Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  There was coffee in the pot on the kitchen counter, a clean mug beside it. Dennis feeling civil this morning. Wes poured, added a little sugar but no milk. Outside the night chill lingered despite the sun, and the wooden seat of the porch swing felt damp through his jeans. Wes waited for his coffee to cool, enjoying the heat of the mug on his palms. The property looked good. It wasn’t much—twelve acres in all—but it’d always been plenty for Wes’s family, the land narrow east to west but stretching south toward where the river hugged the bottom of the mountain slopes. The foothills rose abruptly here, as though the earth had suddenly run aground of something much stronger and sturdier and been left with nowhere to go but skyward. Old logging roads crossed the bare slopes like neat surgical scars. North of the house it was all wooded, but this side was pasture. Dennis had mowed it, replaced the old barbed wire with white rope, built a metal run-in shed. There were three horses in the field. No—two horses and a mule. They stood a few yards from one another, muzzles buried in separate piles of faded green hay. Wes watched the steady working of their jaws, the absent swishing of tails and twitching of ears.

  The letter was still in the glove compartment. Still in its envelope. It had arrived the day of Claire’s last biopsy, sandwiched between a medical bill and an insurance statement. He’d left it alone then. Overwhelmed. Other things to attend to. Truth was, Wes had a pretty good idea what was inside that envelope, and he thought he might put off opening it until it’d be too late to do anything about it. Probably not too late yet. Probably ought to leave it alone for a few more weeks.

  In the pasture, the red horse began eating the mule’s hay. The mule pinned his long ears, squealed and brayed, but the red horse ignored him and after a minute the mule walked to the vacant hay pile, swishing his meager tail hard against his flanks.

  Wes set his coffee on the porch, crossed the yard to the truck. One of the horses, the black one, raised his head to watch. The envelope was made of cheap paper, had lost its crispness after a night in the glove compartment. There was a familiar black ink-stamped return address in the corner, not straight: The State of Montana Department of Corrections. Been a long while since Wes got a letter with that mark. He settled back on the porch and took his pocketknife off his belt. Twice he got his thumbnail against the groove in the blade, and twice the knife slipped from his fingers. He tried once more, forcing his grip until the deep ache flared in his joints and the knife clattered to the porch, skittering across the wooden boards and over the edge into the grass. The simplest fucking things. The black horse was still watching.

  Wes stood, retrieved the knife. Finally got it open, slipped the blade beneath the envelope’s flap and sliced. One sheet inside, the message short and to the point: The State of Montana Department of Corrections inmate Robert F. Williams had come eligible for parole. He, Wesley J. Carver, had the right to deliver a statement at the hearing. No acknowledgment there that he’d given twenty-one years of his life, and then some, to the service of the state. Just the same duty-done letter Victim Services sent to everyone, impersonal enough it took a more generous man than Wes not to think they were hoping folks would stay out of it altogether. It was dated three weeks ago. Still relevant for another five.

  So there it was. Bobby Williams, getting another chance. Wes waited for shock, disbelief, but he’d kept a tally of the months and years going in his head, and he knew the math was right. He wasn’t naïve. Money played a role in parole decisions, and space, and manpower, and politics. All sorts of things that had nothing to do with justice. He could accept that. What made him angriest, then, wasn’t anything to do with the DOC or the state or the parole board, but the fact that Williams’s name still brought with it the memory of the sloppy crunch of breaking bone, that it still sent Wes’s gut into spasm and set his heart racing. That the mere memory of the man still brought forth these symptoms of fear.

  He heard the grind of gravel and looked up. Arthur Farmer—once Wes’s friend and neighbor, widower to Claire’s sister—was only a few yards away, scuffing his boot heels in the driveway so Wes would hear him coming. His horse stood on the other side of the property fenceline, stock-still, its reins dropped to the ground. Farmer stopped when he was still a little farther away than most folks would’ve come. He nodded. Knew better than to offer his hand. “Wesley.”

