Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

“Billy’s nephew fell out of a canoe in Bull Sluice. There was a hydraulic. Not as bad as the one at Wolf Cliff but bad enough. It took Luke two tries.”

  “I didn’t have to harm the river to get him out,” Luke said.

  “So you would have let him drown if saving him had hurt the Tamassee?”

  “Yes,” Luke said tersely, slipping the photos back in the envelope.

  “I don’t believe that,” I said. “I believe you’d have gone in anyway.”

  “Believe what you want,” Luke said, and looked at Allen. “One last thing—Maggie’s cousin is right. If Brennon thinks a five-foot-high piece of polyurethane can stop the Tamassee this time of year, he has no more idea of what that river can do than Ruth Kowalsky did.”

  Luke eased out of the booth. He paused as he stepped past me, his right hand patting my shoulder.

  “So when did you start wearing perfume and makeup, Maggie?” he said, then turned to walk out the door.

  Allen clicked off the tape recorder.

  “Get what you needed?” I asked.

  “For sure.”

  “What did you talk about before I got here?”

  “Mainly how hard it had been getting Wild and Scenic status for the Tamassee, not just on a state and federal level but local as well. The number of times he’d been beaten up by loggers. The number of times his home and business got shot up.”

  “Did Luke tell you he never reported what happened to him? Once he got beat up so bad he was in the hospital four days but wouldn’t give names when Sheriff Cantrell interviewed him.”

  “He didn’t tell me that. Was he afraid to give names?”

  “No. He was proving he couldn’t be intimidated. The loggers would never admit it, but they respect him for that, even if some of them hate his guts.”

  One of the twins’ children shrieked as her drink spilled. Mama Tilson rushed over with a rag and cleaned up the mess. The child started crying and Randy lifted her into his lap, talking to her softly until she calmed down. He took a napkin and wiped the tears from her face.

  “Luke really did do more than anybody else to get the river Wild and Scenic status. He wrote the majority of the letters and got the petitions signed and mailed. He got people to meetings and brought the major environmental organizations on board. The locals, not just the loggers but even folks on his side, underestimated him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’d only been living here a year. Most people didn’t take him seriously at first. They figured he’d get tired or scared or decide to move somewhere he could live above poverty level.”

  “So Luke’s not a native. I thought he was.”

  “No, he grew up in Florida. He’s been up here so long now most folks don’t know or have forgotten.”

  I lifted the last of my apple cobbler into my mouth and set my spoon down. Randy walked over to the jukebox, his daughter held in the crook of one arm. He gave the child a quarter and let her drop it into the money slot. Dwight Yoakam’s high lonesome wail soon filled the room.

  “Did you talk any about Africa?” I asked.

  “I brought it up, but Luke said he’d come to talk about the Tamassee.”

  I pushed the empty bowl to the center of the table. The walk into and out of the gorge had sharpened my appetite.

  “So what else did Luke have to say?”

  “A few things about you. I hadn’t realized what an environmental warrior you once were.”

  “In all my tie-dyed glory.”

  “He told me your mother died during your junior year. He told me what happened to your brother.”

  Allen looked at Randy’s daughter perched in her father’s lap. She tapped a plastic straw against Randy’s leg as she sang along with the jukebox. I wondered if Allen saw something that reminded him of Miranda, if not of how she had been then something of what she might have become. I recalled what my art history teacher had told our class about Rembrandt. Three of his children died before reaching adulthood, and later in life Rembrandt drew them as he imagined they would have been as adults.

  “Luke asked if we were lovers,” Allen said, still looking at Randy’s daughter.

  “Why would he think that?”

  Allen looked at me now, his eyes meeting mine.

  “Maybe because I was clearly interested in what he had to say about you.”

  Claire Pritchard-Hemphill’s face surfaced in my mind. I suddenly wondered if there was something about me that reminded Allen of her. Certainly it wasn’t my appearance—I was pure Appalachia via Northern Europe Celt, my features bleached out by generations of cold, sunless days, my eyes an icy shade of blue. But maybe a gesture or mannerism, maybe my voice or the shampoo I used. It was a silly notion but also a disturbing one.

