After River

by Donna Milner

  I think most teenagers from town must have been at the lake that day. They splashed in the water, lounged out on the raft, or on towels spread in the meadow grass. Every once in a while Elizabeth-Ann snapped a picture with her new Instamatic – another one of the many trinkets her father was forever buying her.

  She caught Carl and Morgan wearing girls’ petal bathing caps on their heads and towels wrapped around their waists like skirts. They hold their arms up in a clowning hula dance. Behind them Boyer leans against the doorway of the cabin, his head almost touching the top of the low frame. I don’t know who talked Boyer into coming with us to the lake, but when Elizabeth-Ann showed me her pictures the following week, I noticed him in the background of each photograph. Even in the one of River.

  I kept that picture, folded down the middle, tucked inside my wallet, or whatever book I happened to be reading. Boyer’s image showed on the front, with River’s hidden away on the other side. I took the photograph out when no one was around and turned it over. I studied River’s face secretly, memorized it, and, just as any adolescent might do I supposed, I sometimes even kissed it.

  Elizabeth-Ann’s camera caught River sitting backward at the picnic table, his guitar in his arms. He is aware of the camera’s eye on him as he strums. His smile flashes carelessly into the future. A smile I pretended was for me.

  Boyer sits on the ground leaning against the trunk of an old apple tree.

  The tree, an accident of a windblown seed, or planted by whoever once inhabited the cabin, was gnarled and ancient. It grew so close to the cabin it seemed to be a part of it. Branches had rotted, dried, then broken off. It couldn’t have had much life left in it. Still, each spring it sprouted random blossoms and in the fall yielded baskets of translucent green apples. We used the fruit to make pies and apple butter. During those summers the fallen branches provided wood for our campfires, but until I saw the photograph of Boyer sitting beneath the shade of that craggy and twisted old tree, I had given no thought to its beauty.

  In the picture, Boyer’s elbows rest on his knees; a book is in his hands. He’s not reading though. He’s gazing over the top of the pages at River. Unlike River, Boyer is unaware of the camera catching this moment. The usual detached indifference is gone from his face, replaced by an expression I could not read.

  When I first saw the photograph, I was struck by the contrast between River’s open smile, and Boyer’s intense focus. I was blind to the similarities in those unguarded expressions.

  That day, I watched from shore as everyone swam in the lake. The girls resembled huge flowers bobbing in the water in their brightly coloured petal bathing caps, which Morgan and Carl found so hilarious. Some soaked up the dying rays of the sun out on the raft. They leaned back in their two-piece bathing suits, trying too hard to look like the swimsuit models of their teenage magazines. No snapshots were taken of those poses.

  The boys did posturing of their own, diving and racing, competing for the admiration of female eyes. Morgan and Carl seemed unaware of the contrast between their tanned torsos and their pasty white legs as they performed cannonballs off the raft, sending showering sprays of water over the screaming girls drying in the sun there. Boyer and River swam leisurely out to the raft and back – enough to cool off – then retreated. Boyer to his book, River to his music.

  I was certain Elizabeth-Ann had warned the girls off, because there was surprisingly little flirting with Boyer or River. The girls concentrated their attentions on Morgan and Carl and their friends.

  ‘Hey Nat,’ Carl hollered from the raft. ‘Com’on in.’

  I ignored the calls as I set out desserts and drinks on the table where River sat picking at the guitar strings and singing softly. I still can’t hear Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’, without thinking of River and that summer day. As I listened to River singing the confusing lyrics about a lover who speaks like silence, I fantasized it was me he sang about.

  I discovered that summer that being in love changes you. It makes you want. I wanted to be nice. I wanted to be pretty. I allowed Elizabeth-Ann, who wanted to be a hairdresser, to cut my hair into a pixie. I still was not ready for the teased bouffant hairstyles all the other girls were wearing.

  And I wanted to be thin. Not long after River arrived, I began to eat nothing unless it was first drowned in vinegar, another trick taught to me by Elizabeth-Ann. By September I was no longer the pudgy milkmaid. No longer ‘Nat the Fat’.

