Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  When Brennon gathered everyone he wanted by the pool, he turned to where Randy and Ronny sat on the bank.

  “You guys ready?” he asked.

  Randy looked at Brennon and shook his head. “We ain’t going in. River’s too high.”

  “You’re not going in?” Brennon said, his voice incredulous.

  Herb Kowalsky moved closer to Brennon. “What?” Kowalsky asked, looking not at the twins but at Brennon. “They’re not going in after all this?”

  “You’ve got to go in,” Brennon said.

  “We ain’t got to do nothing,” Ronny said.

  Randy heaved his oxygen tank toward Brennon. The metal clanged as it hit the ground. Ronny did the same, but aimed his toward Kowalsky.

  “There,” Randy said. “You two go in if you’re so sure it’s safe.”

  The gorge suddenly seemed quieter, even the water. I looked at the dam. The water rose to within a foot of the top. The polyurethane waved and billowed. Joel no longer stood on the far bank. He walked slowly up the trail. Like Billy, he’d evidently seen enough.

  “Please,” Ellen Kowalsky pleaded. “Please get my daughter out of there.”

  She opened her palms to Randy as if to say she had nothing to offer but her words.

  “Please,” she said again. “Please.”

  Randy stared right at her but didn’t speak. I felt Allen’s hand settle on my shoulder. It suddenly seemed as if we had all gathered for this one moment. Except moment was the wrong word, because what I felt was an absence of the temporal, as if the mountains had shut us off not only from the rest of the world but from time.

  “Don’t do it,” Ronny said to his twin.

  Randy reached out for his tank. “Got to,” he said.

  Ronny picked up his mask. “I’m going in too,” Ronny said.

  “No, I need you on shore.”

  Randy put on his flippers and mask and stepped into the water.

  “The rope,” Ronny said, and flung one end to his twin.

  Randy grabbed the rope and tied a single quick knot as he waded into the pool. He inserted his mouthpiece and leaned into the water. One black fin broke the surface and he was gone.

  Walter Phillips’s walkie-talkie crackled and I heard Earl Wilkinson’s voice announcing the river was at two feet.

  “We’re still okay,” Brennon said, his eyes fixed not on the pool but on the dam. For the first time his voice sounded tentative. “We got a few more minutes.”

  I looked at the dam. The water was no longer a foot from the top but inches.

  I jerked my shoulder free from Allen’s hand.

  “Get him out,” I yelled at Ronny. “Right now.”

  Ronny turned to us. He stood in the shallows, the rope in his left hand. For a moment I didn’t think he heard me. Then he began quickly pulling in the slack.

  “Two minutes,” Brennon shouted at Ronny. “Give him two more minutes and we’ll have her out.”

  I turned back to the dam, trying to will it to stay up until Randy was out. Something seemed to buckle slightly on both ends, then just as quickly stabilize.

  You imagined that, I told myself. It didn’t give any.

  And then I knew it had.

  As the middle section collapsed, the other two folded in like playing cards. A wave broke over Wolf Cliff Falls. People downstream scrambled up banks as an explosion of water surged past. Up on the cliff the river rats didn’t yet realize that Randy hadn’t gotten out. They began to cheer.

  Ronny pulled on the rope, his neck veins bulging as he dug his feet in sand and leaned backward. For a few moments the rope stretched taut between the pool and shore. Then the rope whipped out of the water like a broken fishing line.

  Ronny fell backward, landing on his back, his head hitting as well. He got up slowly, sand on his wet suit, his palms seared by rope burns. Then he was stumbling down the river edge shouting for his brother. He searched fifty yards downstream before he turned and ran back toward the pool.

  When Luke’s group saw the rope they quit cheering. They knew as well as anyone present what it meant. The people downstream realized something terrible had happened as well. The explosion of water had drenched some of them. Knees and elbows had been scraped raw by rocks and sand. Children screamed. A woman clutched her forearm against her stomach. Walter Phillips stood among them, the walkie-talkie pressed to the side of his face as he gave directions to EMS.

