Saints at the River Page 6

“Kowalsky said I could ride out with them, but I said you’d know how to get there.”

  “I’ll come by at nine,” I said.

  “Good. I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

  Allen stepped away but I spoke anyway.

  “Sounds like Kowalsky is going out of his way to make your job easy.”

  “So far at least.”

  “Is he a fan of your work?”

  “Not that I know of. He said Hudson contacted him, told him I’d be covering the story.” Allen paused. “Hudson told him I’d be more understanding than other reporters because of what had happened to my wife and daughter.”

  He turned away before I could respond. Glancing back, he raised his hand, then walked toward his room.

  I pulled out of the lot, drove past Billy’s store, and took a right onto Damascus Church Road. The few houses I passed, including Aunt Margaret’s, were dark. The road curved a last time and I turned right at the battered mailbox with GLENN hand-painted on its side. Gravel crunched and spun under the wheels as I drove up to the house. No porch light lit the steps, and the moon was waning. But the stars were out, so much brighter than in Columbia. They looked closer up here as well, as though each one had been picked up and polished, then set nearer to the earth.

  I knocked and no light came on, so I knocked harder, hard enough that my knuckles stung. Finally the front bedroom light came on. I heard movement toward the door, then the sound of a latch unfastening.

  Daddy stepped back to let me come in. He wore a green pair of pajamas that probably hadn’t been washed in weeks. His eyes were dulled and unfocused. They registered no surprise, though I hadn’t told him I was coming.

  “How long you been knocking?”

  I set the suitcase beside the fireplace. “A little while.”

  “That medicine the doctors gave me puts me under pretty good. If I’d been in the back bedroom I’d yet be sleeping.”

  He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, the way a drowsy child might.

  “You go on back to bed,” I said. “I know where everything is.”

  “I can make us some coffee,” he said. “That’ll wake me up.”

  “There’s no need to do that. Soon as I unpack I’m going to bed myself.”

  I hoped the medicine would make him too groggy to argue. That way I’d at least get a night’s sleep before we started in on each other. I bent to pick up the suitcase and carry it on into the back bedroom.

  “Seldom as you come,” he said, “it don’t seem fitting to speak no more than a half-dozen words and then be off to bed.”

  “It’s late, Daddy. I’m tired from the trip up here. You’re tired. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “All right,” he said, the petulance draining from his voice. “I’ll make that coffee in the morning.”

  We stood there looking at each other a few moments, keeping our distance. We hadn’t kissed or hugged and I knew we wouldn’t. I remembered how he’d pulled up a chair beside Momma’s bed those last days. He’d sit there for six hours without once getting up but never hold her hand or kiss her forehead. “He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way,” Aunt Margaret said. “Your momma knows that.” But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expressed.

  “Good night,” I said.

  I walked through the kitchen, toward the back bedroom, past Ben’s room. I knew if I paused and turned on the light the room would be much as it had been fifteen years ago: paperbacks and fishing magazines filling a bookshelf, a couple of rods propped up in a corner, chest of drawers. No mirror.

  I WOKE TO MEMORY—THE YELLOW-FLOWERED WALLPAPER I hung in the ninth grade, the poster I bought at a Ricky Scaggs concert, the bureau mirror where Momma and I checked my dress the evening of my senior prom. And the bed where I lay, the same bed my mother had died in my junior year at Clemson.

  That spring, pill bottles had lined the bureau, and a bedpan lay under the night table. The indentation of my mother’s body and head remained on the mattress and pillow each time we lifted her up. The room seemed dark even when the curtains had been pulled all the way back, and no matter the number of times Aunt Margaret and I opened the windows or cleaned the room it always seemed dank and musty like a root cellar.

  Those weekends I slept on the couch. Ben, who drove the truck down to Clemson to pick me up on Fridays, took me back to school Sunday evenings. My grades suffered that semester, and I almost lost my scholarship.

  On those Saturdays I stayed with Momma while Daddy and Ben planted the spring crops. Though she never said it outright, Momma made it clear she expected me to set things right between Daddy and Ben and me, that this burden was mine and mine alone now. What I wanted to say was Why is it me who has to forgive? How can you expect me to do what you couldn’t? But how could I say such things when she lay there dying?

  When I wasn’t tending Momma I cleaned the house and made lunch and supper. Sundays after church Aunt Margaret sent Joel over with yellowware filled with fried chicken and snap beans and rice. By then Momma was too weak to sit with us at the table. Daddy would say a short prayer, and that was more words than were said the rest of the meal.

