Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (26 page)

The bus wasn’t there, but the flashlight was in the grass by the curb. She switched it off and made her way back up the slope and into the high pasture. Below, the cow had left the spring trough and stood by the barn’s ashes, waiting to be milked, not knowing where else to go.

S
he follows the river’s edge downstream, leaving behind her parents and younger brother who still eat their picnic lunch. It is Easter break and her father has taken time off from his job. They have followed the Appalachian Mountains south, stopping first in Gatlinburg, then the Smokies, and finally this river. She finds a place above a falls where the water looks shallow and slow. The river is a boundary between Georgia and South Carolina, and she wants to wade into the middle and place one foot in Georgia and one in South Carolina so she can tell her friends back in Nebraska she has been in two states at the same time.

She kicks off her sandals and enters, the water so much colder than she imagined, and quickly deeper, up to her kneecaps, the current surging under the smooth surface.

She shivers. On the far shore a granite cliff casts this section of river into shadow. She glances back to where her parents and brother sit on the blanket. It is warm there, the sun full upon them. She thinks about going back but is almost halfway now.

She takes a step and the water rises higher on her knees. Four more steps, she tells herself. Just four more and I’ll turn back. She takes another step and the bottom is no longer there and she is being shoved downstream and she does not panic because she has passed the Red Cross courses.

The water shallows and her face breaks the surface and she breathes deep. She tries to turn her body so she won’t hit her head on a rock and for the first time she’s afraid and she’s suddenly back underwater and hears the rush of water against her ears. She tries to hold her breath but her knee smashes against a boulder and she gasps in pain and water pours into her mouth. Then for a few moments the water pools and slows. She rises coughing up water, gasping air, her feet dragging the bottom like an anchor trying to snag waterlogged wood or rock jut and as the current quickens again she sees her family running along the shore and she knows they are shouting her name though she cannot hear them and as the current turns her she hears the falls and knows there is nothing that will keep her from it as the current quickens and quickens and another rock smashes against her knee but she hardly feels it as she snatches another breath and she feels the river fall and she falls with it as water whitens around her and she falls deep into the whiteness and as she rises her head scrapes against a rock ceiling and the water holds her there and she tells herself don’t breathe but the need rises inside her beginning in the upper stomach then up through her chest and throat and as that need reaches her mouth her mouth and nose open and the lungs explode in pain and then the pain is gone as bright colors shatter around her like glass shards, and she remembers her sixth-grade science class, the gurgle of the aquarium at the back of the room, the smell of chalk dust that morning the teacher held a prism out the window so it might fill with color, and she has a final, beautiful thought—that she is now inside that prism and knows something even the teacher does not know, that the prism’s colors are voices, voices that swirl around her head like a crown, and at that moment her arms and legs she did not even know were flailing cease and she becomes part of the river.

The search and rescue squad and the sheriff arrived at the falls late that afternoon. Two of the squad members were brothers, one in his early twenties, the other thirty. They had a carpentry business, building patios and decks for lawyers and doctors from Greenville and Columbia who owned second homes in the mountains. The third man, the diver, was in his early forties and taught biology at the county high school. The sheriff looked at his watch and figured they had two hours at most before the gorge darkened.

Even so the diver did not hurry to put on his wet suit and air tanks. He smoked a cigarette and between puffs talked to the sheriff about the high school’s baseball team. They had worked together before and knew death punched no time clock.

When the diver was ready, a length of nylon rope was clasped tight under his arms. The older, stronger brother held the other end. The diver waded into the river, the rope trailing behind him like a leash. He dipped his mask in the water, put it on, and leaned forward. The three men onshore watched as the black fins propelled the diver into the hydraulic’s ceaseless blizzard of whitewater. The men on the bank sat on rocks and waited. With his free hand, the older brother pointed upstream to a bend where he’d caught a five-pound trout last fall. The sheriff asked what he’d used for bait but didn’t hear the answer because the mask bobbed up in the headwater’s foam.

