Black River (8 page)

When Wes was a boy, church was for him and his father alone. His mother bowed her head at the dinner table, and on the bookshelf at home there was a small Bible with her name in script on the dedication page, but she stayed home Sundays. Later, when he was an adult, Claire stayed home, too. She had never come with him to church, not in Black River and not in Spokane. Not even to the chapel in the hospital. But she never laughed at him, never belittled his commitment, though she knew the strength of his doubts.

The pastor today was new to him, a younger man with a voice that was stronger than his thin face and slight frame suggested. Wes passed judgment on him over the course of the hour and decided he was a good pastor for a town of corrections officers, hitting the Old Testament heavily, making plentiful references to justice and duty. During the litany of sorrows and misfortunes that made up the weekly prayer list, Wes heard Claire's name. It rang in his head, seemed a strange convergence of his own thoughts and the outside world. Claire Carver, Claire Carver. Claire Carver, dead and gone, pitied and prayed for. It took Wes a minute to find Arthur Farmer in a pew near the front; he'd gone bald beneath his hat. He'd have put her name on the list. He'd have thought it was his business. The ringing of her name died, the service went on. Wes bowed his head for the prayers and recited words that were good by virtue of their familiarity, offered up notes in a low voice for the hymns. He put a twenty in the collection plate when it passed. Didn't take communion. Never did.

When Wes was fourteen, his father switched from evening watch to day watch at the prison. It was a change he had waited years for, but it meant he was now inside the gate Sunday mornings. They began attending evening service, and it was a habit Wes held to as an adult; he was sorry to see it had been done away with. At evening service, the sanctuary was peopled mostly by men who sat alone, wide gaps between them in the pews. The pastor's voice was tired but unyielding, and the hymns took on an appealing strangeness when sung only in low men's voices. It was during that spare, solemn hour, in the largely empty sanctuary, the bright candy windows dark, that Wes came closest to believing.

 

His father died on a Sunday. It was autumn, but the long arctic summer evenings lingered, and the sun was just beginning its slow sink below the mountains when the service let out. His father sent him to walk home alone, said he had an errand to run in town. When he thought back on it later, Wes realized this was a mere veneer of a lie; everything in town was closed on Sunday evenings. He hadn't recognized it then, though, and for years he felt guilty, wondered if his father had been intentionally clumsy with this untruth, hoping his son would catch him in it. But Wes had accepted it easily, and his father had smiled and said, “Help your mother.” Another warning there, maybe, a deeper meaning, but Wes missed it, too, and when he arrived home, he didn't go straight for his fiddle as usual but went instead to the kitchen and helped his mother chop carrots and peel potatoes.

They said later that his father didn't jump from the trestle before the train hit him. How they knew this with such certainty went unsaid, but Wes was old enough to imagine. He took a macabre pride in the knowledge. Wondered if he, too, would have the fortitude to stand his ground with a freight train bearing down on him, no railings restraining him and the river black and heavy far below, the water offering a chance, however distant, of rescue, reversal.

Wes had been up on the trestle twice. Once was days afterward, when he made a white-knuckled climb of the iron scaffolding and walked between the rails in a frightened crouch. At the midpoint, the river evenly split below, he found a dark stain on one of the wooden ties that might have been blood or might have been grease. The other time was years later, the night his relationship with Dennis had shattered. A harder climb, not for age but because even then his hands were halfway to useless. There was a chill breeze blowing on the trestle that he'd been sheltered from at the bottom of the canyon. It lifted his short hair and cooled his skin almost to the point of pain. Wes walked straight that night, his arms held slightly out from his sides, maybe for balance, maybe to better feel the movement of the air around and against him. The height was seductive, and he didn't stay long.

 

Late Sunday afternoon the storm broke into pieces and drifted apart, and Wes and Dennis decided to go up the mountain. The suit he'd brought stayed on its hanger in the closet, and he wore his good jeans and a green shirt instead, the one Claire bought for him because she said it matched his eyes.

