Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I got my taxi and we headed toward Georgetown. It was raining hard so the ride took longer than usual. On the other side of the parkway it was worse. There’d been a wreck, and traffic was backed up a mile. I remember thinking how glad I was that the wreck was in the southbound lanes. When I got to the apartment, two messages were blinking on the answering machine. The first was mine. The second was the hospital, telling me to call immediately.”

  “You can’t feel bad about things you didn’t know,” I said. My words sounded so facile I didn’t say anything else. For a few moments neither of us spoke.

  “Well,” Allen finally said. “We better get back to work.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I want to know these things.”

  Allen lifted the coffee to his mouth. It had sat long enough that he could drink deeply. He did not put the cup down until it was empty.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  As we stepped off the curb I held on to his arm.

  “What did Hudson want?” I asked.

  “Nothing much, really. He just told me he was looking forward to the article about Ruth Kowalsky.”

  “Must be nice,” I said. “Hudson’s never acknowledged anything I’ve ever finished, much less something I’m still working on.”

  “This is an exception for me as well,” Allen said. “He must think this story is going to sell a lot of papers. Hudson’s always struck me as a bottom-line kind of guy.”

  We got in the elevator and Allen pushed floors two and three.

  “I look forward to dinner tonight,” he said as the doors closed.

  “Like I said yesterday, don’t expect too much. For me cooking is more about survival than artistry.”

  Allen smiled. “Don’t worry. Whatever you cook and however you cook it, I promise you I’ve eaten worse. That’s one of the realities of spending time in the third world.”

  “I suppose my culinary skills can rise to at least those expectations.”

  The elevator shuddered to a stop and I stepped out. As the metal doors shut, I wished the most useless thing in the world—that I’d met Allen Hemphill before Claire Pritchard had.

  “I WASN’T SURE WHICH ONE,” ALLEN SAID WHEN HE ARRIVED, offering me the bottles of red and white wine he gripped in his right hand. He set a loaf of bread on the counter.

  He had shaved and, like me, changed out of his work clothes. He wore brown chinos and a blue flannel shirt that matched his eyes. I suspected he too had spent more time looking in the mirror attentively than he had in a while.

  “Red,” I said, taking the bottles from his hand.

  “Can I help do anything?”

  “No, it’s all taken care of, such as it is.”

  “How about a glass of wine?”

  “Sure,” I said, and lifted two glasses from the cupboard.

  We went into the living room and talked about work while Emmylou Harris sang of love lost and love found. When we finished our wine Allen came to the kitchen as I cooked the pasta, but our conversation was stilted, like two people dancing but unsure of the other’s next step.

  As we sat down for dinner I was glad I’d loaded the CD player with five disks. At least the music filled the gaps in the conversation.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” I asked, as Allen set down his fork after a few bites. I wasn’t sure if I was referring to the whole evening or the food.

  “No, it’s very good.” Allen smiled weakly. “I’m nervous, so nervous I can’t eat. It’s like I’m back in junior high on my first date. I couldn’t eat then either.” He paused. “That’s what this is, isn’t it, a date?”

  “C’mon.” I stood up and held out my hand, then led him to the couch in the living room.

  Unlike our kiss on the bridge, this one lasted a good long time. I lifted my hand to his face and felt hair thicker and wavier than mine. How far do I want this to go, at least for tonight? I wondered. How far does he? Not too far, Allen’s hands and lips soon made clear. Tonight at least.

  After a few minutes I kicked off my shoes. I leaned my head against Allen’s chest, my knees pressing the side of his leg.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you a question,” I said, “but I’m not sure it’s something you’ll want to answer.”

  “Go ahead,” Allen said. “I’ve spent most of my life asking people those kinds of questions, so turnabout is fair play.”

  “Has writing about Ruth Kowalsky been hard for you?”

  Allen didn’t say anything for a few moments.

  “In some ways,” he finally said. “It intensifies certain regrets.”

  “What regrets?” I asked, nuzzling closer, feeling the softness of the flannel on my cheek, the beat of his heart beneath it.

  “That for a good portion of my daughter’s life I wasn’t even on the same continent. That she lived only nine years, and during that time she had a father who put her second to his career.”

  “You couldn’t have known her life would be so short.”

  “And I’ll never know if I really would have made Kosovo my last overseas assignment. That’s what I told both her and her mother. I want to believe that’s what I’d have done. But even if I had, that wouldn’t have changed nine years of only seeing her a week out of each month, less than that for the six months I was in Rwanda.”

  Allen shifted so he could look at me.

  “You know what she told me when she was five?”

  “What?”

  “That her friends had fathers they saw every day.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “Not enough to do anything about it.”

  I settled back into Allen’s chest.

  “What about your wife. Regrets?”

  “Sure, but they’re different. Claire didn’t need me the way Miranda did. Claire was independent. She’d made a life for herself when I wasn’t around. She had her own career and friends. She was an attractive woman. There may have been other men in her life—probably were, those last two years. But I didn’t blame her for that. How could I?”

  “And you? Did you have other women?”

