Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice - A Memoir

The next day I limped to a hospital and emerged with my left leg encased in plaster. The knee ligaments were destroyed but I was happy. The cast gave me a legitimate reason for going home. I rode an airplane for the first time and my mother picked me up in Lexington. She drove me two hours into the eastern hills, where the community accepted my return as a wounded hero. My family’s attitude was one of justice having been done; the cosmos had exacted its price for the sheer audacity of leaving the land. Dad and I drank beer together, a rite we’d never performed before. He repeated again and again, “They shoot horses in your shape.”

The cast was due for removal in eight weeks but took ten because the local doctor had to import a special cutting tool. He was so impressed with the New York cast that he asked to keep it. My leg revealed itself pale, withered, and hairless. Every evening, I filled a purse with rocks, fastened it to my ankle, and lifted it from a sitting position. Between repetitions I plucked ticks from the dogs, watching night arrive. The black air seeped down the hills to fuse land and sky in a darkness absent from the city.

My acting career had failed but I had been to all the museums, and many galleries. The paintings overpowered me. I often sat for hours before a single canvas, studying each nuance of brushstroke, seeking to understand not the painting, but the painter. Galleries had the effect of a swift cold shower. Museums left me exhausted. Limping in the womb of the hills, I decided to become a painter without ever having applied brush to canvas. First, I needed a job to finance the supplies. Second, I needed unusual clothes. Third and most important, I needed inspiration.

I thought of Jahi offering herself as reward for violence. I had shunned the ritual as a petrifact. Becoming a grownup had to mean more than sex, needed to be independent of women. The traditional arena of sports had left me with a leg unable to tolerate the required pivots. I could stay at home and cut trees, dig the earth, and kill animals, but using nature as my testing ground would prove nothing. The woods were full of damaged men. Nature always won.

Willows are budding along the river, and young birds already sing from the nest. Rita’s had an easy first couple of months. She sleeps late, takes a daily nap, and has vomited only once. Until then, we were afraid that since she’d had no morning sickness, there might be something wrong, I was proud of her mess.

Lately she has begun traipsing from the closet to the mirror.

“Do I look pregnant?” she asks.

“No,” I say, believing that she’s trying to hide her weight. She curls on the bed and cries. I join her, stroking her hair, slowly realizing that she’s been choosing clothes to emphasize her belly, not conceal it. Rita wants everyone to know. Since becoming pregnant, she leans her shoulders back and rubs her stomach, resembling someone who just ate a fine meal, instead of a woman carrying a child. Now she’s finally showing.

Barring outright violence, the worst move a man can make is abandoning a pregnant woman. The act, however, is not uncommon. I now understand the motivation as uncontrollable fear, rather than desire for freedom or a different mate. Male terror looms in tandem with the woman’s rising belly. She is changing; he is not. Her body and mind drastically alter day by day while he’s still the knucklehead he always was.

The prospect of spending a life with Rita impels a scrutiny of her smallest traits that aggravate me like saddle burrs. In the woods I speculate on which habit will drive me to mania at age sixty — not screwing the lid on a ketchup bottle hard enough, or leaving her clothes scattered like pollen about the house. She would prefer that I answer the phone politely and change my clothes more often. The compromise of pair bonding is the acceptance of previously unacceptable personal traits.

In Kentucky there are two clubs for young boys—4-H and Future Farmers of America. I joined both for the field trips, one of which was to the state fair. We were bused two hundred miles to the grounds — a vast spectacle, bigger than the nearest town in the hills. One exhibit was of a live cow with a plexiglas window in its side. The hide had been peeled back, the flesh removed, and I could watch the churning of its digestive system, the regurgitation and movement of food from one stomach to another. It turned me against milk for a year.

If I could somehow see inside Rita, I’d feel less uneasy about the baby. The library books say it’s an embryo until the eighth week, when all the organs are formed. At that point it’s a fetus the size of a thumb. Photographs make me think of a tiny whale, its heart directly behind the mouth, an eating machine. There is no peephole to Rita’s belly but I have to accept that a baby’s in there. As with God or black holes, one goes by the surrounding evidence.

Yesterday the county Civil Defense warned us of impending flood. They offered free sand, but we’d have to fill the bags ourselves. I drank coffee all night, crossing the yard with a flashlight every half hour. The water rose faster than Rita’s belly. I held tightly to a post, as if the river might suck me into its current. I imagined Rita and me in the boat, the typewriter and child between us, hunting a knoll. Trees crashed into the river, the soil of their roots eaten away by the swiftly rising water. The storm continued through the night.

At dawn today the river’s dark surface runs thick as milk. It has crested two feet from our bank. A single goose sits fifty yards away, black-necked with a white patch on his throat like a chin strap to a lost helmet. It hasn’t moved in two hours. Lightning has sheared a branch from a tree, and the trunk is scarred by the burn. Siberian shamans made sacred drums from such trees, but this one isn’t fresh enough. After twelve hours, the electricity’s power has faded. Beneath its overhang a great blue heron breaks from shore, long neck tucked in a curl, wings lifting slowly like a prehistoric bird. A bloated cow floats by, eyeholes pecked to vacancy by crows.

The anchor for my boat is a coffee can filled with cement. The rope is too short for the sudden rise of water. It holds the bow below the surface, the anchor line a false umbilicus. The motor rides high in the back while the gas tank drifts between seats. The boat is filled with river. All the life jackets have floated away.

A line of geese flies downriver, shifting direction as a group, following the telepathy of flight. Ravens can be taught to copy human speech, and I suppose if my tongue were split, I could talk with birds. They would impart the secrets of their hollow bones, and I could tell them how lucky they were to limit reproduction to eggs. An outbuilding is drifting by, a wooden shed built too near the bank for safety. A squirrel crouches on the ridgepole. A coil of wire still hangs from a nail.

Rita is at work. She dropped me off at home after our monthly checkup. We feel lucky to have our doctor; she is honest and forthright. It is like visiting a favorite sister. She allows me to peek over her shoulder when shining a flashlight deep into Rita’s innards. Everything’s red in there. I don’t know what I’m seeing and don’t want to ask. After the exam, the doctor says Rita has an “easy uterus.” If a man had said that, I might have been offended.

She smeared grease on Rita’s belly and pressed a microphone left of her navel. A cord ran to a small speaker. We listened to the fetal heartbeat miked in the tiny room. The baby had a quick rhythm that harmonized with Rita’s slower pulse. I asked if we could turn off the lights and listen. Rita nodded to the doctor; they allow me little moments, slight involvements. The twining sounds of heartbeat reminded me of the night of the storm. The baby is rain. Rita is the steady gush of river. I am alone in the dark on the bank.