Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  Kowalsky stepped closer to the podium again. “You’ve made your speech,” he said to Luke. “Anybody else have anything to say or ask Mr. Brennon?”

  “I got a question for you.” Joel spoke from the side of the room. Like Randy and Ronny he wore a SEARCH AND RESCUE cap. Joel was tall and broad-shouldered like my father, and his jaw had the jut and set of that side of the family. His last name might be Lusk but he looked one-hundred-percent Glenn. He was like my father in other ways as well.

  “You say you’re from Illinois, right, Mr. Brennon?”

  “That’s right,” Brennon said. “Carbondale.”

  “These portable dams of yours,” Joel said, every syllable drawn out like taffy being stretched, “you’ve used them on rivers in Illinois?”

  I didn’t know where Joel was going with his questions, but he was doing it in classic southern good-old-boy fashion—as if he were dumb as a fence post. But he wasn’t dumb, and whatever was on his mind was something he’d thought out or he wouldn’t have spoken in the first place.

  “That’s right,” Brennon said. “We’ve used them on a number of streams and rivers, not just in Illinois but Indiana as well.”

  “Flat slow-moving streams and rivers,” Joel said, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Implying what?” Kowalsky said, taking a step from the podium, a step closer to Joel.

  “I ain’t implying nothing, I’m saying it,” Joel said. “A whitewater river’s not like any other. Things that work on a flatland river won’t work on the Tamassee.”

  “I think Mr. Brennon knows what his dam can do better than you,” Kowalsky said.

  “But he doesn’t know this river,” Joel said, “not the way those of us who’ve lived here all our lives know it.”

  It was obvious Kowalsky wasn’t used to other people having the last word. His pupils seemed to contract. His glare swept across the room before settling again on Joel. Maybe he expected Joel to lower his eyes, but Joel stared back steadily, his eyes as implacable as Kowalsky’s were intense, which only infuriated Kowalsky more. He let his glare shift slightly to include Ronny and Randy Moseley and several of the other men wearing SEARCH AND RESCUE caps. Luke’s poetic imagery was forgotten now.

  “Maybe you hillbillies don’t know nearly as much about that river as you think,” Kowalsky said. “I sure as hell haven’t seen any indication you do.”

  If Kowalsky hadn’t said hillbillies, Joel probably would not have replied the way he did. Things might have ended right there with Joel shrugging his shoulders or saying something like we’ll see.

  Joel spoke, his voice soft but loud enough. “We know enough not to let a twelve-year-old girl wade out in the middle of it during spring flooding.”

  “God damn you for saying that,” Kowalsky shouted at Joel. Brennon grabbed Kowalsky’s arm, holding him back.

  That was enough for Walter Phillips. He joined Brennon and Kowalsky beside the lectern. “Let’s try to keep this civil,” he said, but we were way past that now. The room had grown as loud and animated as a tobacco auction. Groups formed near the front and in the aisles. Shouting among themselves, Luke and his river rats formed the largest, the most strident. Phillips stood behind the lectern and let people have at it a few minutes, maybe hoping that it would go out on its own, like a brush fire.

  Joel turned and walked toward the door in slow, measured strides. He’d had his say and saw no further reason to hang around.

  I looked at Allen. He leaned forward in his chair, his attention fixed on Kowalsky.

  “Joel was out of line saying that,” Billy said, “but I can hardly blame him, especially after that hillbilly crack. Kowalsky started badmouthing the Search and Rescue Squad soon as he got here. They’ve put up with a lot from that man.”

  Allen turned to Billy, his face incredulous.

  “That man’s lost his daughter,” Allen said. “He just wants to get her out of the river, for God’s sake.”

  Allen’s outburst surprised me as much as it did Billy. In his book Allen had written about a massacre of Tutsis inside a Catholic church. In precise clinical detail he’d described the two hundred men, women, and children strewn around the altar. One phrase in particular had stuck in my mind: “a jigsaw puzzle of human limbs.”

