Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  The falls itself flows between two boulders only eight feet apart and spills into a pool big and deep enough to cover a house trailer. The boulder on the left side of the falls leans into the pool. A good rock to dive off, except that here countercurrent forms a hydraulic and, behind that hydraulic, a deep undercut, an undercut where Ruth Kowalsky’s body was suspended between earth and sky.

  Twenty feet upstream, Ronny and Randy measured water depth and searched for bedrock to anchor Brennon’s polyurethane dam. They worked alone except for the people onshore, who held the ropes knotted around the brothers’ waists. Joel and the other members of Tamassee Search and Rescue had refused to help. Some local people sat on rocks below the falls, but they soon got bored and left.

  Brennon, Kowalsky, and Phillips stood together on the shore, Brennon and Kowalsky holding the ropes out in front of them as if fishing. A woman from the Oconee Tribune was with them, a Greenville News reporter standing a few yards away waiting his turn. On the opposite bank an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter and photographer stood forlorn as castaways. They’d come in on the Georgia side. The reporter was thirty yards away from the people he needed to talk to, but it might just as well have been a mile. He’d tried shouting a few questions to Phillips, but the white water rendered his words unintelligible. He finally gave up and studied a Forest Service map.

  The photographer stepped to the river edge and began shooting. Like more and more photographers, especially at the bigger papers, he had made the switch to a digital camera. Lee had been pressing me to convert as well, to learn Photoshop software. He’d used my resistance as another opportunity to joke about my Appalachian backwardness and nostalgia for the good old days of outhouses and oil lamps.

  But my resistance was aesthetic. When I took a shot I didn’t want high-tech silence. I wanted the mechanical click, the way it signaled like a trap being sprung that something was captured. I wanted the process to be visceral.

  “I’d rather talk to those guys without anyone else around,” Allen said, “but I guess I’ll go over and listen in.”

  “I’m going to sit down,” I said.

  “I’ll join you in a little while,” Allen said.

  I walked twenty yards below the falls and found a long chunk of driftwood the river had tossed on the bank. I sat down and closed my eyes. The air quality was as poor now in the mountains as anywhere in the state, the scientists claimed, and all the proof your own eyes needed was to look at the higher mountaintops and see the brown-needled spruce and fir trees. The same acid rain that killed those cedars fell into the Tamassee, but as I took a deep breath it was hard to believe there could be any place purer in the world.

  During my childhood, even after she’d gotten a washing machine, Aunt Margaret carried her quilts each spring to the river. Knee deep in the flow, she let hands, lye soap, and water rub away winter’s grime, give the quilts a fresh, bright smell you couldn’t get any other way. Nights she had tucked me under those quilts I’d listened for what she claimed I’d hear if I were quiet enough—the sound of the water still flowing through the cloth.

  I opened my eyes and looked twenty yards upstream where Ruth Kowalsky’s body lay under a pall of white water. Farther upstream, Allen talked to the Greenville News reporter. He raised his hand and pointed to the falls, and the gold wedding band caught the morning sun.

  I returned my gaze to the pool that held Ruth Kowalsky’s body. What would Allen, who’d lost his own child, feel in this gorge? It could only be painful, like stitches on a half-healed wound being ripped open.

  I hadn’t said much on the drive from the motel. Allen was subdued as well, no doubt preparing for what he’d be confronting. When he asked how the visit with my father had been, I’d said something about it being the same as always and we’d left it at that.

  We had been the first to arrive. As we’d walked into the gorge, the last remnants of morning fog coiled around our feet. Mushrooms lined the trail, including some Death’s Caps. The sun hadn’t risen over Wolf Cliff yet, and the canopy of oak and hickory made the light wan and splotchy—like the haunted wood of a sinister fairy tale, I’d thought, as we’d made our way to where a dead girl waited.

