Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  “Who are you talking about then?” she asked.

  “Up at Jaswant Singh’s place. There’s a woman there needs help with her sick baby.”

  CLIFF PUT THE EMPTY COFFEE CUPS in the sink behind the counter with the spoons and plates, Alice just behind him cleaning the countertop of crumbs and spills. A bluebottle fly swung in a slow curve above Alice’s head, following her as she moved down the narrow aisle past him. As she did she pressed her body as close to the counter as she could get, but her hips still touched his as they brushed against him. She felt his body tense as breath by breath she passed him by, her hand scouring the cheap Arborite, digging with her fingers into the scratches and scuffs, cleaning out the initials scored into it by bored men. Their knives had created hearts and pistols, breasts and buttocks, names and initials, all and everything their weariness asked of them in the hours they sat alone nursing cup after cup of brackish coffee as they waited out the morning or afternoon before going down to the mill for their shift.

  Everyone had left the store now, the afternoon worn down to after five o’clock. The Closed sign dangled from its hook over the front door, the dance starting in three more hours, eight o’clock, the men who had sat out pieces of the afternoon talking to or teasing Cliff at the counter having left, gone down to the cookhouse for dinner or to the bunkhouse for a few drinks before the dance began.

  “What do you want me to do with all these dishes?” Cliff asked. It was the first time in his life he had ever looked into a kitchen sink except to wash his hands and that had been at home a long time ago.

  “It’s okay, Mister Waters,” Alice still hesitant, saying, “I mean, Cliff. I don’t need any more help.”

  “You know what I told you,” Cliff said. “You can call me Crowchild.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And stop saying you’re sorry. It’s them who lock you up should be sorry.”

  Alice came back down the counter and Cliff moved around to the customer side and stared at Alice’s back as she leaned into the soapy water and washed dishes, putting them out to stand and drain in wire drying racks. “You can go now,” she said into the steam. “I’ve got to wait for Mister Harper. He has to make sure everything is all right before he puts me in my room.”

  “But I’m coming back for you.”

  “I know,” said Alice, turning around and brushing back her hair from her cheek with her wrist. A few drops spattered the front of her dress. “But he isn’t here yet, so I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

  Cliff watched the drops fall, small, delicate spots appearing on her blouse. “Remember what we talked about?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m scared.”

  “Say my name,” said Cliff.

  She faced away from him, her hands gripping the sink. In a whisper she said, “Cliff.”

  “No. My real name.”

  “Crowchild,” she said in a small voice. “Your name is Crowchild.”

  “Louder,” he said. “Say it louder.”

  “Say what louder?”

  They turned as Claude Harper came down the aisle, his girth filling the space between the shelves. He slung a bag lightly up onto the counter, the bag settling there as if there were something soft inside.

  “What’s she supposed to say, Cliff? You want to let me in on the secret?”

  “Nothing,” Cliff said. “We’re just talking.”

  “You’re not supposed to be in here after closing. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I was helping,” he said. “She was all alone here and I figured—”

  Claude interrupted him. “You figured what?” When Cliff didn’t answer, Claude said, “She’s a girl and she’s alone in here, you know.”

  Cliff looked at Claude and slowly, carefully, impossibly, he wanted to hurt the man who could do what he liked with Alice. He wanted to hit Claude so hard in the face the man would go blind.

  “I’m sorry, Mister Harper,” said Alice. “It’s my fault. I asked him to stay and help.”

  “You did?”

  Alice closed her eyes, her wrists crossed on her chest as if with her hands she could fly into herself and disappear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, tears startling from her eyes.

  Cliff tried to unclench his fists, arms rigid at his sides.

  “You sorry too?” Claude asked, a thin smile cut into his face.

  “I gotta go, I gotta go,” said Cliff, desperate not to leave Alice alone with Claude, but not knowing what else to do. He didn’t look at her, saying, “You’ll be all right, Alice. Don’t worry.”

  “Go on, get out of here,” said Claude.

