Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  “I’ve got a rubber in my dry pack.”

  “I don’t think,” I said, and stopped there. I tried again. “I can’t, I haven’t.”

  Luke laughed.

  “You surprise me, Maggie Glenn. I figured one of those college boys at Clemson would have talked you into his dorm-room bed by now. One probably has, but you’re one of those ‘technical virgins,’ right?”

  I was glad our hands concealed much of my face because I knew it burned red, not so much from the wording as from the comment’s truth. It was as if he’d somehow been witness to those moments of groping, starting, and stopping in dorm rooms and backseats of cars. Despite two years at Clemson, I still adhered to the rules of Oconee County females, a code abandoned in the sixties by most of the United States but still practiced and enforced in much of the rural South. On the surface it was simple: A woman was supposed to stay a virgin until married, but what exactly constituted virginity, that murky area between heavy petting and going all the way, was a question of byzantine complexity.

  But Luke wasn’t interested in testing the limits of such a code. He stood, pulling me up as well. He freed his hand from mine.

  “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  His tone was matter-of-fact, in a way almost good-humored, the opposite of the exasperation I’d encountered in all of my other sexual skirmishes. This is what it’s like to deal with a man instead of a boy, I told myself. Which only showed how much of a girl I still was.

  Four weeks passed before I called Luke from Clemson and told him I wanted to canoe the Tamassee again. He knew my meaning.

  “It’ll have to be this weekend,” Luke said. “Next week I’m off to Florida to help a friend get Wild and Scenic status for the Suwannee. She helped with the Tamassee so I owe her.”

  We launched early on a Saturday morning. Fog rose off the river and got tangled in the trees lining the banks. It was still late summer in Clemson, but here fall had already begun. Leaves were turning and the air was so cool we’d paddled a half mile before I took off my sweatshirt.

  The fog finally thinned and the sun broke through. When it did we were in a section where stands of poplar trees lined both shores. As the last smudges of fog evaporated, the yellow sun-struck poplar leaves brightened like lamp wicks being turned up. The air felt charged and alive, like when lightning breaks the sky before rain. Though we were in slow water, the river’s pulse seemed to quicken. Everything, including Luke and me, shimmered in a golden light. For the first time in my life I saw the river the way I believed Luke saw it.

  A Church of God preacher in Mountain View had denounced us as “false prophets” who worshiped nature, not God, as though one were not part of the other. At the community center we’d kidded ourselves about being religious zealots, the males giving each other nicknames that began with the word saint, we females adding Magdalene to our first names.

  But Luke had never joined in the joking. On that September morning I understood his seriousness, that what we were trying to save was holy, for I was not just in the presence of something sacred and eternal but for a few seconds inside it. “Spots of time” was the phrase Wordsworth used for such moments, but the poet’s words were no better than mine because what I felt was beyond any words that had ever been used before. You needed a new language, as members of the church I’d grown up in sometimes did when they’d been possessed by the Holy Ghost and spoken in tongues. They had writhed in the pews and aisles, their bodies contorted as though each word had to be wrenched physically free from its place in the heart. But even in those moments no one knew what they were saying, not even themselves.

  We paddled on downstream. The sky widened blue above the gorge, the sun warming the river enough that light hatches of dun-colored caddis flies dimpled some pools.

  “So how long will you be in Florida?” I asked.

  “Probably until the rafting season starts back up.”

  “I didn’t know you’d be gone that long,” I said, and must have sounded wistful because Luke laughed.

  “You sound like you’re going to miss me, Maggie.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to be around me next summer. I talked to Earl Wilkinson, and he said it’s okay if you work with us as a photographer come May. You won’t get rich, but you’ll make as much as you would potting plants. That is, if you want the job.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I want it.”

  “Good,” Luke said. “I’ll tell him.”

  We didn’t speak again until we came to where Lindsey Creek entered the Tamassee. As we got out of the canoe, I lifted Luke’s dry pack from the bow and brought it with us.