  AT TEN-THIRTY, LUKE AND THE BLOND GIRL CAME INTO VIEW upstream. They beached their canoe on the Georgia side twenty yards above where Ronny and Randy worked. Luke and the girl sat on the bank. They didn’t talk much. They had come to guard the river.

  After a while the county reporter tucked her note pad into the back pocket of her jeans and headed up the trail, leaving the Greenville News reporter alone with Phillips and Kowalsky. Brennon stood away from them, pencil and spiral notebook in hand. All the while Ronny and Randy continued to wade upstream and down, one side to the other. They waded slowly, heads down, eyes inches from the surface as they stabbed measuring sticks into the water like spears.

  They shouted depths and bedrock placements to Brennon, who recorded them. I took some photos of Ronny and Randy working and then some of the falls.

  “Quite a scene,” Allen said, coming over to stand beside me.

  “Yes,” I said. “And nothing’s even happened yet, at least officially.”

  Allen nodded toward the Greenville reporter.

  “That guy says his paper is putting this on the front page. They’re even doing a poll about whether or not to allow the dam.”

  “That seems like a bit much.”

  “I thought so too.”

  The Greenville News reporter left. Allen walked upstream to join Brennon and Kowalsky, while I returned to the piece of driftwood and sat down. A yellow butterfly settled for a few moments on a nearby rock, its wings opening and closing like slow applause. Gnats hovered around my face. The sun was directly overhead now, shining down as if into a well. The shallows sparkled with mica, probably some gold as well. There had been a time when locals panned the Tamassee, but that was illegal now given its Wild and Scenic status. A buzzard circled overhead, not a turkey buzzard but a smaller black one. Luke had once told me they could smell something dead from a distance of six miles.

  Like Allen, I had questions I wanted to ask, but they were for him, not for Brennon or Kowalsky or Phillips. This wasn’t the place, though. Death was too close here. It surfaced out of the ground and lingered in the sky and in the water.

  I wondered if Lee had known about Allen’s family and, if so, why he hadn’t bothered to tell me. Even if Lee hadn’t known, Hudson did. Hudson had never impressed me as an especially sensitive man, but sending a reporter who’d lost his own daughter to cover this story seemed more than merely insensitive. It seemed cruel.

  I made a final swat at the gnats, then hiked back up a trail that had widened significantly in the past week. Fifty yards up I veered right into a stand of blackjack oaks. Soon granite outcrops replaced trees and dirt. I stepped carefully among the boulders, perfect places for timber rattlesnakes to sun. In a few minutes the left face of Wolf Cliff loomed directly above me, and I stood in front of a cave Ben and I had found two decades earlier.

  We had not gone inside the day we discovered it. The entrance was well concealed and narrow. Ben and I wanted to see if the cave got bigger before we risked squeezing feet first through the mouth. We came back the following afternoon, the flashlight we sneaked out of the house jammed in the back pocket of my cut-off jeans. We left our bikes at the bridge and walked down the river trail toward Wolf Cliff.

  I went in first and was able to stand after a few yards. I helped Ben inside, then aimed the flashlight’s beam in front of my feet the same way a blind person might use a cane. The cave was cool and moist like a springhouse. Glossy black salamanders wiggled away from the light, and somewhere water dripped. We kept going until the cave widened a last time, became the size of a room. In the center a mound of ashes smeared the cave floor black.

  “Someone camped here,” I told Ben. “But why in the back of a musty old cave?”

  “So they wouldn’t be seen,” Ben said.

  I swept
the light across the campsite, then onto the cave walls.

  “What is it?” Ben asked.

  I moved the light slowly across an image of a human being, a crude stick figure, arms upraised.

  “Maybe the Cherokees left it,” I told Ben. “Some kind of sign.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  I studied the figure more closely, particularly the blank face that, like the arms, was raised upward.

  “I think someone was hurting and this is the way they prayed for help.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, and reached out to touch the figure with his index finger.