  Claude stood with his back to Alice, Cliff stumbling down the aisle and out onto the porch, the door banging shut behind him. The glass in the front window shivered from the blow.

  “Young men like that,” Claude said. “I saw his kind in the war. They never lasted long. They got so angry they went crazy and died. I think maybe he’s one of them.”

  Alice barely breathed, her hands still pressed against her chest.

  “You go to the back room now. I need to lock you up.”

  When she didn’t move, Claude turned, took a step, leaned on the counter, and said slowly, “Go to the lean-to.”

  Alice stared at him, stricken, afraid.

  “Do as you’re told,” he said, and pointed down the narrow hall. He stepped around the counter and took her arm. She didn’t resist as he pulled her behind him to the lean-to and opened the door, pushing her inside. She was crying as she sat down on the mattress. He went back and brought the bag he’d thrown on the counter when he’d first come in.

  “There’s some stuff in this here bag for you to get dressed up with. I found it in a cupboard over at the house. The last guy who ran this outfit had a daughter your size more or less. He’s running a mill down in Merritt now. Another year and I’ll be out of here too. You put on something pretty and I’ll be back later to let you out.”

  Alice stared at the floor.

  “You be ready,” he said. He raised his chin and sniffed at the air twice, smiling as he closed the door and locked it, the padlock snapping sharp against the hasp.

  * * *

  —

  JOEL DIDN’T GO BACK to the Someday Church after Isabel talked to him. He told her he had things to do back in the village. She just nodded and waved him away. He left her then, cutting through the swamp, turning every few minutes to memorize the new path he was taking so he could find his way back. He’d run through the same swamp when he followed Emerson, but there was no way he’d find his way if he tried to retake the boy’s wandering path. When he got to the railway tracks he climbed up onto the grade, marking a leafless tree standing sentinel in the bog so he’d know where to turn next time, and headed back toward the village. Far ahead the mill shone in the sun, its corrugated iron siding shimmering. The late afternoon light slipped along its walls to the beehive burner, the rusted red the roan of dusty horses. Wisps of pale smoke seeped from the mesh cone, three gulls wheeling, their shrieks faint in the still air.

  The river flowed past, its brown back raked by drifting trees ripped from their moorings on the banks upstream of the canyon. They rolled in water thrust up from hidden rocks, their trunks scoured, bare roots flailing the river before sinking again into the current as they made their way to Mad River.

  He stopped a few feet past a railroad culvert, creek water flowing out and falling onto tumbled rocks. The sound of the river moving seemed bottomless to Joel, a breathing deep and heavy, the water dense with dirt scoured from the mountains the river passed through, every canyon wall, every poplar and aspen flat adding to the burden of soil it carried to the sea. Joel had sat and listened to it every night of every month he’d spent in the valley. Art said the river through the mountains was a long wound. It needed to heal each summer, its song as lonely as the land itself.

  Joel had thought about all the things that Art said many times, but his
hour with Myrna’s mother had given him a glimpse of another kind of thinking, a way to understand things, especially her asking him at the last if he’d been listening. He realized for the first time he should keep his mouth shut not just so he wouldn’t look foolish but so he could hear what people said behind their words. She’d passed something on to him, but what it was he couldn’t explain except to know she’d given it to him in the shape of a pebble, a Chalsey Doney stone as old as forever almost. He was supposed to do something with it or it was supposed to do something to him. One or the other or both. She told him he’d know when the time came.

  But it wasn’t just Isabel who’d given him another way to know things. He realized Wang Po had given him something too. And Art, his stories about the war and what happened in Holland at the farm and to Marie in France. Out of the many bits and pieces of Art’s story Joel had created an impossible place called Paris, a city made from words and make-believe pictures, strange streets, people in cafés, beautiful women who laughed and cried, and men, hard men who had fought a war only to find at the end something broken. Wang Po gave him his war with Nanjing and the slaughtering of his people by the Japanese. Maybe everyone had something they couldn’t make better. His mother did, his sister too, her going through the field to the shed behind his father, and the crippled Elsie Crapsey with eighty acres and no one to share her life with, Irene McAllister with her knife, Art with his dreams, what he called his torments, and Alice, and Reiner and Cliff, Emerson, Isabel, all of them with stories that explained nothing and yet explained everything if you really listened to what they said.

