The River

EPILOGUE

Jack drove.

The steep twisting road up Dusty Ridge. He drove with his lights off, because it was not yet full night and he wanted to see all the woods and the sandy track going through them. He hit holes filled with the afternoon’s rain that splashed up onto the hood of the truck, and when the wind blew, it gusted water and leaves out of the trees and spattered his windshield.

Though it was a cold October night he drove with the windows down and he could hear Sawyer Brook rushing in its banks. He knew every turn and every big maple. He had driven the road who knew how many times. He had driven it mostly with Wynn, and driven it alone when Wynn was studying for some exam and he had already finished and was hankering for family to come home to. It was not his home, but it was close—they had made him feel so. He loved almost more than anything the singsong call of Wynn’s mother, Hansie, as he came through the door: “Jack? Jaaack? Is it you? Come in, come in! Wynn called, said you’d be here. How wonderful, come in!” That song. And the smells would hit him, of a family in the midst of their lives, the morning’s bread on the board, the woodstove, stone scent of the slate at the entrance crumbed with mud, the Lab, Leo, knocking the leg of a table with his tail, the pine and oak exhalations of the old house. The smells wafted in intertwining tendrils and filled a space in him he was used to having empty. It was almost painful.

Tonight he drove the twisting dirt road with dread. He had not come to the funeral. It had been in late September, three weeks after the trip had ended. It was maybe Wynn’s favorite time of year to be on the ridge. The woods yellow and flushed to almost the color of honey, and you could smell the apples ripening on the trees down the hill. And they had held the service in one of his favorite spots, the old hayfield that ran to Sawyer Brook where his mother, mostly, had taught him to fish. They had graciously asked Jack to come, and to say something. He was already at home on the ranch, and he had said, “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“You can’t?” Hansie said. That hadn’t occurred to her.

“I just can’t.”

There was a pause—it sounded like wind through the line—and Hansie had said, “I don’t blame you. Who would? Nobody does.”

“Well.”

“You blame yourself, it’s crazy. I mean it, Jack. God. Just come. Please come. You know he’d want nothing more than that.”

Electronic wind.

He could hear her huff. She said, “He told me once that he didn’t even know where you came from.”

“He did?”

“He said you were the best friend he’d ever had, it was like God or someone dropped you out of the sky onto that trail, and he never hoped to have another one so good. Like a brother but better, because you didn’t have to grow up fighting. God.”

Well. He could hear Wynn saying that. Not wanting to leave God out of it and maybe hurt His feelings in case He really was up there ex machina-ing all over the place. He thanked her and told her he had to go help his father now. That was all he could manage. He wondered for the first time in his life if he was a coward.

But two weeks later he climbed into his truck and drove east. They had not registered for the fall quarter and he had no idea what he was going to do or even if he was going to return to school in the winter. He asked his dad if it was okay if he was back in May and he drove east. He drove across the high desert and the Great Plains, he drove all night. He tried to make himself not think of anything. It was already late in the day when he got to Putney.

The forests at the edge of the fields were luminous with yellows and pinks. The waning light could not mute them. He had already lived one autumn and he was having to live it again. He had no cell signal for some reason and he pulled into the grocery store of the Putney Co-op and asked to use the phone.

“Hello?” Hansie asked, uncertain. She sounded ragged.

“It’s Jack.”

“Oh.” Indrawn breath.

“I’m in town. At the co-op. I was wondering if I could come up.”

A freighted silence, carrying who knew what.

Finally: “You’re here? In Putney?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

A rustling.

“George is away. He’s designing a school in Craftsbury.”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know why he said that. “I can come back another time.”

“No. No, no, no. Come up. For God’s sake. You can stay in Wynn’s room.”

No, I can’t, he thought. I have my sleeping bag.

He bought two bottles of good red wine, he didn’t even know what kind, the price card said thirty-two dollars, and he got back in the truck and drove up the hill west out of town. He passed the sturdy painted clapboard houses and the elementary school and turned up West Hill and the houses became sparser. The road climbed steeply. At a green sign that said Brelsford Road he took the left and drove up to the house that sat above the field.

