Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  He looked over at Ronny and Randy, who had put on their T-shirts and boots.

  “Looks like they’re through for today, so I guess I’ll go on.”

  Brennon pointed out something on the far shore to Phillips while Allen and Kowalsky talked. Ronny and Randy waved, then disappeared up the trail to their truck.

  “I don’t know why those guys are helping Kowalsky,” Luke said, “especially after last night.”

  “Because they’re decent men trying to do some good. They have children. It’s called empathy, another basic human emotion.”

  “Is that it?” Luke said. “I thought they were so thick-headed they didn’t know when they’d been insulted.” He smiled. “See you at supper, Maggie.”

  Luke dove into the river and swam back across. He and Carolyn got into the canoe and drifted beneath Wolf Cliff into the slow water that ended a half mile downstream at Five Falls.

  YOU’RE GOING TO HURT YOUR FATHER BAD, LUKE HAD SAID. AND that was what I had wanted. Because being connected to Daddy was like having an infected limb no antibiotic could cure. What I wanted was not only to sever the limb but also to cauterize it.

  I learned a lot from Luke that summer. He taught me to sight on the surface what lay beneath water—the snags and undercuts. He showed me the Tamassee was not one river but many, depending on the time of year, the amount of rain, the amount of visibility.

  He taught me how to use a camera as well, how to manipulate shutter speed and light, how balance and perspective were as important in photography as painting. He never used color film, despite frequent complaints from the rafting company’s clients. Luke believed you saw the essentials in black and white, that color was nothing more than decoration and distraction.

  He was a good teacher. The following spring when I graduated with my English degree, I’d taken a job with the Clemson town newspaper. I wrote articles, but photography was what I did best, winning some state awards for weeklies. When the Laurens paper called, they were looking for a photographer, not a writer.

  Now I watched as Luke and Carolyn grew smaller, the downstream angle such that they appeared cut in half, their heads, arms, and torsos bobbing in the current.

  I wondered if Carolyn possessed the cool cynicism so many women her age displayed toward relationships. The way she’d reached for Luke’s hand at the meeting seemed to argue otherwise. That was something I would have done, had done.

  I remembered the early August night Luke spent not with me but at the Tamassee Motel with Janice, the woman he’d stayed with in Florida.

  “I thought it was just you and me,” I told Luke the next morning after she left. I’d spent a tearful, sleepless night on the cabin’s couch, listening for Luke’s pickup to turn into the makeshift driveway.

  “Have I ever told you that?” Luke said. He touched my chin with his finger and raised my eyes to his. “Have I ever asked you not to be with anyone else?”

  “No,” I said. “I just believed we were together and for a long time.”

  “I’ve been honest with you,” Luke said. “More honest than you’ve been with me.” He removed his finger from my chin. “I think a lot of what I am to you is a way to get back at your father.”

  “That’s a lie. I couldn’t have done the things we’ve done,” I said. “I love you.” Those three syllables felt strange on my tongue, because I couldn’t remember saying them even as a child. Not even to my mother as she lay in my bed dying.

  Luke said nothing.

  “But you don’t love me. Do you love her?”

  “No,” Luke said.

  I turned to start packing, but Luke pulled me back and kissed me on the mouth. When I didn’t respond, he touched my cheek with his fingers.

  “She’s gone back to Florida, Maggie,” he said. “You and I have had a good summer together, and we still have some time before you go back to Clemson.”

  “And you’ll go back to Florida this fall to be with her again?”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “You’re acting like this is some lifelong commitment I’m making to you or her. Janice doesn’t think that way, why should you? Why can’t we simply enjoy the here-and-now?”

  “I’m not willing to settle for that,” I said.

  I had left that evening and never gone back, to Luke’s cabin or to his bed. I’d lived with Aunt Margaret until school began.

  As I watched the canoe disappear around the bend in the river, I wondered if a day would soon come when Carolyn learned a similar lesson in honesty from Luke.

