Black River (11 page)

 

 

 

 

On Monday, September gave way to October. Big cardboard crates of pumpkins appeared outside the doors of Henderson's Feed and Farm, displacing the weathered old bachelors who usually stood there, one boot sole against the wall, spitting into the gravel. The diner across the street painted cartoonish bats and ghosts on its windows. And the banner Wes had been half waiting to see went up across Main Street, down by the old prison. Looked to be the same one they'd hung when he lived here, faded and frayed. It was tied fast to two streetlamps, knot upon knot, and half-moon slices had been cut into the material so when the wind barreled through the canyon it wouldn't tear the banner down.
BLACK RIVER HARVEST FESTIVAL
, it said, and below, in smaller letters,
THIS SATURDAY
.

“You going to stay for it?” Dennis had asked that morning. Wes pretended he'd forgotten. Pretended to think about it. Then he'd said yes, and let it go at that, because he still hadn't told Dennis about the parole hearing, and now he could put off telling him for another week.

He hadn't forgotten about Harvest, of course. Wes had first stepped onto the Harvest stage when he was six years old, a skinny kid with a ¼-size fiddle. Folks had been prepared to listen politely, applaud dutifully. And then he'd played “Devil's Dream,” a showoff of a tune most of them had heard before, but never so fast and never so good. Harvest was where he'd first played for an audience, where he'd met Claire, where he and Lane and Farmer were the headliners seventeen years running. Time was, no one left Harvest until Wes played his fiddle.

When Claire told him she wanted to come back to Black River, he'd immediately calculated the time to Harvest. It hadn't seemed so many days. He'd imagined driving with her there in the truck, slowing to ease over the ruts when the asphalt gave way to oiled dirt a half mile outside town. He'd imagined parking at the end of a long ragged line of pickups, imagined taking Claire in his arms the way he had when he'd carried her, giggling, over the threshold of the house after their wedding. He imagined her wrists overlapping at the back of his neck, her head against his chest, the plain scent of her hair beneath his nose. He'd imagined carrying her to a seat midway back from the stage, on the side nearest the river, sitting there with her in the cool autumn sun and watching the musicians as they took their turns up on the stage, neither he nor Claire listening, both of them hearing the same long-gone music instead.

 

Harvest was held in a wide fallow field east of town. By late morning, when Wes arrived, parked cars and pickups lined both sides of the road and spilled into the dry lot opposite the field. It was the best day you could ask of October: sunny and cool, only a few clouds in the sky casting rounded shadows onto the mountain slopes. There was a hint of wildfire smoke in the air, a niggling sting at the back of the throat, and though it was from a distant blaze, it mingled uneasily with the scents of fried dough, beer, straw.

Wes walked alone along the shoulder of the road behind parents tightly clutching the hands of children, a group of teenagers laughing too loudly, a man he didn't recognize carrying a black guitar case. He let himself be funneled along with the rest of them through the entrance to the festival, marked with stakes and twine punctuated by triangular plastic flags. The field had been mowed, the stubble tamped down by dozens of boot soles. Along the periphery a couple of old pieces of farm machinery—a harrow, a rake wheel—sat rusted and folded up like the giant husks of dead insects. Down on the far end of the field was an oversized metal shed where the county kept three snowplows and a two-story load of coarse sand. Tucked way off beneath the mountains was the river. Hard to see unless you walked straight to it, but if you got up on the stage it stared you right in the face.

Wes wandered slowly through the crowd, pushed his way along the corridor formed by the rows of food booths. Folks packed tight, lined up to wait for booze or ice cream or elephant ears, or, if they were really brave, for Rocky Mountain oysters. Signs tacked to every available surface reminded everyone that the profits went to the Corrections Officers' Welfare Fund. Wes stood in line at one booth and thought about the unpaid bills stacked on the kitchen table in Spokane, the unopened statements that must be scattered on the floor below the mail slot, the notices still making their way through the postal system. He thought about the fact that Claire had reached her annual maximum benefit cap in May, that he hadn't paid the mortgage since July, that all four of his credit cards were maxed out. He thought about his depleted bank account and the crushed manila envelope in his duffel back at Dennis's, not quite a thousand dollars in cash inside. Then he thought about the welfare fund and how they'd picked up what the insurance wouldn't after the riot. When he got to the head of the line, he bought a beer he didn't want, paid with a fifty and didn't wait for the change.