  Knowing that long ago other people had been here, people now dead for centuries, made me uneasy. I never returned to the cave, but Ben did many times that summer. When it was suppertime I would walk down the trail, then scramble up to the cave entrance. I’d call and he would soon emerge, shielding his eyes as he stepped back into the light.

  I stepped away from the same opening now and headed back to the river, to my spot on the log. Allen was still talking with Phillips and Kowalsky, their words unintelligible. Luke and the girl sat on the other bank, but Luke was no longer looking at Ronny and Randy. He looked right at me.

  He had stripped down to a pair of blue nylon river shorts. He carried more weight around his midsection now, but his arms and upper legs were still visibly muscled from paddling and hiking. Luke said something to the girl before walking downstream. He descended the riverbank stiffly, then swam across, lifting himself onto the stone slab. I recognized the mole on his right breast, the long purple scar just below it where a submerged tree branch had gashed him. Another whiter, less visible, scar marked where a river rock had cracked three ribs.

  “Still on our side?” Luke asked. His scarred knees, an intersection of stitch tracks from the various cartilage and ligament tears, popped as he sat down beside me. He winced, flexed his right knee several times as if it were a gate hinge that wouldn’t close properly.

  “I didn’t know photographers took sides. Cameras record reality.”

  Luke wiped water off his face with the back of his hand. “I taught you better than that, Maggie. You know there is always more than one reality.”

  Luke’s eyes had been the first thing I’d noticed about him when we’d met. Somewhere between green and blue. The color of the Tamassee’s deepest pools on sunny days—if viewed from a ridge trail. When you were actually on the river you didn’t see that color. You saw through the pool to the rocks and sand at the bottom. Luke’s eyes were like that. When you looked into them it seemed you saw not into but through them, toward a place of utter clarity.

  “So tell me the realities, Luke,” I said, looking away.

  “A father who’s lost his daughter to a river and can’t accept it. A businessman getting free national advertising for his product. A developer using this incident to weaken environmental regulations.”

  Up close, I was surprised at how much older he seemed, not just the lines on his face and thinning hair but also his voice. It was as if the river had worn him down the way it might a rock or bank.

  “So what’s your reality, Luke?” I asked.

  “The river. That’s the reality that matters. It’s natural law and, I might add, federal law as well.”

  “There was a time you weren’t quite so enamored of federal law, a time when you didn’t have any problem breaking laws, federal or otherwise, to block a logging road or grow a few pot plants.”

  “The law’s on the right side now.”

  Ronny and Randy waded out of the river. They unknotted the ropes from their waists as they talked to Brennon.

  “So Allen Hemphill’s covering this?”

  “Yes. He’ll probably want to talk to you.”

  “Sure, I’ll give him the party line, but it won’t do any good. He’ll get his story from Kowalsky. That’s the only one he’s interested in.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I’ve read his book. Those blurbs on the back, ‘Allen Hemphill is a journalist who casts a cold eye on life, on death,’ blah, blah, blah—that’s utter bullshit. He’s a sentimentalist. By the time most people finish his book, Hemp-hill’s manipulated them into weeping and gnashing their teeth.”

  “How do you expect people not to be outraged by the massacre of children?”

  “A good photographer should know the answer to that question.”

  “Enlighten me, Luke.”

  “You use a wider lens. You show what would have happened had these children not been massacred. You ask what’s really crueler, being hacked to death in a few seconds or dying from starvation or AIDS.”

  “Maybe that can be changed as well.”

  “It would be nice to believe that, but human history argues otherwise.”

  Luke fixed his eyes on mine, and this time I did not avoid his gaze.

  “You getting sentimental on me? Or are you just a little sweet on Hemphill? I see the way you lean in to catch his words, the way you keep glancing upstream to make sure he’s still there. You can’t fool me. I know you too well.”

  “Maybe I’m not the same person I was eight years ago.”

  “I think you are,” Luke said. “You just conceal it better now.”

