Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  “For the fiddle? Suddenly you’re clairvoyant?”

  “For music.”

  “There are boatloads of people in the world with musical talent, Wes. Why Scott?”

  “You want to help him,” Wes said. “So do I.”

  “Bullshit. You think he’s grand larceny waiting to happen.”

  Wes picked up a rasp, ran the pad of his thumb over the rough surface, feeling the snag of skin. “I really don’t see how it’s your business, Dennis.”

  Dennis stopped hammering, thrust the half-shaped shoe back into the forge. He pulled off his glasses, tossed them onto the workbench. “It’s my business, Wes, because I care about that kid. It’s my business because I don’t trust you to see him as a person, not a protégé. I don’t trust you to see past what his father has done, and I don’t trust you not to ruin him.”

  Jesus.

  “Look, Wes.” A deep breath. “I know you loved Mom. I know that. You were devoted to her and that didn’t change when she got sick, and I’m grateful to you for that, I really am. You were . . . a good husband.” Wes heard the grind of teeth, and Dennis’s voice took on a hard edge. “But you’ve never been a good father.”

  What Wes wanted to do: Overturn the anvil stand. Sweep his hand across the workbench and send the tools clattering across the concrete floor. Yell until his lungs ached. What he did: Took a single step forward. Tested his voice before letting it slip his lips. “This ain’t about you.”

  “You sure?”

  They held each other’s gaze, and Wes thought of the thousands of other times he’d stared into Dennis’s eyes, years ago. The way Dennis never, ever backed down, not in the moment and not later. Time and space never settled his temper. It’d frightened Wes, the way Dennis could sustain anger. Made him feel helpless—and nothing kindled rage in Wes’s soul like feeling helpless.

  He missed the way this room used to smell back when he was a boy, when it was his father’s shop. Like wood and oil and varnish. Churchly scents, almost. Now it smelled only of heat, as though the fire in the forge leached too much oxygen from the air, left it hard and brittle.

  “I just saw Scott in town,” Wes said at last.

  Dennis dropped his eyes. “Ah, shit.”

  “Now maybe you don’t believe it, but I been trying hard to be civil to that kid, because I know you’re trying to help him.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “And I’m having a real hard time understanding why you suddenly decided to rile him up when you know—”

  “Wes,” Dennis said, “I didn’t tell him, all right?”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Dennis.”

  “Then listen, for fuck’s sake.”

  Wes clenched his teeth hard. “Hell of a mouth on you.”

  “This isn’t a church, Wes. It’s my place of business. On my property. You came here.”

  Wes forced himself to breathe, the way Claire used to tell him to do when he was angry. Always been easier with her hands on his shoulders, her kiss atop his head. “Okay,” he said tightly. “What is it you got to say?”

  “I need to show you.” Dennis shut the forge off, and the deep roar of the bellows vanished, left a tentative silence behind. The coal still glowed in its belly. Dennis crossed to the workbench, flipped through a stack of papers held down by an old rasp. He found a manila envelope, pulled it free. “Scott was asking about you and the band,” he said. “I sent him to get this out of the house the other day. Didn’t mean for him to go through it himself.” He tossed the envelope across the table between them.

  Wes pulled a thin pile of photographs from the envelope. The one on top had been taken at a barbecue in someone’s backyard, and showed Lane, Farmer and Wes playing on the patio. It was an old picture, creased at one corner. Wes squinted at it, but couldn’t remember exactly where or when it’d been taken. There were a half-dozen other pictures of the band, at dances, at Harvest, in the yard behind the church. There were other photos in the stack, too, a kaleidoscopic vision of the Carver family. A snapshot of an eight- or nine-year-old Dennis grinning from the back of one of Farmer’s horses. A photo of Claire holding up a sweater on Christmas morning. One of Wes and Claire together, Claire’s hand in his, Wes’s smile only half materializing. And then, on the bottom, a picture no one in the family had taken. It was one of the identification photographs the DOC took of newly minted COs. Plain blue background, harsh light.