  Brennon had not moved. He stared where the dam had been as if it were still there and everything he’d just witnessed a mere hallucination. The Kowalskys stood beside him. Herb Kowalsky stared at where the dam had been as well, but his wife’s eyes were on the pool. She raised a tissue to the bridge of her nose and wiped away a tear.

  “It should have held,” Brennon said, more to himself than the Kowalskys. He turned to the Kowalskys. “It should have held,” he said again. Only then did Brennon move, sending his men into the shallows to look for Randy. Wading in himself as well.

  Allen still stood behind me, but I didn’t turn or reach my hand back to grasp his.

  Ronny was in the pool’s tailwaters, looking for bubbles. There were none, though the white water would have made them hard to see. He ran to where his gear lay and strapped on his tank before Sheriff Cantrell and Hubert McClure pinned him to the ground.

  Ellen Kowalsky stepped into the pool, water covering her shoes and rising to her shins. Allen waded out and turned her away from the falls. His hand rested lightly on her elbow as they moved slowly, almost ceremoniously, back to shore. The crumpled tissue fell from her hand. It looked like a dogwood blossom as it drifted toward the pool’s center, then sank.

  CHAPTER 9

  Randy’s tank had thirty minutes of oxygen. After forty-five minutes, Sheriff Cantrell told Hubert McClure to unlock the handcuffs on Ronny’s wrists.

  “Maybe this should have been your call,” Cantrell said, turning to Walter Phillips, “but I did what I thought best.”

  “I’ve got no problems with that,” Phillips said.

  “You should have let me try,” Ronny screamed, jerking his wrists free from the metal. The cuffs clattered against the rocks at his feet. “Neither one of you had any right to stop me.”

  “And have three bodies in there?” Sheriff Cantrell said. “No, thanks.”

  Most everyone had left now. A few reporters lingered, but they were having trouble getting anyone to talk.

  “I can’t believe this happened,” Allen said, breaking the silence between us. Like me, he wanted to believe it hadn’t happened, couldn’t have happened. He wanted to believe there was still some possibility, no matter how remote, that Randy might yet emerge alive from the pool.

  Brennon and his crew had spread the dam’s middle section across a sandbar. They studied and pointed as if it were a military map for an upcoming battle. In a way it was, for Brennon was already planning for the next morning. No one but his crew listened. The Kowalskys had gone back to their motel in Seneca. Walter Phillips stood yards away with Ronny and Sheriff Cantrell.

  “I need to speak to Phillips a minute,” Allen said.

  “I’m going to the car,” I said.

  “I’ll just be a minute.”

  “I can’t stay here another minute,” I said and made my way across river rocks to the trail end.

  The sun had made the ascent less slick than the coming down, but several times I grabbed rhododendron and mountain laurel to keep my balance. The car was unlocked, parked facing a stand of white oak. I got in and stared through the windshield at shapes left by the breeze, the way there was first a space between leaves and then not.

  Ten minutes passed and still no sign of Allen. I wrote a note that I was walking back to the motel and left it on the seat. I walked fast, and soon the thin mountain air quickened my breathing. I tripped on a root and turned my ankle but kept going.

  I was almost to the blacktop when Allen pulled alongside and opened the passenger door. I kept walking, the open door matching my pace.
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  “Please get in,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we’re in this together.”

  Allen put his foot on the brake and waited until I’d sat down and closed the door.

  “They’re meeting down there at ten tomorrow morning,” Allen said, releasing the brake.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Brennon is wanting to try again.”

  “Who does he think he can get into that pool, Ronny? Joel?”

  “He’s talking about flying some former navy SEAL in from Illinois. Brennon believes he knows what caused the dam to collapse today. He says a few minor adjustments and the dam will be ‘viable.’ ”

  “Brennon believes he knows,” I said, repeating Allen’s words back to him. “And Phillips is going to let him try after what happened today?”

