Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  Also by Patrick Lane

  FICTION

  Red Dog, Red Dog

  How Do You Spell Beautiful? And Other Stories

  Milford & Me

  POETRY

  Washita

  The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane

  Witness

  Last Water Song

  Go Leaving Strange

  The Bare Plum of Winter Rain

  Selected Poems 1977-1997

  Syllable of Stone

  Too Spare, Too Fierce

  Mortal Remains

  Winter

  Selected Poems

  A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie

  Woman in the Dust

  Old Mother

  The Measure

  No Longer Two People

  Poems, New and Selected

  Albino Pheasants

  Unborn Things: South American Poems

  Beware the Months of Fire

  Passing Into Storm

  The Sun Has Begun to Eat the Mountain

  Mountain Oysters

  Calgary City Jail

  Separations

  Letters from the Savage Mind

  NON-FICTION

  There Is a Season

  EDITED BY PATRICK LANE AND LORNA CROZIER

  Breathing Fire 2

  Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast

  Selected Poems by Alden Nowlan

  Breathing Fire

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY PATRICK LANE

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lane, Patrick, 1939-, author

  Deep river night / Patrick Lane.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780771048173 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780771048180 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8523.A53D44 2018 C813’.54 C2017-904761-2

                 C2017-904762-0

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images:

  (trees) Kirsten Stanley/EyeEm/Getty Images;

  (lumber yard) harmatoslabu/Getty Images

  Cover and book design: CS Richardson

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.2

  a

  To the men and women who came home from war only to find the poverty, injustice, inequality, and racism they had fought so hard to end. It is to their sacrifices we owe our lives.

  Midnight, we cross an old battlefield.

  The moonlight shines cold on white bones.

  —from “Traveling Northward” by Du Fu (712-770), translated by Kenneth Rexroth

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Patrick Lane

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE DARK CUP OF THE CAT’S EAR MOVED, the long guard hairs at the tip shivering toward the crack in the window beside her. Art finished his drink, put his glass down by the whisky bottle, and waited to see if the cat’s ear would come back to rest, but it didn’t. Instead she lifted her head and looked out the window, both ears pointed at whatever was outside.

  Something has moved out there, Art thought, animal or man or both, and as he leaned forward in his chair he bumped the table and spilled the glass of whisky. “Damn,” he said, trying to see past the cat. He took a quick drink from the bottle.

  “Hey, the cabin,” a man cried. “Art, you there?”

  The cat leapt off the windowsill the moment Art opened the door, slipping between his legs and gone, nothing left to betray her but a few grass stems trembling where she passed into the meadow toward the aspens behind the cabin.

  He looked to the river and saw Joseph Gillespie coming from the railroad grade along the path by the creek. Joseph’s guitar was banging against his back, a discordant music crying. Staggering beside him was a boy hanging off his arm. Art couldn’t tell if he was struggling to get away from Joseph or was just trying his best to keep going along with him. Art peered through the bright sun broken above the mountains and saw the boy’s legs flutter, Joseph reaching down and sweeping him up in his arms.

  Art turned and went back into the cabin, the door behind him open for Joseph carrying what had to be an accident, some injury done to the boy by himself or by some other. Either way, he was going to need help if Joseph had to carry him.

  He took one more drink from the Ballantine’s, screwed the cap on, and set the bottle by the leg of the table just out of sight. Dragging his grey army blanket back from the cot’s thin sheet, he pulled the narrow bed out from the wall so the light from the window by the door would fall on whoever was going to lie there. As he did he heard Joseph’s boots hit the porch. Art turned quick to the door and caught the soaked body of the boy as Joseph let him go, water dripping from Joseph’s clothes. The man looked exhausted.

  The boy and Art swept in a half-circle as if performing a step to some lost waltz, the boy’s head rolling across his shoulders. “Christ,” Art said looking close at him, “it’s Emerson Turfoot you got here, Arnold’s boy.”

  “He fell in the river,” said Joseph, taking his guitar off his back and leaning it against the wall by the door. “Take a look by his ear there.”

  Art laid Emerson on the cot and pulled the blanket up over the boy’s shivering body. He lifted the torn piece of what had once been Joseph’s shirt wrapped around the boy’s head, took a close look and, gentle, pressed the sleeve against the wound with the heel of his hand.

  “What happened?”

  “You know that dead fir snag that hangs out over the river just up the rail line from here?”

  “Yeah,” Art said, nodding as he leaned over and with his free hand pulled the first-aid kit out from under the chair by the stove. He gripped it hard to still the trembling in his hand as he settled the kit down by the cot. “Put your hand where mine is here, Joseph. Not hard. Just enough to slow the bleeding,” he said, Joseph leaning in, his fingers replacing Art’s by the boy’s ear.