He found Dennis outside, tying the black horse to a heavy hitching rack beside the shed. The red horse was tied too, already saddled. Wes crossed the yard, mud pushing up from beneath the gravel and squelching over the sides of his boots. The red horse skittered sideways at his approach, jerking its head up and startling itself all over again when it hit the end of its rope. Dennis reached out to the animal, laid his palm flat on its neck. “Easy, Serrano,” he said, voice low.

“The hell is this?”

“It's a long way up,” Dennis said, without looking at him. “We'll ride.”

“You couldn't have told me this before?”

“Didn't see any reason to.” Dennis ran a bristle brush over the black horse's back and laid his free hand over its withers. “I'll put you on Rio. He's a good horse.”

Wes didn't say anything. He could ride. Didn't especially like to, but his father had kept a couple horses, chunky animals with coats that never shed all the way out and hooves that chipped on the rocks in the pasture. He'd used them to pack elk out of the mountains, and for a few seasons Wes went along. Fine. He'd do it Dennis's way, this once. For Claire.

He watched Dennis smooth the blanket over Rio's back and swing the saddle up so it settled easy. His stepson moved with the kind of speed and confidence a person exhibited only when he didn't have to think about what he was doing. Wes watched his hands. They expertly tightened the cinch and knotted the latigo, moving swiftly over leather and metal and still finding time for a gentle glide over muscle and hair. “Let's get Mom's ashes set up here,” he said.

Dennis's hands crowded each other when he held the small box. The brown paper wrapping was still on, and it rustled as Dennis gently settled the box into the bottom of a leather bag. He tied it to the skirt of Rio's saddle so it lay against the horse's flank and rose and fell slightly with the animal's breath.

Dennis turned away from the saddlebag too quickly. “Ready?”

Wes nodded.

Rio took the bit readily when Dennis offered it, closing his eyes as Dennis guided the leather straps of the bridle over his ears and fixed the buckles. The reins were split, and without so much as a glance at Wes, Dennis balanced them out in his hands and knotted them together. He started to lead the horse toward a bale of hay near the fence, but Wes stopped him. “I'm good.” He took hold of the saddle horn, set his foot in the near stirrup and hauled himself into the saddle. He could often force his way through a single action—mind over matter lasted that long, at least—but his hand punished him good when he tightened his grip on the horn. A sweet pain on a day like this. Tangible.

“Can you hold those reins all right?”

“They're fine.” He cradled the knot in his palm and let the reins drape over his fingers. He wondered if Dennis had thought it out beforehand.

“Sit back on your pockets a little more,” Dennis said, then turned away to bridle the red horse.

They started up through the access lane that ran between Dennis's land and Farmer's, Dennis in front. The red horse was a firecracker, but Dennis rode him with a natural calm. His spine was absolutely straight, and Wes suddenly remembered this about him, this perfect posture he'd always had, even as a teenager, when most boys slouched like they'd slipped a few notches back on the evolutionary scale. Rio settled easily into step behind the red horse, his head and neck swaying slightly. Wes drove his heels toward the ground, remembering that single piece of advice from his father, and tried to let his body follow the rhythmic movement of Rio's. It was a strange sensation, made so by the distance of time, but strange in another way, too, a way that made him recall the hitch he'd seen when he watched the horse in the pasture a few days back. Rio's hind legs moved stiffly, with an up-and-down jerkiness, like pistons short on grease. “This horse has got arthritis,” Wes said.

Dennis turned in the saddle, and Serrano started jigging. He watched Rio for a minute, and the muscles at the sides of his mouth tautened. “He's old,” he said, the words like a sigh.

“This ride going to be too much for him?”

“No,” Dennis said, but he didn't sound sure. Wes reached forward and grazed the knuckles of his free hand against Rio's neck, received a backward flick of a single ear in return.