  Now my father was dying in the same house.

  I made my way to the kitchen. More memories—my mother making fruitcakes at Christmas, my clumsy attempts to cook for her and Daddy and Ben, the Farmer’s Almanac calendar that predicted snow months in advance. And of course what I always thought about when I entered this room: the pot of pole beans on the stove, my brother’s hand reaching for the handle.

  The smell of the coffee did not rouse Daddy, so I poured myself a cup and went back to the bedroom. I set up my laptop on the bed and plugged it into the phone jack. I typed in Allen’s name and pulled up about forty thousand listings, then narrowed the search. A number were passing references, others reprints of articles he’d written, but I found several interviews and a Newsweek profile. Pieces that revealed, among other things, that Allen had had extensive assignments in Belfast, Kosovo, and Cambodia as well as Rwanda.

  My eye was drawn to a comment he made in an interview in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The subject at hand was the limitations of photography. “There is always more that lies outside the camera’s framed mechanical truth,” he’d said. “A photograph is voiceless. Neither its subject nor its producer can explain the suffering or injustice, give it a context. It’s up to a man or woman using the human tool of language to do that.”

  It was an eloquent statement but also rather grandiose, and I wasn’t convinced.

  I kept searching for what I was really after, not stopping until Claire Pritchard-Hemphill’s face appeared on the screen. I scanned the article’s caption and understood not only why Kowalsky would cooperate with Allen but also why Allen still wore his wedding band.

  Claire Pritchard-Hemphill wore her hair longer than most thirty-four-year-old mothers, the dark hair cascading down her shoulders. No mommy cut for this woman. She looked sure of herself, the type who could do the wife and mother thing and still put on a dark skirt and jacket and hold her own in a boardroom. The lips were thick and sensual, the eyes dark as her hair. She smiled slightly in the photograph, a private smile created as much with her eyes as her lips. EDUCATOR, DAUGHTER KILLED IN CAR WRECK, the caption beneath the photograph read.

  Claire Pritchard-Hemphill, thirty-four, died Friday afternoon at Georgetown University Hospital. Ms. Pritchard-Hemphill taught political science at Northern Virginia Community College. A daughter, Miranda Kay Hemphill, nine, also died in the accident which occurred on the George Washington Parkway at 2:40 P.M. Friday. No other cars were involved. Police say a heavy rainstorm was a contributing factor. She was the wife of Washington Post journalist Allen Hemphill.

  I entered Claire Pritchard-Hemphill’s name into the search engine and pulled up another obituary. Born in Landover, Maryland, BA and MA earned at the University of Maryland, both parents and a sister surviving her as well as a husb
and. A different picture headed this piece, a more informal one with Miranda, their faces pressed close together as they smiled at the camera. The child had her mother’s dark hair but her father’s features. She looked happy and confident. From the way she leaned into her mother you knew she was an affectionate child, a child who would crawl into bed with her parents on weekend mornings, a child who would give hugs and kisses before going to school. I wondered if Allen had taken this photograph, had been the person they smiled for.

  I was staring at the picture when Daddy tapped on the door.

  “I thought I heard you up and about,” he said.

  He wore patched corduroy pants that sagged low on his bony hips and a V-neck T-shirt, white hairs tufting from his sunken chest. The doctor had told Ben that Daddy had lost fifty pounds.

  “I got cereal in the pantry,” Daddy said. “That’s about all the breakfast I can eat anymore. If I’d of known you was coming I’d have bought some eggs and bacon.”

  He stepped into the room and stood next to the bed.

  “Cereal is fine,” I said, and exited the screen.

  “You should have let me know you was coming, Maggie.”

  “I didn’t know I was coming myself till the last minute,” I said, trying not to sound irritated, trying and failing. Here we go again, I thought, always able to find some way to rub each other wrong. “I’ve already made coffee,” I said, picking up my cup and stepping past him. “I’ll get you a cup.”

  Daddy sat down at the table as I poured his coffee and refilled my cup. I placed my fingers around the handles and lifted the sugar bowl off the counter as well.

  “You’re going to burn yourself,” Daddy said.

  I glanced at him sharply as I set down the sugar bowl and cup, took a seat at the other end of the table. Between us lay wooden salt and pepper shakers Aunt Margaret had given Momma, a napkin holder Ben mitered in shop class placed beside them.

  “I see you got yourself a new car.”

  “No sir,” I said, “that’s the newspaper’s car. I helped cover the meeting about the drowned girl last night.”

  Daddy stirred sugar into his coffee and took a tentative sip before adding another spoonful. “They get much of anything settled at that meeting?”

