John Hart - Down River

Robin left a few minutes later to catch the seven o’clock briefing at the police station. I took some Percocet and pulled her sheets around me. Pain tunneled through my head; hammer blows at the temples, a cold nail at the hairline. In all of my life, I’d seen two things make my father cry. When my mother died, he’d wept for days; slow, constant tears, as if they welled from the seams of his face. Then tears of joy, once.

My father had saved a life.

The girl’s name was Grace Shepherd. Her grandfather was Dolf Shepherd, the farm’s foreman and my father’s oldest friend. Dolf and Grace lived in a small cottage on the southern edge of the property. I never knew what had happened to the child’s parents, only that they were gone. Whatever the reason, Dolf stepped up to raise the girl by himself. It was a trial for him-everybody knew it-but he’d been doing well.

Until the day she’d wandered off.

It was a cool day, early fall. Dry leaves clattered and scraped under a dull, heavy sky. She was barely two, and let herself out the back door while Dolf thought she was upstairs, sleeping. It was my father who found her. He was high in one of the pastures when he saw her on the dock below the house, watching leaves spin on the surging current. I’d never seen my father move so fast.

She went in without a splash. She leaned too far and the water just swallowed her up. My father hit the river in a loose dive, and came up alone. I made it to the dock as he went back down.

I found him a quarter mile downstream, cross-legged in the dirt, Grace Shepherd on his lap. Her skin shone as pale as something already dead, but she was round-eyed and wailing, her open mouth the only slash of color on that bleak riverbank. He clutched the child as if nothing else mattered; and he was weeping.

I watched for a long second, sensing, even then, that the moment was a sacred thing. When he saw me, though, he smiled. “Damn, son,” he’d said. “That was a close one.”

And then he’d kissed her head.

We wrapped Grace in my jacket as Dolf arrived at a run. Sweat poured down his face and he stopped, uncertain. My father handed the child to me, took two quick steps, and dropped the girl’s grandfather with a single blow. The nose was shattered, no question, and Dolf bled there on the riverbank as his oldest friend trudged, wet and weary, to the house up on its hill.

That was my father.

The iron man.

I slept some of the pain away, and woke to a thunderstorm that rattled the old windows and put jigsaw shadows on the wall every time the lightning flashed. It swept through town, dropped sheets of water, then boiled south toward Charlotte. The pavement still steamed when I went outside to get my bag from the car.

I laid my fingers on gouged paint and traced the word.

Killer.

Back inside, I stalked the small rooms. Restless energy burned through me, but I felt at odds with myself. I wanted to see home, but knew how the seeing would hurt. I wanted to speak to my father, but feared the words that would come. His words. Mine. Words you can’t take back or forget; the kind that scar deep and heal thin.

Five years.

Five damn years.

I opened a closet door, closed it without seeing what was inside. I drank water that tasted of metal, stared at books, and my eyes passed over it without seeing it; but it must have registered on me. It must have had some impact. Because as I paced, I thought of my trial: the hate that burst against me each day; the arguments built to hang me; the confusion among those who knew me best, and how it was compounded when my stepmother took the stand, swore her oath, and tried with her words to bury me.

Most of the trial was a blur: accusations, denials, expert testimony on blunt force trauma and blood spatter. What I remembered were the faces in the courtroom, the ready passions of people who once professed to know me.

The nightmare of every innocent man wrongly accused.

Five years ago, Gray Wilson was nineteen years old, right out of high school. He was strong and young and handsome. A football hero. One of Salisbury’s favored sons. Then someone bashed a hole in his skull with a rock. He died on Red Water Farm and my own stepmother said I did it.

I circled the room, heard those words again-not guilty-and felt the violent thrust of emotion they put into me: the vindication and relief, the simple conviction that things could go back to the way they’d been. I should have known that I was wrong, should have felt it in the dank air of the slam-packed courtroom.

There was no going back.

The verdict that should have been an ending, was not. There was also the final confrontation with my father and the short, bitter goodbye to the only place I’d ever called home. A forced parting. The town didn’t want me. Fine. Just dandy. As much as it hurt, I could live with that. But my father made a choice, too. I told him that I didn’t do it. His new wife told him that I had. He chose to believe her.

Not me.

Her.

And he told me to leave.

My family had been on Red Water Farm for more than two hundred years, and I’d been groomed since childhood to take over its management. My father was easing back; Dolf, too. It was a multimillion-dollar operation and I was all but running it when the sheriff came to lock me away. The place was more than a part of me. It was who I was, what I loved, and what I was born to do. I couldn’t stay in Rowan County if the farm and my family were not a part of my life. I couldn’t be Adam Chase, the banker, or Adam Chase, the pharmacist. Not in this place. Not ever.

So I left the only people I’d ever loved, the only place I’d called home. I sought to lose myself in a city that was tall and gray and ceaseless. I planted myself there, and breathed in the noise and the flow and the pale white fuzz of endless, empty days. For five years, I succeeded. For five years I pounded down the memories and the loss.

Then Danny called, and blew everything apart.

It was on the fourth shelf, thick and spine-out. Pale. White. I pulled it from the shelf, a heavy sheaf, bound in plastic.

State v. Adam Chase.

Trial transcript. Every word said. Recorded. Forever.

It was heavily used, smudged, and folded at the corners. How many times had Robin read it? She’d stood by me during the trial, sworn that she believed me. And her faith had almost cost her the only job she’d ever cared about. Every cop in the county thought I’d done it. Every cop but her. She’d been unflinching, and in the end, I’d left her.

She could have come with me.

That was truth, but what did it matter? Her world. My world. It could not have worked. And here we were, all but strangers.

I let the transcript fall open in my hands; it did so easily, spread itself to the testimony that almost damned me.

WITNESS: A witness called by the The State,

having been first duly sworn to tell the truth,

was examined and testified as follows:

Direct Examination of Janice Chase by the

District Attorney for the County of Rowan

Q: Will you please state your name for the Court?

A: Janice Chase.

Q: How are you related to the defendant, Mrs. Chase?

A: He is my stepson. His father is my husband. Jacob Chase.

Q: You have other children with Mr. Chase?

A: Twins. Miriam and James. We call him Jamie. They’re eighteen.

Q: They are the defendant’s half siblings?

A: Adopted siblings. Jacob is not the natural father. He adopted them shortly after we were married.

Q: And where is their natural father?

A: Is that important?

Q: Just trying to establish the nature of these relationships, Mrs. Chase. So the jury will understand who everybody is.

A: He’s gone.