After River

by Donna Milner

  ‘He’s lost,’ Boyer interrupted without looking up. ‘He’s in trouble.’

  ‘Isn’t he a draft dodger?’ the other officer asked. ‘Conscientious objector,’ Boyer sighed as he tugged at his laces.

  ‘Well, maybe he went back to the States. Maybe he decided to slip across the border and go home.’ ‘His things are still here.’

  ‘Okay,’ the taller officer said brushing the non-existent hair back from his forehead. ‘If he doesn’t show up by tomorrow, we’ll bring in a tracking dog—’

  ‘It could be too late by then,’ Boyer said. He stood up and stalked out of the kitchen, the screen door slamming behind him.

  Dad caught him on the porch. Through the screen, I saw him put his hand on Boyer’s shoulder, ‘Go get some sleep, son,’ he said. ‘I’ll go out with Carl and Morgan after we grab some lunch.’

  While Dad and Boyer spoke out on the porch the two officers stood, caps twisting in their hands, looking out of place and uncomfortable in the heat of our kitchen. Mom walked over to the sideboard in the corner and turned her back on them as if they weren’t there.

  ‘Must have been quite a full moon last night,’ the shorter one said, searching for words that would return our kitchen to a place where they had often found respite from the tensions of their job. ‘People traipsing through the bush, wandering around in the dark. You wouldn’t believe who we picked up skulking around last night with his pants down – literally.’

  My stomach lurched. I glanced over at Mom. She stood at the sideboard slicing bread with the determination of withheld anger. The remark had no effect. She was in no mood for local gossip. She spun around, pushed her way past them, and slammed the plate of bread on the table.

  ‘Look, Mrs Ward,’ the taller officer said. ‘As soon as we call a search, as soon as we put out a missing person’s report, we have to notify Customs, the authorities in the States, the FBI, and, well, do you really want to alert them if this fellow is trying to sneak home for a visit?’

  ‘He’s not,’ she said. She moved to the stove, her back once again to them, dismissing them.

  It was the first time I witnessed my mother not invite someone who was in our kitchen at mealtime to join us.

  The gossip vine of a small town has its advantages. When the word spread that River was missing, a few people came out to help search. Very few. Mom always said you can tell your friends by those who show up in a crisis. Even more telling are those who don’t. She wondered aloud about all the young people, all our friends who had come out to ride horses, to party at the lake, to dance out in the sunroom, who practically lived at the farm on weekends and holidays. Where were they all now?

  Jake came, though not to search. ‘I’m too old to be climbing these hills,’ he grumbled, but he quietly took up the slack helping with chores and milking.

  Even while the search continued, the routine of the farm had to be kept. Cows had to be milked and the bottled milk had to be delivered daily. The following morning more empty milk bottles waited on porches with notes instead of quarters inside. By the end of the week we would lose ten more customers.

  On Thursday afternoon, Morgan went into town to pick up the grocery order. When he came out of the Super Value, he found written in the dust on the side of the truck the words HOMO MILK! and FAIRYLAND!

  The next night someone climbed up on our gate and spray-painted the words FAG FARM! onto the Ward’s Dairy sign. In the morning, Dad took the sign down and burned it. It was never replaced.

  The anonymous phone calls started that evening. I cringed the first time I heard a muffled voice promising us ‘hell and damnation’. Each time Mom answered the phone only to slam it back down, I knew she was hearing similar threats. And still there was not one word spoken in our house about the root of those rumours. As we rushed past each other, frantically doing what we could during those days, no one questioned the accusations about Boyer’s sexuality. No one asked how and why the rumours started. No one questioned my part in all of it.

  As the rumours spread, rumours that I knew could only have begun their ugly web of gossip from one house in town, there were those who ignored them.

  Before the RCMP finally began an organized search, Mr Atwood and his son, Stanley Junior, showed up. They arrived with two three-wheeled ATVs on the back of a flatbed. I heard Jake tell Dad there had been an announcement at the Bull Moose Mine that any man who joined the search would be paid overtime wages.

