Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  One day Brother Whelan told her she’d be going to work up the river in a village. He said the people who owned the store where she was going to work were coming to get her in the afternoon and she was to be ready.

  Mister Harper still didn’t come. The sun was still far away behind the mountains, but there was a fresh light outside the locked room and Alice knew it was almost time to open the store. Alice stared at the blank door that didn’t have a handle or a knob and as she did she wondered how the other kids were doing back at the residential school. There was one little girl she’d been worried about ever since she left. Her name was Catherine. Exactly where her mother and father were Alice didn’t know and Catherine wasn’t sure either. When Alice asked her she just said they lived by a river. That was all she knew.

  Catherine was only five years old, a year older than Alice had been when she’d come. Alice found out a while later from one of the girls that Sister Mary was taking Catherine to the room where Jesus slept under the bed. Alice knew what Sister Mary would be doing to Catherine. It would be the same as she’d done to her.

  When the Brother said Alice was leaving to go north, she told him about Sister Mary and what Sister was doing when she took Catherine at night. Alice told him what Sister Mary had done to her. That’s when Brother struck her on the side of the head with his fist and knocked her down. It was weeks later that it stopped hurting inside Alice’s ear. The Brother said Sister Mary was only trying to civilize the girl just like she had with her. All Sister has ever wanted is to make you good and useful, he said. He stood there and Alice thought he was going to kick her. She could see his shoes under his soutane. They were scuffed and dirty. What are we going to do with you Indians? he asked, but there were only Alice and Sister Grace there to answer and Alice was on the floor and didn’t know how to move and Sister said nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Sister stood quietly by the door and waited until Alice could get up. It took her two tries before she could get off her knees. When she finally stood Sister Grace took her by the arm and led her out to the front of the school where the truck was waiting in the desert sun to take her to the train station.

  Alice heard the front door of the store open and close and then boots walking on the floor. They were the heavy steps of Mister Harper. She stood by her mattress and waited until he stopped at her door and then the snap of the padlock as the key turned, the click of the hasp, and the door opening to him in his canvas jacket, his leather belt. When Alice met his eyes, she closed hers. When she opened them again she was looking down at the floor and she was a little girl at the residential school and the Sister was standing in the dust in front of the huge red-brick building, behind her the desert hills with their cactus and stunted pines.

  “Well, you’re all ready, aren’t you?” Mister Harper said. He stood there in the doorway, looking at her in the way most of the men from the mill looked at her, with the wrong grin, the wrong eyes, the wrong way of standing, their bodies leaned in the way dogs do when they are trying to decide whether to attack or run. Alice almost expected him to come over and smell her. She raised her head and looked up at the sawmill boss and, yes, his body rested in the same kind of slouch. It was his head, the way it was raised slightly and leaning toward his left shoulder as if he was judging, not her, but himself. It was as if he was deciding what he was going to do and whether or not he was going to do it.

  “Thanks, Mister Harper,” Alice said, her legs moving carefully as she took four steps to reach the doorway, turning slightly so her body could get by him without touching. As she passed she felt her hair move. It was the lightest of touches, a weaving made by his fingers. She felt her stomach tense, her throat thicken. She kept walking, head down as she passed through the door. She stepped around the spot on the floor just past the freezer. It was the damp wood where rusty water leaked, the pool she dry-mopped every day so Imma and Piet wouldn’t slip when they stepped from the store to get to the back. There wasn’t a sound and then there was, Mister Harper behind her, moving slowly just as she was. It was as if the walk they were taking happened like this every morning, Mister Harper behind her instead of Imma or Piet, the padlock and the hasp, the door opening and closing, and each day his huge hand touching her hair.