He held the two wine bottles by the neck in his left hand. When she opened the door he didn’t know what to do with his right hand. He held it out, expecting a handshake or nothing, and she came against it and put her arms around his shoulders and squeezed, squeezed hard, and let her head rest against him. Her hair smelled like woodsmoke and he could see the few rough strands of white. It occurred to him then that he was the last person to see her son alive, that if she was hugging him, she was also hugging Wynn. Goosebumps ran down his arms and he brought his free hand to her back and he held her. He could feel her ribs and she felt frail. It was the first time he’d thought that. He expected his shirt to be wet when she pulled away but it wasn’t.

“It’s good to see you,” she said, not looking at him, and took the bottles. She looked disheveled. Her hair, often in a long braid, was loose. He walked in. He could smell a roast. Jess was at the table, drawing on a sketch pad, her tongue in the corner of her mouth. She looked up and seemed startled. She opened her mouth and her eyes lit and then he could see the confusion. That this time was not like the others.

“Hi,” he said. “Hi, Jess.”

“Hi.” She closed the sketchbook. He didn’t ask her what she was drawing.

“Where’s Leo?” he said.

“Dad took him.”

“Oh. Oh, good.”

She moved her lips around and blinked fast and he could see the fingers of her good hand bending the corners of the sketch paper. “He likes road trips,” she said.

“Oh, good. Yeah, I remember.” He said, “I was thinking of running up the mountain early in the morning. Do you wanna come?”

She shook her head. “No, that’s all right.” She wouldn’t look at him.

Hansie took a deep breath. “Take your jacket off and sit,” she said. “We’re ready.”

He did. She opened one of the wine bottles. She used an old-style simple corkscrew and he noticed that she paused, almost as if to summon her concentration, before she screwed it into the cork swiftly and true and rocked the cork out with two motions. She forked the roast from the oven pan onto a platter and set it on the table.

“It’s from Littledale, down the hill. We bought half a steer this year.”

He nodded. “Smells good,” he said. “His cows were always way better than ours.”

They ate. He faced the big window, out of which, in daylight, he knew he could look down the folded hills and orchards to the Connecticut River Valley and across to Mount Monadnock. They ate in silence. Hansie put down her fork and took a long sip of wine. She left only enough to color the top of the stem of the glass. She turned to Jack.

“It was a beautiful service. He would’ve—” She stopped herself.

He didn’t know what to say.

“What have you been doing?” she said. The edges of her eyelids were raw.

He didn’t know how to answer. He might have said, Combing over every hour of the month of August, then parsing them into minutes. “Helping Pop gather,” he said.

“The cows? Like a roundup?”

“Yes, off the mountain. The Never Summers.”

“You’re on horseback, right? I remember. Like a cowboy song, Wynn said.” He saw her freckled hand reach blindly for the stem of her empty glass. He picked up the bottle and poured the glass full.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. She blinked. He’d never called her that, not since their first meeting, when, laughing, she had given him endless shit. She started to say something but didn’t. Jack thought she was having trouble getting a full breath, and he looked away. He looked down at the table. Wynn had made the table for his parents’ wedding anniversary—clear cherry. The tree must heve been very old, the grain was dark and tight. The grain of the wood was like the contours of a topographic map and he would have given a lot to walk into a country with that much wildness and rhythm and relief. Across the table she was trying to be silent, and he looked up only when she wiped her eyes with her napkin.

“You came a long way,” she said.

He went stock-still. He didn’t breathe.

“You need to tell it, and I need to hear it. Jess, too. She can hear it,” she said.

“Hear it?”

“Jack.”

He felt a surge of panic, maybe like a calf when it feels the first bite of the rope before branding.

“You want me to tell how we…? All of it?”

Hansie nodded.

“Jess?” he said. The girl’s eyes were wide and shiny. He saw that the slice of meat on her plate was uneaten. Her mother in her distraction had forgotten to cut it up. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Jess, I’m sorry. You want me to cut it up for you?” She nodded without taking her eyes off him, and he reached across with his knife and fork and cut the beef into pieces.