  Ma Cooper, strangely silent for once, and Widow Beckett came and worked with Mom to feed the small group of searchers. I begged to join the search, but Mom insisted she needed me at home. I was kept busy between the dairy and the kitchen.

  The police notified River’s family. His anxious mother confirmed that neither she, nor his grandfather, had heard from River and had no reason to expect him. Mom spoke on the phone with her every day while the search went on.

  By the following Sunday they had turned up nothing. There was no sign, no clue, to lead them to River. Convinced that he had found his way around Robert’s Peak and across the border, the RCMP announced that they were calling off the search.

  In the next few days almost everyone else gave up as well, believing or wanting to believe, that the police were right and River was back in the States, safe and hiding somewhere in his own country. Even Dad, Morgan and Carl began to question if that might not be the case.

  Only Boyer and I were certain it wasn’t true. Boyer and I, and perhaps Mom.

  Boyer kept searching. He went further and further into the mountains each day. He was exhausted. I could see the hope had drained from his eyes. Still, he would not let me search with him. He’d hardly spoken a word to me since Tuesday night. I knew he saw the ugly words splashed onto our sign before Dad burned it. He must have known that only my thoughtless tongue, my lack of discretion, could have started the rumours. The morning Dad removed the sign I had caught Boyer on the porch. ‘I’m sorry—’ I started.

  He held up his hand to halt my mumbled apology. But I couldn’t stop the rushed words. ‘Please, please let me come with you,’ I rambled on nervously. ‘I know these mountains, I can help in the search.’

  ‘Just stay and help Mom,’ he said, dismissing me as easily as if he was waving off a fly.

  The next day I stood peeling potatoes at the sink, my mind numbed in the security, the sameness of routine, when the screen door screeched opened. Boyer stood silent and darkened by the backlight in the doorway. ‘I found him,’ he said.

  At the stove my mother’s hand rose to her mouth. She stood frozen, the unasked question not making it past her eyes. I stopped breathing. The paring knife fell from my paralyzed hands.

  Boyer shook his head, his silent answer filling the room. He slowly made his way across the kitchen and picked up the wall phone beside the fridge. The metal dial clicked and whirred back at each number.

  The crows led Boyer to River, Morgan told me later. He followed the crows as they circled above the trees and blackened the branches of an aspen grove, a choir of hoarse-throated mourners keeping vigil.

  Boyer untied the rolled tarp from the back of his saddle. He swatted away the carnivorous black-winged scavengers and the haze of iridescent bluebottle flies. Then, he gently covered what was left of the body he had found lying on the edge of a shallow mine hole. He needed to call the police. And River’s mother. It was the last thing he could do for him.

  While Boyer waited in the kitchen for the RCMP to arrive he gave in to his exhaustion. He sat down and laid his head in his arms on the table. His shoulders heaved with muffled sobs. Mom stood behind him with her arms wrapped around him as if she could curb the shaking. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. Silent tears ran down her cheeks into his hair as she mumbled something I could not hear.

  ‘God!’ Boyer moaned. ‘I sent him away.’

  But I was the one responsible. I had sent him to his death. I killed River.

  ‘A freak accident,’ the police would say when they c
oncluded their investigation. River had stumbled over the mineshaft in the dark. The hole was so shallow it shouldn’t have killed him. But his head snapped back and struck bedrock when he landed. The officer who brought the report out shook his head with sympathy before he left and said, ‘He would have been able to crawl out if he’d survived the fall.’

  As it was, a wild animal, a bear or cougar, dragged his body out.

  So the hunters came. The same hunters whom my father had always denied access to our land. They scoured the hills, using the senseless accident as an excuse to track down and kill a cougar, two black bears and a lynx. By the time they rode by our house with their trophies slung across their fenders, the Ward family was beyond caring.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  WHILE BOYER LED the police to River and Mom murmured mournful words of comfort to his grieving mother on the telephone, I went out to Boyer’s cabin to do the last thing I could do for River.

