Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  I can hear your heart, she tells him.

  That’s good, he says.

  For a long time the light in the room is a slow, sweet gold. And then it is dark, and Claire cannot understand how a day has gone by. (One day? More?) She wishes the window were nearer, so she could look out and see the mountains, black against black. She has always loved the mountains here.

  Play for me, she says.

  Wesley’s body stiffens beneath her cheek. What?

  Play, she says again. Play your fiddle for me.

  He sighs. A long breath like she will never have again.

  Not for long, she tells him. One tune is all.

  Claire . . .

  Please?

  A lament.

  He sits on the edge of the bed and rests his fiddle on his knee, cradling the neck in his left hand. Golden varnish, unblemished ebony, the bright lines of the strings. He holds the bow loosely in his right hand, the stick lying across the bed. The horsehair leaves a fine white line of rosin on the blanket. Wesley passes his thumb lightly over the fiddle’s strings, and even Claire can hear the discordant notes, knows it isn’t in tune.

  Wesley looks over his shoulder at her. What do you want to hear? he asks.

  You know, she says.

  “Black River.”

  Yes.

  He watches her for a long time, and it’s been thirty years—thirty years—but she cannot read his expression. She wants to tell him that the color of his fiddle is like the color of his hair, which is like the color of summer evening sun, but the thought of forming the words overwhelms her, so she closes her eyes and waits. The bed moves as Wesley shifts his weight, and Claire wants to look at him again so she can see the fiddle under his chin—he looks almost haughty when he plays, and she has always loved this about him—but she is so tired. She hears the brush of his skin against wood, the light touch of the bow as horsehair comes to rest on wound steel. The breath before the note.

  She listens.

  Wes Carver was sixty years old and had been a widower five days. He was in his truck, struggling up the Idaho side of Lookout Pass, not quite two hours into a four-hour trip. His fiddle was in its case on the floor, the DOC letter and his revolver in the glove compartment. And Claire’s ashes there beside him on the bench seat, in a small box wrapped with brown parcel paper and labeled with a bar code sticker. They’d warned him the package would be small, but he’d still been surprised when he signed the papers and they handed it to him.

  Tractor-trailers eased into the left lane and passed him, their hazards flashing. Years ago, when Wes was still living in Black River, he’d come through here in January. Couldn’t say why anymore. The storm had been bad enough he shouldn’t have been driving—the left lane impassable, the right invisible against a snow-filled sky—but by the time he realized, it was too dangerous to pull off. At the top of the pass, at the Montana state line, he’d come upon an accident in which a little sedan had thrust itself beneath the trailer of a semi. Never saw it, most likely. Wes must’ve arrived just after the state patrol, no ambulance yet. The patrolmen were standing on the side of the road with the driver of the truck, collars turned up against the blowing snow. The way the car had folded under the trailer, there was no doubt. When he drove by at five miles an hour, Wes saw blood melting the snow beneath the union of twisted metal, illuminated by the chemical glare of the nearest flare.

  Now the truck badly needed the long coasting down the Montana side of the pass. Wes took the curves a little too fast, riding close to the white line. The sun was low, streaming through the passenger window, burning at the corner of his eye. The mountains crumpled up around him, ravines and canyons everywhere, all a uniform green. A few brief moments here near the summit to see it all before descending back into the deep valleys that blinded a man to all but the path ahead or behind. (The day before she died, Claire opened her eyes just as the sun went down. A softness to her gaze. Maybe the morphine. Maybe the first haze of death. Are we still going to Black River? she’d asked. He’d put his hand over hers. Yes, he said. Of course we are.)

  So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn’t. All that space, waiting. Wes never could’ve planned a suicide, couldn’t have swallowed the pills or loaded the gun or climbed the trestle. But this would take only a single moment of conviction, an instant of courage that could be abandoned almost as soon as it had been summoned. The briefest contraction of the muscles in the arms, a short jerk of the wheel to the right—a few inches would do it—and then: through the low guardrail and into the air. The truck, the fiddle, the ashes, the letter. Him. Falling like flying.