  It was good to see him react emotionally, for as much as I had admired Allen’s writing I’d found its unflinching gaze disconcerting. Reading his book had made me wonder, not for the first time in my life, if seeing too much suffering could overwhelm the heart. In my more generous moments I had wondered the same about Luke.

  “PHILLIPS HAD BETTER WATCH OUT,” BILLY SAID, AFTER SEVERAL minutes passed, “or this thing is going to get ugly real fast.”

  Sheriff Cantrell must have felt the same way, because he quickly stepped to the lectern and spoke to the ranger. Hubert McClure edged down the wall closer to Luke’s group.

  I searched the room for Earl Wilkinson. I was curious as to which side he was taking. He stood by himself near the back door. Although he hadn’t been as instrumental as Luke, he’d done his share to get the Tamassee its Wild and Scenic status. But he was also a businessman. As Earl put more and more rafts on the river, some people, including Luke and Billy, had come to believe he was more interested in protecting his profit margin than the Tamassee.

  Sheriff Cantrell stood conspicuously by the table as Walter Phillips stepped up to the podium.

  “This meeting won’t go on until people get back in their seats,” Phillips shouted above the din. “Otherwise I’m adjourning it right now.”

  People lowered their voices and sat down.

  “Does anyone who hasn’t yet spoken have anything to say?” Phillips asked.

  Harley Winchester stood up. He’d been sitting in the back row on the right side so his good eye faced the lectern. Harley wore steel-toed brogans and overalls. Sweat and dirt and grease stained his V-neck T-shirt.

  “I got something to say.”

  Harley looked the room over, his dead right eye milky blue, unfocused. He’d lost that eye ten years ago while logging just outside the Tamassee’s Wild and Scenic boundary. Someone had hammered a nail into a big oak, and Harley’s chain saw hit it and sent a piece deep enough to plunge his right eye into darkness forever. Harley held Luke responsible for that nail being in the tree. Not that Luke had necessarily done it himself but that whoever did had been one of Luke’s followers.

  “I know how they done it twenty years ago,” Harley said, his eye sweeping across the room. “They’d throw some dynamite in that pool and let the concussion free her. But things have changed on the river now, changed a lot. Twenty years ago I could cut timber anywhere on the Tamassee I wanted. I could cut a new logging road or float timber downstream if I needed. Now I can’t log within a quarter mile of it. If I was to throw a rock in that river I’d probably get arrested.”

  Harley let his left eye settle on Luke.

  “Of course it’s different for rafting people and photographers. They can use that river to make money and then tell everybody else not to touch it, even to get a body out.”

  For a few seconds nobody said a word. Harley was in his fifties, but he could still outwork any of the other loggers. He carried a lot of weight in his belly now, but his arms were muscled like a pro football player’s. He had a reputation for being strung tight as new barbed wire. People up here liked to stay on Harley’s good side.

  Luke did not bother to stand up.

  “A camera or a raft accepts the river and its corridor as is, Harley. Nothing is altered.”

  “Touché,” Billy said softly.

  “Maybe we are worried a little too much about the river and not enough about people,” said a man near the front I’d never seen before.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Billy.

  “Tony Bryan.”

  “So that’s Bryan.”

  “Yes,” Billy said. “In the whole of his carpetbagging flesh.”

  I’d expected him to be older, at least in his fifti
es, not closer to forty. He was dressed in a green short-sleeved cotton shirt and khakis. What looked to be a Rolex glistened on his wrist.

  “Well,” said Billy. “Seems we’ve got all the major players present and accounted for.”

  Laurel Mist was Bryan’s development. He’d built it two years ago and already sold all forty houses. According to the full-page ads I read each Sunday in The Messenger, he was ready to begin Phase Two, forty new homes bordering Licklog Creek, right up against the Tamassee’s buffer zone.

  “I agree with this man,” Bryan said, nodding toward Harley. “Maybe the Tamassee should be allowed to serve all the people in this community.”

  Billy snorted. “Harley’s exactly the kind of person Bryan built that guardhouse to keep out.”

  “Anybody can use that river who wants to,” Luke said, standing up now and facing Bryan. “You can fish in it, float it, swim it, and picnic on its banks. You just don’t have the right to destroy it.”

