Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Madeline boils macaroni and dresses it with mayonnaise for lunch. This was Claire’s favorite meal when she was a child; she is both touched that Madeline remembers such an inconsequential detail from so long ago and angry that her sister thinks such a small thing could possibly matter now. She eats only because Dennis refuses his own meal until she has finished hers. Twenty-four hours of riot. Twenty-four hours at least since Wesley has eaten. He must be hungry. In some part of herself, Claire realizes this is a trivial concern, the least of her fears, but it’s a comprehensible worry. Nothing like blood. Nothing like death.

  At half past four, Sara Gregory calls and tells her about Bill. (These first rumors say he was beaten to death—it’s strange the way the details build; by the end of the next day Claire will hear that his spleen ruptured, that he bled to death without a single drop leaving his body—but the autopsy will reveal a heart attack. Scared to death. The reality, when it trickles out in bits and pieces over the coming weeks, is this: Bill was in the ground-floor guard station, safely behind iron. The riot began when the inmates doused him with gasoline from the auto shop, lit a mop on fire and threatened to push it through the bars unless he gave them the keys. He did, and died anyway. Claire cannot blame him for giving in, but for the rest of her life, a black whisper in her heart will insist he got what he deserved.)

  They say he’s been dead since yesterday, Claire. Since the start.

  Claire hears the unspoken words, and though she doesn’t like Sara, not even now—maybe especially not now—it’s a relief to offer even false comfort to someone else. Lane and Wesley are fine, she says. Her voice is so steady it surprises her.

  But there’s no way to know that.

  They’re fine.

  When she hangs up, Claire carefully winds the spiral coil of the phone cord. She takes her hair out of its braid and twists it up into a bun. Then she thinks about Bill, and she thinks about Wesley, and she goes to the bathroom and vomits up the macaroni.

  His fingers are last. Williams breaks them slowly, over the course of the day and night. Right hand first. This is one of the only details Claire will learn directly from Wesley, one of the only things he tells her. But he doesn’t say, My right hand. He says, My bowing hand.

  She has finally fallen asleep, and the phone wakes her. Four-seventeen a.m. Arthur on the other end.

  He’s alive, Claire. She will be so grateful to him, when she thinks of this later, for speaking those words first.

  Where is he?

  We just went in. We’ve got the cellblock back. I was the first one to him.

  Is he all right?

  They’re taking him to St. Pat’s in Elk Fork. Get Maddie to drive you. I’ll come as soon as I can.

  What am I going to see?

  Silence.

  Arthur, don’t you think about what to tell me. Just say it.

  They tied him up. Gave him more than bruises. It was . . . methodical.

  Silence again.

  I’m sorry, Claire.

  What about Lane?

  I can’t say.

  Can’t?

  The deputy warden is driving out to see Sara right now.

  Oh. Oh, God.

  The litany: Dehydration. Concussion. A four-inch laceration above his right ear. A bruise building below his left eye, transitioning from swollen red to dark mottle. Blood crusting black on his lower lip, a broken tooth behind the split flesh. Two fractured ribs, a heel-shaped bruise shading the skin above. Abrasions around his wrists and ankles. Six cigarette burns. Five carved letters. Nine broken fingers. (Claire thinks of it another way: A broken pinkie. A broken ring finger. A broken middle finger. A broken index finger. A broken thumb. Another broken pinkie. Another broken ring finger. Another broken middle finger. Another broken index finger. And she could parse it further still, because she learns that most of those fingers have more than one shattered bone. Condylar fractures, the doctors tell her, split into the joints. Williams didn’t just snap. He twisted.)

  Wesley refuses most of the medicine the nurses offer. The pain’s not intolerable, he says, and who will argue with him? He knows intolerable. Claire sees it wearing him down, though, sees the way he doesn’t quite look at her, his gaze a few degrees off. He has been in the hospital three days; they are talking about letting him go home soon. He is restless here, and while Claire doubts her husband would be an ideal patient under any circumstances, she thinks it is especially difficult for him now. He goes very still whenever the doctors or nurses are in the room, holds his breath when they touch him.