  He’d waited there a long time, fiddle on his collarbone, bow touched to string. Poised beside his dying and then dead wife in a mockery of something he could no longer do. His arms must have begun to ache, but he didn’t notice. In the dark it had seemed possible to stay there like that: Claire just a moment from breath; he just a moment from music.

  Hearing was the last sense to go. The last filament connection to life. Dr. Harmon had told him that, and it was knowledge Wes didn’t want, knowledge he’d have given anything to refuse. Why not sight? Why not touch? A reassuring gaze, a comforting hand. Those things he could’ve offered her. But she wanted his music. So he’d taken his fiddle and brought it to his body and laid horsehair down and then could do no more. Even if he’d drawn the bow across an open string, the pegs had slipped long ago, the strings gone flat.

  How long had she waited?

  Her eyes had closed, and the rattle of her breath crescendoed and dwindled and still he held his fiddle and his bow. Suppose she wasn’t gone yet. Suppose she still waited to hear him play. Suppose she thought he was unwilling, not unable. He waited. Prayed. Considered trying to tune and rosin and play, knew he could do none of those things because he’d tried so long and so hard so many times before.

  When dawn began to edge out night, he lowered the fiddle. Lowered the bow. Thought about smashing both against the wall. But instead he smoothed the blanket over her body. Laid the fiddle back in its case. Closed the lid. Fastened the latches.

  It was impossible to be lost in western Montana. The mountains were always there against the sky, their unchanging silhouettes as sure as any map. Wes felt them closing in as he followed the interstate into the Elk Fork valley: the Sapphires melting into the Bitterroot Range to the south, the Sawtooths behind him, the Whitecaps, Missions and Swans to the north. The Garnets still ahead, to the east. Peaks appeared he could put a name to, some distant and dusted with snow, picturesque, others closer, immediate, covered with dry brown grasses or green pine or black slashes of basalt. Mount Sentinel, Blood Summit, Squaw Peak (he thought they’d changed the name of that one, the Indians upset or some such, but he couldn’t remember what folks were supposed to call it instead). Elk Fork—a city in Montana, a town in any other state—was nestled in the shallowest part of the valley’s bowl, sharing space with three different rivers that laced together and parted again at regular intervals. On the east side of the city the mountains began to draw together, and the valley narrowed, a single strand of water winding through. Black River lay thirty miles into the canyon. Wes remembered one of his grade school teachers telling them how this landscape had come to be—one of those geological phenomena involving ancient, vanished glaciers and lakes—but as a child he had thought the slopes of the mountain ranges looked like the hands of giants, or maybe of God, each ravine and peak delineating fingers and knuckles, just visible above the edges of the earth. A person in Elk Fork’s wide valley felt like he was cradled in the palms of those giant hands. In Black River he was between two clenched fists about to collide.

  Elk Fork was still in the midst of a long autumn twilight, a golden stretch of hours between the time the sun dipped below the mountain peaks and when darkness truly fell. The canyon had already succumbed to shadow, though, and Wes turned on the headlights as he steered around the first curve. He was starting to feel the tension high in his back, betwe
en his shoulder blades. The joints in his hands were aching, too, though he’d been careful to drive mostly with the heels of his hands, tucking his wrist over the crosspiece of the steering wheel on the curves and gripping with his fingers only when absolutely necessary. He opened and closed each hand a couple times, did his best to put the pain out of his mind. Plenty of practice.

  Just before the Black River exit was the familiar large sign: Montana State Prison, 6 Miles. Then the smaller signs, every couple hundred yards: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers. The house was west of town, and Wes was glad. Meant he didn’t have to drive through Black River yet, didn’t have to confront all that had changed and all that hadn’t. Didn’t have to set eyes on the prison. He took the exit, drove three miles down the frontage road. Long strands of barbed wire sagged along the periphery of the fields, tattered white ghosts of plastic bags fluttering where they’d snagged. A pair of ribby horses swished their tails in a grazed-down pasture. Crumpled cans glinted amid the weeds in the ditch, and the speed limit signs bore round silver dents where kids or drunkards had used them for target practice. The final cutting of alfalfa stood in the few cultivated fields, and the heavy, sweet scent filled the cab of the truck. Seemed to Wes it ought to have smelled strongest at midday, beneath a hot sun, but it was always evenings, when the grasses began to cool.