  Wes wondered if Scott would have recognized him if not for the card in his hand with his name printed on it. Wes had been twenty-one, just, and wore a deadly serious expression. He remembered he’d been trying for confident, in that brief moment opposite the camera, but he’d known all too well that he had no experience and was about to start a job in which that was the only thing that really counted. His hair was cut short and parted severely, and his eyes looked backlit, the way a person’s did when the sun shone straight into them.

  “Why’ve you got this?”

  “Found it in the house after you left,” Dennis said, and something in the way he answered made Wes wonder if he was lying. The photograph was public record, though, released to the media during the riot; Dennis could’ve gotten it any number of places. And maybe it was something Claire had kept after all; she was good at that, in the way women could be, good at keeping memories in physical form.

  Wes stared at his younger self. When that photograph was taken, he had not yet walked a tier, met his wife or known how much pain one person could cause another. “You shouldn’t have left it where Scott could get at it,” he said.

  “Guess I know that now.”

  Wes stared past Dennis into the forge. The coal had cooled to livid red, but it still burned too bright to keep his eyes on it for long. “I haven’t gone home yet because there’s a hearing,” he said quietly. “Williams has come eligible for parole.”

  Dennis crossed his arms over his chest. Opened his mouth once, closed it straightaway. Finally he said, “They’d let a guy go after doing what he did?”

  “They let people go who killed people, Dennis. Ain’t gonna change the laws on my account.”

  “What are you going to do if they let him out?”

  The muscles alongside Wes’s spine all tightened at once. He thought about it, about Williams standing outside the double line of fence. Outside the gate. They’d send him home, of course—home for Williams was way out east, toward the Dakota border; Wes had looked it up—but he’d have a couple days to get there, and it was possible—possible—that in those couple days Wes would occupy the same space as him.

  What would he do.

  “Hopefully it don’t come to that,” he said.

  “I’ve probably saved your life,” Williams said. Second day. After the burns and the cuts, before the breaks. “Out there”—a thumb jerked toward the locked door of the control room—“out there your skull is busted, your insides ruptured, your windpipe crushed. Out there they’d have already tore you apart ten times over.” A grin Wes tried not to look at, too wide, all slick white flash. “When you think about it like that,” Williams said, “I’m your goddamn savior.”

  Wes heard Dennis’s truck roll in just after two on Saturday afternoon, but he didn’t stand until he heard both truck doors slam. Dennis came into the house first and held the door for Scott, who stepped tentatively into the living room, though Wes knew the kid had been here before. He wore good work boots today, laces tied, and a dark pair of Wranglers, but from the waist up he was still clad in his favored black. He held his head a little strangely, canted to one side, and Wes saw a bruise at the corner of his left eye, fading but not gone.

  “How’d work go?” Wes asked, when Scott made no move to speak.

  “All right,” Scott said. “Dennis got stomped on by this big-ass draft horse.”

  Wes glanced at him.

  “I wear these ugly old shitkickers for a reason,” Dennis said, stepping on the heel of one boot and pulling it off. “They got steel toes, metatarsal guards, the works.”<
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  “That your way of telling me you’re fine?”

  “That your way of asking?”

  Wes sighed, turned to Scott. “So,” he said, “you want to learn to play this thing?” He nodded to the hearth, where his fiddle waited in its velvet.

  “Yeah,” Scott said, and it was like Wes had released him; he went across the room and knelt to look at the instrument, put out a hand but pulled back before touching it.

  Dennis met Wes’s eyes. “You care if I stay?”

  “It’s your house.”

  Dennis nodded, disappeared down the hall. Wes took two chairs from the table and set them facing each other in the living room, a few feet apart. Knee-to-knee, as his father used to say. Maybe a little silly with just one fiddle, but it was the only way Wes knew to do this. He put Scott with his back to the door. Wes pulled the case to the side of his own chair, sat with the fiddle on his knee. “You never held one of these before?” he asked. “Never took violin lessons in grade school, nothing like that?”

  “No.”