  I looked across the river at Luke’s companion. At her age I would have had my eye on Luke if he were talking to another woman, but she was lying on her stomach reading a book. “To answer your question, maybe it’s just that I’m capable of some basic human emotions.”

  “What basic human emotions are you talking about? Greed, hate, fear? Those tend to predominate, from what I’ve seen of the world.”

  “There are others. Just because you don’t possess them doesn’t mean another person can’t.”

  Luke stood up, ran his fingers through his hair. “Like love,” he said. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I know more about love than you do,” he said, looking not at the blond but at the Tamassee.

  “A river’s not human, Luke.”

  “No, it’s something better. A human being’s puny compared to a river.” He raised his eyes from the river. “And maybe that’s the purest kind of love, Maggie, because I don’t expect the river to love me back. There was a time you knew these things.” His voice softened. “Maybe you’ve forgotten I did an extended tour of duty in the lovers-of-mankind brigade. And that I did it on the front lines.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

  At night or when a hard rain made the river too high to run, we used to stay in the cabin and read. Luke had nailed four bookshelves together, and the shelves and the books they held covered the back wall. Luke claimed he could educate me better than a university could. And maybe he did, because the books I read affected me in a way assigned texts in college never had.

  My family had lived in Oconee County for over two hundred years. Seven generations of Glenn eyes had opened and closed in this place, but it took writers such as William Bartram and Horace Kephart, men from other parts of the country, to reveal what had surrounded me all my life. Luke tutored me on the river as well, explaining not just about eddy lines and hydraulics but also the watershed’s plant and wildlife. He taught me how mountain laurel leaves were glossy and rhododendron weren’t, how on mink tracks you could see the claws where on otters you saw only the pads.

  And he read me poetry written and set in distant places, as though I had first to see another world to see my own. That very thing happening when Wordsworth wrote of a mountain spring’s “soft inland murmur” or Hopkins described “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” In my literature classes at Clemson I had enjoyed poetry, but it had seemed exotic. Luke brought it into the world I knew.

  And after Bartram and Kephart and the poets, he had me read Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry and Peter Matthiessen to learn how ephemeral a wild place could be.

  He told me about Biafra as well.

  Their eyes were the only thing
that remained alive and human, Luke said. Lifting them had been like lifting kites, because that was what their bodies had become, stick bones with papery flesh glued to them.

  After a week in the aid camp, Luke believed the situation was hopeless. The victorious FMG had herded three million Ibo refugees into a region of only 2,500 square kilometers, an area the war had turned into a wasteland of destroyed homes, markets, and hospitals. A few of the ravaged had risen from their cots and gone home, but too often they returned. Most died within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There was never a shortage of replacements to fill the cots.

  Luke’s assignment there had been for six months but he’d stayed eighteen.

  “Long enough to earn my lifelong furlough from any other obligations to humanity,” he’d told me one night when a bottle of wine made him more talkative than usual. “The day I flew out of Owerri, I looked out the plane window and watched it disappear. Free to love or not love, care or not care. Free to find one good, pure thing in the world and save that thing. That’s all you can do anyway.”

  He was saying the same thing now. I looked across the river at a girl only slightly older than I’d been when I’d read Luke’s books, slept in his bed.

  “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you,” I said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck with her.”

  “Maybe I will. Carolyn was majoring in chemical engineering when I met her, gearing up to spend the next thirty years as a lackey for Dow Chemical. Now she’s studying environmental law.”

  “So you’ve saved her soul.”

  Luke did not smile. “Those are her words, not mine.”

  “What’s her reading assignment today?”

  “Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America,” Luke said. “One of your favorites, as I recall.”

  “So when can Allen talk to you?”

  “Six o’clock at Mama Tilson’s. Grassroots environmentalists don’t have expense accounts, so tell him he’s paying. We’ll eat and then talk. You be there too. Sounds like you need some review on what’s at stake.”