At the base of the slope they reached the end of the access lane and turned onto an old logging road. A handful of aspens, their leaves winking gold to white in the breeze, stretched their branches past the pines. The incline was gradual, but the waterlogged ground slowed their progress. The road was wide enough to ride abreast, but Wes and Dennis made their way single file instead so they could ride down the center, where grass tall enough to brush the soles of Wes's boots held the soil more or less in place. Even so, the horses' hooves sucked at mud, and the rain had carved deep rivulets that crossed the road and interrupted their gaits.

Twice during the ride Wes reached back to touch the leather bag that held his wife's ashes. Still didn't sit right with him, Claire reduced to a few handfuls of coarse powder. Seemed disrespectful somehow. He wanted her to have a casket, flowers, her favorite clothes, a restored body. He wanted the embalming, the prayers, a service in a church and another at a graveside. She would have done those things for him.

Dust to dust, love, she'd said.

He would do this thing for her.

And then they were there, and Dennis was stepping off the red horse. “Just bring the reins over his head and drop them,” he said. “These two ground-tie.”

Wes had to give Dennis this much: the man had an eye for beauty. The place they'd stopped was less a clearing than a space where the road ran too close to the edge of the mountain to support trees. Roots burst from the earth and dangled in open air, and fallen forms of trees lay scattered on the slope below. They faced west, looking out over the join of canyon and valley. Below, the Wounded Elk flowed black through the shadowed corridor of the canyon and then curved into the open plain of the valley, where it greeted the setting sun and turned to quicksilver. The black grid of the train trestle spanned the border between light and shade. Across the valley, a lone rain shower was making its way across the Bitterroots, the outline of the mountain behind softened at the edges, like the face of an actress in an old movie, made gentler and flawless with the aid of a blur lens. The sun, dimmed by the clouds, was about to touch the highest crest. Wes glanced back over the other side of the ridge, east, and though Black River was still in plain sight—he could just make out the gray roof of the house—the new prison was hidden beyond the slow curve of the canyon. And ahead, behind, surrounding: endless folds of forested mountain, then white-dusted peaks rising up beyond, too distant to seem entirely real.

Dennis took Claire's ashes from the saddlebag and pulled the brown paper off, real careful, the way a person might unwrap a Christmas present if he wanted to reuse the paper next year. The urn was smooth brushed metal, and it had her name on it. Wes hadn't thought about the screws. Dennis had a jackknife on his belt, though, and he used its blade to coax the screws from their homes. And then he held it like that, lidless, in cupped hands, looking like a little boy with a robin's egg in his palms who's just realized he can't put it back into its nest.

“Should we say something?”

Wes walked to the edge of the ridge, felt a clump of damp soil give way under his feet. “Can if you want to.”

But neither of them did. Didn't move, either, and they stood together for a long moment, Wes noticing Dennis's eyes getting a sheen to them. His own eyes were dry, but his heart beat hard in his chest, drumming against his breastbone in irregular bursts of impossible speed. Normal, he reminded himself. Normal for the permanent absence of a person to derail his heart from its rhythm, as though his grief were trying to kill him, send him wherever his wife had gone. He thought he was ready for this. Ready for her to be gone. He'd known Claire wasn't going to get better. Known it for a long, long time, hard as he'd tried to deny it. He'd already gone through all the anxiety, the anger, the shit the folks with the hospice were always wanting to talk about.
Anticipatory grief,
they called it. Hell of a name. Like he was looking forward to her death. The least he should've gotten for going through that was an easier time when the time came—and Wes had been foolish enough to think he'd earned that much, earned a reprieve from the shock, at least, from the sharpest edge of new grief—but now the time had come and Claire was gone, and it was not easy, and he felt it all.

Beside him, Dennis unfolded the top of the plastic bag. Wes didn't look, didn't want to know that whatever was left of his wife now looked like kitty litter or playground sand or whatever hideously mundane thing human ashes might resemble. “You do it,” Wes said.

His stepson took a handful of ashes, and one of the horses sighed, and Dennis opened his hand.

What was left of her caught the wind and eddied out over the valley.

 

 

 

 

PART II