  WALTER PHILLIPS STEPPED TO THE PODIUM AT SEVEN SHARP. HE introduced Luckadoo and set the ground rules: five minutes a person, and anyone who caused a disturbance would not only be thrown out but also arrested.

  Kowalsky again spoke first, covering much the same terrain as at the first meeting, and just as abrasively, before introducing the man in the suit as his congressman. The congressman shook Kowalsky’s hand and then spoke briefly, his main point being that he represented not just himself and the Kowalsky family but all of the people of Minnesota in urging that the dam be allowed. After the congressman finished, Senator Jenkins’s aide expressed the senator’s sympathy for the Kowalskys as well as his full support in helping recover their daughter’s body. The governor’s representative echoed their sentiments. Brennon spoke as well, emphasizing the minimal environmental impact.

  Then Luke had his turn, again reading excerpts from the Wild and Scenic Rivers legislation. He didn’t look at Kowalsky or Phillips or anyone in the audience. When Luke looked up from the papers he read, his eyes were on Luckadoo. But Luckadoo’s eyes did not leave the watch he’d placed on the table, and though Luckadoo had a pen in his hand, he did not write down a word as Luke made his argument.

  “Your five minutes are up,” Luckadoo announced, looking at Luke for the first time since he’d begun speaking.

  Billy was in the row in front of me. He turned around. “Luckadoo didn’t even pretend to listen,” Billy said. “This isn’t looking good at all.”

  The only group of people who hadn’t spoken were the locals, and none of them did until the meeting was almost over.

  I hadn’t seen my father until he rose, slowly, unsteadily, from his chair in the second row, his hand grasping the shoulder of the man who sat beside him. I couldn’t see his face but his hair was washed and combed. He wore the one suit he owned.

  “He shouldn’t be here,” I said. “He’s too sick.”

  “Who?” Allen asked.

  “My father.”

  Daddy lifted a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth. He had once been able to fill an entire barn loft with square-baled hay in a single afternoon, a man strong enough to carry hundred-pound fertilizer sacks two at a time, but now the effort of rising from a chair winded him. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, but I couldn’t look away.

  “My nephew Joel ought to be saying this, but he’s washed his hands of this mess,” Daddy said, looking around the room as he spoke, “so I’ll say it for him. If this is a matter of drilling a few holes in the riverbed, that’s the thing that ought to be done. But this is a safety issue as well. I’ve lived on this river sixty-six years. I know the river and Joel knows it and the rest of that search-and-rescue squad knows it. One summer a few years back nine people drowned in the Tamassee. Just in that one summer. It got so bad they stretched a big net under Holder Bridge to catch the bodies.”

  Daddy paused to wipe the spittle from his mouth again. He turned in my direction and I saw he wore his white shirt and a tie as well as the suit. I suddenly realized that the next time he’d be wearing these clothes he might well be in his casket. I wondered if he recognized the same thing.

  “Those boys know what they’re doing, and they’ve done all they could to get that body out. Anybody who says otherwise is wrong.”

 
; He paused again.

  “We all make mistakes, and sometimes we pay a high price for them. That girl made a mistake when she tried to cross that river, she paid the highest price of all. She didn’t know how dangerous that river was, but you’ve all been told now. You just be sure that dam works, Mr. Brennon, because that river isn’t something to trifle with.”

  The man beside Daddy helped him sit back down.

  “Is that it?” Luckadoo asked, his eyes sweeping the room. “If so, I’m going to give the last five minutes to Ruth Kowalsky’s mother.”

  Mrs. Kowalsky stepped up to the lectern. She wore a black dress that reached closer to her ankles than her knees, and I wondered if like my father she also wore funeral clothes, not for herself but for her daughter.

  She was a tall slim woman, a woman who had retained her beauty into middle age, conceding only a few wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. Her hair was frosted blond, cut short and stylishly by someone very talented and no doubt very expensive. But her beauty seemed fragile as an eggshell. You could tell something had broken inside her in the halting way she walked to the lectern.