  Still, I was reluctant to change into my bathing suit. I knew my new lean body looked more like a boy’s than like the bronzed bodies of the girls in the water. My skin was as pale as my brothers’ skinny legs. Swimming in Blue Lake with my brothers and our friends was one thing, but wearing a bathing suit in front of River was quite another.

  I still wore my pedal pushers and a T-shirt. My bathing suit, wrapped in a towel, lay on the counter in the cabin. The basket of desserts and drinks was my excuse to avoid putting it on.

  River looked up from the guitar and swung his head to flick his wet hair back. ‘Just like your mom,’ he grinned at me. ‘Always feeding the masses.’

  I didn’t mind being compared to my mother. In any way. Especially by River. I felt my heart swelling at the softness of his voice, the intensity of his eyes.

  ‘You’d better start eating some of that though,’ he said, nodding at the food I was placing on the table. ‘Or there won’t be anything left of you.’

  ‘Com’on, Natalie,’ Morgan’s voice taunted across the water. ‘If you don’t come in, we’ll come and get you.’

  I continued to ignore them, until he and Carl dove in and headed to shore. The dark waters roiled as others followed, laughing and calling out warnings that I was going in with my clothes on.

  ‘Better to go in on your own than be thrown in,’ River warned me while he continued to strum his guitar.

  ‘Right,’ I said and headed to the cabin. I knew I had some time before Carl and Morgan would reach shore. None of us Wards were strong swimmers.

  Inside the cabin I changed in the dark. Once I was back outside I hurried to the lake, anxious to be hidden by the water. By the time my feet sunk into the muddy bottom, everyone was arriving at the shore. They splashed and teased as I waded in. Suddenly I stood frozen, the hidden muck oozing between my toes.

  ‘Grab her feet,’ Morgan called to Carl. ‘I’ll get her arms.’

  I was surrounded, trapped, more afraid of making a scene, having the attention on me, than of the water. It felt as if the mud was quicksand, as if my lungs were drowning in the air. I began to hyperventilate.

  ‘Wait,’ River called out. ‘Let her go in on her own.’ He laid his guitar on the table, then joined me in the water. He moved backwards in front of me. I lifted my feet out of the sucking mud and followed. When he was waist high, he said, ‘Now lean forward.’ His voice was gentle, easy, for me only. ‘Just lay on top of the water and let it take you.’

  I followed him as he moved backward slowly in the water. ‘Keep breathing,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s kind of essential,’ I tried joking, lowering my torso into the water and paddling toward him. River laughed and lay back. He backstroked to the raft, rolled under and came up beside me. His arms made clean, sure strokes through the water as we swam side by side. He lifted himself up onto the raft, water streaming from his body. He held his arm out to me, then pulled me up onto the wooden boards.

  I don’t know why I felt such triumph in that moment, why I no longer cared about my pasty, exposed skin. I only know I felt safe being there, on that raft, alone with River. It was enough. It was everything. On shore we were forgotten. Everyone was caught up in another bout of splashing and screaming. I barely heard them. And even though the mountains had claimed the last rays of the evening sun, I felt warm, exhilarated. The shore seemed far way, another world.

  Then I noticed Boyer still sitting under the apple tree. Watching us. He peered over his book with an expression I did not recognize.

 
For a moment I felt an involuntary shiver as if a rude wind had interrupted the serenity of the lake.

  I lifted my arm and waved.

  Either Boyer did not see my wave or he ignored it. Bending his head down, he went back to reading his book.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  GHOSTS DANCE ON the edge of my vision. They follow me, stalk me, then vanish when I take notice. I turn quickly when I see them flirting with daylight in the corner of my eyes, but I am too slow. Or they are too quick. The teasing shadows evaporate before I can catch up to the blurred movements. But I know they are there. And I know who they are. I just don’t know how to make them go away.