  He looked older, of course—Wes so plainly saw age on everyone but himself—but in no way frail. Be like an ox till the day he died. A wide white mustache hid his upper lip, and a dusty bone-colored felt hat covered what had to be a balding head. Farmer was almost seventy now, and his blue eyes were rheumy and seemed to have faded in the years since Wes had last seen him, like paint exposed to years of sun and wind and snow. Looked right at you, so damned sincere.

  Wes stood, took one step down from the porch. “Arthur.”

  “I’m so sorry about Claire.”

  Wes didn’t do well with sympathy. Never had. There would be cards piling up back at home, well-meaning but trite condolences, and he’d toss them all unopened. “Well.” He took another step down to the gravel, rocked a stone against the sole of his boot. “Known for a long time she might not make it.”

  Farmer looked sideways, like Wes had done something it wasn’t polite to stare at. “Shame a lady like her should have to go through that.”

  “Deserved better,” Wes agreed. He listened to his own voice critically, made an adjustment as he spoke. He knew how to do that, control tone and note. Music, really.

  “Will there be a service?”

  “No. Claire didn’t really believe in all that.”

  “I remember.”

  “She wants to be buried near her sister.”

  Farmer smiled, an infuriating sort of smile, sad and content all at once. “Maddie would like that,” he said.

  Wes was starting to feel his own pulse. “Nice-looking horse you got there.”

  Farmer looked back over his shoulder. Wes didn’t care a whit about horses, and Farmer knew it. “Yeah,” he said. “Brought her over from Billings last fall.”

  “You still rodeo?”

  “Here and there. I been roping some with a fellow over in Drummond.”

  “And your guitar?” Steady the voice. “Still play?”

  Farmer glanced down quick. “Not really.” He put his hands in his pockets, casual-like, but Wes had already seen the calluses on his fingers. That was Farmer. Thought Wes was fragile, thought he had to be lied to. Pitied.

  “Not really,” Wes repeated.

  Farmer squinted at the ground.

  “Well,” Wes said, “good of you to stop by.”

  “Wesley,” Farmer said quietly, “can I ask you something?”

  “Guess I can’t stop you.”

  “Are you here just for Claire, or are you here about the hearing, too?”

  The man never did know how to mind his own business. Thought the fact that they’d been close once meant they still were. “Why? You all got a pool going down at the bar?”

  “Christ, Wesley.” Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Most folks wouldn’t expect that of Farmer, his being a deacon of the church. “I heard about it from Sara, and I figured the timing couldn’t be worse. Just asking after you is all.”

  Sara Gregory. Lane’s widow. “Is she giving a statement?”

  Farmer looked at the sky. “Can’t. They never did connect Williams to Lane.”

  “How about Bill’s people?”

  “He’s only got a sister, and she’s down south somewhere. Florida, Georgia.”

  “Long way.”

  “Yeah.”

  Farmer had been the first one into the control room after the riot. The one to kneel next to Wes, to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him it was all right and just hang on, Wesley, we’re gonna get you out of here now. He knew what was under Wes’s sleeves.

  “Williams ought to be a lifer.”

  “Ought to be,” Farmer agreed.

  “Think they’re going to let him go?”

&nbs
p; Farmer winced, but didn’t look away. “They might. Two of the board used to be police, and they ain’t gonna like it. But they might. Money,” he added apologetically, as though Wes didn’t know why anyone ever got paroled. Sure as hell wasn’t because they were model prisoners. No such thing.

  It was too hard to stay at the house. Wes kept seeing Claire at the periphery of his vision: there at the stove, apron strings dangling over her rump; at the end of the couch, her legs tucked under her and a book on her lap; standing at the window in the bedroom. Not quite hallucinations. Not quite ghosts. Normal, he’d been told. The social workers, the hospice folks, they’d given Wes a handful of brochures in Spokane. All pastels and italics. He’d tried not to look at them, tossed them in the garbage as soon as he was home. Dug them out later, damp, smelling like coffee grounds. It was all there: the shock of grief; the anxiety; the anger; the heart that beat out of rhythm, shallow and fluttery like bird wings. Wes hadn’t been able to decide if he resented fitting so neatly into some psychological profile or if he was relieved to know he wasn’t flat-out crazy.