  He knew he was approaching the house even before he saw the welded pipe gate across the drive. Something about the pitch and roll of the mountains, the cant of the trees. There was a clasp on the gate’s chain, but it was unfastened. Wes wondered if Dennis had done that on purpose, if he knew the clasp would’ve been too much for his hands. Maybe he always left it like that. Another six-tenths of a mile to the house, through evergreen woods. The weave of the forest was just different enough—trees missing, new deadfall on the ground, trunks leaning at steeper angles—that looking too closely was unsettling. Through a lattice of pine, Wes saw the mercury-vapor lamp at the house blazing against the coming dark.

  Dennis was waiting on the front steps. Already not like him. The Dennis Wes remembered would’ve been watching from behind a parted curtain, or while pretending to be absorbed in some task, fixing a fence or working on his truck. Not just sitting there, watching steadily with those familiar wary dark eyes. Here, suddenly, was the face Wes had searched for so many years, looked for in the features of every inmate on his tier. His stepson, no longer a teenager but an adult. Same taut features, skin skimming close over muscle and bone. New lines at the edge of his mouth that ran so deep they looked like cuts. He was just thirty-four, but his dark hair was already going steadily gray at his temples, and he’d cut it short, shorter even than Wes wore his. He stood when Wes pulled up, but didn’t move off the porch.

  What to do. No hug. Not after so many years, and not after the kind of leave they’d taken from each other. And no handshake, either. Dennis almost forgot, offered his hand before awkwardly dropping it back to his side. Claire had come back to Black River for two weeks every spring. And Dennis had come to Spokane when she fell ill, of course, and to Seattle after the transplant. But in the hospitals, Dennis always phoned Claire’s room before he visited, and Wes made sure he was gone. He’d called Dennis a few times, when Claire was too sick to do it herself. And last week, after she died. Maybe ten minutes of conversation in eighteen years, all of it on Claire’s behalf. And now Wes stood on the porch that had once been his, with a stepson who used to be his to care for, and he had no words.

  Dennis hooked his thumbs behind his belt, cocked his weight onto one hip. “Trip all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lot of tourists?”

  “A few RVs. Not so many as I thought there’d be.”

  “Season’s kind of winding down.”

  He should’ve rented a room at a motel. There was a decent one in town, a dozen cottage-like buildings with peeling gray paint spaced evenly around a gravel horseshoe. Wes had no idea what’d possessed Dennis to offer to put him up at the house, even less what’d made him agree. (He’d lived here with her.)

  “You want a beer?” Dennis asked finally.

  The house still smelled the same. Lemon, linen, smoke. Would’ve figured it’d have a different scent after all this time. Wes found himself anticipating each squeak of the floorboards. Dennis went to the kitchen, and Wes set Claire’s ashes on the dining table, near where she used to sit. It seemed somehow wrong, so he moved them to the floor; that was worse. Decided, at last, on the wicker chair next to the front door. When he turned, Dennis was in the doorway, watching, two opened bottles in one hand.

  Wes sat on the couch. Dennis settled on the hearth, one wrist balanced on a bent knee, the other leg straight out ahead. His casual sprawl was a little too conspicuous, the effort of it showing.

  “You look good,” Dennis said.

  “So do you.” Wes turned the beer bottle in his hand, the condensation wetting his palm. Dripping off his wrist like blood. (No. Not like blood.)

  Dennis glanced down, smiled briefly at some unshared thought. He set his bottle on the brick of the hearth, got to his feet and meandered around the perimeter of the room, glancing sidelong at Wes every few steps. He stopped beside the dining table, his back to Wes. Put one hand on the fiddle case. “You’ve kept it all this time.”

  Wes said nothing.