  Even here, sitting on this bus that is speeding into the past, I catch a sudden dark movement in my peripheral vision. I know if I look up from my laptop it will go away. I cannot resist. I turn and see him sitting in the seat across the aisle. My father. He is wearing his dark blue Sunday suit, a red poppy pinned to his lapel. He feels me watching and turns his head.

  An unfamiliar face stares back at me. A questioning smile forms on his lips. ‘Do I know you?’ the look asks. The face is that of a stranger. There is no Sunday suit. But the poppy on the tattered black windbreaker is real. I have been caught again, played with by the shadows and the tricks of the afternoon light flashing through the bus windows.

  It was the poppy that did it. It’s only mid October. Far too soon for this Remembrance Day flower. My father was the only person I knew to wear one this early. Every year in the middle of October he took last year’s poppy down from the visor in the cab of his truck. He pinned it to his lapel and wore it until the Legionnaires appeared on the streets with boxes of new ones strapped around their necks. My father was always one of their first customers. Only then would he discard last year’s dusty felt flower, replacing it with the new one purchased from the old soldiers. After the Remembrance Day ceremony, he removed the poppy from his lapel and stuck it on the visor, where it stayed, ready for the same ritual the following year.

  I never questioned this yearly switching of poppies. By the time I wondered about it, it was too late to ask.

  My father never went to war. Like Dr Mumford he was denied enlistment. I once heard him joke that delivering babies, and delivering milk, were equally essential to the home war effort. Knowing how he felt about guns, I often wondered if his regret over not being allowed to fight for his country was feigned. Still, every November 11, my father started the milk run early, finishing in time to attend the annual Armistice Day parade.

  The last times we went as a family was during the years River was with us.

  My father still had not warmed up to River by that first November. Yet, one afternoon I came into the kitchen to find the two of them huddled together at the table.

  ‘It wouldn’t cost much,’ River was saying as he scribbled notes on a series of diagrams. ‘We can use a lot of equipment parts you already have.’

  I peered over Dad’s shoulder at the intricate plans spread out on the table. He said nothing. He lit a cigarette and let a small stream of smoke escape from the corner of his mouth. I watched as River went over the diagrams and written instructions. Then I noticed that, as he explained the automated system for removing manure from the milking stalls, he had stopped using written notations and was drawing more detailed sketches.

  The following week, the system was built and installed in the barn. ‘Shoulda’ thought of this years ago,’ Dad said when he stood back and watched as an oil drum, cut in half length ways to form a carrier, attached to overhead pulleys, slid neatly above the concrete floor. Not long after that River began to go with Dad on the milk route even on weekends.

  Whatever the reason Dad took River with him on the milk route, I didn’t care. For me it was a relief. It meant I didn’t need to worry about the chance I might have to deliver milk to the Ryans’ house. I wondered if River had ever seen Mr Ryan behind the basement window. Had he ever caught sight of the image I thought I remembered from years ago? Somehow I knew he had not.

  At breakfast on Remembrance Day, however, Dad asked me to come along on the milk route. Mom, Morgan and Carl would come in with Boyer to meet us for the services. I grabbed my coat and followed Dad outside, excited at the thought of sitting so close to River.

  River was waiting for us by the dairy. Even though he had told us that wearing poppies was no longer a tradition in the States, a red felt flower was pinned to the left side of his jacket. When we reached the truck, Dad said, ‘No need for you to come, Richard. Natalie’s helping me today.’

  I felt a pin prick into my nervous excitement. Dad opened his door. ‘We’re all headed to the Remembrance Day ceremony afterwards,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re not interested in that.’

  River opened the passenger door and motioned me in ahead of him. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, sir,’ he said, ignoring Dad’s caustic tone. ‘I’ll come along on the milk run. Then I’d like to attend the ceremony with you all.’