The brother tightened the slack and pulled but nothing gave until the others grabbed hold as well. They pulled the diver into the shallows and helped him onto shore. Between watery coughs he told them he’d found her in the undercut behind the hydraulic. She had been upright, her head and back and legs pressed against a rock slab. Only her hair moved, its long strands streaming upward. As the diver had drifted closer, he saw that her eyes were open. Their faces were inches apart when he slipped an arm around her waist. Then the hydraulic ripped free the mask and mouthpiece, grabbed the dive light, spiraling it toward the darkness.

The diver told the men kneeling beside him that the girl’s blue eyes had life in them. He could feel her heart beating against his chest and hear her whispering. Before or after your mask was torn off, the sheriff asked. The diver did not know, but swore that he’d never enter the river again.

The younger brother scoffed, while the older spoke of narcosis though the pool was no more than twenty feet deep. But the sheriff did not dismiss what the diver said. He too had seen strange and inexplicable things involving the dead but had never mentioned them to others and did not choose to now. We’ll find another way, he said, but that river has to lower some before I allow anyone else in there.

The diver had trouble sleeping afterward. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw the girl’s wide blue eyes, the flowing golden hair. His wife slept beside him, her body curled into his chest. They had no children and now he was glad for that. He had seen a picture of the parents in the local paper. They had been on the shore, within thirty feet of the undercut that held their daughter, the expressions on their faces beyond grief.

On the third night, the diver fell into a deeper sleep and the girl came with him. They were in the undercut again but now the river was tepid and he could breathe. As he embraced her, she whispered that this world was better than the one above and she should never have been afraid.

He emerged in his wife’s embrace. It’s just a bad dream, she kept saying until he quit gasping. His wife closed her eyes and was quickly asleep, but he could not so went into the kitchen and graded lab tests until dawn.

The girl remained in the river. Volunteers cast grappling hooks from the banks and worked them like lures through the pool or stood in shallows or on rocks and jabbed with long metal poles. Some of the old-timers suggested dynamite but the girl’s parents would not hear of it. The sheriff said what they needed was a week without rain.

The diver slept little the next few nights. In class he placed the students in small groups and had them discuss assigned chapters among themselves. He knew they talked about the prom instead of pupae and chrysalides, but he didn’t care. On the third afternoon, he skipped the teacher’s meeting and sat alone in his classroom. The school, emptied of students, was quiet, the only sound the gurgle of the aquarium. He would never speak to anyone, not even his wife, about what happened in the classroom’s stillness, but that evening he told the sheriff he’d dive for the girl again.

Days passed. Rain came often, long rains that made every fold of ridge land a tributary and merged earth and water into a deep orange-yellow rush. Banks disappeared as the river reached out and dragged them under. But that was only surface. In the undercut all remained quiet and still, the girl’s transformation unrushed, gentle. Crayfish and minnows unknitted flesh from bone, attentive to loosed threads.

Then the rains stopped and the river ran clear again. Boulders vanished for weeks reappeared. Sandbars and stick jams regathered in new configurations. The water warmed and caddis flies broke through the river’s skin to make their brief flights before falling back into their element.

The sheriff called the diver and told him the river was low enough to try again. The next day they walked the half mile down the path to the falls. There were five of them this time, the sheriff, his deputy, the two brothers, and the diver.

The sheriff insisted on two ropes, making sure they stayed taut. The water was clearer than last time and offered less resistance. The diver entered the abeyance as though parting a curtain, the river suddenly muted.

She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.

When he returned to shore, he told them her body was gone, not even a scrap of clothing or bone. He told them the last hard rain must have swept her downstream. The younger brother said the diver should go back and search the left and right sides of the falls. He argued the body could still be there. The deputy suggested they lower an underwater camera into the pool.

The sheriff shook his head and said to let her be. The men walked up the trail, back toward their vehicles, their lives. The midday sun leaned close and dazzling. Dogwoods bloomed small white stars. The diver knew in the coming days the petals would find their way into the river, drifting onto sandbars and gilding the backs of pools, and the diver knew some would drift through the rapids and over the falls into the hydraulic. They would furl amid the last bones and like the last bones they would finally slip free.

