Питер Геллер - The River

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.