  “Who said anything about destroying it?” Bryan said. “You tree huggers never see beyond your own narrow focus. I’ve got just as much of an investment in keeping the Tamassee pristine as you do. That river’s natural beauty is the best selling card I’ve got. Why would I hurt my own investment?”

  The girl beside Luke stood up. “By the time the damage is evident, you’ll have those lots and houses sold. And you know that, you bastard.”

  Bryan shook his head and smiled. “The greedy developer come to destroy Eden. That’s the oldest cliché in the environmental-wacko handbook, isn’t it.”

  “No,” Luke said, “just the truest. Something only becomes a cliché when it happens repeatedly.”

  “Anything else?” Walter Phillips asked quickly, and you could tell he hoped hard there wasn’t. “Then this meeting’s adjourned.”

  I took my Nikon out of its case and shot Kowalsky as he said something to Phillips, then took a couple of shots of the crowd as they dispersed.

  “I’m going up and talk to the father,” Allen said, and moved through the crowd toward the front.

  Luke and his entourage had left their seats and were heading for the door. I wondered if he’d seen me.

  “Luke did pretty well,” Billy said, standing up as well once the aisles cleared. “He was downright diplomatic, at least by his standards.”

  “Yes, he was,” I said.

  Allen shook hands with Kowalsky and Brennon at the podium while Myra Burrell sat at the table writing. Walter Phillips stood off to the side, watching the last of the crowd file out the door. The symbolism was perhaps a little too obvious, but as long as the caption wasn’t something heavy-handed like A man alone or Man in the middle it could be a striking photograph. I raised my camera, focused on Phillips, and kept snapping until I’d used my remaining film.

  Walter Phillips did not notice his picture being taken. He had appeared timid, even intimidated, during the meeting, but his profession tended to attract people more comfortable in solitude than in public. He was also new. I hoped that in these unguarded moments I might get one shot that revealed more about the man than had been discernible so far.

  “I’m out of here,” Billy said. “If you’re still around tomorrow night, come by the store. Randall and Jeff are going to play. We’ll get Margaret to sing.”

  In a few minutes everyone had left except for Allen, Brennon, Kowalsky, and Bryan, who had joined the other men up front. Phillips was waiting to lock up. There had been only three other reporters and one photographer in the room. Evidently the rest felt the real action was on the river itself.

  I returned my camera to its case and walked outside. The air was cool, rinsed of the humidity of Columbia. The evening’s first lightning bugs sent off their tiny flares as they hovered over weed tops. A bullfrog grunted in the creek that ran behind the community center as night settled into the valley like a slowly filling bath.

  Luke had nearly drowned on a June evening like this one. Three days of rain had transformed the Tamassee into a brown torrent, but Luke wanted to run Bear Sluice in his kayak. We were on shore with several of the other river rats, all excellent kayakers themselves and not above taking a few risks. We’d been watching the river since midafternoon, waiting for it to clear and settle back into its banks. The others weren’t about to go in and urged Luke to wait for morning as well. But Luke went in anyway and, as always, refused to wear a life jacket. Wearing one was cheating, he always said.

  The hydraulic caught the kayak, sucked it in. A few moments later the kayak bobbed up like a cork, but Luke was still underwater. It seemed he was under an hour, but no more than three or four minutes passed before he emerged, neck and knees tucked to his chest as if shot out of a cannon.

  He’d done what you are taught to do in such a situation—curl your body into a tight ball so the hydraulic spits you out. As Luke waded out of the water, his chest was heaving. He did not look frightened or even relieved.

  “I thought you were going to drown,” I had said, as we walked downstream to retrieve the kayak. I’d been trying to match Luke’s composure, but my voice trembled as I spoke.

  “I was fine,” Luke said.

  He had stopped walking and turned to me. The look on his face was more than just serene, it was beatific, like the faces of the raptured in Renaissance paintings. I thought he might be in shock.

  “I didn’t tuck until the last moment,” Luke said. “Part of me wanted to stay. That hydraulic was like the still center of the universe.”