A
fter Mrs. Newell took away his plate and coffee cup, Pastor Boone lingered at the table and watched the thick flakes fall. The garden angel’s wings were submerged, the redbud’s dark branches damasked white. Be grateful it’s not stinging sleet, Parson Boone told himself as Mrs. Newell returned to the rectory’s dining room.

“You’ll catch the ague if you go out in such weather,” the housekeeper said, and nodded at his bible. “Instead of hearing yourself read the Good Book, you’ll be hearing it read over your coffin.”

“Hear it, Mrs. Newell?” Pastor Boone smiled. “Do you dispute church doctrine that the dead remain so until Christ’s return?”

“Pshaw,” the housekeeper said. “You know my meaning.”

Parson Boone nodded.

“Yes, we could wish for a better day, but I promised I would come.”

“Another week won’t matter,” the housekeeper said. “Youthful folk have all the time in the world.”

“It’s been eight months, Mrs. Newell,” he reminded her, “and, alas, they are not so youthful, especially Ethan. Two years of war took much of his youth from him, perhaps all.”

“I still say they can wait another week,” the housekeeper said. “Maybe by then the colonel will die of spite and cap a snuffer on all this fuss.”

“I worry more that in a week Ethan will be the one harmed,” Pastor Boone replied, “and by his own volition.”

The housekeeper let out an exasperated sigh.

“Let me fetch Mr. Newell to hitch the horse and drive you out there.”

“No, it’s Sunday,” Pastor Boone said. “If he’ll ready the buggy, that’s enough. The solitude will allow me to reflect on next week’s sermon.”

The snow showed no signs of letting up as he released the brake handle, but the buggy’s canvas roof kept him dry, and the overcoat’s thick wool provided enough warmth. The wheels shushed through the town’s trodden snow. There were no other sounds, the storefronts shuttered and yards and porches empty. The only signs of habitation were windows lambent with hearth light. He passed Noah Andrews’s house. The physician would scold him for being out in such inhospitable weather, but Noah, also in his seventies, would do the same if summoned. Above, a low sky dulled to the color of lead. An appropriateness in that, Pastor Boone thought.

When the war had begun five years ago, he had watched as families who’d lived as good neighbors, many kin somewhere in their lineage, became implacable enemies. Fistfights occurred and men carried rifles to church services, though at least, unlike in other parts of the county, no killing had occurred within the community. Instead, local men died at Cold Harbor and Stones River and Shiloh, which in Hebrew, he’d told Noah Andrews, meant “place of peace.” The majority of the church’s congregants sided with the Union, those men riding west to join Lincoln’s army in Tennessee, but some, including the Davidsons, joined the Secessionists. Pastor Boone’s sympathies were with the Union as well, though no one other than Noah Andrews knew so. To hold together what frayed benevolence remained in the church, a pastor need appear neutral, he’d told himself. Yet there were times he suspected his silence had been mere cowardice.

Now Ethan Burke, who fought for the Union, wanted to marry Colonel Davidson’s daughter, Helen. The couple had come to him before last week’s service, once again pleading for his help. They had known each other all their lives, been baptized in the French Broad by Pastor Boone on the same spring Sunday. When Ethan and Helen were twelve, they’d asked if he’d marry them when they came of age. The adults had been amused. Since the war’s end last spring, Pastor Boone had watched them talking together before and after church, seen their quick touches. But when Ethan called on Helen at the Davidsons’ farm, the Colonel met him at the door, a Colt pistol in his remaining hand. You’ll not step on this porch again and live, he’d vowed. Ethan and Helen had taken Colonel Davidson at his word. Every Sunday afternoon for eight months Ethan, whose family owned only a swaybacked mule, walked three miles to the Davidson farm and did the chores most vexing for a one-handed man. While Helen watched from the porch, Ethan replaced the barn’s warped boards and rotting shingles, cleaned out the well, and stacked hay bales in the loft. Afterward, he stood on the steps and talked to Helen until darkness began settling over the valley. Then he’d walk back to the farmhouse where his widowed mother and younger siblings awaited him.