Black River

by S. M. Hulse

  Wes lingered in the sanctuary at the end of the service, managed to be one of the last to reach the lobby. The pastor was there. Greetings, some brief small talk. Wes calculated, let just enough emotion show in his voice and face. Garnered an invitation to talk in the office.

  Wes had been there once before. Alone, a kid of fifteen. He’d sat silently as the pastor at the time offered his enlightened view of the spiritual fate of suicides, providing unasked-for reassurances that Wes’s father was in a heaven that even then Wes couldn’t really believe in. The office had changed little: small, a sharply angled ceiling, brown and white wallpaper with visible seams. He didn’t remember the chairs, but they were old, the seat leather shiny and sunken, the brass buttons on the arms tarnished. An odor in the air like coffee exhaled from damp mouths.

  “I’m very sorry for the loss of your wife,” the pastor said, and Wes waited for the platitude, the biblical wisdom, but it didn’t come. His estimation of the man rose a notch.

  “She was . . . ,” Wes said, meaning to say something like special, but more accurate, less trite, and could think of no right word and so left the sentence hanging, unfinished. The pastor seemed not to notice. He was even younger than Wes had thought; he’d been fooled by the receding hairline. Wes wondered how a man so young could be certain enough of God to go into the ministry, and he wondered if he would still be a pastor a couple decades from now. “I ain’t really here to talk about her,” Wes said finally.

  The pastor sipped at his coffee. Wes had declined when the other man offered it, and the pastor hadn’t tried to cajole him into it, but hadn’t put his own mug away, either. “I heard about the parole hearing,” he said.

  “You got a history with this?” Wes asked. “Family in corrections, anything like that?”

  The pastor shook his head. “A sister in social work,” he said. “Closest I come.”

  “Ever done prison ministry?”

  “I’ve never been called to do so.”

  “You think it does any good?”

  The pastor didn’t answer. Wes watched him, but broke off eye contact after a few seconds. Not like him. “I get the sense,” the pastor said, “you want to ask something else.”

  There was a crack in the leather over the arm of the chair. Wes’s fingertips found it, worried it. “You’ve heard about the hearing,” he said. “So you know about the riot.”

  “I know you were held hostage,” the pastor said. “I know you were tortured.”

  Wes’s fingers tightened on the arm of the chair, and he found he couldn’t relax them at will, like they were spasmed. He despised the word. Torture. The label made it worse. (Was this what Claire had felt when she heard the word rape?) He thought of torture as something that happened to political prisoners, to mobsters in movies, to people who knew things other people wanted to know. What Williams had done to him had been cruel, yeah. Brutal, even. But torture? Aggravated assault, maybe. That’s what they’d called it in the paperwork. “The inmate who did it says he found God.”

  Another long silence. The smell of exhaled coffee was getting to him. The size of the room. The fact that he was saying these things aloud and hoping for a reply that would help it all make sense.

  “You believe he’s being dishonest.”

  “He’s an inmate.” Wes met the pastor’s eyes. “Saying he’s dishonest is redundant.”

  No judgment. “Tell me this, then,” the pastor said, steepling his hands in front of his face. It was an odd gesture, somehow too old for him. “If it were true—and just go along with the ‘if’ for a minute, say this guy’s suddenly become the world’s best Christian—would it change the way you want this hearing to turn out?”

  Wes heard Williams’s laugh in his memory, bursts of hot air against his ear. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He felt the flare of temper, reined it in before the pastor could see it. “Because a person doesn’t deserve to walk around free after doing what he did.”

  “So it’s a matter of justice.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Then is there any reason you can’t hope the man has welcomed Christ into his heart and still hope he’s denied parole?”

  “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  “People usually don’t deserve forgiveness,” the pastor said, his voice frustratingly gentle. It was a lulling sort of voice, the kind that made a man want to listen. “But forgiveness doesn’t forestall justice.”

  “That so.”

  “I realize that the prospect of forgiveness can seem unfair. Like you’re being asked to take on yet another burden when you’ve already endured so much. But there’s something freeing, I think, in the realization that forgiveness is a choice God has given you the power to make, independent of anything this man has done, or will do. And you must understand that there cannot be true justice—and now I’m talking about justice for you, justice in the big scheme of things, not legal justice—without forgiveness.”

