Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  “I hope you don’t say that in front of their wives.”

  “Of course I do,” Mama Tilson said. “Their wives know well as I do it’s the gospel truth.”

  Mama Tilson’s son Ely opened the screen door next to the counter. He’d been tending the barbecue pit and sweat beaded his forehead.

  “This hog’s ready to baste,” he said.

  “Okay,” Mama Tilson said. “You go have a seat, Maggie. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “No rush,” I said. “I’ve got a friend joining me.”

  “This friend wouldn’t happen to be a man by any chance?”

  “He’s just someone I work with.”

  Mama Tilson laughed. “Well, Maggie, your face all ablush argues otherwise, but I won’t pry. You just let me or Becky know when you and that friend of yours are ready to order.”

  I had my choice of where to sit, though the room would fill quickly when people started getting off work. Stools lined the counter and picnic tables filled the room’s center. The barbecue pit was right outside the screen door, and a pungent mix of hickory smoke, vinegar, and cooked pork drifted in through the screen. I walked to the back where booths lined the wall and sat down. Unlike Billy’s store, nothing had changed here except the date on the wall calendar. I let my gaze linger on the battered metal cash register, the stools repaired with duct tape, and the Wurlitzer jukebox that played decades-old 45s.

  I could frame all of it—cash register, stools, and jukebox—into one photograph and create the kind of picture you find in a doctor’s office or on a wall calendar because it invokes a supposedly simpler time and place. A picture that, were I to send it to him, would hang in a prominent place in my brother Ben’s house. A picture he’d point to fondly and explain its place in his past to friends and in-laws.

  The last time we talked, Ben had spoken of bike trips and nights camping out with Billy in the backyard. Listening to him, you would have thought he’d gone through childhood with nothing worse happening to him than a stubbed toe. Someone who didn’t know him well would say he was merely in denial, but I did know Ben well, and I knew the life he’d made for himself as a man. The early history of his life was like history written in chalk on a blackboard—something he could smudge and then erase through sheer good-heartedness.

  But I wasn’t like my brother. I couldn’t let things go. I didn’t even want to. Forgetting, like forgiving, only blurred things. Even Ben, for all his nostalgia, had put the whole width of the United States between him and South Carolina.

  “So what’s good?” Allen said, as he sat down and opened the menu.

  “The special.”

  “I don’t see it,” Allen said.

  “It’s not on the menu,” I said. “You have to ask. Only locals are worthy of the special. But since you’re with me you can order it.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Becky, Mama Tilson’s daughter-in-law, came to take our order.

  “Two specials,” Allen said.

  “Hush puppies or rolls?” Becky asked.

  “Hush puppies,” Allen said.

  “And what to drink?”

  “Sweet tea.”

  Becky left to get our drinks.

  “How’d I do?” Allen asked.

  “She’s got you nailed as a downstate sand lapper.”

  “What gave me away?”

  “The sweet tea.”

  “How so?”

  “That adjective doesn’t exist at Mama Tilson’s. It’s not tea unless it is sweetened. Saying sweet tea here is like asking for pork barbecue.”

  “But I was doing well up until then?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “Though you didn’t tell her if you wanted apple or peach cobbler.”

  “Which one was I supposed to say?”

  “Apple. A county boy is going to pick what he—or at least a good many of his neighbors—make a living from.”

  The picnic tables began to fill with families, and though I didn’t know all the children’s first names I knew the names of their parents and grandparents.

  Earl Wilkinson came in as well and picked up something to go. Earl was a local who’d made good selling rafting trips to business and church groups and anybody else who would pay his fee and sign a waiver. He’d started off with one raft and himself the only guide. Now he had a flotilla of rafts and, during the peak season, several dozen employees. As I watched Earl walk out the door I wondered whose side he’d take at the meeting.

  “Time to give you some background on the Tamassee,” I said when Becky brought our tea. “If I don’t, you’ll have no idea what they’re yelling at each other about tonight.”

  “I’m listening,” Allen said.

  “The most important thing is that the Tamassee is a Wild and Scenic River. That means it’s against federal law to disturb the river’s natural state. A lot of what this is going to come down to is how much change, if any, in the river’s environment can be made. That includes temporary trails, portable dams, and anything else that’s not already there.”

  “But all those things are just for short-term use.”

  “The environmentalists, especially Luke Miller, won’t see it that way. They believe that once you let the law be violated, you open the Tamassee up for all sorts of other exceptions, including ones for developers. And that’s not just an over-reaction. I’ve seen it happen. Twenty years ago the Chattahoochee was as pristine as the Tamassee. Now that watershed’s little more than a housing development with an open sewer running through its middle.”

  “Sounds like you may have already made up your mind about whose side you’re on,” Allen said, but his tone made it unclear if he thought that a good or bad thing.

  “Maybe I have. It’s nice to know there’s something in the world that’s uncorrupted. Something that can’t be bought and cut up into pieces so somebody can make money off it.”

  Allen smiled. “I didn’t realize I’d be eating dinner with Wendell Berry.”