  BECAUSE IT WAS STILL EARLY IN THE RAFTING SEASON, THE first cluster of Tamassee River Tour rafts did not appear till past noon. All four were filled with teenage boys, probably a church youth group. Earl Wilkinson sat in the rear of the lead raft.

  “Maggie May, good to see you back home,” Earl shouted, then turned his attention back to the river as he plunged over Wolf Creek Falls. I wondered if Earl told his clients what they’d be passing over when they entered this sluice.

  In a few minutes Allen made his way to where I waited. If his conversation with Kowalsky had brought to mind his own loss, Allen’s face did not show it. He looked impassive but focused.

  “Get your camera out,” he said, in a no-nonsense tone. “You’re about to get a chance at a really good photograph.”

  I took the Nikon from its case as Herb Kowalsky stepped through shallows and onto the slab of stone his daughter lay beneath. He stared into the water—alone now, no rescue workers or environmentalists or gawkers.

  In photography there is no such thing as memory. The image is either caught on film or it doesn’t exist. I raised the Nikon to my right eye so I might bring this instant in Herb Kowalsky’s life into being. At that moment the part of me that aimed the lens cared nothing about Herb Kowalsky or his daughter or the river or federal law. I clicked the shutter again and again until my film ran out, then jammed in another roll. It’s only about light and angle and texture, I told myself. Whatever these photos do for me or anyone else is not a motive. I’m just an observer, showing what’s already there.

  Gnats circled Kowalsky’s head and I saw him blink his right eye several times in quick succession. He raised his index finger to brush one of the insects from his eye, and I took a last photograph.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Did you tell Miller he’d be talking not only to a journalist of the first rank but a newly certified expert on western Carolina barbecue?” Allen asked, as we drove back up the logging road. “That was part of your job, to convince him I’m an all-around great guy so he’ll feel privileged to be in my presence.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said, doing my best to match Allen’s playful tone. “Luke’s read Death and Life in Rwanda. He says you’re a sentimentalist.”

  We came to the end of the road. No vehicles were coming in either direction but Allen kept his foot on the brake. He glanced in the rearview mirror, as if Luke had uttered the words from the backseat.

  “What did he mean by that crack?” Allen asked.

  Never underestimate the egos of journalists, I reminded myself. Especially Pulitzer finalists.

  I repeated what Luke had said about the wider lens that took in the past and the probable future of the massacred.

  Allen shook his head slightly as I spoke. His lips clamped shut and held.

  “It’s nothing to get huffy about,” I said. “Luke believes most people are sentimentalists.”

  “I’m not being huffy. It just pisses me off when people who never witnessed that kind of suffering try to shrug it off with some utilitarian strategy learned in philosophy class.”

  “But he has seen it,” I said. “He was in the Peace Corps for eighteen months.”

  “But not in Africa,” Allen said.

  “Yes, Biafra to be exact. Or at least what used to be called Biafra. He was there during the worst of the famines.”

  “It was a different situation,” Allen said brusquely.

  Allen lifted his foot from the bra
ke, and I half expected him to floor the accelerator and leave a plume of dust rising where he swerved off the dirt and onto the blacktop. Instead, he pulled out slowly, keeping silent as we headed back to the motel.

  So the loss you’ve suffered hasn’t purified you into some kind of cross-bearing martyr after all, I thought. You can be just as petty and jealous and vain as the rest of us.

  And what I felt was relief, because since my Internet foray I’d had trouble seeing myself making any kind of real connection with Allen. I’d formed a picture of a man who had suffered on a level I couldn’t claim for myself in my most self-pitying moments. Yet he hadn’t seemed to let it embitter him. From what I knew he hadn’t turned to alcohol or drugs.

  If anything, he’d appeared a candidate for sainthood. But now I saw he was still human. Human enough that I, made neither noble nor forgiving by my own past, could believe we might not be so unalike after all.

  I saw Luke’s truck parked in front of Mama Tilson’s.