  Black River, though, was no less fraught with memory than the house. It’d changed, yeah; he saw that the moment he drove down Main Street. The town stretched a good five, six blocks longer than it used to, inching eastward, toward where the new prison waited beyond the curve of the canyon. Modern glass and concrete buildings picked up where the old brick storefronts left off. A new high school—windowless and solid, with Black River Wardens painted on the exterior wall—stood where cows had once grazed. But it’d avoided the boom so many other towns in Montana had experienced: the Californians weren’t moving here; the movie stars weren’t building luxury ranches on the outskirts. The prison spared the town that much, at least.

  Despite the changes, Black River remained more familiar than Wes liked. It had been a logging town before it was a prison town, and the railyards were still there on the north side of the interstate, piles of raw logs waiting beside empty track. The bulk of the town was south of the freeway, longer than it was wide because it butted up against the mountains. Half the residents lived in houses or trailers on the crosshatching of streets here in town; the other half lived on swatches of land up and down the canyon. Having land didn’t mean you had more money than those who didn’t; it just meant at some point you’d had a daddy or a granddaddy who bought up acreage when it was cheap. A few folks, like Farmer, still lived on a piece of their families’ homesteads.

  The buildings on Main Street were mostly brick, standing since the twenties at least. Chipped painted advertisements for products that no longer existed were barely visible above sagging awnings. There were two cafés, their signs topped by warring cola logos. A Back to School poster hung in the window of Jameson’s Mercantile, its colors starting to fade. Old streetlamps lined the curbs, ensconced beneath generations of paint, and the streets themselves were lined with pickups, a few sedans and station wagons sprinkled in. A single traffic light hung at the center of town, a four-way flasher caught in a perpetual sway up on its wires.

  The old prison stood on Main Street at the corner of First, occupied the whole oversized city block. It was a peculiarly Gothic structure, its stone façade something like an ancient European fortress. The walls rose straight up from the street, and when Wes was a boy he and his friends used to come here after school to stand at the base of the wall, arch their necks back and watch the guards pace from tower to tower with their rifles. It was dark inside, the stone eternally damp. The kind of place that made you expect claps of thunder and flashes of lightning. Wes had spent his entire career here; it had been the state penitentiary right up through 1995, when everything had moved to the new campus four miles east. It was a museum now, and the legislature had granted it some kind of historical designation that ensured it would always lord itself over Black River.

  Claire had asked him once, when she was in one of her playful moods, what he’d wanted to be when he was a boy. The question brought him up short. Truth was, he’d always known he’d be a CO. That was the way it worked. Most of the sons of Black River did what their daddies and their daddies’ daddies did, and that meant they went to the academy and got a uniform and spent their days inside the gate. Wasn’t really a pride thing—plenty of the COs Wes had worked with prayed their children would find another way to make a living—but prison work paid better than retail or ranching, and neither of those offered government benefits. Doing something else meant leaving town, and the canyon had a way of holding on to its people.

  He’d lied to Claire. A firefighter, he said. Or maybe a construction worker. He’d turned the question back on her quickly, and she’d catalogued a whole host of careers that weren’t meant to be: ballerina, veterinarian, chef, painter, stewardess. It seemed there was no fantasy so fleeting it’d escaped her memory; they were all there, preserved as alternate versions of herself. Claires that might have been. He liked hearing her talk about them, and wondered only briefly if wife and mother were ever a disappointment to her.

  She’d stopped suddenly, as though he’d spoken aloud. Ask me again, she said.

  What?

  Ask me again what I wanted to be when I was a girl.

  He’d smiled, puzzled. What about you, he’d asked again. What did you want to be?

  This, she said. I wanted this.

  The cemetery was midway between Black River and the new prison, a sprawling acreage settled on one of the low gold hills below the mountains, far enough from the road that folks only had to set eyes on it when they’d prepared themselves to do so. Wes wore his good shirt, the crisp white one. The office was by the front gate, a squat little building with worn red carpeting and a cloying floral smell that must’ve come from a can. The man sitting behind the desk was much younger than him—it constantly surprised Wes that so many people in the world were now younger than him—and he repeated his rote condolences too many times.