  “I hope that’s okay,” he said, “that I’m interested in you. If it’s not—”

  “It’s okay,” I interrupted. “It’s more than okay.”

  I laid my hand on the table, close enough to Allen’s that he could easily place his hand on mine. But he didn’t. Give him time, I thought.

  I nodded at Ronny and Randy’s table. “You talked to the Moseley brothers this morning, I guess.”

  “A little. They didn’t have a lot to say.”

  “That’s the way they are, especially around people they don’t know well.”

  “You grew up with them?”

  “Yes. Their wives too. As a matter of fact, I’ve got some catching up with them I want to do. Why don’t you wait for me over at the motel. Let me talk to them a little while, maybe get you a good quote, then I’ll show you a few local sights, give you a chance to hear some good picking and singing. That is, if you’re interested.”

  “Definitely,” Allen said, and picked up the bill.

  BONDING FIRES ORIGINATED IN THE SCOTTISH MIDLANDS. A family’s hearth fire was never allowed to die down completely. Banked embers from the previous night’s fire were stirred and kindled back into flames. When children left to marry and raise their own families, they took fire from their parents’ hearth with them. It was both heirloom and talisman, nurtured and protected because generations recognized it for what it was—living memory. When some clans emigrated they kept the fires burning on the ships as they crossed the Atlantic. Then they hauled them up into the southern Appalachians from Charleston or down the Shenandoah from Philadelphia. There had been one bonding fire started in the 1500s that was kept alive until the 1970s. The flame was tended by an old man and extinguished only when a dam flooded the valley where he’d lived eight decades. Two hundred feet of water covered that hearth now.

  The closest thing to a bonding fire in Tamassee was Saturday night at Billy’s store. It was not unusual to see four generations of the same family seated in lawn chairs together, not fire but song passed from parent to child.

  Lou Henson began the communal gatherings the summer I turned fourteen. Ben hadn’t wanted to go, so Aunt Margaret, who had planned to drive, offered to stay with Ben while the rest of us went. But Daddy wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Nobody notices those burns but you,” Daddy said to Ben, and his voice was angry and frustrated, as if the scars were just something in Ben’s imagination. “You’ll go whether you want to or not. I’ll not let you hide in the house and feel sorry for yourself. You hear?”

  Daddy was shouting but Momma said nothing. It was Aunt Margaret who placed her hand firmly on Daddy’s arm.

  “I’ll go,” Ben had said softly, just as he did the other times Daddy insisted he attend a family reunion or a gospel singing or—worst of all because people didn’t know him there—go down to Seneca.

  When Daddy went to get his cap, Aunt Margaret leaned over me.

  “Your daddy isn’t mad at Ben, honey. He’s mad at himself.” But if that was true, I thought, why was he yelling at Ben?

  My girlfriends and I were beginning to be interested in the boys in our middle-school classes. They lagged behind us physically and socially, but despite their attempts to act otherwise, we k
new they were interested in us as well. We would drag them out in front of the pumps to dance. They’d be awkward as newborn colts and all blushing but you could tell they enjoyed our attention. Sometimes the bolder boys would venture a kiss or slip their hands under shirts or blouses to caress the small of our backs, and we realized they were catching up to us perhaps faster than we were quite ready for.

  I’d be out there enjoying myself and then I’d turn and see Ben in the shadows, not staying in one place but always keeping within the perimeter of the lit-up storefront, like a hungry stray dog circling a hunter’s campfire. And I’d think, What right do I have to enjoy myself when he can’t? Sometimes I’d go join him, and we’d wait together until Momma and Daddy were ready to go. Other times I wouldn’t. Every now and then Momma would coax Ben out with soft drinks and food, but he quickly returned to the shadows.

  BY THE TIME ALLEN AND I GOT TO THE STORE A FEW DOZEN people had gathered, and I knew a name to match every face. Billy was on the porch with his sons, setting up a makeshift stage for Randall and Jeff Alexander. Billy’s wife Wanda worked the cash register inside. Most people had brought lawn chairs, though a few sat on the gas islands.