On the far side of the food corridor the festival forked apart: crafts in one direction, games in another, the stage straight ahead. Wes found a spot to stand near the back of the crowd, behind the rows of straw bales that served as seating. It was a good stage for a small-town event like this. Not real big, but high, and bound overhead by an upturned squared-off horseshoe of metal latticework, speakers on either side, lights above. A few more bells and whistles than he remembered. There was another banner across the front of the stage, as tired as the one on Main Street, and a few pumpkins and cornstalks arranged near the speakers. A bluegrass band was playing now. Wes didn't recognize them, but they were young. A guitarist, a bass player, banjo and mandolin pickers. A fiddler.

He wasn't bad, the fiddler. Kept a good chop going, played a fast break. But he was getting by on the speed of his fingers. That was enough for most folks in any given audience: a quick melody, a fast bow, fingering that was so far beyond anything they could imagine doing themselves they thought that made it good. But the thing about a fiddle was that it was more like the human voice than any other instrument in the world. You could make it sing. You could sustain a note for as long as a breath, longer. You could draw that bow across two strings at once, or slide it from one string to the other in a single downbow, and in doing that you could sound a piercing cry and a low sob at once, joy and sorrow made one.

There were open seats up ahead, but Wes stayed where he was. The band rounded off one song, launched into another. “Salt Creek.” Wes knew it, of course; it'd been one of his band's standbys. His fingers tried to tap out the notes against his thigh, but they crossed and tripped over each other, and he pulled them into a painful fist. Forced himself to be still and listen. A strange thing to stand here and listen to a man who was a good fiddler but nowhere near as good as Wes had been. Wasn't sure if it was a rare pleasure or an especially exquisite torture. He liked hearing this familiar music played well, with familiar scents in the air and familiar ground beneath his feet. There was something right in that. But it also just about killed him to be so close to a stage he'd stood on so many times in his life, a stage he'd commanded, and know he'd never stand on it again.

 

Lane had changed the name of the band at least once a year. Lane Gregory and the Lockdown Lads, or Lane Gregory and the Prison Posse, or something equally ridiculous. A fluid series of names for a fluid band. Lane, Arthur and Wes had played together for nineteen years. Others drifted in and out: there had been a couple mandolin players, a second guitar for a while, a standup bass for a few short weeks. They played an even balance of bluegrass and old-time, with a little straight-up country mixed in for good measure.

At Harvest they were always the final act, got an hour where the other bands had twenty minutes. They'd play their usual set: upbeat songs people knew, or that sounded close enough to ones they did; maybe a few of those old cowboy ballads Lane liked, the ones that showed off his voice but tested the audience's patience for pathos. And all those songs were good, but what they really did was give everyone time to wrap up whatever else they might be doing, to make their way over to the stage. Because Wes had played here every year since “Devil's Dream,” and folks knew what was coming. Lane and Farmer would step back, and Wes would step forward. And that stage belonged to him alone.

He had a repertoire of tunes that numbered in the hundreds, all learned by ear, all held there in his head, ready to be brought forth by his fingers at a moment's notice. A nearly endless stable of notes and melodies at his command, and even that wasn't enough. He composed his own tunes sometimes, pieces that went beyond improvisation, beyond a hot lick or a fast break. He never set out to do it; the tunes came into being as he played alone, forming themselves from notes that joined together almost without his deciding to join them. One of those tunes, especially, Wes let himself be proud of. It was a slow piece, not what you'd think folks would want to hear at what was essentially a big party. Not quite a waltz. More an air.

Low notes first, building to a melody that rose into the highest register, then broke back down into the low notes again. Back and forth. Lingering on hope, never escaping melancholy. It was a piece that had evolved over the years, started as a simple thing with an A part and a B part, each repeated once. He'd built it into something more over time, found that he never played it precisely the same way twice. He added ornaments, took them away again. Experimented with double-stops, added new parts, shifted keys in the middle. To this day, he didn't know its final form, didn't know how it would sound if he could play it now—if he could have played it for Claire when she asked—and that, more than anything else, was why he would never forgive Williams.

