Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  It just got harder.

  He pulled his hat down onto his skull. Shoulders hunched, fingernails gripping his palms, he passed behind a clutch of young alders, their leaves shaking. The shadows ate him, nothing to mark his passing but the dragged scuffs in the dust his boots left walking.

  ART KENNING HAD COME DOWN from McAllister’s trailer to Lost Line Creek where it ran just beyond the path that led to his cabin. He knelt in the moss and placed his hands deep in the pool he had made when first he moved up the river. He’d carried stones there so the water would stay clear. Ever since, he’d got his drinking and cooking water in the end where he’d dug it deep. Below the pool the creek re-formed and ran another fifty feet before disappearing into an iron culvert and from its far mouth beyond the railway grade fell at last into the North Thompson River.

  The cold wreathed his wrists under the moon, blood lines in the water shivering like stretched green copper left too long in the rain. Irene’s blood was like that, metal vines writhing in water come down from the high springs and alpine snows. He knelt there in the moss and wrung his fingers together, his palms scouring the backs of his hands. Bits of brittle blood sheared away, fragile flakes of Irene McAllister floating from among the golden hairs on his wrists.

  Deep under the waters beyond him great boulders rolled on the river bottom, their thunder the guns of the Scheldt, the guns of Walcheren. He clenched his fists, the ghosts of Holland dancing wisps in the cul-de-sacs of his mind. The whispers were always there.

  He sat back by the pool and thought of his squatting in front of McAllister’s wife as she sat on the edge of her bed. She’d looked more child than woman, she was so small. If she’d stood she wouldn’t have reached five feet. It’s going to be okay, he’d said to her when he got there. She didn’t speak except for those few words to him after McAllister cursed her: “No, not damned,” she’d said, and Art then telling her it was going to be all right.

  As Art spoke she had tilted her head back, her necklace with its Alaska black diamonds rising on her white throat. The bits of cheap glass glinted in the light from the lamp. Her small mouth gaped. He thought, looking at her, of a wolf he’d seen once in a winter meadow howl at a severed moon. The cry before him was the same, the moan diminishing to a gasp of spittle-choked air.

  And then there was a sudden noise, something breaking in the front of the trailer, and her eyes startled, stared out, and, “Don’t let Jim back in,” she said, and whispered, “Please.”

  He’d watched her eyes look from him to the ceiling above and followed them with his own to a water stain, a dark blotch spreading there. He imagined her lying on her back in their bed and staring at it as it slowly grew, misshapen, alive. He’d tried not to look at her bare thighs and the deep cuts in her flesh. She had pulled the skirt of her cotton dress up in a tangled roll at the bottom of her belly, holding it there in her fists, the blood from below gathering there. The folds above her groin were blotted too with blood. Her bare arms and her legs below the wounds were splotched with bruises, some a pale yellow healing and others still purpled. He’d seen such bruises before and knew she hadn’t got them by bumping into things. Her dress was stitched high at the neck, tiny scarlet crosses embedded there as if to match the stains below. On her one foot was a red high heel, the colour of her wounds. The other foot was naked. It looked lost against the brown linoleum on the floor as if it had somehow been a foot someone had forgotten, someone who had put it gently down and then gone away without a thought.

  “Was it Jim did this?”

  He’d asked and she’d answered him by letting go of the blood rolls at her waist and putting her wet hands over her eyes as if to protect herself from the walls and the black smut that grew in the damp corners, saying, “No.”

  Before she could cry out again he, gentle, said, “Okay, it’s okay.”

  And she was quiet.

  Her hands were still over her eyes as he took the slip and blood-soaked dress and rolled them tighter, tucking them higher across her waist. He tried not to look at the swell of her mound, the dark hairs like fragile fronds pasted to her flesh at the edge of her panties.

  She lowered her hands then, the blood prints of her fingers and palms on her face. When he was done with lifting the folds she placed her hands again upon the rolled dress, gripping it tight, holding it there, the knuckles of her hands wet.