  As she passed along the aisle of tinned food, she imagined herself continuing through the store and out the front door, but when she stepped down from the deck she didn’t know where she was or where she was going. She only knew she wasn’t in the store anymore and she wasn’t owned by Piet and Imma. Mister Harper was standing now at the open front door of the store watching her walk away. He was waiting to see where she was going. It was a terrible kind of dream she was having because Mister Harper was waiting for her to turn around just past the Hall where the dance was going to be, turn and come back to the store, and she did turn, she did return, and his hand touched her hair as she walked through the door back into the store, his fingers knotted above the red twine bow she had tied there.

  The dream vanished as she stepped around the front table where Imma charged the customers for what they bought. Mister Harper walked past her as if she wasn’t there, as if whatever had passed between them hadn’t happened. There were sandwiches to make, food to prepare, the vegetable bins needed filling, the floors swept, the cash to be counted again and again to make sure it was right, all the things that had to be right before people came. If anything was wrong there would be someone who would tell Imma and Piet and if someone did she would be in trouble.

  She went to the cupboard by her room, took out the broom, and began a slow sweeping of the hall that led past the storage room where the canned goods were stored. Halfway down she stopped and leaned the broom against the wall. She put her hand on the side of her head and touched the place where Brother Whelan had struck her. She could still feel the blow, the sudden shock of his fist. She didn’t remember falling down. All she knew was that she was lying on the floor and the Brother was standing over her. She had put her hand to the side of her head and felt the numbness in her ear. It felt wet and when she’d looked at her fingers there was blood on them. Get her up, was what Brother Whelan said. He was talking to Sister Grace. Get her up and get her out of here. And when the Sister helped her up, Brother Whelan said what he said about Indians. She knew then and she knew now that she would never forget what he said about her, what he said about all the children who lived at the school.

  She pushed back her hair and felt her ear and it all came back to her, the years at the school, Sister Mary hurting her and Brother Whelan too. She remembered the truck they packed all the kids in when they were taking them away. She remembered the little ones crying when they looked through the wooden slats and she remembered when she was little and she had cried too and how they beat them when they cried. And the wooden box Sister Mary put her in the time she caught her trying to take an apple from the bowl in Sister’s room. The Sister had left her in the box all night and when the Sister opened it to take her out her dress was wet from peeing herself and the Sister had beat her and beat her with the stick she kept in the corner by the bed. You dirty girl. You dirty girl, she had said as she struck her.

  Alice put her hand to her face and it felt wet. When she took it away and looked there wasn’t any blood on it. It was clean and it was only then she knew she had been crying. She told herself not to cry.

  She was afraid of Mister Harper. She had hated him touching her hair. She didn’t want him or anyone else to touch her hair ever again and then she thought of Cliff and how gentle he was with her, but it didn’t matter if he was gentle or not. She didn’t want him to touch her either, not anywhere, but part of her did want him to touch her, but not in that way and not now. She wanted him to hold her gentle, hold her the same way he talked to her, the way he protected her. He wasn’t like Brother Whelan and Sister Mary and Mister Harper and she put her hands up to her face and held them there. She didn’t want to see anything. The terrible thing was that when she did that
she could only see in and what she saw inside was Sister Mary undressing her when she was still a little girl. Sister Mary’s long white fingers were on her skin. They were touching her and she was afraid to cry.

  ART’S FIRST-AID KIT was hooked over his shoulder, the strap wrapped around his knuckles as he left the cabin and took the river trail along the railroad grade past the bog. The swamp reached out beside him, green pools seething in the sun. Mourning cloaks and fritillaries licked the muddy banks by the tracks with their slender tongues. The blades of their wings willowed in the heat as the butterflies rose into the breeze along the river. They lifted from the mud as the scissored shadow of his trembling legs passed by.

  The morning was half gone.

  Bone-dry trunks of aspen snags stood crooked in the muck, among them the flayed bodies of red cedars and hemlocks, their needles fallen, their bark stripped away by woodpeckers and flickers in search of grubs and beetles. Dragonflies quartered the air feasting on flies and mosquitoes. Below the skimmers and meadowhawks were the festering pools of their birth. He looked into an eddy by the grade and saw water tigers and diving beetles course the deep as they hunted for prey. Mosquito larvae jigged in the fetid water, their bodies dancing.