  “All right. You kind of balance it here on your collarbone,” he said, bringing the fiddle home to rest beneath his jaw. He remembered what his father used to tell him: halfway between head and heart. Wes had always loved that phrase. The way it summed up all you needed to know to play the fiddle right. He could almost feel his father’s hands on his body: a light touch on his right shoulder, his left elbow, adjusting his posture. His father’s quiet voice. Halfway between head and heart. Wes couldn’t bring himself to say it now. “You settle your jaw on the chinrest real light, okay? Don’t clamp down on the thing.” And he held his fiddle across the space, had to fight not to close his hand around the neck when Scott took hold of it.

  He was awkward, more awkward still when Wes added the bow, but he got that same look on his face he’d had at Harvest, a determination so intense it was almost grimness, and Wes guessed he’d stick with it a while at least. Wes taught him how to draw the bow, how to keep his right wrist loose and his left wrist straight, explained how to practice his bow hold anytime, anywhere, with a pencil. He showed him a G major scale and made him play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” even though the kid made a face. “You got to start with something you know by heart,” Wes told him. “I know you know this by heart.” Scott fumbled for the notes, but after a few minutes he was sliding his fingers to more or less the right places without prompting. It was more than most people could do at first, and Wes told him so. Once he looked up and saw Dennis standing in the doorway, arms crossed. A few minutes later Wes looked again and he was gone.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  A break in the lesson. Almost over anyway. All the “Twinkle, Twinkle” either of them could take.

  “Sure.”

  “Do your hands hurt?”

  A sound from the kitchen. No, a stopping of sound.

  “Yes.”

  “All the time?”

  “Some days worse’n others.”

  “The . . . guy who did it.”

  Wes waited.

  “Did he know you were a fiddler?”

  “I think,” Wes said, “he just knew it hurt.”

  “You see that black eye?” The first words out of Dennis’s mouth after dropping Scott back home. His hand still on the front door.

  Wes looked out the window. The horses and the mule were gathered at the gate, coats metallic over muscle in the fading light. Their tails swished out of rhythm, tangling together before parting again. “Yeah.”

  “Scott tell you how he got it?”

  “Didn’t ask.”

  “Didn’t ask,” Dennis repeated. He came into the room, his boot heels sounding solid on the wood. He had a heavy step for such a slim man. “Shouldn’t surprise me, I guess. You never did care why I got into fights. Only that I did.”

  Wes thought about that for a minute and knew it to be true. He crossed his arms, tucked his fingers into the crooks of his elbows out of habit. “Kid’s got a tongue. He wants me to know something, he’ll tell me.”

  Dennis shook his head. “Not everyone considers stoicism the highest of all virtues, Wes.”

  “You’re the one spent most of the day with him. Did he tell you?”

  No answer. Instead: “How are you going to teach him?”

  “You saw the lesson.”

  “How are you going to teach him when he’s had enough of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

  Wes thought about not answering, shutting the conversation down with a couple sharp words. He’d taught before. Never for a living, but once in a while folks would approach him after a performance, or they’d call the house and leave a message Claire would pointedly pass along, and then he’d find himself sitting in the living room on a Saturday afternoon with a beginning fiddler who usually had more enthusiasm than talent. (And, of course, there was Dennis.) Wes had always taught his students the way his father had taught him: by ear. He’d play a tune through, twice. Then he’d play the first few notes of the A part over and over until the student joined in on his own fiddle. When the student could play those notes in unison with him, Wes would move on to the next few bars, and the next, and then on to the B part. He kept time with his foot on the floor and played harmony when his students could reliably carry the melody. Sheet music never made an appearance, and to this day Wes could barely read notation. So what was he going to do when Scott was ready for something more than kids’ songs? “I ain’t sure,” he said finally.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Dennis told him, and disappeared down the hall. Wes heard him rummaging in the bedroom closet, and he returned a minute later with a sturdy shoebox. He offered it to Wes.

  There were cassette tapes inside, a few with cases, most without. The lettering on the labels was precise, sharply angled. Claire’s handwriting. Wes turned a few of the tapes over. Dates only. “You kept these?”

  Dennis shrugged.