  “No, though I’m not sure Claire believed that. I put all my energy into the writing. A lot of the other journalists would go out drinking and skirt-chasing, but at night I stayed in my room and wrote.”

  “So you were faithful to Claire,” I said. It was the first time I’d spoken her name, and it unsettled me to hear it come from my mouth, almost as if I were afraid the word might invoke her spirit to join us in the room.

  “Faithful to her, or maybe just faithful to the writing.”

  Lucinda Williams’s voice filled our silence for a few moments. She sang of car wheels on a gravel road, of things left behind but not forgotten.

  “That evening after I came back from the hospital, I gathered all my notes for the Kosovo book and threw them in the fireplace. I struck a match and watched them burn. I don’t know why I thought that would make any difference.”

  Allen paused.

  “But this situation with Ruth Kowalsky, it’s like I’ve been given another chance to be a good father by helping get another man’s daughter out of that river. I didn’t see that at first, when Hudson asked me to do this story, but I see it now. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I was thinking something else, that sometimes you don’t get another chance.

  “I used to be arrogant enough to think I could save the world, but I know better now. The best you can do is find a single good cause, no matter how small, and put all your energy into that.”

  “Luke says the same thing,” I said. “He says that’s what the Tamassee is for him.”

  “Because of what he saw in Biafra?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was hands-on for him, I guess—people literally dying in his arms.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

  “It wasn’t that way for me. What I witnessed wasn’t something I felt in a persona
l way. I always seemed somehow removed from it, like there was a partition between me and the victims. I used to try to rationalize that. I’d compare myself to relief workers, or ER doctors back in the United States. Like them I couldn’t get emotionally involved. If I did, the suffering would overwhelm me, and what I was doing was too important to allow that to happen. That’s what I told myself.”

  “Maybe it would have overwhelmed you. And what you did was important. People needed to know what was happening there.”

  The CD ended and the room was quiet except for the ticking of the chestnut mantel clock passed down to my mother from her mother. The day after Momma’s funeral I’d taken it from Daddy’s room and placed it on my bureau. I hadn’t asked and he’d never said a word about my taking it.

  “But I was little more than a voyeur. I hadn’t earned the right to be ‘emotionally detached.’ I always arrived after the fact, and even then I wasn’t the one lifting those bodies into graves. There was a girl in Kosovo who’d been killed by a land mine. She looked Miranda’s age. Same complexion, same color hair. Maybe the same color of eyes if they’d been open. She lay in a potato field. It had rained and the field had been recently harvested. They searched an hour on top of and then under the mud before they found her right foot.”

  I wanted to say something but Allen raised his index finger as though in admonishment.

  “For a few seconds I saw that this girl could be my daughter, that this was the world I lived in. I closed my eyes right there at the field’s edge, and, at least for one moment, I didn’t believe I could open them again. It was too awful to look at. I understood something else at that moment as well, something I’d witnessed in Cambodia—women who’d seen so many of their family members and friends die in Pol Pot’s death camps that they had willed themselves blind.”

  He blinked as though coming out of a dream.

  “And then it was like adjusting the focus on a camera. No, I told myself, this isn’t my world. This has nothing to do with my reality. At that moment the partition came back up. I could see then, see the girl’s body, the search for the foot. I could see it all, and it could touch me no more than if I were watching a movie.”

  The mantel clock chimed ten times.

  “But that changed when I was in the morgue’s basement and placed my hand on Miranda’s cheek.”

  Allen looked at me.

  “Do you understand what I mean? I felt death, not just observed it.”

  I did understand, because I was with Momma when she died. I had been on one side of the bed and Ben on the other. The doctor had seen her that morning and told us she’d live another day or two, but by early evening her breaths shortened to harsh gasps. Daddy called an ambulance and then called Aunt Margaret. He stayed in the room only until she arrived.

  “I can’t watch her die,” he told her. “I just can’t.” He waited on the porch till it was over. But Aunt Margaret was there with us, talking to Momma in a soothing voice, her hand brushing Momma’s hair. Then Momma exhaled one last time, almost like a sigh. I lifted Momma’s wrist to feel her pulse, and her arm felt heavier, as though death gave a body an additional weight to carry.

  The blue in Allen’s eyes seemed brighter, like the blue you see when long-cured firewood burns. I knew he had never told anyone what he was telling me now.

  “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

  “When I felt Miranda’s cheek I realized the Bible is right about us being made of clay, because that was what she felt like—cool, clammy. I lifted her off the morgue table, and as I held her she felt so solid. And every dead body I’d seen in Cambodia and Rwanda and Kosovo suddenly had solidity as well. So does Ruth Kowalsky’s.”

  I listened to time clicking like hooves on pavement. But time isn’t something you can rein in. It moves on without pause, taking us with it no matter how much we wish otherwise.

  Allen’s attention was now on the clock as well. A wry smile flickered on his face.

  “I’m so glad we could have such lighthearted fun on our first date. Maybe next time we can read aloud passages from Blood Meridian.”

  “I haven’t read that one.”