  As Art got up he turned and tried not to look at the whisky bottle, its dull gleam behind the table leg. “Go on,” he said to Joseph as he took a clean cotton sock from the line stretched beside the chimney, dipping it in the seething water kettle on the stove
. He knelt again beside Joseph and washed the trailing blood from Emerson’s throat.

  “See here,” Art said as he carefully took the bloody shirt sleeve away. He placed two fingers on the artery just below the cut beside the boy’s ear. “Come here and feel the pulse,” Art said. “Press down, but not too heavy.”

  Joseph went to the other side of the cot. “Okay,” he said.

  “The tree?” Art asked.

  “The damned kid was climbing it.”

  “What? That rotting snag?”

  “Yeah. It’s the old tree the osprey hunts the river from,” said Joseph. “When the kid was almost at the top, the branch he was holding on to up there must’ve broke. He was forty feet high when he fell into the river.”

  “And this?” said Art, pointing at the wound.

  “Maybe the branch cut him when he landed,” Joseph said. “I don’t know. Water was deep where I fished him out. Couldn’t have hit a rock or anything. Hell, he was floating downriver. I had to swim to get him.”

  Art looked close at the wound he’d exposed on the side of Emerson’s face. It was deep and reached a crooked inch from just above Joseph’s fingers.

  “He’s a strange kid, this one,” said Art.

  “Jesus,” Joseph said. “He should be dead after a fall like that.”

  Art reached into the first-aid kit and took out antiseptic, tape, and a roll of bandage. He laid them out on a shirt he took from the drying line and then very gently touched Joseph’s fingers. “Good. That’s good,” he told Joseph.

  Art tried to count how many drinks he’d had before they’d come. He tried to remember, his body whispering for another sip from the bottle. Art turned and leaned down hard onto the table, pressing his hands flat against the worn wood.

  “You okay?” Joseph asked.

  “Yeah,” said Art. “Just a little tired.” He reached again into the kit and took out scissors and a razor and went back to the cot, kneeling as he clipped and shaved the skin along the cut, the razor’s blade delicately slipping in and around Joseph’s fingers. As he washed the last hairs away, the boy stared up at Art from his pale blue eyes, his small body tense. Art placed the palm of his hand against the boy’s chest where a wild heart was beating and said quietly the one word, “Breathe.”

  Emerson grabbed hold of the arm pushing him down, his fingers white against Art’s wrist. His frantic eyes blinked once as Art said softly, “Breathe.”

  And Emerson did.

  Everything became very quiet and Art could hear the water roiling in the pot on the stove, the wood crackling in the firebox, and then far off the screams of a Steller’s jay began somewhere down the river.

  “Damned birds,” Art said.

  As he spoke Emerson let go Art’s wrist.

  “Always angry at the world,” said Joseph.

  Emerson stared past his wet boots at the open door and the sun on the meadow.

  “When you fell out of that snag you landed in the river and cut your head,” said Art. “How, I don’t know. Joseph here swam out and got you before you could drown and brought you to my cabin. I’m going to stitch up the long cut you got on the side of your head and then I’m going to bandage it. You can go home after that. That sound okay with you?”

  When Emerson didn’t reply, Art rested the palm of his hand upon the boy’s chest again. “Take deep breaths,” he said. “Deep and long. And while you’re doing the breathing I’m going to give you a needle in your arm that will help with the pain when I stitch that wound. When I’m done, Joseph here will let you go. You’re not afraid, are you?”

  Emerson just stared at him. All Art could see behind those eyes was a boy who wanted to run. Every muscle and bone in the small body wanted to be gone. Art knew Emerson Turfoot didn’t like being inside any cabin, shack, or house. If the boy had his way he’d have lived in the forest in a cave or hollow tree, but Art knew his mother, Isabel, refused to put up with any such thought as that. The best she could do though was have him sleep out in the barn with the horse, the straw mattress and blanket she set there for him vacant most every night she looked to find him. She’d told Art that her son rarely spent a whole night there at the best of times, but at least she knew there was a place he could doss down that had a roof over it and an animal that loved him as much as she did. That was good enough for her.

  Emerson lay quiet, his chest pinned under Art’s gentle hand. He breathed, the cage of his ribs lifting and falling, the air coming deep and slow as he gave himself over to the first-aid man, Emerson’s two pale eyes staring into Art’s.

  “You lie there and listen,” Art said, taking his hand away. “Joseph here is going to tell you how you turned into an osprey when you were falling out of that snag. You didn’t fall, you know. You flew right into the river. He’s sure you had a big trout in your teeth when he pulled you out. You tell him,” he said to Joseph. “You tell him how he turned into an osprey.”