  I peered over my shoulders into the bush as I hurried out alone. Every movement in the shadows held terror for me now. And every time I closed my eyes during the long sleepless nights since the assault, the horrors played out again.

  Still, I forced myself on. I knew the police wanted River’s personal belongings. I would make sure no prying eyes read his private journals. I would get rid of any marijuana hidden in his duffel bag. The gossipmongers had had enough of him. I would let them have no more.

  In the cabin I sorted through his things. Tears rolled down my cheek as I undid the zipper of the duffel bag and lifted out the clothes that smelled of him. At the bottom of the bag I found his journals and a small plastic bag of rolled smokes and matches. I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my sweatshirt as I placed the journals on the table. Then I opened the small plastic bag and removed a thin cigarette.

  Was it really just over a week ago that I had sat in his room over the dairy with the sweet aroma of marijuana smoke hanging in the air? I placed the cigarette between my lips and struck a match. I’d never even tried to smoke before, but I wondered if this sweet-smelling drug would make me not care for a while. I wondered if that was what he had felt when he inhaled this fragrant weed; what he had felt on the night we were together. I wanted to understand why he had allowed himself to be with me for even those few brief moments that night. I thought I might find some glimpse of that understanding in the smoke and in the journals.

  But I found no answers in either. I felt nothing from the marijuana except nausea. I tried to smoke the only way I knew how, dragging on the cigarette as I’d seen my father do for years. I sucked the smoke into my mouth then blew it out in cloudy blue streams. I found it difficult to keep the thin cigarette lit. When it went out, I lit another and pulled at the embers in an attempt to create the billows of smoke that came so smoothly out of my father’s mouth. Three cigarettes burned down in a saucer between my short puffs and coughing fits, while I sorted through River’s journals. Still, I felt only slightly light-headed. Finally, with my throat burning, I gave up and concentrated on finding the order of his entries.

  River’s journals were dated from before he left the States. I started reading about his difficult decision to leave his country, his family. I skimmed through the pages trying to find any reference to our family, to me. But as I read his daily entries I found myself struggling to concentrate. My attention was on the rounded handwriting, the beauty of the script on the page. I shook my head and tried harder to focus. But I found it impossible to hang onto the meaning of his words for anything more than a few seconds. Through the haze of my sleep-deprived mind I wondered if this was what if felt like to be high? I closed my eyes for a moment.

  The night had crept up and dimmed the light in the cabin when I reopened my eyes. I forced myself to reach through the fog of my brain. I flipped through the pages of the last journal. Half-asleep I recognized the angst of a gentle soul trying to seek meaning for his feelings, his sexuality, his attraction to Boyer. Then I came to the final date. June 8. The night I was in his room. I felt the pain in his words as he chastised himself for his lack of judgment.

  What have I done? By trying to deny the truth of who I am I have destroyed everything. I have betrayed her, betrayed everyone. And myself. For what? A thoughtless moment of curiosity? How inadequate the word regret is.

  Scribbled on the very bottom of the page, barely legible, as if he had been trying to force all the words into the space, was his last entry. Stunned, I read the words telling how, as he looked out of the window as I was leaving his room, he saw my mother duck under the dairy stairs.

  My mother? My mother was there?

  So it was true, she knew I was in his room that night. But why was she there?

  Was it possible that she too No, that couldn’t be. But what was she doing there? My mind raced with unthinkable thoughts. I recalled anonymous whispers on the phone, ugly accusations about everyone in our family, about our free love commune, about River. My mind whirled in confusion.

  Suddenly headlights flashed in the window. Boyer was home. I jumped up and dumped the ashes, spent matches, and butts, along with the rest of the marijuana in the rubbish under the sink, then quickly rinsed the saucer. I rushed to gather the journals.

  Boyer came through the door, defeated, tired, somehow looking smaller, as if a part of him had been cut away. He sniffed at the air and shook his head wearily. Then he spotted the journals.

  ‘These belong to River’s family,’ he said reaching for them. As he picked them up he said quietly, ‘Come on, I’ll drive you back to the house.’