  My father hoisted himself into his seat and muttered, ‘A pretty strange place for a pacifist isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that, sir,’ River replied, climbing into the truck, bringing the scent of freshly shampooed hair with him. ‘But isn’t Remembrance Day here much the same as Veterans Day, at home? Isn’t the purpose the same? To remember the horrors of war, and to honour those who died? I’ve attended both Veterans Day, and Memorial Day services with my mother and grandfather every year for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘What for?’ Dad grumbled. ‘I thought you were against war.’

  River banged the truck door shut. I felt the heat of his body as he settled in the seat beside me. ‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, ‘I am. But, for me, today isn’t about protest.’ Then his voice became even quieter. ‘It’s about my father and my uncle,’ he said slowly. ‘To remember them. They both died in the Battle of Okinawa, three months before I was born.’

  There was silence for a moment. Then my father reached down and threw the truck into gear.

  It doesn’t take long for the small procession to march down Main Street in Atwood each November 11. That morning, with the smell of burned leaves and the promise of snow in the crisp autumn air, we stood on the sidewalk and watched the silent parade make its way to the Cenotaph.

  A handful of aging veterans, wearing tight-fitting uniforms, which wafted the scent of mothballs in their wake, came first. They marched in stoic and proud rhythm, staring ahead to some place those of us on the side of the road could not see. A Scottish piper, his bagpipes held ready and silent on his arm, followed – the pleats of his kilt swaying to the beat of the lone drummer. Then the young cadets with serious faces brought up the rear. They marched by, slow, solemn, reverent. There was no hurry this day. The dead would still be dead when they reached the granite war memorial at the end of Main Street.

  I looked over at River standing erect as the procession moved down the street. I thought about his words, about his father, and uncle. For the first time, I felt the reality, the sadness of this memorial to fallen soldiers.

  After the small troupe filed by, those of us watching began to fall in behind. The wives and mothers of soldiers, present and gone, joined in. Then, as they did every year, my father followed behind with his three sons. Before Dad started marching, I saw him turn and wave at River to join them. Mom and I brought up the rear.

  At the end of Main Street, the crowd gathered around the Cenotaph, a looming monument honouring Atwood’s fallen sons. During the ceremony, a number of women, including Widow Beckett, stepped forward to place poppy wreaths below the brass plaque, which bore the names of those lost in both world wars. Following two minutes of silence, gunshots broke through the air. They echoed through the streets and the sound bounced off the mountain tops around us. As each shot rang out, I saw my father’s body flinch as violently as if he had been struck. And, on either side of him, I noticed both Boyer and River’s shoulders jerk with the identical involuntary spasm.

&n
bsp; After the service, as we did every other year, our family headed to the Atwood branch of the Royal Canadian Legion to join the local veterans for lunch. As we strode down the street I spotted Jake up ahead with Widow Beckett at his side. My father called out and they turned to wait. It was the first time I had seen Jake since he left the farm. I did a double take, surprised to see that he could actually smile.

  While Mom and the Widow Beckett greeted each other with hugs, my father shook Jake’s hand. ‘So, looks like married life agrees with ya,’ Dad said. Each of my brothers greeted Jake and shook his hand. Then Dad gestured to River and said, ‘Jake, I’d like ya to meet our new man, Rich … er, I mean, River. River Jordan.’

  After lunch, I climbed into the cab of the milk truck with Dad and River. Once again I felt the electric thrill of sitting so close to River. As we drove home I noticed two poppies pinned to the overhead visors.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE HEADLIGHT BEAMS stab through the blackness, cut it wide open and leave a gash of white-lined highway as we plunge into the night. They’re out there. I can’t see them, but I can feel the mountains as we speed from summit to summit through the rugged Cascades.

  The roads are bare; the snow hasn’t arrived yet. Still, I am certain that if the invisible peaks looming over us are not dusted in white, they soon will be. Before long snow banks will flank the highway. Banks that can grow to heights taller than this bus.

  Snow was a constant in our lives for four to five months of the year while I was growing up. Every winter our farm became a labyrinth of trenches between the house and the outbuildings. Most mornings Dad had to clear the yard between the barn and the dairy with the tractor; the plow blade pushing the mountains of snow into the front pasture.