Run River

by Joan Didion

  “You hear it rising?” Everett said, looking up at the levee.

  Sears stopped digging to fasten his jacket against the wind. “Going to crest at thirty-eight.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Near to noon. Thiel’s Landing.” Sears was coughing now. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up the shovel again.

  Everett put his hand on Lily’s shoulder.

  “You want to move into town?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t see any need.”

  Sears looked up. “There ain’t no problem this far up. Downriver maybe.”

  “The Engineers might blast it tonight. Upstream. We’d get some water.”

  “They wouldn’t blast a levee until they’d evacuated,” Lily said. “We’d know.”

  Everett shrugged and took the shovel from Sears.

  Because she did not want Everett to see that she was crying Lily shifted the flowers close to her face. It would be all right, these next few hours, if she could keep her mind on the water. Where and when would the levee go, were the levee to go at all: there was the question to consider. Somewhere in her mind was a file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water, and it was upon those facts that she must now focus her attention. At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. How many gates were open at the Sacramento Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Fremont Weir. Rio Vista.

  Obscurely comforted by her ability to remember, however uselessly, flood stages which bore no relation to this year’s flood, she stood with her eyes closed and did not think of Martha for half an hour.

  “All right,” Everett said then, propping the shovel against the tree. “That’s enough.”

  He took one end of the chest by its rope handle and Sears took the other; together they lowered it into the grave, already filling with seepage. Lily kneeled in the mud to drop the flowers on the chest, but Everett pulled her up.

  “Not yet.” He motioned Sears to stand back from the grave.

  Oh Christ, Lily thought. He’ll say that prayer and they’ll cover her with dirt and that’s all there is. Christ in heaven. How many people did you bury before you stopped screaming inside at the thought of that first night in the dark.

  “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” Everett repeated without inflection. It was the prayer he and Martha had learned as children. “Look upon a little child. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to thee.”

  “God bless Martha, amen,” Lily whispered.

  Everett did not look at her. “Now,” he said.

  She dropped the camellias into the grave and stood back.

  “Henry’s going back to the house with you.” Everett picked up the shovel. “Get him some breakfast.”

  China Mary was not in the kitchen: she had gone, late the afternoon before, to visit her sister in Courtland. They should have called her after it happened. They should have called and brought her home before they buried Martha; she had raised Martha. But there had been so many people last night: the sheriff, the deputy, the respirator squad, the doctor, Sears, even the children, wakened by the sirens; and by the time they were alone there was no use calling anyone because Everett wanted no one there. They should have called Sarah. They should have called maybe fifty people but above all they should have called China Mary and they should have called Sarah. Sarah can’t come, there’s no reason to call her, Everett had said. It’s too late. She left here of her own will and anyway it’s too late now. She had said You’re getting worse than your father was, knowing that Sarah would hear about it from her, would read that her sister had drowned when the mail arrived one morning next week at her ivied brick house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, for Lily could never call her alone. She had tried to call Everett when his father died but had been unable to say it. Martha had finally taken the telephone and said it.

  Lily dropped her raincoat on the table and held out her hand for Sears’s jacket.

  “Sit down. I’ll fix bacon and eggs and biscuits. I had the biscuit batter made for Everett but he didn’t eat.”

  “No bacon.” Sears paused. “He don’t seem so good.”

  “He’s upset. That’s all. All his family’s gone now.” She forgot for the moment Sarah, and when she did remember Sarah it did not much change the sense of what she had said to Sears.

  “Got you and two kids. That’s family.”

  Lily did not say anything.

  “I didn’t figure her that way,” Sears said after a while.

  “What way.”

  “I didn’t figure her to do something like that. She grew up on the river, she should have known enough not to take a boat like that out when it’s in flood.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’d she think she was going to get to?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily repeated.

  She knew, she knew better than that: Everett had said it, almost shouted it, after he carried Martha’s drenched body up from the dock. Down there on the dock he had not said anything much to anyone. He said nothing to Lily from the time he first shouted from the driveway Get McGrath the hell over here with a respirator until the time, almost an hour and a half later, he laid Martha’s body on her bed upstairs. By the time she had called McGrath at home and run down to the dock, Everett was already in the water, on the end of the rope Sears was still knotting around a piling. What happened, she kept saying, and finally Sears said Martha. She was holding onto the boat but I don’t know how long. In the dark (they did not have the flares until McGrath arrived a few minutes later) she could see nothing, neither Everett nor Martha, not even the boat, overturned and caught on a trunk off the far bank. If Sears had not told her about the boat she would not have known that much, because Everett, after he brought Martha in with him on the rope, said nothing. In the brilliant cold light of the flares they had watched then for an hour while the boys with the respirator knelt over Martha on the wet dock, but it was nowhere near an hour before they all knew, all but Everett and maybe Everett knew too. “Thank Christ he didn’t lose his head and go out there without the rope,” McGrath said to Lily after the first fifteen minutes. “You’d have lost them both.” “We haven’t lost anybody,” Everett said flatly, looking up from where he crouched at Martha’s head, staring at McGrath with confused malice; McGrath looked at his deputy and they both looked away from Lily. It had been five or six minutes later when the doctor arrived and two or three minutes after that when he pronounced Martha dead. “She’s alive,” Everett said. “You don’t know anything about her.” Thirty minutes later he admitted what they all knew: “All right,” he said. “All right.”