  Slow and careful, tender, he touched her skin.

  A tremor crept from her thighs to her belly. Her hands lifted and she cupped her face again. When he tried to move them away, she said one word, a small no.

  Silent then and utterly so, she was, and he left her to be such, alone and blind, and him, to her, someone far off as if not there at all, his hands on her imagined things and, belonging to no one, nothing more.

  He went out to the kitchen, the living room a larger space past the small sink, stove, and counter. He filled a pot with warm water as the sawyer stared out the front window at the darkness over the river. McAllister turned and started to speak, but Art raised his open hand and Jim was silent.

  Art walked down the narrow hall back to the bedroom feeling Jim’s stare on his back. He took one of the clean cloths he found in the bathroom cupboard and washed her wounds, cleansing them with antiseptic. The tourniquet he had tied on the leg with the deepest cut had stilled the worst bleeding. He knelt in front of her and took a curved needle from his kit, drawing the point over the narrow Washita stone he kept there. The sound the needle left behind was a faint whish whish whish as if there was somehow hope in the tiny steel blade. The needle had to be perfect to enter her skin without mar. When it was ready he laid it down on the clean dressings beside the syringe. The pool at the bottom of the bottle was all that was left of the morphine after looking after Emerson Turfoot that morning. Art’s stitching the boy’s face seemed a long time ago. It was strange that he was doing the same again.

  Irene McAllister sat very still but for her breathing as she waited for him to begin what he was going to do.

  Here, he was here, he thought, as he prepared the syringe.

  He leaned over Irene then and tied off her arm, a vein rising in the crook of her elbow. The needle slid in, the morphine entering her as he untied the strap on her arm. In a moment her eyelids began to flutter, but she held fast to the roll of cotton in her fists. She didn’t let go.

  The kerosene lamp on the half-moon table beside the bed was the only light in the room. Beside the lamp was a china figurine of an antebellum Negro girl in a long white dress. The little creature was trying and failing to look both innocent and coy. She held a frilled lace umbrella with pink china flowers embedded in the porcelain. The bulb she was supposed to hold was missing, the receptacle empty, the lampshade balanced precariously there as if to give the illusion of another kind of light, there being no electricity.

  Art shook his head at the craziness of it all, McAllister, the woman’s wounds, the long night that wasn’t over. He knelt now in the moss by the river, thinking of the Negro lamp and how odd it was for Irene to have kept such an object with nothing to bring it to life. Who knew but that the lamp was a gift given her by some older woman, a spinster aunt maybe, or a widowed mother, someone foolish enough not to understand its uselessness, the irony of such a gift brought to a narrow northern valley far from the world of porcelain and pretty hats. Or Irene had bought it herself when she was younger. It was the kind of sentimental thing women from the backcountry loved. Perhaps some odd hope had come to her by having it, but hope for what?

  What hope was hers?

  For a moment Art imagined her standing at the foot of the bed when Jim was working night shift at the mill. He could see her turning the lamp switch on and off, on and off, and no light ever there in the darkness.

  He held up his arm. A thin line of her blood had run along the side of his wrist and soaked into his shirt cuff, the stain looking to him like the mushroom his mother called Scarlet Devil’s Tooth, the blood having grown there like the mushro
om, blots of blood on flesh.

  Back in the trailer he’d willed his hands not to shake, the right hand because it had to thread the needle, and the left to hold everything steady. The lamp glimmer had been dim and Art could barely see the hole in the needle.

  Was hope what she’d allowed herself?

  He didn’t think so. That kind of thinking could kill a woman.

  Or a man.

  The boulders rolled in the river below the tracks, the thunder of far-off guns. Tommy laughing as he brought the girl in from the dark where she’d been hiding.

  Irene had sat utterly still. She had let go the rolled dress, her hands curled over, resting like supplicant cups on the bunched cotton at her belly, waiting.

