Saints at the River

by Ron Rash

  Herb Kowalsky still sat on the rock farther upstream. He looked diminished. He was not a likable man, and he must have been a hard man to work for, maybe to live with as well, but at that moment I wanted to be more generous to him. I wanted to believe that he had been as attentive to his daughter in life as in death. I wanted him to have that—despite whatever sorrow or guilt he felt—to know beyond any doubt he had been a good father to his daughter.

  Allen reached his arm around my waist.

  “Phillips is doing the right thing.”

  “Yes, he is,” I said. “I just hope his superiors see it that way.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “That depends on whether Phillips gets any backing. Come July the river will be more rock than water. They shouldn’t have any trouble getting into the undercut then.”

  “You think they’ll be willing to wait that long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Someone was coming down the trail, moving quickly. I turned around, expecting Brennon or one of his crew, but it was Ronny, a backpack slung over his shoulder. He cut off the trail and shoved through mountain laurel till he reached the tailwaters of the pool.

  “What are you doing, son?” Reverend Tilson asked, as Ronny waded into the shallows. Reverend Tilson took a few tentative steps after him. “What are you doing, son?” he repeated.

  “Get out of there, Moseley,” Sheriff Cantrell shouted.

  No one moved as Ronny opened the backpack and pulled out three sticks of dynamite, gray masking tape binding them together like a bouquet.

  Luke reacted first, running down the ridge as Ronny flared a cigarette lighter. It took him three tries to light the fuse. Sheriff Cantrell and Walter Phillips and Hubert McClure stood at the pool edge now, but they didn’t enter the water.

  “Don’t do it,” Sheriff Cantrell said.

  “It’s what has to be done,” Ronny said, and waded deeper into the pool, raising the dynamite in his left hand as the water rose to his chest.

  Reverend Tilson raised his hand as though to make a pronouncement as Luke crashed through the last thicket of mountain laurel and onto the rocks at the pool’s edge. Like the rest of us he could only watch as Ronny heaved the dynamite into the right side of the falls.

  Ronny turned and started wading out as Sheriff Cantrell and Walter Phillips backed away from the pool. Allen tried to pull me toward the woods, but I refused to move.

  “Turn your head,” Allen shouted at me, but my eyes were on Luke. He’d dived into the pool and was swimming underwater toward the falls. He was going after the dynamite. Maybe to snuff the fuse. Maybe to use his body to shield the river.

  Everything was quiet, so quiet I thought I could hear the fuse sizzling under the water.

  Then the ground beneath my feet shook and the pool heaved upward like a geyser.

  Reverend Tilson stood in the shallows, his white shirt drenched. One of the women in his congregation screamed. The back of Ronny’s neck was bleeding. Sheriff Cantrell and Walter Phillips took him by the arms and set him down on a sandbar.

  Walter Phillips knelt beside Sheriff Cantrell, blocking my view.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “I think he’s okay,” Sheriff Cantrell said.

  Luke was staggering back to the opposite shore, his face bloody.

  Reverend Tilson was still in the shallows, his hand still upraised. He stared at something in the pool.

  “Oh, God,” Herb Kowalsky said.

  Then I saw what they saw, Randy’s and Ruth’s bodies rising from the pool’s depths into the light.

  CHAPTER 10

  After death, everything in a house appears slightly transformed—the color of a vase, the length of a bed, the weight of a glass lifted from a cupboard. No matter how many blinds are raised and lamps turned on, light is dimmer. Shadows that cobweb corners spread and thicken. Clocks tick a little louder, the silence between seconds longer. The house itself feels off-plumb, as though its foundation had been calibrated to the weight and movement of the deceased.

  So it seems to me on this October afternoon as I box up my father’s clothes. Everything and everyone else has been dealt with: the horse and the cow given to Joel; the truck donated to Luke’s Forest Watch Project; paperwork done at the courthouse, pictures and a few other heirlooms I’m taking with me packed in the Toyota’s trunk; Tony Bryan, who wrongly assumed that Ben and I planned to sell.