  “You want a beer?” Allen asked.

  “Yes. Something in a bottle.”

  I reached into my jeans for some money.

  “I got it,” Allen said.

  I looked around at the familiar faces, familiar but older. Several people waved or nodded. Randall and Jeff arrived, instrument cases in their right hands, Randall’s left hand on his son’s elbow. They stepped slowly up the steps, Jeff holding on to the banister. Jeff led his father to a stool and then un-cased the instruments. He handed his father the guitar.

  Joel’s pickup pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. He lifted two lawn chairs from the truck bed and helped Aunt Margaret out of the passenger side.

  “Oh, girl, it’s so good to see you,” Aunt Margaret said, pulling me to her. She was Daddy’s older sister but had always looked and seemed younger, even more so since Daddy had been sick. “It seems like it’s been more than forever.”

  I knew without looking that Aunt Margaret’s eyes had brightened with tears as she hugged me tighter. In a few moments she loosened her arms and stepped back to look at me.

  “You’re pretty as ever, Maggie,” she said, clasping her hand around mine. “Come here.” We stepped farther away from the stage where she could speak more softly. “I don’t know what your daddy’s telling you, but he’s in a bad way now. That cancer’s eating away at him.”

  Aunt Margaret gave my hand a final squeeze. I felt the strength in that hand.

  “The time’s come to let bygones be bygones, Maggie,” she said. “You wait too long, and you’ll not have a chance to set things right.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, because it was the easy response. But I also knew if Aunt Margaret were in my place she would do exactly what she was telling me to do. Ben had inherited that forgiving nature. I had not.

  Randall and Jeff started into “Mary of the Wild Moor,” so we turned to face the porch as Jeff began to sing.

  It was on one cold winter’s night

  The winds blew across the wild moor,

  Mary came wandering home with her babe

  Till she came to her father’s door.

  After the second verse Randall took a solo. I watched the blur of his fingers as they plucked and bent the strings. I tried to imagine what it would be like to know something as well as Randall Alexander knew that guitar without being able to see it, to know it only by feel. As I watched the old man lean his head toward the strings as if in some private conversation, I wondered if sight would be just another distraction, a barrier to that place inside the music where nothing and no one could break through.

  Allen joined us, two long-necked Budweisers in one hand and a bag of boiled peanuts in the other. I introduced him to Aunt Margaret and Joel, but it was hard to talk over the music, so we soon turned back to watch Randall and Jeff. Aunt Margaret and Joel sat down in their chairs. Allen and I moved closer to the porch to sit on the gas island.

  “I’ve heard some of these ballads date back to Elizabethan times,” Allen said, when the song ended. “Some of the language up here as well.”

  “That gets exaggerated a good bit. People come up here expecting to wander into a Shakespeare play. But there’s some truth to it. Some of the old words and ways have held on.”

  Randall and Jeff began playing again, a faster song. More people had arrived, their vehicles parked up and down the road. Billy never advertised these gatherings. There was no need.

  “They’re good,” Allen said, when Randall and Jeff took a break. “Especially the father.”

  “He used to do some session work in Nashville. But he’s about given that up now.”

  I set my empty bottle beside Allen’s.

  “You want another?” he asked.

  “Sure, if you’re having one.”

  Allen looked at the mound of peanut shells at my feet and smiled.

  “I’ll get some more peanuts too. But I’m holding the bag this time. That way I might get to eat a few.”

  Allen went into the store as Billy stepped off the porch to talk to Aunt Margaret. It took a couple of minutes, but he finally got her up to join Randall and Jeff, who were back on the stools tuning their instruments.

  Allen handed me my beer and sat down, closer, his leg touching mine as Randall and Jeff played the intro to “Omie Wise.”

  Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.

  Come listen to my story

  About Omie Wise

  And how she was deluded

  By John Lewis’s lies.