  The morphine he’d given her had done its job and he knew she drifted soft inside her mind. Most nights he chased dreams too, but his were confused these past months, his nightmares limbo.

  “Let the morphine do its work,” he’d said to Irene, and then almost pleading: “Why did Jim cut you?”

  She looked at him out of her blue eyes, wide open at his question, staring. He saw her then clearly for the first time and wondered to himself how he could have been mistaken.

  Not Jim then.

  Her.

  She was the cutter.

  He understood then the ladders of pale scars that crissed and crossed her arms. She whimpered and then she stopped, her mouth as if closed forever.

  “Just breathe,” he’d said in wonder.

  Softly, he’d spoken softly, and bending, he helped her get unstuck. He shifted her hips away and leaned her back upon the quilt. He lifted and turned her, straightening her legs and slipping off her high heel shoe. He placed it on the floor under the bed with the other.

  Blood welled a bit in the deepest cut she’d made with the knife, her hand by then sure.

  He knew she’d had no care for what he tried to say: “Easy, careful, it’s all right, I have you…” What? Have her, how, and how, lying in her blood, was she anywhere near all right?

  Irene McAllister had stared up at the ceiling, seeing, he thought, the same thing he did back in his cabin when he read the ceiling and the walls, the damp rot above her formed into odd and terrible shapes in the cheap plywood veneer above her. She was buried in visions of what to her must be ruined cave paintings made in some far-off time, but what those visions were he did not know. Women’s dreams were a mystery to him and perhaps to all men. He couldn’t imagine their hallucinations, living as they did in their moons of blood. He didn’t understand his own.

  Irene must have looked at that ceiling a thousand times in her months alone. He knew. He’d laid himself down on beds in rooms with stained walls and ceilings and watched terrible creatures come out of the cracks with screams in their teeth, monsters living between the boards in the ceiling at his cabin.

  The water purled across the rocks in the creek below the pool. He took another drink from the bottle. It was close to empty now. He had to stop thinking of Irene McAllister and the man who had driven her to such a place as was hers. He placed in his mind the hand-split cedar boards of his own cabin walls and the newspapers that had been glued there to keep out the drafts in winter, cracked now and torn by years of worms and wasps and beetles.

  The river beyond the railway grade moved past, always different, always the same. Art clenched his hands and opened them, his fingers steady again.

  He thought of how he’d gripped them over and over back there in that room in McAllister’s trailer, squeezing his fists tight and letting them go slowly. When his hands had quieted he’d lifted the needle to his better eye, the left one, and slipped the silk through the tiny slot, the thread moving with his breath as he drew it down, a single strand of web hanging as if left behind by a spider in the night, as delicate, as strong as that. Then he’d loosened the tourniquet just above her wounds. The peroxide had foamed pink in the cuts and dribbled down her thigh. Blood had bloated in the longest one, a thickness swelling in the crevice. He tightened the tourniquet again until the bulb of blood stopped growing. Blood thick as rubber had welled into the other cuts too and he wiped them gently with antiseptic on the clean cotton he’d found in the bathroom cupboard.

  He’d told her there was more stitching to do, but she’d neither moved nor minded as he pushed the needle through her skin, the flesh resisting slightly as the needle sank like a delicate silver fish and rose from her body as if from shivering water. Art tied a knot in the first suture and moved steadily on, sewing the gaped lips of each wound, pulling her together. He tried to remember where he learned the double loop of the square knot. Somewhere.

  When Art finished he’d bound her thigh tight with pressure bandages. No one had taught him how to do what he had done. What he knew of injury and the care of others he’d learned by watching the medics in the war, his own regiment’s medic shot dead outside Tournai. Tournai? Somewhere in Belgium, nowhere, the goddamned war. After they took the medic’s body away they came to him for aid. He didn’t know why.

  Wiping his fingers on the sheet, he’d wished her scars to be as thin as stretch marks, something a man if he saw them when she was naked or wearing a bathing suit might forgive her for, thinking childbirth the cause of her suffering.

