A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

by Norman Maclean

  “Where do you want to go, Neal?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I don’t want to go home.”

  I told him, “There are three women there who know how to take care of you.”

  “I don’t want to see three women,” he said, and more sand ran off him.

  Old Rawhide held her clothes under one arm. I reached down, picked up Neal’s clothes, and put them under his arm. “Here,” I said, taking his other arm, “I’ll help you wade back to shore.”

  He jumped away in pain. “Don’t touch me,” he said. To Old Rawhide he said, “You carry my clothes. They hurt when I hold them.”

  “You take them,” she said to me, and I did, and she took Neal by the arm he had pulled away from me and led him to the edge of the water. Part way out, she turned around and said to me, “He’s my man.” She was a strong woman and very tough. The Blackfoot is a big river and hard to wade. The man couldn’t have made it without the strength in her legs.

  Part way across Paul turned around and went back for what was left of the bottle of 3-7-77. After Old Rawhide got Neal all the way across she left him feeling his way through the rocks with his tenderized feet, and waded back to the sandbar. Her feet were tenderized, too, but she waded back to the sandbar to get the Hills Bros. coffee can.

  I met her on the shore when she returned.

  “What’s good about the coffee can?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But Buster always likes to have it with him.”

  There was a light blanket on the back seat of the car that we used to spread on the ground when we were going to have a picnic. Fir needles had stuck on it. We put Neal and Old Rawhide in the back seat and threw the light blanket over them—probably for several reasons. Probably to keep them from getting further burned, especially by the wind, and probably also so the state police wouldn’t arrest us for indecent exposure. But the moment the blanket touched their shoulders, they writhed until it fell off. So we drove to Wolf Creek, completely exposed to the elements and the police.

  Neal never sat up straight, but he murmured from time to time, “I don’t want to see three women.” Each time he murmured this, Old Rawhide would sit up straight and say, “Don’t worry. I’m your woman. I’ll take care of you.” I was driving. Each time he murmured this, I took a firm grip on the wheel. I didn’t want to see three women either.

  For most of the trip Paul and I didn’t speak to each other or to them. We just let one murmur through his armpit and the other jump up straight and then recede into the clothes pile. But as we neared Wolf Creek I could feel Paul getting ready to change the format. Slowly his body shifted until he could reach to the back seat. A murmur came again, “I don’t want to go home.” Paul reached and grabbed the arm that belonged to the armpit, and pulled him up. The arm turned white, even when it was sunburned. “You’re almost home,” Paul said. “There’s no other place you can go.” There were no more murmurs. Paul kept holding the arm.

  The whore was still tough, and she and Paul got into a big argument. Paul was used to talking to tough women and she was used to tough talk. The argument was over whether we were going to dump her as soon as we got to town or whether she was going to stay and take care of Buster. Mostly what was said was, “God damn you, I am,” and “God damn you, you’re not.” He said to me, as part of the argument, “When you get to town, stop at the log dance hall.”

  The log dance hall was the first building at the edge of town. It was a good place to have fights, and there had been plenty of them there, especially on Saturday nights—every time some home-town drunk from Wolf Creek tried to dance with the girl of some drunk who had come from the Dearborn country.

  You couldn’t tell by the profanity who was winning the argument, but as we got closer to town she would reach into the clothes pile and put some of it on her. There is a bend in the creek and the road just before you get to the log dance hall. When she saw the bend, she realized she wouldn’t have all her clothes on by the time we reached the dance hall, so she scurried through the pile grabbing the rest that belonged to her.

  Just as I stopped the car, she made one wild grab into the pile, opened the door of the car and jumped out. She was on the opposite side of the car from Paul, and must have figured that would give her a big enough head start. She left the back door swinging and took a good hold on the clothes in her arms. At the top of the clothes in her arms was Neal’s underwear, which she had taken either by accident or for a keepsake. She made one more grunt as she tightened her hold on her belongings, like a packer throwing a double diamond hitch just to be sure the whole load will stick together on the rough trip ahead.

  Then she said to my brother, “You stinking bastard.”

  Paul came out of that car as if the body of it had fallen off, and took after her.

  I think I knew how he felt. Much as he hated her, he really had no strong feeling about her. It was the bastard in the back seat without any underwear that he hated. The bastard who had ruined most of our summer fishing. The bait-fishing bastard. The bait-fishing bastard who had violated everything that our father had taught us about fishing by bringing a whore and a coffee can of worms but not a rod. The bait-fishing bastard who had screwed his whore in the middle of our family river. And after drinking our beer. The bastard right in the back of the car who was untouchable because of three Scotch women.

  She was running barefoot and trying to hang on to the rest of her clothes and his underwear, so Paul caught up to her in about ten jumps. On the run he kicked her, I think, right where the “LO” and the “VE” came together. For several seconds both of her feet trailed behind her in the air. It was to become a frozen moment of memory.

  When I could move, I took two quick looks at my brother-in-law, and counted to four. The four was for those four women in the street ready to protect him—one in the middle of the street and three in a house part way down it.