  “Luke’s waiting,” I said. Allen flicked on the right blinker, turned into the motel parking lot, and eased close to his room door.

  “I guess we’d better get on over there then,” Allen said.

  “I think it’s best if you two had some one-on-one time,” I said. “Besides, I need to check in. I’ll be over a little later.”

  “You’re not staying with your father?”

  “No. One night is enough.”

  Allen took the keys from the ignition.

  “Can you leave those with me?” I asked. “My stuff is in the trunk.”

  Allen handed me the keys but didn’t get out. He attempted a smile.

  “Sorry to get huffy, but Miller hit a nerve.”

  “You’re not the first. If pissing people off were an Olympic sport, Luke would be a Gold Medalist.”

  “But what he said, especially since he’s been there—it’s not as easy to dismiss as I wish it were.” He put his hand on the car door but then paused. “I just don’t want to believe the world’s that bleak.”

  I wanted as badly as I’d wanted anything in a long time to wrap my hand around Allen’s upper arm and lean my head against his shoulder. Maybe I would have if he’d stayed a few moments longer, but he opened the door.

  “See you in a little while,” he said.

  BEFORE I LEFT MY MOTEL ROOM I PUT ON BLUSH AND LIPSTICK, something I hadn’t done often in the last year. I sprayed some perfume on my wrists and rubbed it on my neck. I looked in the mirror a last time and walked on over to Mama Tilson’s.

  Allen and Luke sat in the back booth. Mama Tilson had taken their plates away and refilled the tea glasses. The tape recorder lay on the table between them.

  “Just in time for the supporting-materials portion of my presentation,” Luke said.

  I sat beside Allen and ordered while Luke removed papers and photos from a manila envelope, slid a stapled set of pages across the table.

  “Wild and Scenic River regulations,” Luke said. “I’ve underlined the relevant parts.”

  Luke handed Allen an eight-by-eleven black-and-white.

  “In case Maggie didn’t do her job. They widened the trail so reporters and the search-and-rescue squad had easier access. Clear violation of federal law.”

  Luke handed a final piece of paper across the table.

  “That’s the silt level in Licklog Creek since Bryan built his development. That stream had reproducing brook trout in it three years ago. Now you’d be lucky to find a knottyhead.”

  “So why didn’t you report him?” Allen asked.

  Luke looked at me and shook his head. Despite our conversation on the river, despite what had happened eight summers ago, Luke still believed I was on his side. I wondered if that showed faith in me or faith in himself.

  “We did, both Forest Watch and the Sierra Club, and Bryan got fined a thousand dollars. It’s cheaper for Bryan to pay the fine than put up the barriers to keep silt from washing into the stream. He’s a businessman. It’s all bottom line for him.”

  “Some people would say you’re making him into nothing more than a caricature,” Allen said. “Some people would say you and your cause lose credibility when you make things that black and white.”

  But that’s also what appeals to people, I almost blurted out, that at least there is one thing in their lives that is black and white, all complexity drained away.

  “Some people would say that, wouldn’t they,” Luke said, locking his eyes on Allen’s. “I’ve read enough enviro books and seen enough lame movies to know developers are always the stock villains come to take Grandma’s farm or build a housing project over a nuclear waste dump. The beauty of Bryan is he’s the word made flesh. Your worst fears about developers are not just confirmed but transcended. Sometimes I can’t believe him myself. He’s so pure, the same way a shark or a cockroach is pure because it no longer needs to evolve—it’s achieved perfection.”

  Luke paused as Momma Tilson set my food and tea on the table.

  “At first I thought Bryan couldn’t be that bad either,” he continued. “When I traced the silt in Licklog to the development, I went to his office. I was on my best behavior. No name-calling. I didn’t threaten anything. All I did was suggest he put up barriers between his construction area and the stream. When I’d finished talking the bastard opened his billfold and took out three hundred-dollar bills. That was his solution.”

