Bright Flows the River

by Taylor Caldwell

  A great terror seized Guy and made him numb. Then he reached out and took Sal by the arm again and she fell against him and put her head on his shoulder and cried aloud, enormous sobs that racked her from head to foot. She clutched him. “Help him, help him!” she moaned. “I love him, even if nobody else does!”

  Guy’s lips were thick and icy and his heart began to pound like a stricken machine. His father—his only friend, the father he had loved so intensely since childhood. The world felt empty, forlorn, forsaken, abandoned, and the terror in him was increasing. “No,” he muttered. “Not Pa.” The wind tossed particles against his cheek like cold fire. A pale crystal sun had come out and intensified the sensation in Guy of desolation and wild despair, of ruin and devastation. Never before, in his lonely young life, had he felt the horror of unalleviated loneliness. The whole landscape was a white hell and he in it, alone. There was no voice, no change, no being.

  He tried to speak again to the woman clutched to his body. His voice was just above a whisper. “It may only be ulcers.” Sal shook her head violently.

  “No, no, he is dying. I can’t make him go to a doctor. Help!”

  “Yes,” he said. After a moment he said, “He mustn’t know we’ve talked. I’ll talk to him, Sal. Go back to the house. I want to think a minute.” He had to make her go; he was too weak to move just yet. She looked up into his face, her own distorted with anguish, but there was now a little hope in it. She withdrew herself, and he took the basket from her. “I’ll get the eggs.”

  “Couple of weeks ago, I said I’d do the milking, and I thought he’d get to argufying, but he only said, ‘Thank you, Sal, but just for a little while.”

  She went back to the house and Guy stood, a dark haze now moving before his eyes. He tried to draw deep breaths but his ribs felt like iron, unmoving. Clouds of vapor from his mouth puffed out, resembling the gasps of a faltering engine. There was suddenly a hard and monstrous pain in his temples. The agony in him quickened. Then he forced himself to go into the chicken shed. He never remembered gathering eggs, and then he found himself walking slowly and feebly towards the house, the basket feeling too heavy in his numb hand. He had the sensation that he had grown very tall and fragile and that his legs were mere bending sticks. He had a sudden overpowering need to urinate, and he did so, in the snow, fumbling in the cutting wind. The terror was almost more than he could bear; not even during the war, and under fire, had he felt such a crushing fear; such a wild desire to run, to hide, to look for shelter. There was no shelter. Not even when he had known about Marlene Kaufmann, that young murdered German maiden, done to death by Russian soldiers by rape in a Berlin subway, had he felt such blind rage against life, such unbearable suffering, such tormented denial.

  One awful word insinuated itself into his laboring mind, but he refused to say it to himself.

  The weight of the door was almost too much for him. He entered the hot kitchen and saw his father standing at the window, smiling and puffing on his pipe. He turned when he saw Guy. “I thought Sal had brought the eggs,” he said.

  “I sent her back, it was too cold,” replied Guy. He could hear his own voice from a hollow distance. Sal took the basket from him and again her eyes were desperately imploring. He nodded. He looked at his father’s back, saw his emaciated body, the fallen shoulders. But nothing could have been more tranquil than Tom’s attitude.

  “I like spring and summer,” said Tom. “They’re like a quilted spread thrown over the hills and the land, all colors mixed together, and warm. But the winter—I like it best. Look at the land and the hills and mountains, son. Like white embossed velvet, laid over everything. Austere. Noble. The sun’s out. The hillocks of snow have hollows made by purple knives carving new ivory. Come and look. What a beautiful world.”

  “Pa,” said Guy. “I’ve got to talk to you. Please sit down.” His voice sounded as if it came from a far and echoing distance. Tom turned, surprised. He went back to his chair. There was a clarified light in the kitchen now and by it Guy could see the full ruin of his father.