  Suddenly, I developed a passion to kick a woman in the ass. I was never aware of such a passion before, but now it overcame me. I jumped out of the car, and caught up to her, but she had been kicked in the ass before and by experts, so I missed her completely. Still, I felt better for the effort.

  Paul and I stood together and watched her high-tail it down the road through town. She had no choice. She lived on the other side of a town which is in a narrow gulch. After she got near home, she stopped several times to look back, and Paul and I didn’t like what we couldn’t hear she was saying. Each of these times we pretended that we were going to start after her again, and she edged closer to her shack. Finally, she and her clothes pile disappeared, and we were left with the back seat. “Now we haven’t anything left to do but take him home,” my brother said. As we walked back to the car, he added, “You’re in trouble.” “I know, I know,” I said. But I didn’t really know. I still didn’t know what Scottish women look like when they struggle to keep their pride and haven’t much reason left to keep it. In case you have any doubts, they keep it.

  Even Neal tried to pull himself together. He tried to put on some clothes before the women saw him. He piled his clothes outside the car, and, when he couldn’t find his underwear, he started trying to get into his pants, but he stumbled and kept stumbling. He held his pants out in front of him and tried to catch up to them. He was stumbling so fast he was running after them, but he never got any closer to them than an arm’s length.

  He was breathless when we caught him and he gasped when we put on his pants. His feet were too swollen for shoes. We put his shirt over his shoulders with its tails hanging out. When we brought him into the house, he looked like something shipwrecked we had found on an island.

  Florence came out of the kitchen and when she saw what Paul and I had, she began drying her hands on her dish towel.

  “What have you done to my boy?” she asked the brothers who were holding him up.

  Jessie then followed from the kitchen when she heard her mother. She was tall and red-headed anyway, and I was shru
nken before her from trying to hold up her brother.

  “You bastard,” she said to me. The bastard I was holding weighed a ton.

  “No,” Paul said.

  “Get out of the way,” I told her. “We have to put him to bed.”

  “He’s badly sunburned,” Paul said.

  The women I was brought up with never stood around trying on different life styles when there was something to be done, especially something medical. Most people have an immediate chemical reaction to shrink from pain or disfigurement, but the women I was brought up with were magnetized by the medical.

  “Let’s get him undressed,” Florence said, backing to the bedroom door and holding it open.

  “I’ll find Dotty,” Jessie said. Dotty was the registered nurse.

  Neal didn’t want his mother to undress him and his mother thought we were clumsy and kept pushing us away. Before a situation could develop, Jessie was in the bedroom with Dorothy. I didn’t know how a nurse could get into a uniform so fast, but I could hear the swish of starch as she came through the door. When Neal heard the starch, he stopped wriggling away from us. Dorothy was short and powerful and Jessie and her mother were tall and skinny, but strong. Paul and I stood by the bed wondering why we hadn’t been able to get off a pair of pants and a shirt. In an instant he was a red carcass on a white sheet.

  In almost the same instant Paul and I, who held the world in our hands when we held a four-and-a-half-ounce fishing rod, were not even orderlies. We were left to one side as if we couldn’t warm water or find a bandage or bring it in if we found it.

  The first time Jessie passed me she made a point of saying, “Get out of the way.” I knew she hadn’t liked it when I had said it to her.

  By chemical reaction, Paul and I backed for the bedroom door, but he beat me to it and was on his way to Black Jack’s for a drink, which I needed, too. I didn’t get the bedroom door closed, though, before I was to be visited by three women.

  As soon as Florence saw her boy in red she came close to knowing what the score was. With Scottish women, the medical barely precedes the moral. She took another look to make sure that Dorothy had taken charge, and then she called to me.

  She stood in front of me as rigid as if she were posing for the nineteenth-century Scottish photographer David Octavius Hill. Her head might have been held for the slow exposure by an unseen rod behind her neck. “Tell me,” she said, “how does it happen that he is burned from head to foot?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her, and I wasn’t going to lie if for no reason other than that I knew I couldn’t get away with it. I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That’s what we mean by original sin—we don’t have to do it to know about it.

  I told her, “He didn’t feel like going fishing with us, and when we got back he was lying asleep in the sand.”

  She knew I wasn’t going to go beyond that. Finally the nineteenth-century photographer released her neck from the brace. “I love you,” she said, and I knew she couldn’t think of anything else to say. I also knew she meant it. “Why don’t you get out of here?” she added.

  “Wait,” Dorothy said to me, and turned her job over to Florence. Dorothy and I were the ones who had married into the family and often had the feeling that if we didn’t hang together we would be strung up separately. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “Second-degree burn. Blisters. Peeling. Fever. A couple of weeks. Don’t worry about him. Don’t worry about us. We women can handle it.

  “In fact,” she said, “why don’t you and Paul get out of here? We have Ken and he can do anything and Neal is his brother.

  “Besides,” she said, “I think you aren’t even wanted here. All you can do is stand around and watch, and right now nobody in the family wants to be watched.”