  I wish you’d let them give you something more for the pain, she says. They are walking down the hallway outside Wesley’s room. He takes short steps, but they come steadily, one after another.

  I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

  How’s that?

  Like I ain’t entirely here.

  Maybe that’s not such a bad thing right now, Wesley.

  His eyes shift to hers. Let’s go back, he says.

  She helps him turn; he can’t hide the wince. His ribs this time, she thinks.

  The nurses don’t like her being here so often. They cluck at her about visiting hours, try to guilt her into leaving by telling her Wesley needs his rest. But they don’t know her husband. He is wearing sweats and a bathrobe she had to buy for him two days ago at Jameson’s, because he doesn’t own such casual clothing. His hands are useless; he can’t feed himself, can’t bathe himself, can’t dress himself. He will not accept help from anyone else. Will not rest in front of anyone else. The nurses don’t know what it costs him just to be here.

  It’s gonna be all right, Claire.

  I know.

  I love you.

  It’s not something he says often. I love you, too, she says.

  I love you, he repeats. They are back at his room; Claire pulls the door closed behind them. That’s all that matters, Wesley says. I love you, and you’re here, and we’re together.

  She stays quiet. Puts her hand on his arm, above his elbow. She wants to take his hands in hers, but they are too swaddled in gauze and tape.

  The rest of it ain’t important. I know that.

  Wesley . . .

  There’s a chance I might play again, he says. Can’t look at her when he speaks. She tries to guide him to the bed, but he won’t allow himself to be moved. Even if the doctors don’t think so, he says, there’s a chance.

  Shattered was the word they used. Claire has seen the x-rays. Shattered doesn’t begin to describe what Bobby Williams did to Wesley’s fingers. They had to go in and take out bone fragments. They’re still talking about amputation.

  Baby, she says. She wants, suddenly, to shut him up. To put her hands over his mouth, hold his jaw closed.

  It was just a hobby, he says.

  And she sees the tears building in his eyes, and knows something inside him will break if they fall. Claire has never seen her husband cry, and she doesn’t want to. She rises on her toes to kiss him, and as she does she takes his face in her hands, and she wipes the tears from his eyes before he can know they are there.

  After he comes home, Claire waits for the nightmares. She is prepared to comfort him, ready with soft words and a light touch. A small, shameful part of her actually looks forward to it. She is so eager to help, and Wesley so reluctant to let her. In the dark, just back from the dreamworld, maybe he’ll allow it. But either the nightmares don’t come or Wesley bears them with stillness and silence. (She suspects the latter, because when she wakes she often finds his eyes already open, and she can smell the sweat damp in his hair.) Instead, Dennis is the one with plagued dreams. He is fourteen, but starts to call for her in the middle of the night the way he did as a young child. His voice must wake Wesley, too, but he lies unmoving beside her, so Claire rises and finds her slippers and robe and crosses the squeaking hardwood hall to Dennis’s bedroom, and she sits on the edge of his bed and brushes his hair back over his forehead and tells him over and over that everything is okay until he be
lieves her and lets sleep take him again.

  Claire comes to know about the riot—the times, the details, what her husband endured while she waited—because she reads the reports. Wesley almost never speaks about his hours as a hostage, and when he does, it is only a few words, which appear between them as if by accident. Always the sense that Wesley wishes he could take them back. Always the certainty that he conceals more than he reveals. So Claire drives to Elk Fork one day while he is at work, sits at a metal table in an over-air-conditioned room in the courthouse and turns the pages of the file.

  She thinks of the way the little Wesley has told her has seemed wrenched from his lips against his will, and she tries to imagine her husband voicing the words on these pages, admitting to all this pain and fear. Such detail, line after line. So vivid. She is wearing a good dress, and has put on makeup, something she rarely does. She remembers it only when she touches a page and leaves a smear of red lipstick on the pristine paper, realizes she has had her hand to her mouth as she read.