  Dennis moved his fingertips over the pebbled surface of the case, over the yellow line of stitching that chased itself around the contours of the lid. And then his hands went to either end, positioned over the brass clasps, and Wes saw tendon push against skin as his fingers flexed, and Wes said, “Don’t.”

  Dennis looked down at his hands. They stayed taut for a long moment. Then he sighed, and his hands fell away from the case. He turned around but didn’t look at Wes. “I made up the guest bedroom for you.”

  It was the same twin bed Dennis had slept in when he was a boy. Wes’s old bedroom—his and Claire’s—was across the hall. Dennis’s now, of course. All of this was his, the house, the land, all of it signed over to Dennis on his eighteenth birthday. A far more generous gift than the boy had deserved, but one that had pleased Claire, eased the anxiety she’d felt since leaving Dennis behind in Black River. Wes lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, the creak of the springs so sharp as to be almost tangible. A palm out to touch the quilt. Claire had made it. Pieced and quilted it all by hand. She started it when Dennis was a toddler, finally finished it for his twelfth birthday. He remembered her in the front room in the evenings, red and blue scraps of calico joining in small strips and squares, slowly working into a bigger pattern that covered her lap and then most of her body. The hoop and thimble and needle. So nimble with that needle. She’d seemed reluctant to work in front of him after the riot, sewed mostly in the mornings before he got up.

  The quilt was soft beneath his hand, the fabric gentled by repeated washings. Touching it was almost like touching her. The stitches like writing. Or scars. After the riot, Wes wore long sleeves, hid what he could. Late at night, he and Claire together on the couch in winter or the porch swing in summer, she would take first one, then the other of his hands into hers—her skin always cooler than his—and she would move her fingers across skin and tendon and bone, soothing his most persistent aches in a way doctors and pills never could. Then she would unfasten the buttons at his cuff, and she would feel him try not to pull away, feel his muscles go hard under his skin, and she would wait but not draw back. She moved her hands over his wrists, his forearms, touching skin and scar tissue he let no one else set eyes on. Claire could make the ugly, hated letters on his left arm disappear. She never traced them, never avoided them. Moved across them like they were any other flesh. She did touch the six smooth rises on the soft underside of his right forearm, hid each beneath the pad of a fingertip. When she stretched her hand to its widest span she could cover five of the scars, obliterate them from existence. But there was always one left, stubbornly visible.

  He drifted into sleep, woke to the moan of
a train whistle. Dark still. It took him a moment to remember where he was—still a shock at every waking to realize Claire was gone—and another moment to recognize the whistle for what it was. Long and low, an animal sound. They were all freight trains here in the canyon; the Amtrak only ran up north on the Hi-Line. Freights didn’t look like they moved fast, but when you stood right next to the tracks you saw they barreled along pretty good. There was a trestle over the river not far from the house, and when the trains crossed it the river ran beneath at matched speed. Silent, though.

  The whistle sounded again, more distant this time. Across the hall, Wes heard a sigh, the sound of shifting weight on bedsprings. Then a long stillness. He’d never been a good sleeper, not even before the riot. He used to get up in the middle of the night and take his fiddle outside, unless it was cold enough to throw it out of tune. He’d walk halfway across the field toward the river and the mountain slopes, hearing the shifting steps of Arthur Farmer’s horses in the pasture across the fenceline, and when he was far enough away not to wake Claire or Dennis he’d play. Music for the moon and stars. Claire would still be asleep when he returned to bed, but in the mornings she hummed what he’d played.

  When Wes woke a second time, the sun was already high over the mountains and Dennis was gone. In her last weeks, Claire had slept more and more, going to bed early and rising late, naps throughout the day. The doctors said it was normal, that she’d be harder to wake as they got closer to the end. Wes had slept less and less himself, staying up to watch the rise and fall of her chest, deluding himself into believing vigilance might make a difference. It’d been all he could do not to constantly bring her out of sleep, and sometimes he found himself shifting heavily in bed beside her, just enough to rouse her but pretend it was an accident. A little too easy to sleep long and deep now.