  The kayak had lodged on a sandbar. Luke had started to shiver, so I made him stay on shore while I waded out to it.

  “It was like entering eternity,” Luke had said as we’d made our way back up to Bear Sluice. “That’s what the Celts believed—that water was a conduit to the next world. Maybe they were right.”

  Herb Kowalsky might not agree with what Luke had said about leaving the dead in the river, but Luke, unlike Kowalsky, had been to that place, and for Luke it had been beautiful.

  JOEL’S TRUCK WAS STILL IN THE PARKING LOT, AND I WASN’T surprised when he called my name. He was behind the community center near the creek. The orange tip of his cigarette hovered before him as he stepped toward me.

  “I didn’t want to be in there no longer, but I didn’t want to leave without speaking to you,” Joel said.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said, and gave him an awkward half hug.

  “I probably shouldn’t have spoken to that man the way I did,” Joel said, “but he’s been ragging on us ever since he got up here.”

  “That’s what Billy said.”

  “You’d think losing a daughter to that river would make him understand how dangerous our job’s been.”

  Joel took a final draw from his cigarette.

  “When’s Aunt Margaret getting back?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “So I’ll see you both at Billy’s tomorrow night?”

  “We’ll be there.”

  Joel threw down his cigarette and crushed it into the gravel with his boot heel.

  “I best go,” he said. “If I stay I’ll just get in more trouble.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I said.

  Joel got in his truck and pulled out of the parking lot. For a few moments part of me followed that truck past Billy’s store and down Damascus Church Road to a farmhouse I knew every bit as well as the one my father lived in. “Come on home with me,” Aunt Margaret would say every other Friday night. “I’m tired of dealing with four boys. I need me a sweet little girl to spoil.” The house she and my Uncle Mark lived in had a tin roof, and the nights it rained were always the best. After Ben and I had gotten burned, I slept there often, leaving my own bed and walking the quarter mile to Aunt Margaret’s house wearing pajamas, a coat, and shoes. I always slept deep and peaceful under that tin roof.

  CHAPTER 4

  You’re a wanderer, Aunt Margaret had told me. It’s the way you look at the mountains; you want to know what’s on the other sid
e. And you’ll never come near being content till you do know. I was eight years old and we were picking blackberries on the east slope of Sassafras Mountain. We had come early, dew soaking our shoes as we sidled up land slanted as a barn roof, shiny milk pails in our hands. Morning sun brightened the mountainside as our first berries pinged the metal. Black-and-yellow writing spiders had cast their webs between some of the bushes, and dew beads twinkled across them like strung diamonds. My fingers purpled as my pail began slowly to fill, a soft, cushiony sound as berry fell on berry. The sun sipped away the last dew from the webs, and I started to sweat under Uncle Mark’s long-sleeved flannel shirt. My arm ached from the pail’s weight. The thin handle dug its imprint on my palm. I sat down in a gap among the bushes, my gaze crossing over Tamassee toward Licklog Mountain. Aunt Margaret had come and stood behind me, her hand brushing leaf litter from my hair as she spoke.

  Aunt Margaret’s prophecy had been correct, for college and each new job took me farther from the mountains—first Clemson, then Laurens, and now Columbia. It had not been until the Columbia move that I recognized a steady eastward migration toward Charleston, toward a place I could look out my office window and see not mountains but the Atlantic Ocean.

  But I was back now, at least for a little while, traveling the same road as that morning we’d returned from Sassafras Mountain, Aunt Margaret driving as I kept the pails full of blackberries from spilling.

  I glanced at Allen and knew he was already working, mapping a lead paragraph for his article or a possible follow-up question for Brennon or Phillips.

  “They’re going to meet at Wolf Cliff Falls tomorrow at eleven,” he said, as we pulled into the motel parking lot. He got out and I slid behind the wheel. After closing the door, he leaned in the window.

  “Brennon is going to look over the area where he wants the dam. Phillips and Kowalsky will be there too, so I’ll have a chance to talk with all of them more in-depth. Maybe you can get some good photos as well.”

  “I probably can,” I said.