  “Oh, shit,” one of the river rats sitting with Luke said. He hadn’t spoken loudly, but the room was so still his words carried like a shout.

  “My name is Ellen Kowalsky, and I’m Ruth’s mother,” she began. “My husband didn’t want me to come tonight. But I had to. You didn’t know Ruth, but I’m going to tell you about her, because maybe if I can give you some sense of what she was like, you will understand why it’s so important to us to take her home, to give her a proper burial.”

  Ellen Kowalsky spoke slowly, her words carefully enunciated, making each word seem tentative, difficult. She did not look at us but above and past us. Her eyes were fixed on the back wall as though she were scaling it, each word she spoke another piton.

  She’ll never make it through this, I said to myself, because her eyes already glistened with tears. I thought of her diving into the pool below Wolf Cliff Falls, hands searching for her daughter as she moved along the bottom until she’d had to surface. What had she thought or said to her husband as he restrained her from entering the pool a third time? Had she begged him to let her go, tried to break free from his grasp?

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to watch your child being swept away. How many nights would you wake in the dark, gasping for breath, as you thought of her trying to breathe? How often would you wonder if you’d only gone to Grandfather Mountain or Asheville your daughter would be alive now?

  No, I couldn’t imagine what those moments had been like for Ellen Kowalsky, but as I glanced over at Allen’s face I knew he could, that there were times he thought about what his life would be like now if he’d taken an earlier flight, or a later one, or told his wife he’d take a taxi home or decided, as she’d evidently wished, not to go to Kosovo at all.

  Walter Phillips got up from his chair, as if to offer his seat to Ellen Kowalsky.

  “You don’t have to do this, Ellen,” Herb Kowalsky said, a tenderness in his voice I’d not heard before. That tenderness surprised me and, I suspected, a number of other people in the room. But maybe not his wife. I wondered if I had made some judgments about Herb Kowalsky that were a little too easy and convenient. Yet even as I thought this another part of me remembered the scorn in his voice when he’d spoken of hillbillies.

  “Yes, I do,” Ellen Kowalsky replied, glancing back at her husband as she spoke. She blinked quickly and for a few moments stared at the back wall again, securing her hold before continuing. She took a deep breath and lowered her eyes so she might see ours.

  “I could tell you Ruth was the perfect child, that she never gave her father or me any trouble and was always good to her brother.”

  A woman on the second row began to cry, loud enough to make Ellen Kowalsky pause and raise her eyes to the back wall again.

  “But you’d know that couldn’t be true of any child, so I’ll tell what’s true, that there were times Ruth tried our patience, times we had to punish her, times she disappointed us.”

  The Atlanta Constitution’s photographer took a photo. Several people turned and glared at him. Neither he nor anyone else took another one.

  “In other words, she was like anybody else’s child. But there were times we were short-tempered with her when we shouldn’t have been and times we didn’t give her as much attention and love as we could have. Any parent in this room knows how that can happen. We get so caught up in our own lives we forget that nothing’s more important than our children. We always say we’ll make it up to them tomorrow or this weekend or on a birthday or Christmas. We assume that tomorrow or that birthday is going to come.”

  Ellen Kowalsky had used up her allotted time, but no one in the room was going to tell her that. Her voice softened even more, almost a whisper now, as if she were in a confessional booth instead of a rural community center.

  “But sometimes that day doesn’t come, and the things you meant to do or say can’t be said or done because the child is no longer there. The vacation was my idea. It seemed like we hadn’t been seeing each other much, not even eating meals at the same time. I thought a few days together would bring us closer as a family. And it had. We’d had two good days together, until we came here.”

  Ellen Kowalsky paused for a few moments. The room was so quiet I could hear crickets chirping outside the open windows. Suddenly I realized Ellen Kowalsky wasn’t looking at the back wall. She was looking through it, past the bridge and Bobcat Rock, all the way to that undercut inside Wolf Cliff Falls.