  “Who knows the politics of this?” Allen said, frustration in his voice as well. “Who knows what Luckadoo or Senator Jenkins or the damn governor for that matter will tell Phillips to do?”

  A half mile up, the two-lane asphalt darkened with recent rain. The tires shushed and whispered.

  I spoke only after we parked in the motel lot.

  “I’m going to lie down in my room,” I told Allen.

  “You can do that on my bed.”

  “No. I want to be alone awhile.”

  “I’ll be in my room,” Allen said. “You change your mind, come there.”

  Allen took my hand and didn’t seem to want to let go. I freed myself from his grip.

  “We’re going to have to talk about this, Maggie,” Allen said.

  “Not now,” I said, and went inside.

  I closed the curtains and found an easy-listening station on the radio. I didn’t undress, just lay down on the bedsheets and tried not to think. My head hurt, but there were no aspirin in my purse. I did not close my eyes because I knew I would see Randy’s flipper disappearing into the pool.

  The radio did no good so I turned it off.

  Think about something else besides today, I told myself, and I cast my memory out like a fishing line.

  I was eight years old. Ben and I wore our Sunday clothes, though it was a Thursday afternoon. We were at our Grandfather Holcombe’s farm. He was in heaven, the grown-ups said, though Ben and I knew better because we’d peeked in the box. When we’d eaten our fill of fried chicken and banana pudding, we sneaked off from the adults and went down to the bridge that crossed Licklog Creek. We lay on the gray splintery boards, our foreheads pressed to the slats. Water spiders skimmed the surface as salamanders bellied across the sandy bottom. A snake unspooled on the bank and crossed the pool before disappearing into a clump of reeds.

  My grandfather is dead, I had thought to myself as I looked into the pool, then whispered the same words as my mouth pressed against the wood.

  And now, twenty years later, I remembered something I had forgotten—my father stepping through the barbed wire in his suit. Ben and I expected to be punished, since we’d been warned never to go near streams or ponds without a grown-up.

  “You all know better than to come down here alone,” Daddy said, but his words were gentle. “It would near about kill your daddy if one of his babies was to get hurt.” He’d lifted us up into his arms and walked upstream to the cow guard and then to the truck where Momma waited.

  I LAY ON THE BED A FEW MORE MINUTES BEFORE I GOT UP AND showered. I let hot water beat against my neck and back till the bathroom became a sauna. I felt the sweat bead all over my body like another layer of skin. I didn’t want to leave that shower, but after twenty minutes the water began to cool. I got dressed and went to Allen’s room.

  The door was unlocked. Allen lay on his bed, the only light coming through the gap in the curtains. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw a lampshade on the floor, jagged pieces of the lamp itself scattered close by.

  I looked outside and saw the late-afternoon sky was cloudless. If they could have just waited a day, maybe just a few hours, I thought.

  I closed the curtain and lay down beside Allen.

  “Some of those children in the café,” Allen said. “They were his children, weren’t they?”

  “Yes. A girl and a boy.”

  Allen pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, as if shielding his face from a blow.

  “How old are they?” he asked, his voice slightly muffled by his forearm.

  “Sheila’s four. Gary is seven.”

  “If I could have even imagined it could turn out this way. . . .”

  “You couldn’t,” I said. “But I’m not so sure I can say that for myself. Joel knew it could happen, and Randy and Ronny knew too. What they knew I should have known, did know.”

  “You warned them,” Allen said.

  “I warned them too late.”

  Allen put his arm under my neck and turned me toward him. “He was a good father to those children, wasn’t he?”

  “From everything I know, yes, he was.”

  “A better father than I was,” Allen said. He pulled me closer.

  We pressed ourselves against each other, into each other. For a moment I thought of undressing, of putting my hand on the back of Allen’s head and leading his mouth to my flesh.

