could not even open her eyes. The only movement was her own breathing, and she could not control that, either. Her body inhaled and exhaled on some primal level, directed by the most basal area of the brain. It was all out of her hands now.

  No sense of how much time had passed; a new day came. The dawn began to break out of blackness into purple and pink, the pastel light before sunrise bled into the sky, and she observed its many shades, so many degrees of darkness and brightness. She lifted herself up from her makeshift bed and peered down at her body. Her shoes and socks and coat were gone; her legs and arms were scraped, scratched, and bloodied; and her head felt full of sharp spikes. Her torn and ragged dress still clung to her body, and all of her was coated with hay. She was too cold to shiver now.

  Beyond the open barn door, the rain had stopped, and the air wafting in was warmer.

  After cranking herself up to a stand and shaking off the stiffness, she brushed away the hay. The flood hadn’t dissipated. Water could still be seen in the distance but getting nearer. She searched out any objects she could find—an empty crate, blocks of wood, a fragment of rope—and fashioned them to make something of a way up, then climbed and clawed to the barn roof while the water crept closer.

  The river was still at war with the land. Above the water, mists formed and reformed like the ghostly remains of the tribal hunters that had once roamed here. Nothing but flooded plain and the tops of trees, their branches glazed with shimmering ice. No homes or buildings in sight. It was as though the rest of the world did not exist or had forgotten this place.

  Surely she would die before help could arrive. Surely this pain and thirst would kill her.

  Did she want help? She deserved to die; she had killed her husband, and even worse, she had tried to cover it up. How could she live with that?

  With a pulsating head, she recalled the early days with Lester. He had treated her like a free bird he’d captured and tamed for his pleasure. During the first year, a few times he’d taken her to the Arcade Theater, hosted by uniformed and brass-buttoned ushers, and the White Oak Diner, with its delicious five-cent hamburgers. Thinking of Lester in those early days—his sparkling eyes, the smooth glide of his movements, his smile as he dug into supper—nearly collapsed her. She’d appreciated and grown to love the farm—its orderly rows of burley tobacco, each plant a large green flower; the smoky tang that drifted in the air during firings; the warmth from a mule’s flan
k when she lay her hand against it. These things had pleased Les, and she’d instinctively taken to cooking and housework as if a mother had taught her from an early age.

  Most of her life had been spent in bustling cities, surrounded by others, but the day after her marriage, she woke to an almost-silent morning, looked beyond the window, and gazed at a world run not by people but by nature. In between the lovely silences, there was the snapping of sheets drying on the line, the hammerings of something Les was repairing, the rumbling of the river, and the shrieking of hawks.

  There was a sense of comfort as she walked the land entrusted to her as Lester’s wife. The shade of old trees, the smell of turned earth, and the unmistakable spirits of other lives before theirs floated on the pollen-rich air. She and Lester shared that same sense; they tasted it daily and allowed its weight to fall upon their shoulders. This, they had in common.

  For a time as a couple, they had worked.

  And yet there were ominous signs. One day a bird with a broken wing foundered in the grassy area before the house, and Les had taunted the bird, laughing at its helpless plight. It sickened Adah. As the Depression deepened, they couldn’t afford to make improvements to the house, which was showing its age. Les became easily frustrated and irritated, drank more and more, and the first few shoves became harsher and more hurtful. Then came slaps and pushes to the floor, and finally his fist.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and covered them with her elbow, remembering: Once, in a panic, she’d tried to get away from him on foot, but Les had tracked her like a bloodhound. He’d plodded over the land that spread downriver, his head low, his expression grim, and moved closer, slowly but surely, in her direction. He had hunted her, then forced her back. He would never have let her go.

  She dared not cross her husband, but it had never been her nature to cower. It required extreme acts of will to keep her mouth shut and move about lifelessly while Lester worked himself first into a state of supreme self-pity and then rage. After making her own way in the world for so long, she had no intention of letting someone master her.