  “I can only do one more thing for Ruth, and that is to get her out of the river, because it’s not just her body down there but her soul. That’s what my church has said for hundreds of years—that a person is in purgatory until the body is given Last Rites. My husband, even my priest, say they don’t believe that.”

  Ellen Kowalsky lowered her eyes and looked straight at us.

  “But what if they’re wrong?”

  No one in the room was ready for that statement. The reporters and other outsiders might have written off Ellen Kowalsky’s concern as a bizarre symptom of her grief, but I knew many of the locals, though low-church Protestants, would not dismiss her fear or its premise.

  Ellen Kowalsky continued to look at us as she spoke.

  “I’ve already tried to bring Ruth out of that place, and I couldn’t do it, at least not by myself. I need the help of Mr. Brennon and his dam. And I need the Forest Service and the rest of the people in this room to support Mr. Brennon. It’s the last thing I can do,” she said, her voice starting to falter. “It’s too late for anything else.”

  At that moment not even the most cynical person in the room could have doubted that the loss of her child had broken Ellen Kowalsky, and that she would not begin to heal until her child was buried in earth, not water.

  Brennon stood by the chair Ellen Kowalsky sat in. He leaned toward her, his hand on her shoulder. He spoke, and she nodded. Brennon’s facial expression made clear his concern about recovering Ruth was now emotional as well as professional.

  Billy turned to me and shook his head. “It’s a done deal,” he said.

  Luke knew as well as Billy that he had lost. What restraint he’d had so far disappeared. As soon as Daniel Luckadoo said the meeting was adjourned Luke started to the front, weaving through the people who filled the aisle.

  “It’s federal law, Luckadoo,” he shouted. “Federal law. It’s not something you or anybody else decides. It’s been decided, and if you allow this dam you’re breaking the law and you know it.”

  Sheriff Cantrell and Hubert McClure grabbed Luke by the arms before he could say anything else. They shoved him through the crowd and out the door. People soon began to follow them out.

  I left Allen and made my way to the second row of chairs where Daddy still sat.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” I said.

  Daddy looked up at me.

  “I figured no one else woul
d say some things that needed to be said. It turned out I was right.”

  “Who brought you?” I asked, because Daddy hadn’t been sitting with anyone I knew.

  “Joel dropped me off. He wouldn’t come in though.”

  “When’s he coming back to get you?”

  “I don’t know that he will. I figured to get a ride with someone heading out that way.”

  I looked around the room. Billy was gone as well as anyone else who might be driving down Damascus Church Road.

  “Did Joel say he’d be at home?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  I looked up front. Myra Burrell had not left, but she lived back toward the river.

  “Let me get the car keys,” I said.

  “You don’t have to take me,” Daddy said, the stubbornness in his voice pricking like a briar.

  I walked up to the podium where Allen had joined the circle of reporters around Brennon and Kowalsky.

  “I need the car keys so I can take my father home,” I told him.

  Allen fished the keys from his front pocket. “You want me to go with you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not far. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “I would like to meet him,” Allen said.

  “Some other time,” I said, and walked out to the parking lot where Daddy waited.

  The sun was settling into the trees now, and shadows unfurled up mountainsides. Across the road in Herb Greene’s pasture, cows clumped together under trees. Daddy didn’t see them. If he had he’d have said it was a sure sign of coming rain.

  “You ought to turn on your headlights,” Daddy said, as I pulled out of the parking lot.

  “I know how to drive,” I said, then turned on the headlights anyway. It was simpler to do so.

  “It seems I can’t ever say the right thing to you,” he said, his words low, too low to tell which of us he felt was responsible for that.

  We passed Billy’s store. Billy and Wanda sat on the porch while their boys kicked a ball in the parking lot.

  Daddy shifted in his seat. I looked at the road but I knew his eyes were on me.