  “Classic Cormac McCarthy. In other words, four hundred pages of unrelenting bleakness. It’s like falling into a well with no bottom. You keep thinking the book can’t get any darker, but it always does.”

  Allen checked the clock again.

  “I need to go,” he said.

  We kissed, a final lingering kiss, and I walked him to the door.

  “This is good,” he said, “being with you, I mean. But a little scary, too, like what I’m feeling is happening a little too fast and part of me hasn’t caught up yet.”

  “I know,” I said, touching Allen’s face with my left hand. “Wherever this is going between us, there’s no rush to get there.”

  I closed the door and started clearing the table. Don’t expect too much, I cautioned myself. But I put on another CD, and as I washed the dishes I sang along.

  WHEN THE DOCTORS AT THE BURN UNIT IN COLUMBIA HAD done all they could, when all the skin grafts had been completed, it hadn’t been enough. The taunts and stares and the nicknames Ben had been given by classmates, the middle school and high school ball games and dances Daddy made him attend, the nights he stayed in his room listening to songs about things he must have believed he’d never experience, all of that he had endured, never acknowledging the pain he felt to Daddy or Momma or me.

  Daddy always made it worse. Before every skin graft he would tell Ben this one was going to make all the difference. When it didn’t make much of a difference at all, Daddy would insist it had, though you could see the disappointment in his eyes even as he said it. And still he couldn’t keep himself from going into a rage when he’d find Ben in his room nights there was a ball game or dance. You’d think Ben wanted to stay in his room just to spite him, and all the while Momma saying nothing.

  And Ben never telling Daddy to go to hell or even saying no. When I tried to stand up for him, Ben would say It’s okay, Maggie, and that made it worse for me.

  I remembered the summer days spent in a cave where people once lived in darkness, a place where he could not be seen by anyone, not even himself.

  Now my brother was on the phone, his voice crossing two time zones.

  “We need to talk about Daddy,” Ben said.

  “Did he tell you I’d been up there?”

  “Yes, but he didn’t say a lot except you only stayed one night.”

  “So he didn’t tell you about our little row.”

  The line was silent for a few moments.

  “Can’t you just let it go, Maggie?” Ben said, his voice almost a whisper.

  “Why just me? He can’t let go of things either.”

  “He’s dying,” Ben said.

  I thought of Ben’s hand holding the phone against his ear, his right hand pressed against his scarred cheek. My brother said he was happy now and I believed him, because despite everything that had happened, happiness and forgiveness were his natural states of being. He had a wife and baby and was finishing up a four-year hitch in the military. More cosmetic surgery had been done once he joined the army, and the scars were less visible. You had to look carefully now to realize he’d been scarred not by acne but by boiling liquid.

  “Are you listening to me, Maggie?” Ben asked.

  “Yes. But it’s not just about him and me. It’s about how he treated you.”

  “He was angry at himself, frustrated he couldn’t do anything to make it better for me.”

  “So if you can’t make something better you make it worse.”

  “We’ve been over this before. He couldn’t help it. I knew that even as a kid, Maggie. I think you did too.”

  “He could help it,” I said. “He could have thought less about his own feelings and more about yours. It was the same with Momma’s cancer.”

  “Sometimes you have to forgive people,” Ben said.

  “Maybe I’m not like you,�
� I said. “Maybe I’m not as good a person as you are.”

  “It’s not about being good or bad,” Ben said. “It’s about being afraid of what you’ll feel if you can’t feel hurt and anger.”

  “I thought your night classes were in business, little brother, not psychology.”

  For a few moments we listened to a silence that stretched across a continent.

  “So why did you really call?”

  “I talked to Dr. Rogers yesterday,” Ben said. “He thinks Daddy will need the most help in the fall. I’ll be out of the army at the end of October. I was supposed to take a job here with an insurance company. I talked to them, and they can hold the position until January. Lee Ann will stay here with the baby while I stay with Daddy. But he may live longer than the doctors think or get sicker sooner.”

  “And if that happens you want me to take care of him.”

  “Yes. Aunt Margaret’s too old to do it by herself.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “He’ll be put in the hospital or a nursing home. You know he doesn’t want that. He’s the same as Momma.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Can’t or won’t? . . . Well?” Ben asked when I didn’t reply.

  “It’s late here, Ben,” I said, “and I have a full day tomorrow. Tell Lee Ann hello for me.”

  The afternoon Luke had first visited the house, Daddy and I wounded each other as best we could while Momma lay dying in the next room. We’d given voice to every spiteful, hateful thought our hearts had held for each other. Had used up years of them in those few minutes.

  Yet our hearts weren’t empty. It was as if we had miscalculated how much we could say to each other and still have enough resentment left to cover what lay deepest, what could only be expressed with words of reconciliation and forgiveness—words that acknowledged we were bonded by blood and family and, as much as we might wish otherwise, even love. Words so frightening we sealed our mouths tight, risked not a syllable of that language. Because we both realized once you open your mouth to speak such words you open your heart too. You open it wide as a barn door and you take off the hinges and then anything could get out or in, and what can be more frightening than that?