  And as I heard Aunt Margaret’s voice again I remembered the Sunday mornings in church, Preacher Tilson, red-faced from shouting and pacing back and forth, the Bible raised above his head. I remembered the shouts and tears, the speaking in tongues, and how frightening it all was. Until Aunt Margaret stood beside the rickety piano and sang.

  I was no longer afraid then. Her voice settled over me like a warm balm. Sometimes as she sang I’d look out the open window and see the gravestones and wonder if even the dead listened.

  Randall and Jeff broke into brief instrumental solos mid-song, then let the sounds of the guitar and banjo flow back together smoothly as two streams merging while Aunt Margaret reached the song’s most chilling verses.

  Oh pity your poor infant

  And spare me my life.

  Let me go rejected

  And not be your wife.

  No pity, no pity,

  John Lewis did cry.

  On deep river’s bottom

  Your body will lie.

  I thought of Ruth Kowalsky in the blackness of the under-cut, and I thought of her parents in their motel room in Seneca. Did they talk of their loss or turn on the TV or merely wait in silence? I wondered what Allen had done those first days after he’d lost his family. Had he sought solitude or friends or work? Had he gone into a bar or a church? Had he been able to stay in a house as much his wife and daughter’s as it was his?

  And I thought of my own family those first weeks after Ben came home from the hospital, how, when we ate our meals, hardly anyone talked or raised their eyes from the plates, making it worse for Ben, who was already getting taunted at school. What must he have thought when it seemed his own family could not bear to look at him? It was like we were all ashamed for our parts in what had happened. Momma would try to say something, maybe ask what Ben and I learned in our classes, but every question and answer was in syllables, not sentences. Those first weeks Daddy ate quickly and left for Henson’s Store as soon as he could. When he came back, there was always beer on his breath.

  One of those nights Daddy came back and went directly into Ben’s bedroom. Unlike me, Ben was already asleep. Daddy didn’t turn on the light. He woke Ben up with his voice, talking so loud I co
uld hear him as well.

  “Soon as you get that next skin graft you’ll be as handsome a fellow as Rock Hudson,” Daddy said.

  Then he’d stumbled on down the hall. I lay in bed and vowed again what I’d been vowing since the accident—that I’d study hard and get a college scholarship so I could make a life far beyond Tamassee.

  “Do you have any of her singing ability?” Allen asked, when Aunt Margaret finished.

  “No. She’s the only one in our family with that kind of gift.”

  Randall and Jeff started a slow song and several couples got up to dance. I stood and reached for Allen’s hand.

  “Come on.”

  Allen stood up reluctantly. “I grew up Southern Baptist. We have an eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not dance.”

  I took his hand. “No excuses,” I said.

  I led Allen to the open area that served as a dance floor. I placed his arms around me and pulled him closer, my head against his chest. I felt him tense as my right hand pressed the small of his back. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of soap and lime aftershave.

  We didn’t move much, just swayed in each other’s arms. Allen’s right hand did not urge me closer. He still wanted some distance between us.

  We danced one more time, then got in the car and headed toward the motel, but Allen did not turn in. He drove on toward the river, pulling off at the parking lot on the South Carolina side. We walked out to the middle of the bridge and leaned against the concrete railing.

  After a couple of minutes he spoke. “Did the Moseleys say anything about the recovery?”

  “We talked mainly about who’s gotten married, who’s divorced, that kind of thing. We didn’t talk about the other until we were in the parking lot and the kids out of hearing range.”

  A pickup with Georgia plates drove slowly across the bridge, its truck bed filled with fertilizer bags. The bridge trembled from its weight.

  “They didn’t have a lot to say, just that Kowalsky didn’t understand they were doing everything possible. The twins take a lot of pride in being professionals. It bothers them that Kowalsky thinks they’re incompetent.”

  “Phillips probably feels the same way,” Allen said. “I couldn’t get him to say much, especially with Brennon and Kowalsky nearby, but you can tell the poor guy would love to wake up and realize this is all a bad dream. He’s getting pressure from all sides.”