He heard a tree branch ticking one of the windows. He owed them.

“Well,” he said. “I—” He set his knife and fork on the plate. “Sure,” he said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and laid it on the table beside his plate, he didn’t know why. As if at the end of the telling he would get up and go. He might.

“It began with us smelling smoke,” he said. He glanced at Hansie.

She nodded.

“Okay. Well. We climbed a hill on an island and saw the fire. It was so big. It scared us. And then a morning with a heavy frost and a thick fog and a lot of wind.”

He told it. The fog, the voices, how it was Wynn who insisted that they paddle back and tell the couple about the fire. Wynn was always taking care of people. He told about the man coming around the bend alone, about finding the woman. They watched his face. Jess’s eyes were wide, almost as if she were watching a thriller she couldn’t tear away from, and she kept twisting her napkin. The only sound was the knocking of the branch and an occasional gust buffeting the windows, whistling in the stove pipe. Now and then their drawn breaths. They didn’t want him to slow down or stop.

He told about the woman’s injuries, the near ambush, the fire. How they walked back into the burn. He didn’t tell about the calf or the bear and her cub on the beach. When he got to meeting the Texans again and the night and the man in the tent and them hurrying down the beach toward the two canoes in the dark, he stopped himself. He turned his chair away, toward the stove. He just breathed. They hadn’t shed a single tear since the beginning and he owed them.

“Okay,” he said. Turned back.

“I took their canoe because it had a motor,” he said. “She needed to get out as fast as we could get her and there was no way I was sending her with them.” He reached for the Skoal in his shirt pocket without thought, untwisted the lid, put in a dip. “Also, after what happened I didn’t want them to catch up with us.”

“Here.” Hansie slid him her teacup from the afternoon. It was rude to chew at dinner—what was wrong with him?

“I’m okay,” he said, and swallowed.

She watched him closely. He coughed into his fist. “And because I wanted to protect my best friend and this woman. At all costs.”

Her eyes bored into him. He said, “That’s why I went upstream. I wanted the Texans to lead. I knew he—the man Pierre—would be waiting with his gun.” He made himself look at her. She nodded. He was not looking for a reprieve and she did not give him one; it was as if she barely saw him. If she were anywhere, she was on that beach.

He told them how the fat man had shot Wynn. He told them that Wynn had died instantly. It was the only lie he told. He told about motoring down to Wapahk. He had given the Texans half a day and then paddled and motored all day and night. He told how he’d come to the portage at Last Chance and found Pierre. The shock. How he carried first the woman, then Wynn around the falls. How two Cree boys were on the dock when they got to the village at daybreak, and when they saw him they ran up the road. The Texans had come in the night before in a sleek expedition canoe raving about men being shot, a woman kidnapped. The men said they had come around the corner at Last Chance and angled toward the left shore and when they were twenty yards from the take-out beach this crazy sonofabitch had popped out from behind a tree and shot at them. With a 12-gauge. But he was clearly not a shooter and he didn’t seat the stock and he blasted high. The fat one had told it and he said his partner JD might have been hungover and he might be a fuckup, but he was a good and loyal friend and he had been a Marine—that’s where he and Brent had met—and he plugged the man Pierre in the chest as easily as he would shoot a deer startled in a clearing. He shot him just as Pierre let off another wild blast that this time shredded the limbs of the pine as he fell.

The village had called up to Churchill and Churchill had sent a Mountie named Austin McPhee. McPhee had married a Cree girl from Wapahk and so he was family and the town was relieved. He flew in on an Otter that night and had already interviewed the Texans and had asked them to be patient and had kept them under guard at the rec center. So Mountie McPhee was already there when the kids ran into town yelling about a wild man with a scoped Savage slung on his back and the wounded girl in the canoe with Wynn.