  He’d collapsed his fingers into loose fists again as he looked at her wounds. He figured she’d made a whispered cut along her left thigh first and then another, slightly deeper, the last the heavy bleeder he’d just finished stitching. The two cuts in her right leg were shallower, skin deep, the slices crooked as if she’d almost forgotten what she was doing and had to start over. She had to have been in shock by then, the muscles in her arm heavy, her fingers without feeling as they dragged the knife awkwardly.

  He closed his eyes and imagined her as she must have been before he saw her sitting in her blood, still trying. It was as if she’d been patient when she made the first cut, placing McAllister’s hunting knife sharp against her white skin and drawing the blade across in the same way she might have tested a ripe tomato, the blood rising behind the steel, a red furrow forming, the blood lines sudden, draping down the sides of her thigh in slender rivulets and drying in a pool beneath her hips. She had to have worried the bigger cuts with the knife or with a finger to keep the blood flowing. She had cut into veins, the big artery in her leg too deep for her to get to. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to. Someone so close to her own blood must have known the artery crossed the groin in a place so shallow she could have cut it open without trying and bled to death in five minutes.

  She didn’t want that.

  Art could see her sitting there waiting to see what the inside of her leg looked like when they were opened, and then going on, cut after cut, each one a little deeper than the one before. After the first three she must have stopped and waited, he thought, to see if they were enough.

  They weren’t.

  So she tried again on the other leg, the knife wavering, the weight of her hand and the knife doing what they could alone, her body not helping the blade to go deeper.

  Where was he?

  The pool shimmered under what was left of the moon, the water he’d washed his hands in clear again, her blood gone on to the big river. Fish were lifting from the deep pools and eddies to sip at the wisps of her lost body, his hands having washed what of her he had taken away. At the thought of the great fish rising to her smell, he rocked back on his heels and fell against a huge granite rock rolled off the risen grade by the railway years ago.

  He stretched himself there, his hands pressed into the moss.

  A clutch of daisies nodded by his shoulder, the petals worn by the wind the trains dragged passing.

  Irene McAllister had made of herself a long thinking. He knew what it was to live in the holes you found inside your head. A woman too could burrow there. Live too long in the tunnels and trenches and your body becomes a stranger, your skin and bones things you look at from far off. You hang in obscure caves and crannies. You’re the dream you don’t remember, b
ut you know you’re down there if only you can find yourself. You’re a fish in the river, a trout with a slash of red to mark its jaws. You rise from that dark, a cutthroat trout, ascending blood.

  The fish roved in the river currents the way her life did in her skull.

  He wondered how long she had waited before her husband came home. Was she playing with the knife or did she just sit there in a terrible solitude? What was it she wanted from him that she should wait until he came home from wherever he’d been? Out with Ernie maybe, somewhere, or alone. McAllister had worked the day shift so he could have been anywhere in the night. What might she have done next with the knife but for Jim finally coming in and finding her?

  Once begun, there was no end to such play. Wang Po told him once there was no end to a painting, no end to a poem. Art had seen lonely games in the war, men trading cigarettes butt for butt, taking turns stubbing them out on the tender inner skin of their arms, a bullet in a foot or hand, a wrist opened up with the tip of a bayonet, a man staring at his tendons and muscles, another gazing curiously at the strange repetitive pulse of an artery, blood spraying the air to a tune played by the heart. There were men who took themselves apart like that. And there were men too who tried to put themselves back together. The soldier he saw in a bomb crater near Bruges who kept trying to push his intestines back into his body. The simplicity in the soldier’s eyes, the concentration as he asked for help with his own offal. Art wondered if he’d been like that when they found him after the explosion at Moerbrugge. Was he knocked out or was he sitting by the fieldstone wall trying to put his mind back together, picking up a memory here and there and putting them back in his head? When they found him did he ask them the question the corporal a half mile south of Lange Munte had asked?