  Tom’s fair skin was a grayish yellow, the lines deeper, the declivities sharper. There was a skull-like appearance about his smiling face. His teeth appeared larger between ashy lips. But his blue eyes were living and vital as usual, the thin beard as jaunty. Guy closed his eyes for a moment. God curse me, he thought. Why didn’t I see this before? No. I was too wrapped up in my own sullen reveries and resentments and wants and demands, my own damned self-pity. I put a wide space between us. I wouldn’t let him come close—because I was afraid of what he was saying. Whether I was right or wrong doesn’t matter now. I wouldn’t let him come close, after all those years. I gave him the face of a shitting little bastard who wants his own way and sees nothing else. I gave him the face of a child when he needed a man. He needed a son.

  “What’s wrong, son?” asked Tom, and for the first time Guy heard the effort his father had to make to speak.

  Guy pulled his chair closer to his father’s and held him with his eyes, which kept dimming in his rage. “Pa, don’t kid me any longer. I—I’ve seen it for some time.” Sal made a faint noise near the stove. “You’re sick, Pa. I didn’t like to speak about it before, but now I have to.” There was such a thickness in his throat, dry and hard. “You’ve got to see a doctor at once.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Tom, with indulgence. “Nothing wrong with me but age. We all come to that, eventually.” His antic face, his satyr’s face, changed, became melancholy as well as amused. “What is it the Bible says? ‘The days of our years are threescore and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow. For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.’ Yes. And Panin says, ‘In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and the days long.’ Yes, son. In youth is the time to prepare for old age. I did that. I’m content.”

  Guy bent his head. Tom looked at him with unusual gravity. “If you want contentment later, boy, start looking for it now for your middle age and old age. When you’re fifty it is almost too late—and fifty will be on you before you realize it, with all its doubts and its glooms and regrets. Then tomorrow you’ll be old. What have you then but yourself, and a love to warm you, if you’re very lucky? A love to warm you.” He glanced at Sal, who was gazing at him with agonized love. Tom slightly shook his head, as if in regretful pain. Then once more he was smiling. “Son?” he said. “Never reject love, in your arrogance or because you want no commitment or involvement. Hell, I’m wandering in my old age. It’s age, not youth, that has long thoughts, despite what the poets say. Well, if you reject love, feeling yourself of one piece and not needful, then you’ll have barren years and cold.”

  Guy, with acute intuition, knew that his father was trying to distract him from the idea of medical attention. He lifted his head. “Pa,” he said, “I am going to take you to a doctor tomorrow. If you refuse, then I’ll leave now, and I’ll never come back.” He wanted to add: I couldn’t stand it.

  Father and son stared at each other in silence. Then Tom said with gentleness, “You mean that, don’t you, son?”

  “Yes, Pa, I do, so help me God.”

  “Tomorrow’s Monday.”

  “The hell with tomorrow, and work. This is more important. Well, Pa?”

  “I don’t like doctors, son. But if you had been one—”

  Guy shut his eyes for an instant. “Never mind what you feel about doctors. Well, Pa?” He stood up. “Do I take you tomorrow, or do we say goodbye?”

  Tom chuckled. “Always knew there was steel in you somewhere, kiddo. Now, let’s discuss this—”

  “No discussion, Pa. Yes or no?” He reached for his coat.

  Tom gave an exaggerated sigh and looked humorously at Sal, who was one listening ear. She was nodding fervently. “Jerry’s right,” she said. “And if you don’t listen to him, Tommy, then I’ll pack my things and I’ll go, too.”

  Tom spread out his hands and shook hi
s head over and over. “You want to kill me off. That’s what. Doctors and their brews! Remember what Holmes said? ‘I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica as now used, could be sunk in the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.’ Correct. Can they cure old age?”

  Guy felt beset. “I’m afraid, Pa, you’ve been substituting quotations for common sense.”

  “That’s the way to get a reputation for being an erudite man. Saves time, and study. All professors know that.”

  A huge nausea hit Guy’s viscera. “Pa, it’s getting late. Yes or no? Now.”

  Tom again gave that elaborate sigh of surrender. “All right. If it makes the two of you happy.”

  Sal uttered a cry and ran to him and pulled his head to her big breast. He leaned against it, and Guy saw his exhaustion, saw his eyes. He turned his head again, but not before he saw his father put his arms about Sal like a child, like a child who was home. Sal was weeping. Guy felt another huge pain, a new desolation.