  The surface of the long pool where the creek met the swamp was dimpled with small trout rising in search of grubs and insects. There was hunger everywhere, an infinite variety of hunter and prey.

  The bit of opium he’d smoked when he woke up had settled his body down. He thought his head would clear in a little while even though his body was exhausted. The nightmares had gone back to an uneasy rest after raging through his head. As he walked he caught a glimpse of someone at the edge of a cedar copse on the dry island in the bog behind the bunkhouses, but when he turned to take a better look whoever it was vanished into the dense brush. He thought it might’ve been the Turfoot boy, Emerson—trust him to be roaming around again already—but he wasn’t sure. It wouldn’t have been Joel. He’d be sleeping the sleep of the young after his long night’s wandering. But that island was where Joel kept his stuff. Art had seen him hiding things there. The kid had better be careful, he thought. He wasn’t the only one who noticed things.

  Joel. He had to thank him for picking up the package. He remembered then that Joel had been at McAllister’s trailer, both times.

  Art drew the back of his wrist across his forehead, his shirt cuff coming away wet. What breeze there was cooled his arm, salt lines growing on the cloth. Jim had gone somewhere in the night when they’d been down at the cookhouse. It couldn’t have been Irene with him in the truck. Even McAllister wouldn’t have taken his wife out of the trailer. She’d have started bleeding as soon as he tried to lift her. And she couldn’t walk. She had to still be in the back bedroom where he’d stitched her up.

  He swung the kit over to his other shoulder. The whisky he’d drunk at the cabin simmered in his belly. The liquor rode the tremors that attacked him everywhere. He had to keep on walking, the cramps from constipation grinding his gut. He needed to shit, but he knew if he tried all he’d do was crap black chunks hard as blasting rock. The opium had eased the pain a little, but he felt like he was walking in the wrong kind of feathers, goose down made of stone. When he tried to stop moving, his legs betrayed him and he wobbled on loose ankles. He had to cut back on the liquor, the opium too. He didn’t know which was worse, the drug or the drink. All he knew was the one seemed to help the other.

  The Express had gone through while he was passed out. Joel had dropped off the package and Li Wei had his money. He could see the wrapped package of drugs falling into Joel’s hands as the man in the Express car tossed it from the open door. The penicillin, the opium.

  Heat came off the swamp in a thin mist. He sat down on the tracks and placed the first-aid kit between his legs. He could barely breathe, his shirt soaked with sweat. He pressed his hands down upon the hot steel of the tracks and felt it burn into his palms. The heat quieted him.

  He looked to the river and said to the brown flood: “Hey, deep river, I got to go see if Irene McAllister’s okay.” He rubbed his hands together as if trying to wipe something off. “Jim just doesn’t want me seeing to her now she’s stitched up. He says she’s gone, but there’s no way she could have gone anywhere.”

  His share of the opium was back in the cabin in a purple Seagram’s bag on the shelf above his bunk. He was going to hold off taking that again for a while. The drinking too. He was going to slow down. He could do it. The way he was he was no good to anyone.

  “I’m going to clean up a little,” he said. He looked out over the river again, but if the river heard him it gave no sign. Its long whispers promised him nothing. The only thing the river offered was the gift Helga Fyksen had accepted. Sitting there he took no comfort from the river, but for listening to it flow. There were times he felt it was a ravenous tongue eating the valley.

  A black dragonfly landed on his knee. He leaned down and stared as it rested there, its gleaming scales reflecting the clouds. He moved closer to its double-eyed, bullet head and saw his face in the mirrors there. He hung distorted in the curves of the myriad eyes looking back at him. He shuddered and the dragonfly, its wings clashing like shaken rice paper, lifted from its perch and circled his head before flying out over the swamp.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d been blessed or damned. He got up and started walking again thinking of the messages the world sent to him that he never paid attention to, never had time for. He crossed over the swamp by the mill and the cookhouse, passed the bunkhouses, and turned up the raw cut of McAllister’s driveway.

