Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  ALSO BY RON RASH

  NOVELS

  One Foot in Eden

  SHORT FICTION

  The Night New Jesus Fell to Earth

  Casualties

  POETRY

  Eureka Mill

  Among the Believers

  Raising the Dead

  SAINTS AT THE RIVER

  SAINTS

  AT THE

  RIVER

  RON RASH

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, New York 10011

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2004 by Ron Rash

  All rights reserved.

  Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and

  events portrayed in this novel either are products

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rash, Ron, 1953–

  Saints at the river / Ron Rash.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8050-7487-2

  1. Women photographers—Fiction. 2. Search and rescue operations—Fiction. 3. Parent and adult child—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Environmentalists—Fiction. 6. Drowning victims—Fiction. 7. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.A698S35 2004

  813’.54—dc22

  2003067630

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and

  premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First Edition 2004

  DESIGNED BY KELLY S. TOO

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Ann

  It need not blame the votary; but it may be able to

  praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully

  according to his rights.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  “The Value of Saintliness”

  SAINTS AT THE RIVER

  Part One

  She follows the river trail downstream, leaving behind her parents and younger brother who still eat their picnic lunch. She is twelve years old and it is her school’s Easter break. Her father has taken time off from his job and they have followed the Appalachian Mountains south, stopping first in Gatlinburg, then the Smokies, and finally this river. She finds a place above a falls where the water looks shallow and slow. The river is a boundary between South Carolina and Georgia, and she wants to wade into the middle and place one foot in South Carolina and one in Georgia so she can tell her friends back in Minnesota she has been in two states at the same time.

  She kicks off her sandals and enters, the water so much colder than she imagined, and quickly deeper, up to her kneecaps, surging under the smooth surface. She shivers. Fifty yards downstream a granite cliff rises two hundred feet into the air to cast this section of river into shadow. She glances back to where her parents and brother sit on the blanket. It is warmer there, the sun full upon them. She thinks about going back but is almost halfway now. She takes a step, and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I’ll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom she tries to set her foot on is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she is a good swimmer and has passed all of her Red Cross courses. The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won’t hit her head on a rock and as she thinks this she’s afraid for the first time and she’s suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it and the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath before the river pulls her under and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into darkness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and all is black and silent and she tells herself don’t breathe but the need grows inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through the chest and throat and as that need rises her mouth and nose open at the same time and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone along with the dark as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism’s colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ghosts.

  That’s what I thought of on an early-May morning as I stared at the blank computer screen, imagined this newsroom forty or fifty years ago. Certainly there would have been more noise: the steady clacking of teletypes and typewriters, the whole room hot and sweating and loud-voiced. Bustling would have been the word to describe it, like a giant beehive, a fumigated one, for there would be cigarette and cigar smoke bluing the air overhead like a stalled cloud. Everywhere would be men, white men, wearing rumpled suits and ties and suspenders. No bottled water or granola bars on these guys’ desks.

  If their ghosts ever wandered back here, they probably assumed the place had been renovated into a hospital wing, for in the second year of a new millennium the fluorescent bulbs spread an antiseptic glow. Faces were shuttered inside cubicles, and the air was smoke-free and 72 degrees year-round. Perhaps most surprising to those men would be the fact that an equal number of women, and of varying skin tones, filled the desks.

  A few things had not changed. Thanks to The Messenger’s skinflint owner, Thomas Hudson, salaries were still low, the hours awful, and, as always, looming deadlines provided chronic doses of stress.

  My managing editor, Lee Gervais, interrupted my thoughts.

  “I do believe Miss Maggie Glenn is daydreaming about me,” he said.

  Lee leaned over my shoulder, his eyes rheumy and red-veined as they took in my blank screen. He was thirty-eight, ten years my senior, but he looked older, the flesh on his face pasty and puffy, what hair he had retreating toward the sides and back of his head. Lee wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt. The skin on the undersides of his arms was loose like an old woman’s. He came from a wealthy family, and part of his softness was the result of never using his muscles for lifting anything heavier than a tennis racket or pitching wedge. The rest came from lifting too many gin and tonics.

  Yes, I almost said, because I knew Lee would have preferred the newsroom of fifty years ago, a place where he could have told dirty jokes between drags on his cigarette and sips from a whiskey bottle kept in the top desk drawer.

  “No, Lee. I’m just trying to get myself motivated on a Thursday morning when I’d rather be sleeping.”

  “I think I can help,” Lee said. “How would you like a photographer’s dream assignment?”

  “George Clooney coming to town?” I asked.