  The warden resigns. The situation, it is acknowledged, was handled badly. A plaque is set into a boulder just outside the gate, Bill’s and Lane’s names engraved on it. They plant some flowers nearby, but they are annuals, and no one replaces them after the first winter.

  Almost a year beyond the riot, Claire will come home from Jameson’s and find Wesley bent over the bathroom sink, blood twining over his wrist and off his fingers. A jackknife with slicked blade gripped awkwardly in his other hand. She stares at his blood, impossibly red against the white porcelain, and thinks, It’s not the way I would have expected him to do it. She has always worried about his revolver, certain that if he ever took this route, he would leave as little to chance as possible. She has never worried about the knife. (All this in a moment. A moment in which she would have expected to scream, drop her bags, faint. Exhibit some symptom of shock. Instead, the shock comes a heartbeat later, when she realizes she is shattered but unsurprised.)

  Then Wesley looks up, and she realizes this isn’t suicide. The blood wells from higher on his arm, above the wrist. Beads red over his scars. He opens his hand, lets the knife clatter and settle on the countertop. He straightens but doesn’t say a word, offers no explanation, as though he already knows nothing he can say will satisfy. As though he doesn’t need to justify this. His green eyes are steady on hers, unapologetic.

  She will learn to ignore these new scars just as she ignores his old ones. And she will even understand why he did it, will imagine the hurt of carrying his devil’s name on his skin, will remember that her husband is a man starving for control. But though she tries—she tries—she will never forgive Wesley for those seconds between the sight of blood and the meeting of their eyes.

  “The hell is this born-again bullshit?” Wes demanded.

  Farmer stood in the center of his round pen, pivoting on one heel to follow the horse trotting around the rail. He’d glanced over when Wes pulled his truck up next to the barn, but didn’t quit working the horse. Glanced up again when Wes crossed the yard to the hitching rack just outside the pen, but again, didn’t quit working.

  “Farmer. What’s this shit I’m hearing about Williams?”

  No answer. Three days Wes had been trying to catch Farmer to talk, and now that he had, the other man just kept fooling with that damned horse. It was a buckskin, with a yellow coat and a black mane and tail, a matching stripe down the center of its back. Young, Wes guessed. Still kind of skinny the way colts sometimes were, like no amount of feed could keep up with the speed at which they were growing. There was a battered old saddle on its back, a rope halter on its head. Every time it passed the place where Wes stood, the talcum-fine dirt in the pen got kicked up and found its way to Wes’s lungs.

  He waited until the horse was on the far end of the pen, raised his voice. “Were you ever plannin’ on fucking telling me?”

  “I tried that time you came to dinner,” Farmer said, “but you weren’t having none of it.” He slapped the coiled rope in his left hand against his thigh, and the colt broke into a high-headed lope. “I’d have told you before the hearing if no one else did, but frankly, Wesley, I figured I’d let you hear it from someone else if I could.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “’Cause I knew you’d be pissed as all get-out. Fact that you’re swearing up a storm tells me I wasn’t wrong.” He slowed his pivot a little, said “Easy” in that same low voice Wes had heard Dennis use before, and the buckskin fell back into a hurried trot.

  “Well, someone tells me that Bobby Williams of all people has gone and—Farmer, would you leave the goddamned horse alone for two minutes and talk to me?”

  Farmer turned toward Wes and quit moving. Abruptly, the horse slowed to a walk and then came to an uneasy halt, legs awry as though frozen midstep. “Good boy,” Farmer said absently. He tugged on the brim of his hat, crossed slowly to where Wes stood, but stayed on his side of the pipe fence. He looked very much the cowboy today: jeans, the hems brown with dust, stacked over work boots with curled kilties; a chore coat with cuffs that looked chewed on; his well-worn bone hat. A new uniform. He raised one foot to the first rung of the fence, pushed it forward until the boot heel hit, crossed his arms over one of the other rungs. Then he looked at Wes in that way he had that let a man know he had Farmer’s full and unwavering attention.