  Tom was very lively at early dinner. He had never spoken so well and so pithily, while his dying face shone with affection for these two he loved. He kept touching Sal’s hand and smiling. He kept looking at Guy with profound emotion. “I’m a lucky man,” he said. “A very lucky man, with you two.”

  Guy noticed that he ate almost nothing of the good dinner, and that, as he swallowed, he winced. And I never looked, I never saw, he said to himself. There’s no forgiveness for that. It was plain to see, but I never looked. The wood stove crackled, the day darkened. No one really tasted the dinner. Death was the fourth guest.

  At four o’clock Guy looked at his steel Army-issue watch and then called his mother before she left for the church supper. “Ma. I’m not going home tonight. Pa and I—I’m taking him to the doctor tomorrow.”

  She almost screamed, “But tomorrow’s Monday! Work. You’ll lose a day’s pay!”

  He nearly hated her. “Did you hear me, Ma? Pa’s sick—I think. He needs a doctor.”

  “Why doesn’t that sinning woman of his take him? Why you, Guy, wasting your time? Let his fancy woman take him, that bad wicked woman, everybody knows what she is—”

  Guy glanced at Sal and his father. They were holding each other’s hands in brimming love, and all at once Guy envied his father.

  “Goodbye, Ma,” he said, “I’ll be home Tuesday. Perhaps.” He hung up.

  Later, when it was dark and the winter storm was raging and bellowing and rattling his windows, he lay in his old room on his old sagging bed, and could not sleep. Conscience tore him like tenterhooks. Tom and Sal lay in their ancient brass bed, and Guy knew that Sal held Tom in her arms. Tom groaned softly through the night and Guy sweated with anguish. I never knew, I never knew, I refused to know, rang the mournful accusation in his mind. He heard Sal murmuring like a mother. The dolorous wind was an accompaniment. In that warm brass bed there was love and consolation and vows, and it needed no speech. What have I? thought Guy.

  He could not sleep. He got up, carefully shut all doors. He turned on the radio in the still-warm kitchen, as softly as possible. The New York Symphony Orchestra announced that its next selection would be Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Guy had heard it once before, in Munich, that shattered city. He had heard it later after Marlene had been so monstrously murdered. As the first muted strains began he could see Marlene’s delicate little face, her pale long hair, her great blue eyes, her tinted cheeks, her frail little body, her expression of bewildered innocence, her trusting hesitant smile. An arctic moon was running between clouds outside the kitchen window, bloated and glittering, alternately causing the snow-filled landscape outside to gleam like polished marble, then obliterating it to gray ash and black shadows.

  The music climbed into a crashing crescendo, and behind his closed eyes Guy could see enormous fiery-white wheels whose spokes were interwoven with flashing swords; he could see mountains falling and the land roaring up into mountains—and then the tender melody like the touch of a translucent hand. He thought of his father and he began to weep as he had never wept since he was a child.

  He thought he must have fallen asleep out of his exhausting pain, for he opened his eyes. His father, in his old-fashioned nightshirt, was standing on the threshold, listening and looking at Guy, and he was not smiling now. He held out his hand and said, “Son.”

  Guy could scarcely get up and walk to him and take that febrile hand, so dwindled in his now. He could not speak. Tom put his other hand on his shoulder and said again, consolingly, “Son.”

  He took away his hand and returned to his bedroom and Guy still had not spoken. But he felt that something invincible had touched and comforted him.

  The early-morning sun was clear and blinding on the snow, and the wind had gone and everything was immobilized into black and white. Sal had prepared a good breakfast. Nothing was said of the night before. Tom seemed the only one of the three who was at ease and carefree. He studied the determinedly stolid faces near him with amusment. He drank a little milk, a cup of coffee, and ate a piece of toast. “We’re not going to a funeral, you know,” he said. “The doctor you called so early at the Cranston Memorial Hospital this morning, Jerry, must have been pulled out of bed.”