  “Bett
er than that. A chance to work with Allen Hemphill on a sure front-page feature.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  Lee shook his head. “How did an Oconee County farm girl get so cynical?”

  Lee’s low-country accent made girl and gull indistinguishable. It was an accent I knew he had refined the way another man might perfect some convoluted Masonic handshake. And in a way that was what his accent was: a sign of belonging. It spoke of old money and old houses, of Porter-Gaud Academy and Charleston cotillions.

  “A year of working for you,” I said.

  “So are you interested or not?”

  “I’m interested. But why not Phil or Julian?”

  “The assignment’s in Oconee County. Since you know the natives, you can translate mountain speech into standard English for Hemphill.”

  So there is a catch, I thought.

  “Contrary to what you may have heard, Lee, Oconee County’s not the heart of darkness. It’s four hours away, not four centuries.”

  I tried to smile but I’d heard such comments too many times since I’d moved to Columbia.

  “Sounds about right to me,” Lee said. “That part of the state used to be called Dark Corner. I suspect there’s a reason.”

  “I can tell you the reason. Your ancestors down in Charleston were ticked off because mountain people wouldn’t help fight to keep slaves.”

  Lee nodded. “Mountain people. Is that the correct term now? I guess the PC ayatollahs would give me twenty lashes if I said hillbilly.”

  “They should,” I said, my tone no longer playful. “It’s an offensive term.”

  Lee’s act got old quickly, but he had given me good assignments in the twelve months I’d worked with him. He’d also talked Thomas Hudson into giving me a raise at Christmas. Lee wasn’t a bad man, just the kind who mistook insensitivity for masculinity. He had been in Kappa Alpha at the University of Georgia, and behind his desk he’d hung a picture of his fraternity brothers on the porch of their antebellum two-story house. They were dressed as Confederate soldiers. Not mere foot soldiers, of course, but officers with swords and plumed hats. He’d always be a frat boy.

  “Hey, I’m just joking,” Lee said.

  I smiled at him, the same way I’d smile at an eight-year-old boy.

  “What will Hemphill and I be doing in Oconee County?”

  “Something on the girl who drowned up there three weeks ago.”

  “They finally got her out?”

  “No,” Lee said, “and that’s the story. Her father is starting to raise hell, saying the locals aren’t doing enough. He’s trying to get some portable dam company involved, but the tree huggers want to stop that. They’re swearing on their humpback whale CDs it’s against some federal law.”

  “The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. It prohibits anyone from disturbing the river’s natural state.”

  “So you already know about all this?”

  “If you mean the girl, just what I’ve read in the paper. But I know about the Tamassee, and I probably know most of the people involved.”

  “Good. That’s even better. I get the feeling this story is going to break national. The Atlanta Constitution has done a long article, and the Charlotte Observer has someone up there now. I’ve heard CNN may do something as well.”

  Lee glanced at the wall clock. I wondered if he was checking how long before lunchtime and a chance to down a couple of Heinekens at the Capital Grill. I occasionally joined him there, and I’d seen how his eyes closed when he raised the green bottle for his first long swallow. I knew that was probably the high point of his working day, that he must have felt like a climber at altitude getting a hit of bottled oxygen.

  “The story’s getting national play—is that how you were able to convince Hemphill to take it?”

  “Hudson chose the assignment,” Lee said, “and pushed Hemphill hard. Hudson’s evidently getting tired of his highest-paid reporter covering chitlin struts and peach festivals.”

  “So you wanted him on it as well?”

  “I’m only doing what the boss wants, following the party line. But just because he’s won some hotshot awards,” Lee said, frustration in his voice, “it’s not like he’s earned the right to take a good salary and do nothing. If he was seventy and had been doing this fifty years, okay, but Hemphill’s thirty-nine for God’s sake. He hasn’t put in twenty years yet.”

  More than just frustration, I thought, when Lee finished. Perhaps professional jealousy. Perhaps resentment that someone of a lower caste had surpassed him in status.

  Lee glanced at the clock again. “Give Hudson credit. If he can get Hemphill off his ass, get him to write to his capability, this could be one hell of a story. Just pray they don’t get her out before that dam’s built, because you’ll get some good pictures, something UPI or Reuters might pick up.”

  “I think I’ll save my prayers for a worthier cause.”

  “Suit yourself,” Lee said, “but that girl can’t get any deader than she already is. If we get a good story out of what’s happening now, that’s not so terrible. It’s not hurting her.”

  He laid his hand on my shoulder.

  “I need to know by twelve if you want this. Otherwise, I’ll send Julian.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll let you know by twelve.”

  His grip tightened. My Uncle Mark once told me that a man’s hands reveal a lot about him. Lee’s were smoother and softer than any woman’s I’d grown up with.