Hansie and Jess would not take their eyes off Jack. It was as if his face would give some lie to the telling, that he would crack and say, “No, not really. None of this happened. Wynn will be home tomorrow.” Instead he said, “We carried her up to town on a stretcher behind a four-wheeler and they called back the Otter. We took her and Wynn to the airstrip in two separate trucks. McPhee flew back with them to the health center and returned the next morning with two more Mounties. They kept me in the back of the rec center away from the men and interviewed everyone separately. I guess they were afraid I would try to kill them. But I hadn’t shot anyone, and the Texans weren’t pressing charges about the boat. So they said they’d take me back to Churchill on the next flight and arrange another plane back to Pickle Lake, where we—I—had my truck.” Was he telling them what they needed to know? He wasn’t sure.

He said, “They said you-all had already arranged about getting Wynn home.” Why hadn’t he called them then?

“We did,” Hansie murmured. “Then what?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Somehow in the telling he had drunk his wine. He reached for the bottle, poured half a glass carefully, drank it down. He said, “McPhee said, given all the circumstances, the Crown or whatever did not foresee charging the Texans. There’s, uh—” He held himself tight. Why now? He’d gotten through the hardest parts.

He said, “The Mountie said preventing a man from stealing your boat in the wilderness can be considered self-defense.” He took a breath. “Well, and—considering the confusion, heat of the moment…”

She had squeezed her own napkin into a ball. Now she looked at it in her palm like a crumpled dove and laid it out on the table and smoothed it, folded it. She said, “What about the rape? The attempt?”

“The man JD said he was just checking on her since he was the only one awake. She couldn’t tell which man it was in the dark, and though she knew he was trying to molest her, in her half-conscious state she wasn’t sure of much more than that.”

Hansie blew out. She refused to cry again. He wished she would. Jess was looking from her mother to Jack, covering her curled right hand with her good one as if she were trying to protect it from the story.

Jack said, “They held the Texans, I guess, in Thunder Bay for two days. That was it. The woman Maia had a perforated intestine, broken ribs. McPhee told me that they said she would fully recover.”

Hansie said, “She called us. She was at Brigham and Women’s. We talked for an hour.”

Jack looked up sharply. Of course she did. He was the only one who hadn’t. Hadn’t come across. Because in his heart he was still on the river. Right then he realized that was why. He was still on the river with Wynn and they were still paddling and they were still arguing about how much slack they should give the man, everyone. They were still fishing a tea-colored creek with watergrass in the bottom, wading up the stream, separated by a few yards. Wynn was making sculptures of rock and feathers on the shore. Thingamajigs. And reading to him from a book of ghost stories by the fire. This was Wynn’s mother and sister, they were trying to move on. He wasn’t.

“Gimme a minute,” he said. “Please.” He stood. He went out into the windy dark that smelled sweet of decaying leaves and stood on the little deck and packed his pipe and lit it. In a minute he would go back in. He would tell them whatever else they wanted to know.

But he wouldn’t tell them how a Cree deputy had met him at the airport in Churchill and driven him to the Aurora Hotel. How he hadn’t gone in. That he’d turned around and walked up Bernier Street past the ramshackle houses and rusted Ski-Doos and down to the shore. The tide was out, and he walked past the wreck of an outboard motorboat half buried in the sand and he walked straight out onto the tidal flat. He’d seen the polar bear warning signs and knew the bears stalked the shore this time of year but he didn’t care.

How he’d walked twenty yards to open water and kept walking into the shallows until it was near the top of his boots. He pulled Wynn’s canoe from his pocket and set it in the water. It windcocked into the onshore wind and faced the open sea of Hudson Bay. Good. “Good, Wynn,” he whispered. “You carved it true. Of course you did.” How he pushed the little boat toward open water. But the tide was slack and the wind kept knocking the canoe back into his legs. It wouldn’t go. “Hey, hey,” he whispered. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you can go now. Please.” It was almost desperate. How the boat turned sideways against the top of his boot and rested there. He stood in the shallows against the small waves and didn’t move. He looked out into the bay where the line of the horizon was gray against gray. Sky and sea the same. A skein of geese. He closed his eyes. He smelled salt. He heard the rapid plaint of a gull. And then he picked up the canoe and held it in his hand and walked back into town.