  “He’s waiting for us,” said Guy. The food was sickening in his mouth. There were many things they had these days—for that—if it was that. He was weary and drained, for he had slept but three hours. Sal’s full plump face was pale and very still; she could not take her eyes from Tom. He had always been sparrowlike, but now his small coat hung on him as from sticks. Sal wrapped a woolen scarf about his neck, firmly pulled on his farmer’s cap. She had hardly spoken a word this morning. She put her arms about Tom and kissed him over and over. “Come home soon,” she said. He patted her round full shoulder, touched her opulent breast. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Have lunch for us. We’ll be hungry, sweetheart.”

  Guy went out to his car and brushed the heavy snow from the windshield and studied the whole situation. He went to the barn for a shovel and cleared the wheels. He asked Sal for a blanket for his father. “Good God,” said Tom, “I’m not an infant.” But he pulled the rough folds about him, and tried to suppress a shiver. “Damn growing old,” he said. He lit his pipe, and Guy lit a cigarette. Carefully starting, Guy rolled slowly down to the road, blasphemously praying the car would not be stalled in the drifts. But the little vehicle sturdily found its way and they were on the road, just recently plowed. Tom looked through the window, wiping the gathering mist with his mittened hand. He said, “Such a beautiful world. A thousand lifetimes isn’t enough to appreciate it.” He smoked with contentment, waving away the spiraling little cloud that rose from his pipe. There had been no regret, no sadness, in his high shrill voice. It had in it a note of deep tranquillity and calm. Guy’s eyes were burning and sometimes he could not see to drive.

  He said with irascibility, to keep from weeping again, “I thought I’d have to drag you out today. You’re so damned obstinate, Pa, almost as bad as Ma.”

  Tom laughed. “Would you really have said ‘goodbye, forever,’ if I had refused?”

  “Yes,” said Guy.

  Tom looked at him admiringly. “Damned if I don’t believe you! And Sal, too.” He began to sing, almost in a falsetto. “‘Woman is fickle, false altogether, light as a feather, borne on the summer wind!’ Not Sal, though. She’s a real old Mother Earth. A woman. A woman is a rara avis in the world now, Jerry. Oh, the whole fucking place is full of females these days, all dainty gestures and big glistening smiles and hips and padded breastplates, and brass and dancings, and pretensions and airs and graces. But they’re not women; all their looks are artificial and they have artificial souls, too. Not an honest emotion in ten thousand of them. Not a throb of genuine feeling. Even their tears are fake, and probably perfumed, too. I bet their genitals never felt one joyous ecstasy. They’re too careful of their curled hair to let it get mussed in a bed. But Sal. She is a woman. I hope you find a re
al woman like Sal, Jerry. But you’ll have to look hard. Don’t go off your head at the sight of a mere pretty face. You can find them in every Woolworth’s. Look behind the face and the silly gestures. Look into a woman’s soul, that is, if a woman has a soul.”

  “You’re a real Turk,” said Guy.

  Tom laughed once more. “Remember what Nietzsche said? ‘When you walk among women do not forget your whip.’ Correct. Most women need the whip now. Find someone like Sal. If you can. Sal was never a beauty, thank God, and you mustn’t look for that. Few real women are beauties. They are too busy taking care of what a woman should take care of to look in the mirror and paint up their eyes.”

  Oh, God, Pa, you don’t have to make conversation just to cheer me up or something, Guy thought with the deepest pain of his life. I can hear how weak your voice is, Pa, and what an effort it is for you to laugh. And I never noticed it before yesterday. Forgive me, Pa. Guy said, “If I find the sort of woman you advise, I hope you’ll dance at my wedding.”

  Tom was silent. Guy gave him a quick glance, and saw that his father was grave. Then Tom said in a low but emphatic voice, “You can bet on that, Jerry, you can sure bet on that.”

  They did not speak again until they rolled into the city, where brilliant light reflected on all windows and the roofs tumbled with snow and a fresh wind blew skeins and scarfs of whiteness into the bright air. Drifts and ridges of snow smoked with a mist like fog. Cars were all about them. “Glad that stupid hospital is near the suburbs,” said Tom, and his yellowish skull-like face was drawn. “Not too far to go, not too far to get back.”