  After two months I am returning to Columbia.

  “Don’t worry about your job,” Lee had assured me in August. “It’ll be here. You take care of your father.”

  And so I had, in this room where I had emptied bedpans and urinals instead of drawers, lifted pain pills and cough syrup to his mouth and what food and liquid he could swallow, bathed him with a sponge and washtub and afterward rubbed Desitin into his skin. The window is open, as it has been most of the last week, but the smell of stale sweat and urine lingers.

  Only a portion of what’s in the drawers is worth giving to Goodwill. Some jeans and work pants, some blue socks and a white dress shirt still wrapped in cellophane, two sweaters, a couple of belts. That’s it. The T-shirts stained gray with sweat, socks and overalls frayed at heels and knees, underwear and handkerchiefs—all these will be put in a dumpster.

  I carry the two boxes out to the car. I shove them into the backseat, turn and gaze across the pasture to Damascus Pentecostal Church, the snaggled rows of stone rising beside it. The grave is easy to spot, an unseasonable blossom of flowers set among a swell of black dirt. A grave dug by Joel and Billy, because, as Wanda Watson once reminded me, “we take care of our own up here.”

  I hear a crackling of gravel and see Aunt Margaret walking up the drive, one hand clutching a shawl around her neck, in the other a dead man’s mail.

  “You need something besides a T-shirt on, girl,” she says. “It’s October, not July.”

  I nod at the house.

  “I’ve been inside. Anyway, filling and hauling these boxes is enough work to keep me warm.”

  Aunt Margaret hands me the mail.

  “Nothing but advertisements far as I can tell,” she says, as I stuff it in the pocket of my jeans. “I got my chores done, so thought I might could help you.”

  “I’m about done,” I say. “One more box load and I’ll be on my way.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Not before Thanksgiving. I’ve got some serious catching up to do at work.”

  Aunt Margaret meets my eyes. “What about in the romance department? You got some catching up there as well?”

  “Maybe,” I say, smiling. “Let’s just say I still like the smell of him.”

  She smiles too. “That’s more than just some old wives’ tale, girl. There’s a whole lot of worse ways to measure a man.”

  Aunt Margaret looks at the house and lets her gaze linger a few moments. I wonder if, like me, it seems somehow different now. When she turns back to me, tears dampen her cheeks.

  “I’ll say my goodbye now,” she says, “so you can say your own.”

  Aunt Margaret pulls me to her. I smell the Ivory soap she bathes with, the talcum powder she brushes on her skin each morning and night. She holds me hard, like she wants to remember exactly how I feel, make an imprint of my body on hers. She knows that though she’s in as good health as an eighty-two-year-old woman can expect, at her age each goodbye may be the last. She loosens her hold, though her hands linger on my arms a few moments longer.

  “Take good care of yourself, Maggie,” she says, reaching into her skirt pocket and pulling out a wad of tissue. “I best go now before I make a scene.”

  She heads back down the drive, dabbing her eyes with the tissue as she walks.

  I go back inside, to fill one more cardboard box with my father’s clothes, to say my goodbyes, to close more than just this house before I leave. But it isn’t that easy. I would like to say my father and I reconciled in these last months, that as I tended him the past was
simply forgotten. But there were times the old grievances resurfaced and the less angelic part of our natures won out. When that happened it was easy enough to believe nothing had really changed between us.

  Yet it had. We’d made our tentative, sideways gestures of reconciliation, and they were not always self-serving and they were not always futile. Maybe that was as much as we were capable of, especially in a place where even land turns inward, shuts itself off from the rest of the world.

  All that’s left is the closet. I open its door and smell mothballs and the dank, musty odor of clothes shut years in darkness. The faint linger of cigarette smoke as well. I free cotton and flannel shirts from the rattling jumble of clothes hangers, then dig deeper into the closet for two pair of khaki pants, a heavy winter coat, and a denim work jacket. I stuff them in the cardboard box, then take out the denim jacket and put it on. I stand before the bureau mirror. The sleeves come to my knuckles, the denim loose on my shoulders. Not a good fit, but that seems appropriate. I turn back the sleeves, then lift the last box and carry it outside.