  They were mostly performances, Wes knew. Recordings made from a distance at Harvest, or in a school gym. Coughs and chatter intruding upon the notes, dozens of pairs of feet stamping dance steps over the music. A few of the tapes—the later dates—preserved afternoons in this house, one fiddle, his fiddle, moving from one tune to another with whatever purpose he’d had in mind that day. Wes had never listened to these. When he was younger he’d only been able to hear his errors, and later, after the riot, he didn’t dare listen. He’d wanted to get rid of them—had one of his rare, real fights with Claire about it—but she’d flat-out refused.

  “I know it’s all at speed and a lot of it’s with the band,” Dennis said. “But maybe it’ll at least help Scott get familiar with some of the tunes.”

  Wes nodded. Met Dennis’s eyes and nodded again. “Thank you.”

  Dennis reached into the box, tapped one of the tapes with two fingers. “That one’s got ‘Angelina Baker,’” he said. Flipped another tape. “And this one has ‘Cripple Creek’ on the B side.”

  “You know these.”

  Dennis nodded. “I know them all.”

  He sat alone in the living room the next afternoon, the shoebox balanced on his knees. Fourteen cassettes, with twenty-three dates. This, all the extant proof of what he once was. How many more recordings might there have been, if not for the riot? Wes selected one of the cassettes at random and wrestled it into the tape deck in the stereo beside the television. Hissing silence first. Then his voice, as simultaneously familiar and strange as the sound of one’s own voice always was. “That thing on?” And Dennis, seven or eight, voice still pitched high: “The little wheels are moving.” His own self again. “You ready?” “Yeah!” “Okay, here we go.”

  And he lit into “Hop High Ladies,” played it fast as he knew how. Here was his fiddle: the rich, round, woody sound of it. Part of him wanted to fast-forward until he found a slower piece, something with long, sustained notes, so he could savor the sound, welcome it, wallow in it. But he was transfixed by the tune playing now, by how easy it had been. Wes closed hi
s eyes, and though he did not move—his arms stayed at his sides, his hands relaxed, fingers curled into their new skewed normal—he could feel himself playing. The weight of the fiddle in his left hand, the bite of it at his collarbone, the pressure of the strings against his fingertips, the smoothness of the ebony beneath. He could feel how it had been to play like this, too fast to think about the notes, each of them just miraculously there, exactly when and where they were needed, the tune unraveling almost of its own accord, seeming to bring him along almost as a simple courtesy, an afterthought.

  There were other sounds on the tape, too, beneath the music. A mischievous little boy’s giggle, a steady thumping. More distant, a single ring of metal on metal, the duller clank of glass or ceramic on a countertop. And then, when the playing stopped, his fiddle eased into silence, Claire’s voice: sweet, gentle, a little huskier than he’d expected the first time he heard her speak. “Denny, must you always be such a whirling dervish? He’s going to bring this house crashing down, Wesley. Something a little slower this time, please.”

  He stopped the tape player, pressed the rewind button. A little slower this time, please. God, these things that had been his, these voices, so close. Rewind, again. This time, please. Again. Time, please. Please. Please.

  Monday he woke to snow. It was coming down hard, but wouldn’t stick; Wes could tell by the way it didn’t gather on the gravel, the way there seemed to be fewer flakes in the air the closer they got to the ground. A little early for the first snowfall of the season, but not remarkably so. Wes knew there were probably curses flying around Black River; most folks dreaded the coming of winter in a place where it could stay for five months at a stretch. Wes, though, had always liked winter. The way it sounded. The way the gray tint that winter brought to the world seemed almost audible, a certain hushed and muted quality over everything. Calm.

  He saw Rio a moment later. Couldn’t have said why the sight startled him so. Horses did lie down from time to time; he knew that. And Rio wasn’t flat on his side; he was settled on his chest a few yards beyond the gate, legs gathered at his side, head up. The way normal horses rested. But the red horse and the mule were standing a few yards away, nose to tail, hunched a little against the cold, ears turned back just a bit. They didn’t look unhappy, really, but they knew they were standing in a storm. Something about Rio was . . . off.