  Wes leaned forward in his chair, waited until the pastor mirrored him. “Look,” he said. “I never told anyone this before. I kept it from my wife. Not ’cause she wasn’t strong enough to hear it, but because she shouldn’t have to hear it. That whole time during the riot, Bobby Williams never once looked at me. He looked through me. Like I wasn’t nothing to him, not even a person. You know how you sometimes hear about a kid who kills the neighborhood dog for fun? Just to see how long it will take, and what noises it will make while it dies? Williams was that kid, and I was a dog he found. He’s soulless. Or—what do they call it now?—a sociopath. But there’s something not right about that man, and it wasn’t right when he was born, and it ain’t gonna be right till the day he dies.” He sat back, forced deep breaths into his lungs, forced his hands to relax. “Tell me, Reverend, you think someone without a soul can find God?”

  The pastor sighed. So much compassion there on his face. So much it made Wes sick. “I believe,” he said, “that all men, even wicked ones, have souls. And I believe in the power of Christ’s love to lift up all—”

  “I didn’t mean forgiveness,” Wes interrupted. Couldn’t listen to all that.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “When I said he doesn’t deserve it, I didn’t mean Williams doesn’t deserve forgiveness.” Wes closed his eyes. The pastor waited. “I mean God. He doesn’t deserve God.” He opened his eyes again. The pastor was still watching him, and nothing obvious had changed on his features, but Wes saw something different in his eyes. Suspicion, maybe. Or merely sorrow. “A man like that doesn’t deserve to believe,” Wes said, “when I spent my whole life trying and still can’t do it.”

  The red horse and the mule were missing when he returned to the house. A couple halters dangling from the hitching rack, Dennis’s truck parked beside the workshop. Wes squinted toward the slopes, but he saw no glint of sun on silver, no movement through the trees. Rio stood alone in the pasture, looking, so far as Wes could tell, none the worse for wear after his struggle during the snowstorm. He watched Wes from across the yard, and though Wes liked the black horse, he didn’t like this. The way he watched.

  Wes opened the passenger door of his truck, twisted his key in the lock on the glove compartment. His revolver was satisfyingly heavy in his hand. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson Special with a six-inch barrel, the kind COs had used way back when officers still carried sidearms. His father’s before him. When he was younger, Wes had been a pretty fair shot with a rifle; he was competent with the revolver, nothing more. It made him nervous in a way the rifle never had. Claire hadn’t liked it, even before that night with Dennis. Urged him more than once to get rid of it.

  He was careful now. The gun wasn’t loaded, and he kept his finger outside the trigger guard. Sighted only at the pile of firewood beside the workshop, and felt guilty even so. Wes shot with his left hand now. Williams hadn’t snapped his left thumb the way he had his right, and Wes had a marginally better grip with that hand. Enough years gone by that it no longer felt en
tirely awkward. He went to the range once or twice a year, fired off a few rounds and paid the price in pain later.

  Wes knew as well as anyone that a weapon could be used against its owner. There was a reason today’s COs checked their firearms at the gate. Dangerous enough to carry what they did. (His handcuffs. Lane’s baton.) But all this talk of Williams. All these memories being stirred up. Wes would be lying if he said the weight of that revolver in his hand didn’t make him feel better.

  He took it inside the house. Laid an old dishtowel on the kitchen table. Found Dennis’s gun-cleaning kit where he’d always kept his own, on top of the safe in the living room. Sat at the table and set to work. The revolver didn’t really need the attention; Wes always cleaned it after he’d fired it. Claire helped him most times, sat silently at the table and completed the fine, precise work he couldn’t manage. She pursed her lips while she did it, held her head cocked a bit too far to one side. She’d never voiced her displeasure at those moments, but she hadn’t needed to. He knew.

  Slow work for his hands. Hard work. Wes wasn’t even halfway done, still feeding a cleaning patch through the barrel, when Dennis and Scott came through the door. Dennis glanced at the revolver, the supplies arrayed across the table, but all he said was “Church good?”