  Wang Po’s story was Nanjing and Shanghai. Art’s was Belgium and Holland, France and Paris.

  Somehow their stories were the same. They just didn’t know how to finish them. Their lives were in a mill wheel going round and round without end as it ground them to dust. Especially Art.

  Joel gripped the Chalsey Doney stone in his pocket. It burned into his palm like something alive. He stopped and sat down on the steel rail of a railway bed almost a hundred years old. Before that there wasn’t even a wagon road, just a trail busted out of the forest and the swamps. A tatter of wild daisies grew out of the gravel bed by the tracks. He leaned on his knees before their tough frailty, his hands cupping his chin. The river flowed. It was always changing, it was always the same.

  He reached into his pocket, took out the Chalsey Doney stone, and rubbed it with his thumb. The sun caught at it and the band flared, a green fire burning inside.

  He knew there wasn’t a name for what he felt. It was a kind of sadness. The only person he knew who didn’t have it was Myrna. If she had a sadness it was a happy one. There was joy in her life all the time. And that was the difference. That’s what made Emerson and Isabel, her father too, the three of them to protect her, the three of them to love her. And him too. When he was with her he wasn’t afraid.

  A hawk slashed the air beside him, its sudden passing a blow to the right of his shoulder. Its sound was a pale scream, the hawk streaming into the grass by the river’s edge and stopping with a jolt, the wings outspread, the broad red tail feathers flaring for a moment before the hawk lifted, a wood rat hanging below its clenched talons, the rat’s tail curled beneath it like a question mark. Joel watched the hawk lift and glide out over the river before curving back to the forest’s edge by the mountain. He waited until it vanished into the arms of a big fir tree and for a moment wondered where the red-tail’s mate might be. He remembered seeing the smaller male that spring in a courting flight. The male had come down upon the female’s back in the air and then her turning her body upside down and grasping the male’s talons, rolling over and over with him in free fall, only letting go of each other a few feet from the treetops. The female screamed when they let go, the male rising until he gained enough height to tumble over her as she passed beneath him. And he thought of him and Myrna up on the mountain. Like the hawks whose cries had stilled the day.

  Joel placed his hand on his shoulder as if to touch the air the bird had breached as it flew by. There was a coolness there. The day had moved on. Isabel would be talking to her elder tree by the great rock fallen from the ancient glaciers. She’d be listening to the world, each grass blade twisting, a nuthatch searching the bark of her elder tree for a grub or beetle. While she did, the rest of the Turfoots would be turning the church into a house for Myrna and the baby and while they did he was sitting watching the river, a warm pebble in his hand, and now a hike to the mill and then on up to the cookhouse and a meal.

  But before he went back to see Myrna he had to go into the bog behind the bunkhouse and get his tobacco can from its hiding place. He needed to get his money out so he could take it back to her. They were going to need it to buy things for the church that was going to be their house now and they needed to get things for when the baby came. He didn’t know what exactly, but Myrna and Isabel would know. Maybe Myrna and him could go down to Kamloops and buy some things. It’d be exciting to take her there, just the two of them. They could get a room in a hotel or a motel. He’d never done that before. It sounded exciting.

  Suddenly he was starving. He looked back the way he’d come, taking it in once more, memorizing each tree and bush so he could find his way back if he had to. There would still be a bit of a moon later on. He’d be able to see okay.

  There was an ache in his belly. He needed to eat something.

  He thought of Wang Po. There was a moon in one of the poems the cook was always singing out loud. In the spring he had made Joel memorize the English he had made it into, the Chinese sounds impossible for Joel to make. Wang Po told him the man who wrote it was from a place called Sian. Joel tried to say the poem:

  A full moon over the river.

  All of heaven burning.

  A night without sleep.