  The morning has a cool, clean feel as I drive out Damascus Church Road, and an October sky widens overhead with not a wisp of gray or white cloud, just blue smoothed out like a quilt tacked on a frame. It’s a sky that makes everything beneath it brighter, more clarified. I cross the creek and pass bottomland Joel planted in the spring with corn. What stalks remain standing look like something after fire, brittle and singed to an ashy gray, the shriveled shucks clinched close.

  The land rises again and I pass Aunt Margaret’s house and the church, a pasture, and another cornfield. Then it is only apple orchards, late in the picking season but still some fruit left to dab some red and yellow onto the brown branches. The spring’s heavy rains, the rains that had brought me up here in May, have ensured a good harvest.

  At the stop sign I turn left, because there is one more place to go before leaving. I pass Billy’s store and Luke’s cabin, following the land as it leans toward the river. I park on the road’s shoulder and walk out until I am at the center of the bridge.

  I place my hands on the railing and look down. Poplars and sweet gums hold clutches of gold and purple, but many leaves have already fallen. The thinning foliage makes the river seem wider, as if the banks have been pushed back a few yards on each side. Enough color remains for a good photograph. My camera is in the front seat of my car, but I let it remain there.

  The Tamassee is shallow. Rocks underwater in May now jut above the surface. What was once white water flows slow and clear. Two trout waver in the sandy shallows. Their fins break the surface as they drift a few feet downstream then scuttle back to where the female has used her caudal fin to dig a nest. I can see only their black backs, not the blood-red spots on their flanks or the buttermilk yellow of their bellies.

  I hear voices from under the bridge, and in a few moments a yellow raft appears, PROPERTY OF TAMASSEE RIVER TOURS stenciled in black on the side. It’s late in the year for a rafting trip, probably some business or church group with enough money to talk Earl Wilkinson into pulling a raft out of storage. They wear yellow life jackets and red, green, and blue helmets. One of the rafters sees me and waves. Earl looks up and our eyes meet. He nods but does not smile. I watch the raft scrape and slide downstream, then through Deep Sluice and past Bobcat Rock. The sun is out and the bright colors refract and merge as I offer a kind of prayer.

  A breeze lifts off the river. I raise the jacket’s collar and tuck the denim lapels under my chin. In another month all the leaves will be shed. Things hidden will emerge: knotholes and barked stretches of root, mistletoe and squirrel nests in the trees’ higher junctions. From this bridge I will be able to follow several of the river’s bends and curves as it makes a boundary between two states. Outcrops and rivulets will become more visible. Wildlife as well, mainly deer and wild turkeys but also an occasional wild boar or bobcat, even a black bear foraging for mast. Possibly a bigger cat, allowing a glimpse of yellow eyes, a long black-tipped tail, before vanishing back into the realm of faith.

  From this bridge I cannot see the pool below Wolf Cliff, but I know the water is low and clear, the shallows thickened by red and yellow and purple leaves. Perhaps trout spawn in those shallows, their fins stirring the leaves as they follow old urgings.

  In the boulder-domed dark below the falls, no current slows or curves in acknowledgment of Ruth Kowalsky and Randy Moseley’s once-presence, for they are now and forever lost in the river’s vast and generous unremembering.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank John Lane, Marlin Barton, Tom Rash, and Butch Clay for their help with this novel. Special thanks also to Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Janette Turner Hospital, Silas House, George Singleton, Frye Gaillard, Amy Rogers, Linda Elliott, and Don Garrison. Good people all. I am especially indebted to three angels of the literary realm: Nancy Olson, bookseller extraordinare; Jennifer Barth, as gifted an editor as any writer could hope for; and, most of all, Marly Rusoff, who is not only an exceptional agent but also an exceptional human being. Thank you all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Winner of an NEA poetry fellowship, RON RASH has published three collections of poetry and two of short stories. The paperback edition of his first novel, One Foot in Eden, was published by Picador in February 2004. He is the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.