Always there was a moment toward the end of the tune, a long single high note Wes could hold seamlessly for several bow strokes, the string pressing sharp against his fingertip, his wrist fluttering in the slightest of vibratos, when he knew that everyone at Harvest was listening to him. He'd look out across the field and see them watching, from the stage all the way to the glittering river. No talking. No laughing. No drinking. Hundreds of faces, all turned his way, all listening to the music he made, all knowing there was something true in that wistful note, that even in the midst of the festival there were things here, in this canyon, in these lives, that were always painful and sometimes beautiful.

The moment didn't last long. The note had to end—though sometimes Wes wondered if he might sustain it forever—and when it ended people drifted out of the collective pause. By the time Wes took his fiddle from beneath his chin and nodded his head in an awkward bow, all was back to the way it had been three minutes earlier.

And afterward, one day, there had been Claire, shy; Dennis, a dark-haired four-year-old clutching her hand; and Farmer, a sure smile on his lips and in his eyes as he introduced them. You play beautifully, Claire had said, and though Wes had heard the words from many others, many times, they'd never before brought a flush to his cheeks. That song, she said. The one you played alone. What's it called?

Hasn't got a name.

She hadn't even had to think about it. You should call it “Black River,” she told him.

 

Wes applauded with everyone else as the bluegrass band took their bows and left the stage. There was a general exchange of people in the audience while cords and microphones were rearranged, as some folks drifted away and others came to find seats and settle in. A group of teenagers claimed the straw bales in front of Wes, and they folded their gangly limbs and leaned into each other as they sat. Eighteen years working security at a shopping mall had left Wes with an earned dislike of teenagers in packs, and he thought about moving, but then Farmer walked onto the stage, Scott trailing him. One of the girls on the straw bale giggled loudly and whispered something to the boy beside her. Up on the stage, Farmer settled onto a stool near the back, out of the way. He'd dressed up; his jeans had a crease down the front, and the pearl snaps on his shirt shone in the sun. Scott had made no such concession to the occasion. He wore skinny black jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Red sleeves reached from the base of his fingers to his elbows; they looked like socks with the feet cut off. Scott's eyebrow piercings glinted, and his dyed hair was in such disarray he might've just gotten out of bed, though Wes supposed he'd actually worked to make it look like that. He approached the microphone with his customary sulking shuffle. He didn't introduce himself, didn't speak at all, just looked back at Farmer once and sang his first note as Farmer played his first chord.

His voice was startling. It was the clearest of tenors, nothing like his shambling speaking voice, and he hit each note so roundly, with such ease, that it seemed his range might be limitless. Scott hadn't lied: he was a singer all right. The song he chose was just as surprising as his voice. “Mary Morgan.” It was one of those old campfire ballads with a misleading tempo, so when the tragic twist came it was a surprise that seemed either improbable or inevitable, depending on one's mood and disposition. It told the tale of a rancher's daughter who falls in love with a young man who has joined a roving band of horse thieves. Her father forbids her to see the horse thief, but she steals away in the middle of the night to meet him. When she returns, long past midnight, the rancher hears her in the barn and, in the dim moonlight, mistakes her for the horse thief. He gets his rifle and fires, not realizing he has taken his own daughter's life.

Scott really sold it, made you think it'd happened here, and not so long ago. When he sang the chorus—
Wait for me beneath the willow, my Mary Morgan
—it might have been with the voice of the grief-stricken young horse thief. It was, Wes realized, the first time he'd seen the kid express emotion that went beyond sullenness and anger. His audience wasn't rapt, though. Wasn't even polite. The whispering had started soon as Scott stepped onto the stage, and it hadn't quit. Folks clearly knew who Scott was—and who his father was, or
where
he was, at least. In front of Wes, two of the teenage girls were sharing a pair of earphones, their heads touching; he could hear the thrum of the bass from where he stood. One of the girls had blond hair, blond as Claire's had been, and he wondered briefly if Scott knew her, if he thought she was pretty.