  She knew better than that: Edith Knight had said it, when Lily called her to come for the children. “That little girl, that little fool,” she repeated again and again. “She knew better.” It was for Edith Knight that rare event, a happening in which she could not immediately perceive the providential pattern, the point, the unmistakable, however elusive, benefit. Usually she was able to make death seem the most fortunate of circumstances, an unlooked-for circumvention of further bother for the deceased; sudden death was, logically, the supreme economy. “What a blessing he went without a long illness,” she said regularly of Walter Knight; “One thing, she had certainly gotten the good of her furs,” she reflected with sincere satisfaction when informed that a cousin had met death in the crash of a Piper Apache over Pyramid Lake. Of Martha’s and Everett’s mother, she frequently observed to Lily: “Mildred went the best way to go, everything in order, and I only hope I can do as well.” This observation usually accompanied the cleaning of a closet or the discarding of a memento, because what she meant by “order” was that Mildred McClellan, shortly before her death in childbirth, had cleaned two back bedrooms of the McClellan house, disposing of several cartons of snapshots, dance programs, newspaper clippings, unmatched gloves too good to throw away, sketches of the Yosemite Valley made on
her wedding trip, and the souvenirs of a trip to Chicago taken before her marriage. Having one’s things in order was a persistent note in Edith Knight’s reflections upon death: the ideal life, as she saw it, was characterized by the continual jettisoning of accumulated debris. One could leave this world, with planning, exactly as one came into it. Possibly because Martha had accomplished so little in the direction of having her things in order, Edith Knight was pressed to find a rationale for her death, although after a few minutes she had managed to glimpse, in the fact that Martha had not left behind a husband and small babies, an interim silver lining. “A blessing,” Lily had agreed wearily on the telephone, and then: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  She knew better than that: Everett said it, Henry Sears said it, her mother said it, and all she could say was I don’t know. It did not seem possible that they could not see what had been happening, but then she had not seen it herself until she had looked last night at the notebook. It was not that there was anything in the pages she read that she had not known about Martha. It was only that she had not seen the pattern, and maybe she would not have seen the pattern even last night had Martha not been lying there dead. She had found the notebook in Martha’s dressing table when she looked for a brush to untangle her wet hair. It went back three years, with only occasional entries, some in pencil and some in ballpoint pen, hard to read because Martha’s handwriting had grown increasingly illegible. The last entry, dated March 20 1949 and scribbled over seven pages, could not be read at all. In addition to the entries from day to day, there had been separate pages headed “REASONS NOT TO LOVE RYDER,” “REASONS NOT TO LOVE EVERETT,” “REASONS NOT TO REMEMBER DADDY WITH LOVE.” When she heard Everett in the hall Lily had dropped the book into the pocket of her apron, and early this morning she had burned it. She had wanted Everett never to see it, even if he went on thinking the things he thought now. (He had, he told her last night, killed Martha himself. She had been in his care and he had killed her. He had let her go, had not kept her safe. Martha had been, Lily reminded him, twenty-six-years old. He could not have kept her in a glass box. He could have kept care of her, he insisted. He could have done that much. Martha had not been well, Lily said, as close to saying it as she ever came; Martha had not been well a long while. She knew better, he said again. Christ almighty she looked like a kitten that’s been dropped in water and all you see are the little bones. You saw her, Lily. You saw how she looked.)

  The notebook would have changed nothing. Everett would only have blamed himself more for not having seen before what she now saw with ineluctible clarity: the pattern there all along, worked through it all as subtly and delicately as, in a drawing she had loved as a child, the tiger’s face had been worked into the treetops. Once you had seen the tiger’s face, you could never again see the treetops.

  At ten minutes past one Ryder Channing called and asked for Martha.

  “She’s not here. She died last night.”

  Channing did not say anything.

  “She drowned in the river,” Lily added in an expressionless voice, the only one she could master. “She took the boat out and drowned.”

  “I saw her last night. I saw her at Cassie Waugh’s.”

  “It was later. It was after the party. I didn’t see her but it was after that. She drove up in front of the house and Everett went out and she was down at the boat. I don’t know what happened.”

  “I saw her. I didn’t talk to her but I saw her.”

  “Well,” Lily said, “I didn’t see her but she’s dead.”

  “Where is she.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I mean her body.”

  She had known what he meant. “We buried her this morning,” she said finally.

  “Where?”

  “Here on the ranch.”

  Channing said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” Lily said before she hung up. “I’m sorry we didn’t let you know.”