  In the past I would have argued that I could walk that far, that I was not afraid of the dark, and he would have let me. But not that night. We drove the short distance in silence, both of us surely thinking of different dangers lurking in the night.

  ‘Are you sure we should give those journals to River’s mother?’ I said before I climbed out of his car. My tongue felt thick as I rambled on. ‘I mean, do you think he would want her to read them? To know … to know all this?’

  ‘His mother knows,’ Boyer sighed. ‘A mother always knows.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  MOM’S NOCTURNAL WANDERINGS saved Boyer’s life that night. She smelled it first. The hint of smoke drifted across the alfalfa field behind the house and in through an open window in the sunroom. Her sensitive nose turned to the scent carried on the night breeze. She peered past her reflection in the darkened window. Above the trees behind the field, she saw her ominous fear of fire manifested in a pink glow in the sky.

  I pulled myself up from my drugged sleep, at the sound of her screams ripping through the house, ‘Gus! Gus! Get up. There’s a fire! Oh! God! Hurry! Hurry! It’s Boyer’s cabin!’

  As I jumped out of bed, I heard Morgan and Carl rush out into the hallway and thunder down the stairs to the kitchen. I ran behind them in my nightgown. Through the kitchen window, I saw my father, still wearing his longjohns, run across the farmyard and into the machine shed.

  I flew out of the kitchen and leapt down the porch steps. My shaking fingers fumbled with the gate latch. I forced it open and bolted up the road towards Boyer’s cabin. Up ahead Mom ran along the backfield, her dressing gown flapping behind her, Morgan and Carl close behind. I raced after them in my bare feet. The roar of the tractor sounded behind me as I stubbed my foot against a root and tumbled to the side of the road. I threw myself back against the fence as the steel forklift prongs on the Massey Ferguson passed. I scrambled up and ran behind the tractor, dodging clumps of dirt thrown up by the tyres. The grinding metallic screech of changing gears rang through the night as my father stood over the steering wheel, urging more speed from the old machine, the screaming protest of the engine matching the hysteria I felt shrieking in my head.

  I caught up with, then passed, the red taillights. I ran ahead of the tractor, down the seemingly endless road, through the trees, and into the meadow. I rushed into the clearing and stumbled towards my brother’s cabin, trying to make sense of the scene in fro
nt of me.

  At first I thought the lake was on fire. Orange light, angry and alive, lit up the night. The shining reflection of flames leaping from the log cabin created a mirrored blaze in the dark waters of the lake. Sparks flew from the shake roof and exploded into the sky, then disappeared into the darkness. Hungry flames escaped from the open kitchen windows. Greedily they reached out and fed on the branches of the apple tree. I stifled the screams rising in my throat as the ancient tree, which had sheltered the cabin for over half a century, burned like a giant torch in the night sky.

  Blistering heat radiating in waves distorted the strange dance being performed in the flickering shadows. In front of the cabin, Morgan and Carl, on either side of Mom, struggled to hang onto her arms, to hold her back. She fought viciously to pull away. She kicked and twisted like a mad woman as she strained towards the cabin door. A voice I barely recognized screamed at them, demanded, threatened, and begged them to let her go, to let her go to her son.

  I whirled around and ran to the side of the cabin, to the addition, to Boyer’s bedroom window. I threw myself up, clawing at the wood, my feet trying to climb straight up the side as I too screamed my brother’s name. Strong hands grabbed me and pulled me back. I scratched and bit at Morgan’s arms as I fought to escape his hold. The tractor roared behind us. Morgan dragged me further away as our father rammed the front-end of the Massey Ferguson into the side of the cabin. I slowed my struggles as I saw my father’s determined face, illuminated by the red glow. He backed up the tractor to take another run at the frame walls. As he willed the tractor forward again and again, the forklift prongs tore into the siding and plywood wall until it ripped apart, leaving a gaping hole into Boyer’s bedroom. The fire inside, fed by the fresh oxygen, exploded through the opening.