  Jim’s pickup was in the shed.

  Art stood a long time before pushing tentatively at the joy-shack door. As he did he heard the loose chain rattle against the two-by-four frame. It wasn’t hooked on the spike. He banged on the aluminum wall, but all he got back was quiet from inside the trailer.

  He opened the inner door slowly.

  “Hello, this place,” he called.

  The only answer was from a Steller’s jay mocking him from a branch of fir outside. He turned and the bird shook its blue wings at him, lowered its black head, and shrieked with a terrible rage. At the bird’s scream Art’s skin came alive, the last of the drugs in him exploding. Electrified chiggers crawled under his skin. He threw his arms out and spun around, the first-aid kit tight in his fist banging against the door jamb as he stumbled from the stoop to the dirt. He knelt there shaking, the bird staring down at him, silent, waiting to see if he dared rise up again.

  “Fuck off,” he said, as much to himself as to the bird. He got to his feet, exhausted, the bird giving one last scream as he climbed back up the steps to the open door.

  The joy-shack’s room stretched long and narrow into the shadows. McAllister hadn’t cut windows in the thin plywood walls, but sharp cracks of light cut across the spaces from where the wooden sheets had been nailed on badly, three bluebottle flies soaring in and out of the slats of brightness with steady, exhausting drones. The door open, they didn’t flee, but kept on in their endless jagged triangles and squares.

  The room had been cleaned up since the night before. Jim’s chainsaws were still there along with his swede saw and handsaws. The steel tool box that likely held most of his wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers and other small tools was in the corner by the workbench. There were a couple of cartons neatly stacked against the wall, but the odds and ends of things that were there the night before were gone. He remembered vaguely the mess the joy-shack had been. Everything now was neat and tidy. The washing machine that’d been there had vanished. Like most everything else that was gone it was as if it had never been. He remembered seeing the frayed cord hanging from the machine’s back, a copper fox tail hanging down, but even if the plug had still been attached the machine wouldn’t have worked without electricity. He’d wondered why McAllister would have cut the plug off and thought maybe the sawyer had got a deal on the machine, buying it from someone downriver, someone who had no more use for it
than the sawyer had now. Maybe Jim was going to fix the cord if they moved on to another mill town where they’d have power. There’d been a box freezer but it was gone too. Just something else that had been useless up the river.

  Jim and Irene storing stuff for another day wasn’t any different than everyone else in the village. Most people had packed away junk they couldn’t use, washing machines, televisions that didn’t work because there was no signal they could get, vacuum cleaners, anything that needed electricity. It was like people were just waiting for the day when they got away from the valley.

  All junk, he thought. And then, Irene.

  There were only two windows on this side of the trailer, the one down by the bedroom and the other inside the joy-shack by the trailer door. The curtains were pulled close in both. He peered through the thin slit in the curtains by the door but all he could see was a stub of nail pounded partway into a scratched plywood wall.

  He rapped his knuckles against the window glass and then louder on the door, but there was no answer. If McAllister wasn’t there then he had to be down at the mill or at the store. There was nowhere else he would have gone on foot. Maybe he’d taken off with Ernie somewhere. Either way, Art was glad he was gone. He didn’t feel ready to start fighting him about seeing Irene.

  The jay gave one last scream as he tried the trailer door, the handle turning with a wince, the metal door scraping against the white rust on the worn aluminum sill.

  The knob felt cool in his palm as he pulled the door wider, a last thin squeak crying light. He sniffed and the sharp burn of vinegar and ammonia seared his nose and throat. It brought back the smell of wounds and outcries, field hospitals, wet rubber sheets in ragged tents, the chemical stink of war, the bodies and the graves. He leaned his head into the room and looked long down the narrow hall past the kitchen…no one.