  “Bryan says he brings jobs to this area,” Allen said.

  “A few short-term construction hires, though the companies he uses are from Columbia and bring most of their own people. There’s some minimum-wage work as security guards and groundskeepers. Sometimes his clients need someone to mop floors or unclog a toilet. All in all, Bryan’s offering great career opportunities for the folks of Oconee County.”

  The front door opened and Randy and Ronny came in with their wives, Jill and Nadine. The children were with them, running ahead of their parents to claim certain seats. Jill and Nadine wore slacks and blouses, but the twins were dressed in overalls and brogans. They had probably left the river and gone straight to their orchards. The two families filled the table at the room’s center.

  Unlike Billy, the twins had never left the county, not even for school. Nor had Jill and Nadine. The life they always imagined for themselves was marriage right after high school. They had aged quicker than I had and not just from bearing and raising children. Long hours spent helping their husbands in the orchards had lined and weathered their faces. Jill and Nadine looked tired, but they also looked happy as they got the kids seated and settled.

  Don’t sentimentalize their lives, I told myself. Don’t believe this little Norman Rockwell portrait is necessarily anything more than a brief respite. Still, I could not help thinking how, if things had turned out differently, Ben and I might have brought our own families here on Friday nights.

  Luke leaned back and raised his arms, letting them spread across the back of the booth, as if to see Allen from a wider angle.

  “This is not about that girl’s body being in the river.”

  “Then what is it about?” Allen asked.

  “It’s about whether federal law can be circumnavigated. Once a precedent is set, there’ll be other exceptions. Bryan understands that. Why else would he be helping Kowalsky and Brennon?”

  “You don’t think publicity about the Tamassee being this dangerous worries him?”

  “Total bullshit. Most of Bryan’s clientele have their hands full getting in and out of their bathtubs. They’re not getting into that river under the best of conditions.”

  Luke paused.

  “If anybody has to worry about clientele it’s Earl Wilkinson. His customers want the illusion of danger, not the real thing. They read about a place on the river so bad it’ll not only kill you but won’t give your body up, they’ll choose to get their weekend thrills risking mall traffic instead.”

  Luke checked his watch.

  “I’ve got to go in a minute. Someone
from the Sierra Club’s supposed to call me at eight.”

  He turned and leaned slightly in my direction, shutting Allen out of his line of vision. His tone was almost conspiratorial.

  “I’m tempted to tell them to stay out of this.”

  “Why is that?” Allen asked. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be left out of the conversation. “I’d think you’d want all the help you can get.”

  Luke glanced at Allen, the irritation clear in his eyes, his voice.

  “Too many tenured college professors, too many old hippies working for Microsoft. They assuage their consciences for selling out by joining Sierra Club or Amnesty International. They’ve become a new-millennium version of the Optimists Club.”

  I laid down my fork. “That’s not fair,” I said. “You’d never have gotten the Wild and Scenic status without their help. You didn’t have a problem calling on them then to help you. And they did help you, not just with donations but a lot of time spent making phone calls and writing letters.”

  “But this is different,” Luke said. “They’ll have to take a stand where not everyone is going to pat them on the head and say how beneficent and conscientious they are. It will take guts to say what they know is right.”

  “And what is that?” Allen asked.

  “That the girl’s body is the Tamassee’s now, that the moment she stepped in the shallows she accepted the river on its own terms. That’s what wilderness is—nature on its terms, not ours, and there’s no middle ground. It either is or it isn’t. Look at the Smokies. They’ve got restaurants and hotels and first-aid stations and gift shops in there. You’d think it was the North Carolina branch of Disney World. If that park was set up the way it should be, there wouldn’t be a single road. You’d walk in. There wouldn’t be a McDonald’s every hundred yards in case you got hungry or thirsty. And if little Johnny got lost and starved to death or was bitten by a rattlesnake, that’s the price of admission.”

  “So why didn’t you let Billy’s nephew drown?”

  I turned to Allen.