  But I also thought of what it would feel like afterward—the smell of sex on our bodies, tangled sheets, late-afternoon light slanting through the window.

  Perhaps we might transcend everything that had happened that day, and there might be enough lingering afterward to hearten us through the rest of the day and night. But there was also the possibility that the temporary distraction would be just that—temporary—and so much the sadder for its transience. Then the room would only feel emptier, the space between Allen and me, between ourselves and our own hearts, wider.

  I wasn’t ready for us to take that risk, not yet.

  I kissed Allen lightly on the mouth.

  “I need to go,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Allen said, then mashed his lips roughly against mine. His fingers tried to loosen the metal button on my jeans. I jerked my mouth free from his.

  “No,” I said, in a harsh tone. I laid my palms against Allen’s chest and pushed. Like a puppet suddenly unstrung, his whole body gave way. He rolled on his back.

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry, Maggie,” he whispered.

  I rubbed a finger across my upper lip. No blood, but it would be swollen. I got off the bed. For a few moments I stood there hoping one of us might find some word or gesture that would make things right again. But none came.

  I walked over to the door and put my hand on the knob. I let go and turned toward the bed.

  “Are you going to the meeting tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why not? I’ve seen it through this far. I owe it to someone, I’m just not sure who.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  I looked out the window a last time, the sun lower in the sky but the sky still blue. Just a few more hours.

  “Do you want me to open the curtains?”

  “No,” Allen said. “Leave them closed.”

  I DID NOT GO BACK TO MY ROOM. INSTEAD, I LEFT THE MOTEL and walked the half mile to Billy’s store. I stepped onto the porch and opened the screen door. Wanda sat on a stool behind the counter. The boys knelt beside the drink box building a cabin with Lincoln logs.

  “Maggie,” Wanda said when I came in. It was a perfunctory greeting.

  I crossed the store to the second row of shelves and picked up a bottle of aspirin.

  “One forty-eight,” Wanda said when I placed the bottle on the counter. She took the dollar bills from my hand without looking at me and opened the cash register.

  “Where’s Billy tonight?” I asked.

  Wanda looked at me then. “He’s gone over to see Jill Moseley and the children. See if there’s anything he can do for them.”

  The boys heard the harshness in their mother’s voice. They stopped building and looked up at her, then at me.

  �
��You know of anything I can do to help out?”

  “No,” Wanda said. “We’ll do what can be done.”

  The register made a clapping sound as Wanda shoved it closed.

  “This ain’t Columbia,” Wanda said. “We still look after our own.”

  “I grew up here,” I said. “I know that.”

  Wanda checked to make sure the boys had resumed playing. “Then you know what I mean when I say we look after our own. We look after our neighbors before we look after people who come here and tell us to our faces we’re stupid hillbillies. We look after our own fathers before we worry about the father of someone we’ve never met.”

  Wanda gave me my change, dropping it in my hand so our flesh didn’t touch.

  “Goodbye, Wanda,” I said.

  I walked back to the room and took two aspirin, then picked up the phone. He answered on the third ring.

  “You’ve heard about Randy, I guess.”

  “Yes, Margaret called me,” Daddy said, his voice guarded.

  “I was there when it happened.”

  “I know that too.”

  Daddy paused. A vacuum cleaner roared to life in the hall outside my door, and I cupped the receiver closer to my ear.

  “Margaret said Reverend Tilson will have a service of sorts on the river come morning.”

  “Where on the river?” I asked.

  “There at Wolf Cliff.”

  “That’s not an easy place to get to, even after the bulldozers,” I said. “And it’s slippery.”

  “Randy’s momma and wife want it there. I reckon Reverend Tilson feels he’s got to do what they ask. I’d go if I thought I could walk back out once I got down in there, but that chemotherapy’s taken the starch out of me.”

  “You’re feeling worse?” I asked.

  “No worse than what the doctors said I’d feel. It ain’t nothing I wasn’t expecting.”