  “Fine,” Wes said. Scott stood beside Dennis. He stared a little, but not much. A Montana kid, his father’s son. Hardly the first gun he’d seen. “You going straight home, Scott?”

  The kid shrugged. “Mom’s working.”

  “You’re welcome to the fiddle, if you want to play.”

  Scott nodded, went to the mantel. Dennis disappeared down the hall, and a moment later Wes heard water running. He traded the cleaning rod for a nylon brush, set to polishing up the rear cylinder opening. The ache already starting to drive in his hands. Scott had the fiddle out now, was warming up with “Cripple Creek.” He was struggling a bit with the string crossings, but Wes held his tongue. Kid needed to work some of it out on his own.

  Dennis returned to the living room, took a chair. He sat silently for a moment, watching Wes. Finally he asked, “Is that it?”

  “The very same,” Wes said. Same gun Dennis had aimed at him. Same gun he’d aimed at Dennis. (He’d wondered, from time to time, why Dennis had used the revolver that night. Wes thought he could have forgiven a punch, maybe even a steak knife impulsively taken up in a fist. But not the revolver.)

  “Let me help you?”

  Wes’s first instinct was to refuse. But the ache in his hands was a mere harbinger of what was in store later, so Wes laid the gun on the towel and let Dennis slide it across the table toward himself.

  Scott was on to “Angelina Baker” now, making a disastrous attempt at playing with drones. Wes waited until he quit in the midst of the B part, a frustrated skittering of the bow over the strings. “Try arching your fingers up a bit more,” he said. He touched his left fingers to his right palm to show the angle. “Land more on the tips, not the pads. Won’t catch the second string so much that way.”

  Scott put the fiddle back up on his collarbone, tried to follow Wes’s advice, with moderate success. But Wes had made him self-conscious, and he soon left “Angelina Baker” behind for simple scales.

  “Good ride?” Wes asked.

  Dennis rolled the revolver’s cylinder against his palm, squinted down each chamber. “Yeah,” he said. “Chilly, though. Wind’s starting to get winter-sharp up in those hills.”

  “Think it’ll be a bad one this year?” Almost a month he’d been here, and still the weather seemed the only safe topic.

  “We’re overdue.” Dennis fed the cleaning rod down the first of the chambers. “Pretty light winters the last couple years.”

  Scott eased off the scales. A few seconds’ silence before he drew the bow again. Somehow, Wes knew what he was playing before the first note had finished ringing. Heard it in the pull of the hair, the way Scott tried to ease off the string toward the end. It took Dennis a few moments more, but by the third note he’d put the revolver down, met Wes’s eyes. He found his voice before Wes did. “Scott . . .”

  That song. His song. Uneven, the timing a little off, the intonation imperfect, all too tentative, but oh, his song.

  “Don’t play that.” It came out a whisper, and Wes said it again, louder. “Don’t. Don’t play that.”

  Scott stopped, but kept the fiddle in place, the bow on the string. He didn’t look angry, or indignant, only mildly confused. “What’s wrong?”

  He must have waited too long to answer, because Dennis jumped in. “Nothing, Scott. It’s just, that song’s got some meaning to our family.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Wes asked.

  Scott brought the fiddle down from his collarbone, settled it on his knee. “It was on one of those tapes you gave me,” he said. “I thought it was pretty.”

  “I wrote that,” Wes said, and he heard his own voice like it was someone else’s. Heard the words come gently, like the annunciation of a discovery.

  “Really?”

  Wes opened his mouth to answer, found no words. It surprised him. His fiddle had been mere wood and varnish, steel and silk, for years now. Decades.

  Dennis watched Wes warily and Scott stared like a chastised child. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

  “It’s all right,” Wes said. He moved to the chair opposite Scott. He held his hands out for the fiddle, and Scott immediately handed it over. Such a fragile thing. So small for its sound. Wes moved his hands over its body: the head, the neck, the shoulders, the waist, belly and back. He knew this fiddle like he knew his own body, like he’d known Claire’s. That intimate. That much a part of him. “It’s called ‘Black River,’” Wes said, “and someday I’ll teach it to you. But you ain’t ready to play it yet.” And I ain’t ready to hear it.

