Joan Didion: Run River

The wind was rising off the river, breaking both the quiet and the still heat, disturbing the dry leaves and splashing water against the dock, rocking the little cruiser in its mooring, knocking Channing’s flashlight free from the tangled roots and into the drift of the water. Willows whiten, aspen quiver . It was the only line of verse Everett knew: he had learned it maybe thirty years before and he did not remember who had written it or what followed it, but often when the wind came up on the river he found himself repeating it in his mind. Once in Colorado he had seen aspen trembling, miles of them, and had wanted them for the ranch.

He brushed the leaves and dust from Julie’s sweater and wrapped it again around Lily’s shoulders. If a wind comes up when the kiln burns , he thought distantly, the house could go . He stroked Lily’s hair, imagining the flames flashing down through the windbreak of eucalyptus, catching the immense dusty growth of ivy on the north walls, smoldering, then flaring up irrevocably through the entire wooden frame of the house. He could not get it out of his mind that Lily would be trapped in the fire, and he shut his eyes in vain against the ugly image of her fragile bones outlined in the incandescent ruin.

“You knew,” she said finally, her dry sobs mixed with coughs now. “You knew there wasn’t any need.”

He recognized her plea and could not answer it. He wished that he could comfort her (there was no need, Lily, no need, you weren’t involved, Lily, count yourself out) , because she had not, in fact, been involved. Now that it was done, now that Channing lay dead between the river and where they stood, it seemed to Everett that none of them, least of all Lily, could have been involved; that all of them, he, Lily, and Channing, had simply been spectators at something that happened a long time ago to several other people.

“You shot him,” Lily whispered.

Everett nodded, abruptly exhausted. Maybe she didn’t realize , he thought, inert with the new possibility that he would, after all, have to explain it to her. (He had thought they were at least done with that, had thought she realized that for once she had something worth crying about.) Maybe she just now figured it . Then he saw that she was looking beyond him at the dock where his gun now lay, and realized that she was doing no more than framing a question: what would he do now .

He had not thought of there being alternatives, solutions, next steps. Although he could not now focus upon how it had happened or what would happen next, he seemed to have known all along, as surely as he knew about the kiln fire, not only that it would happen but that everything he knew would be obliterated by it. Lily meant something else: you shot him , she meant. Now what .

It occurred to him that Lily had always been keyed to picking up pieces, peculiarly tuned for emergency. What eluded her was the day-to-day action. She would not buy a dress without his approval, but she had driven into the hospital without waking him the night last Christmas when they called to say that Julie had been in an accident after a dance. She had gotten a respirator down on the dock in ten minutes the night his sister Martha drowned. And once, years and years before, she had literally saved Knight’s life: he had been playing with Knight on the grass when Knight crawled away and tore his foot open on a broken Coca-Cola bottle. He had knelt there for whole minutes with Knight in his arms, helplessly watching the blood spurt clear red on the grass. Then as now, he could not think. (That time it had been Lily who had seen them from the house, had come running with a dishtowel and had known how to make the blood stop, and finally shoved Everett and the baby into the pickup and had driven twenty-five miles in to the emergency hospital in Sacramento, her foot down on the accelerator all the way in along that twisting river road. Knight nearly died and he might have died anyway, there in the waiting room of the hospital, if Lily had not slapped the attendant and screamed I don’t give a goddamn what the rules are you’re going to help my baby whether he’s a resident of the city of Sacramento or whether he’s not and you’d better get to it or my father’s going to have every one of you on trial for manslaughter . On the way home, with Knight in her lap, she had begun crying for the first time: she had forgotten, she said, that her father was dead.)

Lily’s hands were on his arm.

“Did Ryder have a gun?” she whispered.

“I can’t hear you,” Everett said harshly. Why did she whisper, knowing full well that there was only one person for miles around (Julie and Knight would still be at the Templetons’, and Liggett and the Mexicans in town; it was Saturday night) and that this one person, this single listener, the topic at hand, was dead.

Lily had stepped back and was staring at him.

“I mean you don’t have to whisper,” he said, brushing a mosquito from his face.

“I said did he have a gun.”

“What do you think? You think he had a gun? He wasn’t out here for the goddamn pheasant, was he?”

“He threatened you.”

Everett looked down the river. “No,” he said. “He did not have a gun and he did not exactly threaten me.”

“He might have, you see.” Lily spoke slowly and clearly, as if to the children when they were small. “He could have threatened you.”

Running for her life , Everett thought. He did not say anything.

“He’d been drinking and he might have come out here and tried to—” She broke off and looked away. “Tried to hurt me.”

“Sure thing,” Everett said. “That’s a nice one. You think the smartest Jew lawyer in California could find twelve friends and neighbors between here and Stockton who’d believe you hadn’t asked for it?”

“We could make the reasons.”

“Listen,” he said. “You listen to me now, this once, and mind what I say. It’s not as easy as that. There aren’t any reasons. I don’t want that.”

“It’s a little late for choosing.”

“You don’t see. I don’t want that.”

“What is it you want,” she said without inflection.

He looked down the river. What is it you want . He had wanted to go away with her, for one thing. The idea of going away had been weaving itself into the fabric of his daily life for months. He had not in the beginning (say in April) thought of it as a trip, a possibility, something which might easily be arranged by travel agents, steamship pursers, airline clerks; even by July, his desire had acquired neither the brilliantly attainable colorings of travel posters and Holiday magazine nor the subtler, more exotic pastels of Rand-McNally cartography. The want would strike him briefly, and at odd moments: while he talked price to the hop broker, or waited for someone to answer the telephone. Even before the idea took real shape, he had begun to count on it: when we’re gone , he would think without perceiving that he had thought it.

But a trip was not much to want. More than that, he had wanted this summer to do something with the children; he had not. In a few weeks Julie would be going back down to Dominican, and all he could remember of the summer was the heat. That was all he could make of it now: the heat, and Lily lying upstairs with the shutters closed against it, and Julie coming in jumpy from it, and how it had bothered Sarah when she came through in June, and how the coolest place was down in the dust among the hops. The house had seemed too small all summer. Three floors, seventeen large dark rooms, room enough for three generations of his family before him: the house had not seemed, this summer, big enough for the four of them. It had been the heat. (“I didn’t remember the heat this way,” Sarah had apologized breathlessly to her husband. “When you’ve lived where it’s green you forget how it is out here. You realize it hasn’t rained since April and it won’t until September? You realize that?” As disturbed still as he had been when Sarah first went away, Everett had said that if she wanted to see green, she had only to look out into the hops. Counting the new system they were spending maybe ten thousand dollars this summer keeping those hops green. “That’s exactly my point,” Sarah had said.)