  The man squinted at his computer screen when Wes told him he wanted to bury Claire’s remains beside her sister’s. “I’m sorry,” he said yet again. “I’m afraid that sector of the cemetery is closed. All the plots have been sold. I do have some very nice—”

  “I just got ashes,” Wes said. “Not a coffin.”

  “I understand, sir. I do have some very nice plots in the newest part of the cemetery.”

  Wes pressed his palms against the wooden armrests of his chair. The varnish was worn off from years of touch, like on the neck of a fiddle. “She’s in a little box,” he said. “Like this.” He let his right hand hover eight inches above the glossy surface of the desk. The man stared at Wes’s crooked fingers, and Wes jerked his hand back down.

  He let the man lead him to the open section of the cemetery. He thought they would walk, but the man showed him to a green-canopied golf cart, and they drove along the asphalt paths with a feeble hum. The stones there were flush to the ground. Easy to mow over. Convenient. No trees overhead, just a few spindly maples bound to support stakes with rubber loops. The sound of traffic rose from the interstate. It was a glorified potter’s field, not so different from the patch of grass behind the old prison where they’d buried the unclaimed remains of inmates.

  Wes had the man leave him there, and waited until the sickly drone of the golf cart had disappeared. He walked back through the older part of the cemetery. The trees there were aged, maples and oaks whose leaves were just beginning to turn, and sturdy pines with trunks bleached white where the automatic sprinklers soaked them every day. Wes’s father was buried here, but he didn’t try to find the grave. He stopped instead in front of a white stone angel whose hair and wings were turning black with lichen as she stared into the distance and pointed one finger toward the sky. Wes remembered Madeline’s funeral. A lot of the officers were there—Farmer was a lieutenant then, respected and liked—but Wes stood at the graveside with Claire. He remembered her silent tears he couldn’t coax away. The way she wouldn’t look at Farmer, who wouldn’t look at anyone. It was an accident, a m
oose on the road. But Farmer had been driving.

  There was space here, beside the white angel. Claire didn’t need a whole plot. Just room enough for the box, and a small marker. Used to be you could bury your dead on your own property. Way back on Farmer’s land there were three graves; the grass and weeds were wild that far out, but there was a little wire fence and a patch of grass Farmer kept mowed, and three weathered wooden crosses. His grandparents, a child of theirs who had died without a name. Rules against that kind of thing nowadays.

  Wes used to like rules. He liked knowing what to do, when to do it, how. He’d always felt that folks on the whole didn’t know what was best for themselves, and what he did for a living didn’t change his mind any. Believed rules helped. But then there were the rules the doctors had when Claire was sick. Visiting hours, when anyone could see a dying woman needed family with her. Rules the insurance company had about which treatments could be tried, and tried again. And now rules against burying a dead woman beside her sister.

  A curled brown leaf spiraled down through the air and landed on the angel’s hair, obscuring one eye. Wes watched it for a moment, fluttering like paper in the light breeze, caught there on the marble. He thought about brushing it away, but in the end he left it, and went back to his truck.

  Dennis was still gone when Wes returned to the house, but a steady metallic ringing echoed off the hills, and when Wes squinted through the trees he saw Dennis’s truck parked at Farmer’s place. Wes walked slowly down the access lane that ran between the two properties. He stayed in one of the tire ruts; the grass on the centerline to his left was broken close to the ground, but on the verge to his right it brushed almost knee-high. Used to be Farmer kept it all mowed. Dennis’s truck was butted up to one of the barns, a brown horse just visible in the shadows of the aisle. There was a small propane forge swung out to one side of the dropped tailgate, and when Wes got close he could hear it blowing. He hadn’t noticed the lettering on the side of the truck before. Black River Horseshoeing was stenciled on the door in white, Dennis Boxer, CJF in smaller letters below. Wes studied the name for a good minute. Boxer was Claire’s maiden name. After she married Wes she’d taken his name, and given it to Dennis, too. He’d been Dennis Carver growing up.