  Why the hell did Wes want to talk to Farmer about this, anyway? So they’d been friends once, married to sisters. So they’d played in the same band and worked the same shit job. That was all a long time gone, and there was plenty Wes didn’t like about the man, shared history or no. He was too good at everything. Too ready to involve himself, to provide balm for other people’s troubles. Altogether too eager and too earnest. But perhaps that was itself the reason—because while Wes and Farmer had sat in the same pews and listened to the same sermons all those years, Wes was pretty sure Farmer heard something in them he didn’t, something that let Farmer believe it all without the doubts Wes had to battle through.

  He waited Wes out now, not rushing him. The horse walked across the soft dirt, neck and tail swinging with each step. It stopped behind Farmer, stretched its neck to sniff at the back of Farmer’s head, nostrils flaring.

  “Nice colt,” Wes said.

  Farmer held out a hand without turning, and the horse took one more step forward, accepting the reward of a gentle touch. “You didn’t come to talk about the colt.”

  Wes mirrored Farmer’s posture, leaned forward over the hitching rack, crossed his own arms at the wrists and let his hands hang loose. Yes. That felt right. Casual. “How long ago this supposedly happen?” he asked. “Williams . . . seeing the light?”

  “Been awhile, Wesley.” Farmer moved his boot, and the pipe rang. “I heard about it before I took my pension. Probably ten years ago. A little more, maybe.”

  “It’s all cooked up to impress the parole board.”

  “Most likely.”

  There had been plenty of inmates like that. Always with a Bible on their bunk, a frayed ribbon marking the page. Painstakingly copied verses of scripture and maybe a cheap print of a bland, blue-eyed Jesus on the wall of their cell where other inmates put up girlie pictures. Lining up for the call to chapel even before the COs announced it. For most of them, Wes knew, it was a calculated decision, designed to look good on paper when it mattered. For a few, religion seemed like a hobby, the way weightlifting or watching the soaps were hobbies for other inmates. And maybe—maybe—it was more for some. For some.

  Wes leaned sideways, spit. Felt his molars find each other and grind hard. “Farmer, you don’t think he could have really changed.” He looked up. “Do you?”

  Farmer’s eyes searched his, and Wes wondered what he was looking for. If he found it. “I don’t know, Wesley.” Farmer slid back the gate’s bolt and slipped out, closing the welded pipe against the colt. The horse took one step backward, then turned and crossed the pen, muzzle bent to the dirt. Farmer joined Wes at the hitching
rack. He moved slowly, as though he were living in a world in which everything happened at a slightly lesser speed than it did for everyone else. “Do I think a man can come to religion and be the better for it? Yes, I do.” He glanced back at the mountains suddenly, at the sun hovering above. “But do I think Robert Williams can be that man? That I just don’t know.” Wes tried to catch Farmer’s eye, but now the other man seemed to be deliberately avoiding it, fixing his gaze just a little over Wes’s shoulder. “What Williams did to you was evil, Wesley. I know that. I don’t know as I could forgive it, if it’d been done to me. I mean, I seen some of what he did to you,” he said, his voice dropping low, “and I seen some of how much it’s hurt you since. But no one was there when Williams did what he did but him and you, Wesley. Way I figure it, that means you know him best. Better than anyone else on God’s earth. There ain’t no one can say whether he might’ve changed but you.”

  Wes liked church. The ritual of it, the way going every week without fail made him feel like he was doing something decent, something unequivocally right. Odd, he supposed, that he should cling so hard to a habit that had done his own father so little good.

  This week the reading was from the Gospel of Mark, the sermon all about the rewards of faith. Wes expected frustration during services—his mind ran a constant stream of objections against his efforts at faith—but the anger was new. There was something pathetically trite in being angry at God, and for such a clichéd reason: How could He do this to me? Wes had avoided that kind of anger after the riot, after his hands went crooked and stiff. But losing Claire . . . Williams up for parole . . . these things were too much. The rewards of faith.