  I blow out the candle,

  See your face in the dark.

  It didn’t seem quite right the way he said it. He thought maybe he’d mixed up the words. Some of it didn’t make sense except for the people far apart. Maybe the two people are looking at the same moon far apart. He thought how strange his life was now, how only a night ago he was looking down on Alice from his perch on the cedar round. Now he was going to be living in an old church with Myrna. And he knew a poem by heart. Who ever thought that would happen?

  And he was going to be a father.

  A shiver went down his arms and he turned again to the swamp, thinking the hawk might have returned for a second kill, and saw something in a clump of dying cedars fifty feet back in the swamp.

  Emerson.

  The boy was trailing him again.

  It didn’t matter now to Joel if the boy was there or not, if he followed him or didn’t follow him.

  What Joel needed was to find Art. He hadn’t seen him since Art had talked to Jim McAllister up at the trailer and Jim telling him Irene was gone. There’d been too much going on since he dropped off the package in the morning. Art had still been passed out then, but Joel knew he’d be somewhere else by now, trying to figure out where Irene McAllister was. And Joel knew what was in the package from Vancouver. Art might have used some of the drugs but Joel hoped he hadn’t.

  He got to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. His body felt alive as he stepped onto the railway ties. He looked far down the tracks to where they came together and became one steel line and he began to run, his feet touching the ties, three and then four, then three, the railroad passing under him. Far behind him the cry of the afternoon freight train sounded coming up the grade from Mad River crossing. The train was miles away, the horn in the distance a wolf’s faint howl. He would be at the station before the freight came around the bend below the swamp. As he ran he didn’t turn around. He knew Emerson would be pacing him, the boy’s thin body running the rails with him.

  The sun had passed over the mountain above the village, its shadow crossing the river. In a few more minutes it would begin the slow climb up the green slopes to the east. The mo
untain the shadow climbed had no name and neither did the one to the west. Maybe the Indians had names for them but there were none around to ask except for Alice and he didn’t think she’d know.

  The Brother down in Kamloops who sold her to the Rotmensens wouldn’t have taught her anything about Indians or their names. All she’d know was what the school taught her. Her story was that she’d lost her story. Joel figured she’d have forgotten most everything from when she was a little girl up in the Cariboo. Her last memory would be of a wagon back and white hands lifting her up and taking her away.

  His feet drummed on the railway ties, bits of gravel skittering from under his boots.

  The dance would start in a few hours.

  They’d be playing the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly records, maybe “Peggy Sue” or a slow one like “My Special Angel.”

  He thought about dancing to “Bye Bye Love” with her, but then he couldn’t decide who he meant. It didn’t matter. He knew one thing for sure, he’d be dancing.

  Alice or Myrna, he couldn’t wait.

  * * *

  —

  THE ROAD WAS DUST and there were women with black wings. Their hands were white birds and they were pecking her. And the dust. Alice remembered the dust. She went away sometimes and dreamed the day they took her. The dream was full of sounds, words she didn’t understand, faces she didn’t know, all but one, Sister Mary holding her, and in the dream she was crying. And there was dust in her nose and mouth, and it was hard to breathe, and in the dream sometimes there was a blanket around her head, and she kept trying to breathe through it, and there was Sister Mary’s voice, and she kept getting it wrong and she didn’t know if it was Sister Mary’s voice that first day or if it was her voice on all the days, all the nights, and her crying was only on that first day because she remembered lying in the bed in Sister Mary’s room and Sister Mary telling her she couldn’t cry and when she did Sister Mary hurt her so bad she never cried again. Not once and, no, she had cried when her friend died, and she had cried when they wouldn’t tell her where they buried her, Brother Whelan and the Sisters, because she had begged them to tell her and that night Sister Mary took her, Sister Mary took her, and she couldn’t, she wouldn’t remember that, because the blanket was tight around her head, she was dying and there was no way she would ever find her way back if she brought that night into her dream, and, Oh, the road was dust, and it was dust, and she couldn’t breathe.