  I’m sorry. She was. No matter what she or Everett or even Martha had thought about Ryder Channing, none of it had been his doing. November 18 1947: In bed all day, told E and L with flu. Ryder sent lilies of the valley, meant no doubt for L. Found field mouse in bathroom closet. Do not tell E because L will make him kill it. April 27 1948: Dinner at R’s, things to remember about: (1) making me bring gin (2) sleeping while I fixed dinner (3) asking if I intended to eat dinner in my slip (4) calling me slatternly (5) asking if I had forgotten how to cook spare ribs along with everything else (6) pretending to read while I finished my dinner and his too (7) difficulty of eating spare ribs and artichokes with someone watching (8) getting sick and telling him he was impotent and knowing it reached him because he hit me. July 4 1948: Told R at picnic he was a redneck, white trash, not fit to eat off E’s plates. I am reaching him all the time at last. The ways to do it were always transparently clear but I was too much on the defensive to see them. Now he is on the defensive and thrashing blindly: called me “you Okie bitch.” February 20 1949: E could fall down dead in front of me and I would think it was nice he didn’t live to be old. I am so far away from them all it is incredible when you consider.

  At three o’clock the doorbell rang. It was Joe Templeton, the rain running off his bare head and down his rubber poncho. He had been working on the levees with Ed McGrath. He wanted to say he was sorry about Martha. He had seen Everett about noon but Everett had said nothing.

  “Come in for a minute.” She did not want to talk to him but could think of nothing else to say. “I’m upstairs sewing.”

  He followed her upstairs to the sitting room and stood by the window behind her chair. She had not seen him in three weeks and had been trying all winter to avoid seeing him alone.

  “Put another stick on the fire,” she said. “Everything’s too wet to burn.”

  “I thought you’d have your mother here.”

  “She took the children this morning. Everett told me to send them to school but they were too upset. I tried to keep them away but Julie saw them carrying her in and started screaming and screaming and finally I gave her some warm milk with bourbon in it and she quieted down.”

  “I remember I saw them downtown a couple of weeks ago, Julie hanging onto Martha’s hand, they looked like mother and daughter. They looked a lot alike.”

  “Not so much, actually.” Lily knew that she was talking too much and too fast but could not seem to stop: she had been unable to talk to Everett. “Martha took her places, played games with her. Anyway Julie kept screaming ‘my Martha, my Martha’ and Knight was trying not to let his father see him cry but anyway.” She trailed off and finished lamely: “They both loved her.”

  “We saw her last night.”

  Lily looked at her hands for a long while. “How did she seem,” she said finally.

  “She looked pretty. She had on a pretty dress.”

  “Yes.”

  “We asked her to come to dinner with us. She said she would and then we all had another drink and she turned on Francie. She said Francie was drunk and I was getting drunk and she didn’t want to sit around at dinner with a pair of lushes.”

  He paused, as if demanding an explanation.

  “Well,” Lily said. “I guess she didn’t.”

  “She was very rude.”

  “Well, then. It served her right, didn’t it. Sweet Christ.”

  Joe said nothing. Instead he walked across the room and began examining the framed photographs above the fireplace: Martha the night she took all the jumping firsts at the State Fair horse show; Everett at sixteen in an American Legion baseball uniform; Walter Knight, Lily in his lap, in the driver’s seat of the Hispano-Suiza he had bought when she was very small.

  She got up to close the door to the bedroom. She did not want Joe looking at her unmade bed, the sheets and blankets and her nightgown and Everett’s sneakers tumbled together at its foot.

  “How are Francie and the twins.” She sat down again.

  “Francie still wants the divo
rce,” he said after a while. “She was talking about it again last night.”

  “She was drunk. You said she was drunk.”

  “I said Martha said she was drunk. What about it. She brings it up cold sober.”

  “I told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  It had been a month since Joe first told her that Francie had again decided to divorce him. Unless he filed a cross-complaint for custody of the twins she would not name Lily. She would simply say mental cruelty if he would keep his hands off the twins. Although she had made this latest decision in the Islands and in order to tell Joe immediately had flown home instead of waiting for the Lurline, she still had taken no action. She never did. Francie had been divorcing Joe off and on for fifteen years that Lily knew of; it was their way, although neither seemed to realize it, of periodically reviving interest in each other.

  “I told you,” Lily added. “If Francie files for divorce you file for custody if you want it. It wouldn’t bother me.”

  “It wouldn’t?”

  “I said it wouldn’t.” It was a question so academic as to be absurd.

  Joe poked at the fire. “Would you leave him and marry me if Francie goes through with it?”

  Lily stood up without saying anything.

  “I don’t believe you’ll ever leave him,” Joe said.

  “What would you give if I would? I mean if Francie goes through with it.”

  “What do you mean, what would I give?”

  “Would you cut off your right arm?”

  “Yes. I’d cut off my right arm. What’s the matter with you.”

  “That’s right. You’d cut off your right arm.” Lily paused. “You all would. Listen. You get out now but listen to me first: you think you’ve got some claim on me? You think it was some special thing that made any difference to me? Listen to me. Nothing we did matters to me. Nothing touched Everett and nothing touched me.”