  “Sorry to wax poetic,” I said, “but the Tamassee’s the last free-flowing river in this state. A wild river’s something that can’t be replicated or brought back once it’s gone.”

  Becky wove through the kids and picnic tables with our food.

  “Anything else you need?” Becky said, as she laid our plates before us.

  “We’d like apple cobbler for our dessert,” Allen said.

  “You got it,” Becky said.

  Allen stared at a plate filled with sliced barbecue, baked beans, hush puppies, and cole slaw.

  “It’s not mustard-based.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” I said. “Up here we know mustard is for turkey sandwiches, though some of the old folks do use it as a chest salve.”

  “What flavors it, then?”

  “Vinegar. That and hickory smoke.” I nodded at his plate. “Try it. Then try to tell me with a straight face it’s not the best barbecue you’ve ever tasted.”

  Allen raised a small portion to his mouth, then a larger one. “I may have to rethink my views on barbecue,” he said.

  Maybe it was the food or just the chance to relax after driving four hours, but Allen was talkative. He told me about his newspaper work in Georgia and Virginia before the Washington Post had hired him eleven years ago.

  “What was it like growing up in Chester?” I asked, trying to get something out of him less tied to work.

  “Probably pretty much like growing up here, the only difference being the mountains. There was the mill, but not much else. I did my share of hunting and traipsing in the woods. I fished and swam in a river. A good place to grow up, though when I was eight years old I already knew I’d leave.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “My third-grade teacher had one of those maps that flattens out the whole world. It was so big it covered half a wall. On the first day of class she took a pin and stuck it on the map. This is how big Chester is compared to the rest of t
he world, she’d said. Then she stuck a thumbtack where the pin had been. That’s South Carolina, she’d said. I knew right then I’d have to know more of the world than what a pin or thumb-tack could cover.”

  Becky replaced our plates with bowls of cobbler. I looked around and saw more familiar faces. Kids roamed the room while their parents talked between tables. Hank Williams wailed on the Wurlitzer. Friday night in Tamassee, South Carolina, the pinprick where I’d been born and raised. It wasn’t much, but it was what almost all the kids I’d grown up with had settled for. They had their own kids now and their blue-collar jobs and mortgages, and this was what passed as a luxury, one night a week eating out and some Saturday night music at Billy’s store. But as I looked around the room at several people I’d gone to school with, they seemed, at least tonight, satisfied with their lives.

  “So when you were a child did you know you’d leave here?” Allen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you ever think about coming back here to live?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be too hard to fit back in, especially since I didn’t fit in all that well when I was here.”

  “I can understand that,” Allen said.

  Allen’s hands and forearms were on the table. As he spoke, he closed his left hand and pressed it into his right palm, covering the wedding ring.

  “How do you know so much about the Tamassee? Did you spend a lot of time on it as a kid?”

  “Some. But most of what I know I learned later.”

  “How was that?” Allen asked, his right palm still covering the ring.

  So I told how about Saturday mornings at the community center when I’d helped Luke and the others he’d gathered to win the Tamassee its Wild and Scenic River status. How the following summer I’d worked as a photographer on the river, taking pictures of rafters. I explained about working with Luke, who knew the Tamassee better than anyone else on the planet. I told Allen about cool, dewy mornings when we launched at Canaan Sluice and paddled down to Five Falls, our day spent taking action shots of the rafters. I described evenings we were alone on the river after the tourists and other guides had left, just Luke and me in a canoe as the sun fell behind Sassafras Mountain and the only sounds were the river and an occasional bullfrog.

  “Sounds like Huck and Jim,” Allen said.

  “Yes, but a little more than friendship, at least for a while.”

  A smile creased Allen’s lips. Something else flickered across his face as well—curiosity.

  “I see,” he said. “You think he’d talk to me?”

  “Yes, if you mean about the river.”

  “The river,” Allen said, his smile widening before he filled his mouth with the last spoonful of cobbler. “But who knows what other topics might come up.”

  He checked his watch.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  A TRACTOR WAS PLOWING THE FIELD BEHIND MAMA TILSON’S, and when we stepped out into the parking lot I smelled the rich open-earth odor of a fresh-turned field, a smell I always associated with spring but not necessarily the planting of new life.

  It had been raining on the morning we gathered under the green Jenkins Funeral Home tent to bury my mother. The tent hadn’t been big enough, and we huddled so close to the coffin and the grave it seemed we were crowding Momma out of her own funeral. Especially Daddy—the way he stood next to Preacher Tilson, saying amen after each passage, reading from the Bible himself after Preacher Tilson finished and telling Aunt Margaret what hymn to sing. Then, as we walked back out into a day gray as the gravestones, Daddy told Preacher Tilson it was finally over and what a blessing that was. I marveled at how even at the moment when all five of us could hear the rasp of shovels, the dry splash of dirt against the varnished wood, he couldn’t acknowledge we’d never hear Momma’s voice again, couldn’t realize that the best way to honor Momma’s silence was not to speak but instead to listen to the sound of the shovels gathering dirt and the dirt hitting the wood and, all around that, the steady hush of the rain. The rest of us realized it but Daddy didn’t. He kept on talking, all the way to the car.