  Although she was short, she had big hands. She took one of mine in one of hers, and put on the pressure. I thought that was her good-bye and turned to go, but she pulled me back and gave me a fast kiss and was on the job again.

  It seemed as if the women had agreed on some kind of a shuttle system whereby two were always working on Neal and one on me. “Wait,” Jessie said, before I had closed the door behind me.

  A man is at a disadvantage talking to a woman as tall as he is, and I had tried long and hard to overcome this handicap.

  “You don’t like him, do you?” she asked.

  “Woman,” I asked, “can’t I love you without liking him?”

  She just stood looking at me, so I went on talking and saying more than I had intended. I said things she already knew, but possibly one thing she wanted to hear again. “Jessie,” I said, “you know I don’t know any card tricks. I don’t like him. I never will. But I love you. Don’t keep testing me, though, by giving me no choices. Jessie, don’t let him …” I stopped from going on because I knew I should have found a shorter way to say what I had already said.

  “Don’t let him what?” she asked. “What were you going to say?”

  “I can’t remember what I was going to say,” I replied, “except that I feel I have lost touch with you.”

  “I am trying to help someone,” she said. “Someone in my family. Don’t you understand?”

  I said, “I should understand.”

  “I am not able to help,” she said.

  “I should understand that, too,” I said.

  “We are talking too long,” she said. “Why don’t you and Paul go back to the Blackfoot and finish your fishing trip? You’re no help here. But wherever you go, never lose touch with me.”

  Although she said we had talked too long, she took only one backward step. “Tell me,” she asked, “why is he burned from head to foot?” When it comes to asking questions, Scottish daughters are almost complete recapitulations of their mothers.

  I told her what I had told her mother, and she looked like her mother while she listened.

  “Tell me,” she said, “just before you brought Neal in, did you happen to see the whore run through town with an armful of clothes?”

  “At a distance,” I told her.

  “Tell me,” she asked, “if my brother comes back next summer, will you try to help me help him?”

  It took a long time to say it, but I said it. I said, “I will try.”

  Then she said, “He won’t come back.” Then she added, “Tell me, why is it that people who want help do better without it—at least, no worse. Actually, that’s what it is, no worse. They take all the help they can get, and are just the same as they always have been.”

  “Except that they are sunburned,” I said.

  “That’s no different,” she said.

  “Tell me,” I asked her, “if your brother comes back next summer, will we both try to help him?”

  “If he comes back,” she nodded. I thought I saw tears in her eyes but I was mistaken. In all my life, I was never to see her cry. And also he was never to come back.

  Without interrupting each other, we both said at the same time, “Let’s never get out of touch with each other.” And we never have, although her death has come between us.

  She said, “Get out of the way,” only this time she smiled when she said it. Then she started closing the door in my face. When there was only a crack left, we kissed, and with one eye I tried to look around her. They had him greased from head to foot like a roasting ear of corn. They had enough bandages open to go on from there and wrap him up for a mummy.

  I went down to Black Jack’s and had a drink with Paul, and then we had another. He insisted on paying for both and on going back to the Blackfoot that night. He said, “I asked for a couple of days off, so I have another day coming.” Then he insisted we go by way of Missoula and spend the night with father and mother. “Maybe,” he said, “we can get the old man to go fishing with us tomorrow.” Then he insisted on driving.

  Our customary roles had been reversed, and I was the brother who was being taken fishing for the healing
effects of cool waters. He knew I was being blamed for Neal, and he may well have thought my marriage was breaking up. He had heard me called a bastard, and he was out of the house when I and the three Scottish women publicly declared our love for each other, given the restrictions Scots put on such public declarations. Actually, I was feeling lordly with love and several times broke into laughter that I can’t explain otherwise, but he could have thought I was trying to be brave about having made a mess of my life. I don’t really know what he thought, but he was as tender as I usually tried to be to him.

  On the way he said, “Mother will be glad to see us, too. But she gets excited when we show up without telling her ahead of time, so let’s stop at Lincoln and telephone.”

  “You call her,” I said. “She loves to hear you.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but you ask father to come fishing with us.”

  So he made the arrangements for what turned out to be our last fishing trip together. He thought of all of us.

  Even though we telephoned, Mother was excited when we got to Missoula. She tried to wring her hands in her apron, hug Paul, and laugh, all at the same time. Father stood in the background and just laughed. I still felt lordly and I just stood in the background. Whenever we had a family reunion, Mother and Paul were always the central attraction. He would lean back when he hugged her and laugh, but the best she could do was to hug and try to laugh.

  It was late when we arrived in Missoula. We had been careful not to eat on the way, although there is a good restaurant in Lincoln, because we knew that, if we ate there, we would have to eat all over again in Missoula. Early in the dinner, Mother was especially nice to me, since she hadn’t paid much attention to me so far, but soon she was back with fresh rolls, and she buttered Paul’s.

  “Here is your favorite chokecherry jelly,” she said, passing it to him. She was a fine cook of wild berries and wild game, and she always had chokecherry jelly waiting for him. Somewhere along the line she had forgotten that it was I who liked chokecherry jelly, a gentle confusion that none of her men minded.