  “Okay,” Scott whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t got to apologize,” Wes said. “I’m just stating a fact.”

  He handed the fiddle back, and then he taught Scott two new tunes. One was an old Scottish air, the other a hymn, and both had been on his mind when he’d first started putting together the melody that would become “Black River.” Scott seemed satisfied with the new tunes, and Wes hummed them for him, over and over, till the kid had the melodies in his own head.

  Afterward, while Scott packed up the fiddle, Dennis handed Wes his revolver. “All polished up,” he said. Wes nodded his thanks. “I could pick something up for dinner after I drop Scott off,” Dennis offered. “You got a preference?”

  “I’ll take him home,” Wes said. “I could stand to get out of the house again.”

  Dennis shrugged. “Fine by me.”

  Wes tugged his coat on and put the revolver in the pocket. Liked the heft of it there. “Bring that fiddle with you,” he told Scott. “I got something to show you.”

  Outside, Wes got in the truck and returned the revolver to the glove compartment, double-checked the lock before he let Scott into the cab. The kid sat with the fiddle case between his knees, the bottom of it resting on the tops of his boots rather than the floor.

  “Things go okay when you saw your father on Friday?” Wes asked, as he steered the truck down the long drive. He weighed the fading sunlight, flicked the headlights on.

  “If by ‘okay’ you mean we had our usual fight and my mom cried her usual tears, then yeah. It went okay.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t take that tone,” Wes said. He pulled onto the frontage road. Passed Farmer coming the other way, raised his hand off the steering wheel in greeting. “I think you got your reasons for feeling like you do.”

  “Yeah, it sucks.” Scott thought for a minute. “But at least after next month I’ll be back in a town where not everyone hates my guts.”

  Wes supposed that was as close to philosophical as the kid could manage. Not bad for a teenager, really. Main Street was quiet, the sidewal
ks all rolled up. Good to see that Sundays were still like that some places. The bars would be busy later, of course—the rotating shift schedule at the prison meant every night was someone’s Friday night—but the streets were empty, most of the shops dark, the signs on the doors flipped to Sorry, We’re Closed.

  The windows of the trailer Scott shared with his mother were dark. “When’s your momma get home?” Wes asked. He pulled up behind a silver hatchback parked in the driveway, killed the ignition.

  “By six, probably.”

  Wes nodded toward the hatchback. “Yours?”

  “Yeah. My mom got it from a guy she works with. Said it was real cheap, but I know we can’t really afford it.”

  “School going okay, then?”

  Scott sighed. Wes counted it a favor that he didn’t do worse. “Mr. Carver, I know you’re trying to look out for me or whatever. But the stuff that sucks is gonna suck, and you can’t do anything about it.”

  Wes thought about arguing the point, but the kid was right, wasn’t he, so Wes just said, “All right,” and nodded to the fiddle, still resting beneath Scott’s hands. “You take that with you.”

  Scott glanced down, took his hands off the fiddle case. “It’s yours.”

  “You need something to play,” Wes said. “You’re talented, no doubt about it. But you’ve still got to practice, and a few minutes here and there when you’re at the house ain’t gonna do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I don’t know if this is gonna make sense to you or not,” Wes said after a minute, “but that fiddle’s got a particular voice I don’t hear from it all the time. It sounded a certain way when I played it . . . before . . . and it doesn’t ever seem to sound that way when other folks try it. Not bad, understand? But not the way I remember it.” Scott was watching him closely, but Wes couldn’t tell what the kid thought of what he was saying. He looked away, squinted through the pocked windshield. Those damned mountains blocking out everything else. “When you started to play . . . my tune . . .” Wes closed his eyes, couldn’t keep the notes from his mind, couldn’t stop them from prickling in his fingertips. “I heard its voice today,” he said finally. “I heard it when you played.” He looked back at Scott, and he felt so weary. No energy left to hide what he felt. No effort to guard his features.