  I knew something else as we moved through that stone maze the dead had placed between us and the rest of our lives: It wasn’t only Daddy I was angry with but Momma as well. Because now I was left to set things right between us. Momma had surely sensed my anger as well, because she could always intuit things like that in a way Daddy never had. She may have even believed my resentment was about having to nurse her those weekends, that I was twenty years old and wanted my Friday and Saturday nights for something other than helping my mother die. She’d never asked about the anger, never acknowledged it. But that was how it had always been. Silence then and silence now.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Tamassee Community Center was little more than cinder blocks, tables, and a few dozen metal folding chairs. The roof needed new shingles, and the one window had a piece of plywood where a pane had been. Hawkweed and broom sedge sprouted thick around the edges, some of the plants sortieing out to rise in the gravel parking lot. People voted in this building and occasionally a revival or gospel sing would be held, but passersby would most likely take it as a boarded-up honky-tonk.

  But not tonight. The parking lot was full, mainly with pickups. Luke’s battered blue Ford Ranger was among them, on its back window a faded decal with EARTH FIRST printed beneath an upraised fist. I did not see my father’s truck, and that in itself said a lot about how sick he was. He was a man who’d want to have his say in this matter.

  Allen pulled off on the roadside behind a Jaguar.

  “That car looks out of place. You know who it belongs to?”

  “Nobody I know,” I said. “Maybe some big-shot reporter. Definitely not a photographer.”

  “I’d say more likely a newspaper owner,” Allen said, picking up the pocket tape recorder that lay beside my camera.

  Inside, people already stood against the walls, but there were two empty chairs in the last row next to Billy.

  “Saving those seats for somebody, Billy?” I asked.

  “None other than your own lovely self,” he said, “and of course your companion.”

  I stashed the Nikon and backpack under my chair, looked for Luke, and found him in the front row. His face was tan, as it was year-round, because no matter how cold or high the river, he ran it almost every day. He wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans, gray wool socks, and Tevas. Knowing Luke, the shirt was probably the same one he’d worn eight years earlier when we’d gathered in this same building.

  From the beginning, I had known Luke was interested in me—from the way his eyes often found mine when he spoke to the whole group, the way he lingered by the table where I worked, how he began to come to Henson’s Store on Saturday nights and always seemed to end up talking to me more than anyone else there. Apparently his interest had been obvious to others as well. I’d look up and catch Daddy watching us, and he was never smiling.

  One Sunday afternoon Luke came out to the house. Daddy got to the front door before I could, still wearing his dark pants and white dress shirt. He’d taken off his cuff links and rolled up the sleeves, revealing two forearms muscled by decades of lifting and hauling.

  “Maggie asked to borrow this book so I thought I’d bring it over,” Luke said, holding out a copy of The Clearcutting of Paradise.

  Daddy took the book from Luke’s hand and held it with his thumb and forefinger a few moments as if weighing it. “What do you reckon this book’s made of, son?”

  Luke smiled slightly. “I get your point, Mr. Glenn. But there’s a difference between clearcutting and responsible timber harvesting.”

  “I’ve been cutting pulpwood since I was twelve years old,” Daddy replied. “I don’t do it full-time like Harley, but there’s been lean times when pulpwood money was all that got the bills paid.”

  “I respect that,” Luke said.

  “No, you don’t,” Daddy said. “If you did
you wouldn’t be trying to put people like Harley out of work.”

  He handed the book back to Luke.

  “Maggie don’t need to read this,” Daddy said.

  I moved closer to the door, close enough that Luke could see me. But his eyes were on Daddy, not me.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d give it to her anyway, Mr. Glenn,” Luke said.

  Daddy closed the door in Luke’s face.

  “You didn’t have a reason to treat him like that,” I said, as Luke’s pickup bumped back down the drive. “He just wanted to share a book.”

  I kept my voice low because Momma was sleeping.

  “He’s been up here not even a year and wants to tell us how to live,” Daddy said. “What we can do and not do, when Glenns and Winchesters have been in this valley two hundred years.”

  Daddy looked at me, the anger clear on his face if not in the volume of his voice.

  “And you supporting them,” Daddy said. “If that’s what going to college does to you, I ought not have let you go in the first place.”

  “You didn’t let me go,” I said. “I went, and with no help from you. I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t have a scholarship.”

  “No help but eighteen years of clothing and feeding you,” Daddy said. “Keeping a roof over your head. And it didn’t seem to make no difference to you when it was pulpwood money that bought your back-to-school clothes and paid the grocery and doctor bills.”

  “Maybe there wouldn’t have been so many doctor bills if you hadn’t needed a pack of cigarettes so bad.”

  Daddy didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The anger that tensed his features became something harder to define, more unsettling.

  Momma coughed in the back room. I could hear the mattress springs as she shifted in the bed.

  “I ain’t letting you take my truck to no more of those meetings,” he finally said.

  “I’ll get a ride with Billy then,” I said, “and if he isn’t going I’ll walk.”