  Lee let go of my shoulder and stepped out of my cubicle.

  “If you don’t go, you’re disappointing not just me but Hemphill.”

  “How so?” I asked. The question was directed at his back.

  “Hemphill was the one who suggested you,” Lee said, pausing before he walked away. “Since I knew you were from Oconee County it seemed perfect, so I convinced Hudson you were the best choice.”

  I HAD A SHOOT AT THE UNIVERSITY IN THE AFTERNOON, BUT I couldn’t remember if it was at two or two-thirty, so I checked my calendar, a calendar that had no visits to Oconee County marked on it. I hadn’t been back since Christmas and had no plans to return until Aunt Margaret’s birthday in July, but the office party I’d attended two weeks earlier now made me reconsider. Allen and I were the only singles, so it wasn’t surprising we ended up in a corner together, leaning against a wall and sipping cheap white wine from styrofoam coffee cups. We had talked about our backgrounds, which were in many ways similar—both of us growing up in the rural South, both of us the first in our families to go to college. Yet I did most of the talking. It was clear that this was a man who’d spent much of his life letting people reveal themselves to him, not vice versa.

  And I was a woman who spent much of her life focusing on surfaces to reveal deeper meanings. Allen wore a wedding band, although I’d overheard Hudson’s secretary say SINGLE had been checked on his insurance application. I’d glanced at that wedding ring several times, wondering if it symbolized some lingering attachment to an ex-wife. Or was it merely a prop to keep women such as myself at bay, let us know he wasn’t interested?

  But he was interested, at least had seemed so at the time. As the days passed and I hadn’t heard from him I’d begun to second-guess my instincts. Now, however, Lee had confirmed them.

  “Good girl,” Lee said when I stopped by his office on my way out to lunch. “I wouldn’t send you up there if I didn’t know you’d do a great job.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “Two o’clock tomorrow. That gives you plenty of time to make the meeting the Forest Service has set up.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon I’m supposed to photograph a Confederate flag rally.”

  “We getting ready to secede again?” Lee quipped. “I’d better go home and dust off my uniform.”

  “Why bother, Lee? You’d just lose again.”

  “You think so?”

  I tried to imagine Lee on a battlefield in Virginia, shoeless and surviving on ditch water and hardtack. But I knew he�
��d have dropped dead of a heart attack before he marched across Bull Street, much less across the Georgia and Virginia state lines.

  “So what about the rally?” I asked.

  “I’ll send Phil.” Lee smiled. “This will be like a paid vacation. Just take a few photos and we’ll pick up the tab. You’ll even have a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a chauffeur.”

  I went back to my cubicle and stared at a blank screen. The only sounds in the surrounding cubicles were fingertips tapping keyboards, a mouse clicking like a telegraph key. Ten people in the room and not one talking. You would have thought human speech had become obsolete as smoke signals. I wondered how the old newspapermen would react to this muted environment. Would they be able to work without the shouting traffic of typesetters and galley boys, the background roar of presses, the smell and smear of ink?

  I unsealed my coffee. Moist heat rose from the styrofoam, carrying with it the rich, dark odor that always reminded me of fresh-dug earth, not the sandy loam of the piedmont but the black mountain soil flung off shovels to open my mother’s grave.

  Ghosts, I told myself, more ghosts.

  CHAPTER 2

  To get to Tamassee, South Carolina, you leave the interstate at the last exit before the Georgia line. You turn right at the stop sign, and suddenly mountains leap up as though they’d been crouching along the four-lane waiting for the car to turn. You follow Highway 11 into Westminster and turn left on Highway 76, and all the while the mountains get bigger, narrowing the sky until the gap between clouds and earth disappears. The two-lane road coils upward like a black snake climbing a tree. Soon you notice fewer homes and mailboxes and more cornfields and barbed wire and woods. You see the dogwood trees, and it’s like time-lapse photography in reverse. White blossoms that puddled the ground in Columbia re-attach themselves to the limbs, brighten the woods like crown fire. On the highest mountains, green buds still clinch the flowers. The homes, except for a few two-story farmhouses, are small A-frames and trailers. Then there are no houses at all, only curves with wooden guard posts jutting from the roadside. You pass a billboard that says LAUREL MIST: ANOTHER TONY BRYAN PLANNED COMMUNITY. Above the caption a fawn grazes on a golf course. On some of these curves you will see a cross made of wood or styrofoam. Often there is a vase or Mason jar filled with flowers, sometimes a plastic angel or pair of praying hands. Shrines that make the ascent like some Appalachian version of the stations of the cross.