  “Never saw anything like it,” said Joseph as he sat down on the end of the bed, the boy’s eyes locking on his as he spoke. “Never saw a young man like you turn into a bird, just like that.”

  As Joseph spoke Art took a syringe from a cloth bag in his kit. He tipped the needle into a small blue bottle and took up just enough morphine to knock the boy out, what remained of the drug puddled in the bottom. He capped the bottle tight and placed it back in the bag. He stared at the needle and syringe in his hand, the glisten of the morphine in its glass tube, and for a long moment felt a soft melting inside him, his dreams, his memories of the war and all else of the past he had tried to forget gone. It had been a long time since he’d taken up the needle.

  He knelt by the cot and gave the boy the drug in the slender vein in the crook of his elbow, smiling as he saw the quiet shadow of morphine swallow him. The blood from the wound had slowed to almost nothing. Emerson’s eyes were closed, his breathing slow and steady as Art took up the curved needle and began.

  As he tied the first knot he told Joseph he could take his hand away from Emerson’s temple. “Play something,” he said.

  Joseph picked up his guitar and stared far off as he tuned the strings. As the first notes sounded he began to sing, I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by. To stop himself from weeping along with Hank Williams’s “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” Art whispered in Emerson’s ear, “You dive deep with that osprey now, you hear?”

  Emerson drifted, his eyelids fluttering as Joseph sang the song, the quiet chords carrying the boy away. Art knew the song and the singing and he remembered morphine too and as he did the temptation came again as it always did and once again he set the thought aside. The opium he smoked with Wang Po was enough, the whisky enough. He had to think about the boy. Emerson was in the presence of a gentle emptiness. Art knew that place, but knew too its other side. Whisky, morphine, opium, dreams, all the same at the end.

  The needle binding the seam of Emerson’s wound was something far away from the body on the bed. The boy under Art’s hands was an osprey child moving feathered through the river currents in search of an elusive trout, a silver fish that was always almost in his talons and never was.

  The needle moved as it always had in the war and after the war, the loops of thread gathering flesh together until what had been a crevice in Emerson’s flesh became instead a gathering of tiny winged insects, each one closing Emerson’s skin. Tenacious creatures, immaculate in their desire to make whole what had been broken. Art smiled as Joseph finished the song and began another. “Cool Water.” Art remembered the Sons of the Pioneers singing: He spreads the burning sand with water. Where was he when he first heard the song? What bar, what room, what camp, mill, bunkhouse, somewhere, yes, but alone, always alone? No, not always. Not in Paris. Not with Marie.

  He thought of the boy under his hands, this young, wild creature who roamed the valley and the mountains. An animal who was still learning how to be human, the restraints the world offered creating his rebellion. Art wondered what would become of such a on
e, and then he laughed and realized Joseph was laughing too, and though he didn’t know if Joseph had the same thought as he did, he knew whatever crossed Joseph’s mind was good and that the boy had found in the man and his songs his own life saved, a debt without limit.

  Joseph rested the guitar when Art put the needle down, Emerson quiet beside him as Art began to dress the wound. “You think you could go up to the farm and get Arnold to come down here and get his son?”

  “I can do that,” Joseph said. “Won’t take me all that long, I guess. It’ll take a little for Arnold to get that horse of his out of the pasture and harnessed to the buckboard. I know. I’ve met that horse. He doesn’t much like coming down to the village.”

  “Why’s that, you think?” asked Art, knowing the answer.

  “ ’Cause he has to haul the buckboard back up.”

  They both laughed.

  Joseph looked down at Emerson. “Looks like he’ll be resting for a bit,” he said. “Mind you—keep an eye on him. I figure he’s a boy could run off in his sleep let alone on morphine.”

  “He’ll be okay,” said Art. “You can leave the guitar here if you want.”

  “No,” said Joseph. “I kind of like having it around. You never know when someone’s going to need a song.”

  Art smiled as he watched Joseph sling his guitar across his back and head out the door. As it closed behind him, Art stood up and sat back at the table. He reached down for the bottle, raised it, and filled his glass half full. Three ounces, exactly. He’d measured the invisible line on the glass many times, his hand and eye knowing precisely when too much was the same as too little, neither of them ever enough.

  * * *

  —

  ART LISTENED TO THE HARNESS CLINK and jingle as Arnold Turfoot and his buckboard crossed the meadow and pulled up to the cabin, the horse heaving a little before leaning down into the meadow grass to graze. Emerson was sitting on the porch, groggy, still dazed from the fall into the river and the stitching of his wound, but mostly because of the dregs of morphine running in his veins.