  “They spent most of the time getting each other riled up.”

  “What they ought to do is what they done in the old days,” Daddy said. “Throw a stick of dynamite in there and be done with it.”

  “That’s what Harley Winchester said.”

  “Well, it works, and I’ll bet better than any harebrained scheme of building a temporary dam.” Daddy shook his head. “There’s always somebody coming up here to tell us how to do things, everything from what trees we can cut to whether a man can put a trailer on his own land. They never seem to realize we’d been doing just fine before they showed up with all their advice.”

  Daddy waited for me to respond. When I didn’t he took another sip of coffee, then looked out the window to where the milk cow waited outside the barn.

  “Joel’s running late today and that cow don’t like it a bit.” Daddy continued looking out the window as he spoke. “I reckon he was at the meeting.”

  “Yes sir, but I doubt he’ll be at another. Joel and the girl’s father got into it.”

  “I’m not much surprised. That fellow’s been riding him and the twins pretty hard, saying they’re not doing enough when it’s them in there risking their lives while he’s up on the bank. Did you hear what happened to Randy?”

  “No sir.”

  “He was using an underwater camera and he got too close to the hydraulic. It tore the mask right off his face. He was lucky that’s all it got.”

  Daddy looked out the window again. He’d always taken a lot of pride in the way his farm looked, crop rows so straight you’d have thought they’d been marked off with a plumb line, hay bales stacked in the barn loft with the precision of a mason laying brick. What he saw now was a barbed-wire fence that needed mending, a barn roof browned by rust, a pulp-wood truck whose tires were flat from dry rot. Nothing sprouted but broom sedge in the bottomland, and the pond held more silt than water. He was dying and his farm was dying with him.

  He scratched the white hairs sprouting on his chin. Just as he’d kept everything on his farm tidy, he’d done the same with his own appearance. He’d shaved every morning, and when he came in from his fields he never sat down at the supper table without taking a shower first. But that didn’t seem very important to him now. Maybe letting things go made it easier.

  Daddy took another sip of coffee, a longer sip. Coffee dribbled onto his chin like tobacco juice.

  “Can’t run a farm, can’t hardly even swallow no more,” he said. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “If it wasn’t for that chemotherapy I might be able to do more things. That stuff’s probably killing me more than the cancer.”

  “I could milk her. I haven’t forgot how.”

  “No, Joel will be here directly. He just has to get his own chores done first.”

  Daddy looked at the salt shakers. “I reckon Luke Miller was there last night.”

  “Yes.”

  “And talking all his nonsense.”

  “He had his say.”

  Daddy looked at me. I knew he wanted to comment more and probably would, not just about Luke but about Luke and me.

  “Let’s not talk about Luke now,” I said.

  My father’s hands lay on the table before him and they trembled.

  “I got things I need to say,” he said.

  I had never seen him cry, not when he’d visited Ben in the hospital, not when Momma died. But he looked as though he might do so now. It’s the medicine, I told myself.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, and finished my coffee with one long swallow. I could always eat breakfast at Mama Tilson’s.

  I stood up and pushed the chair back under the table and went to the bedroom. I locked the door behind me and shoved clothes and toiletries into my suitcase.

  It wasn’t my first quick exit from this house. I’d been working with Luke a month when I asked to stay overnight. We were in chairs we’d brought out to the cabin’s porch, not so much sitting as sprawling, our bodies, especially arms, succumbing to gravity after a day muscling rapids and sluices. A minute passed before Luke spoke.

  “You sure you want to do that?” he asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you’re going to hurt your father bad, and he’s already had a hard enough year with your mother dying.”

  Luke’s words surprised me.

  “You’re not scared of him, are you?” I asked.

  “No,” Luke said, “but this is going to change things between you two.”

  I laughed. “Well, maybe then it will help, because it can’t get any worse. If something changes between us, it can only be for the better.”

  My birthday had been two days earlier, and I reminded Luke of this fact.

  “I’m twenty-one,” I said. “I make my own choices now.”

  So that night Luke did not drive me down Damascus Church Road to my father’s house. I did not sleep well, perhaps because I wasn’t used to sharing a bed, perhaps because my resolve was weakening. I finally got up and checked Luke’s watch. Three A.M. It wasn’t too late. I could wake Luke and have him drive me home. Daddy would have some words for me about coming in so late, but I would be there before daybreak, and that would make all the difference. To him it would be a sign of deference, an acknowledgment of where my home was.

  But I hadn’t done that. Instead, I turned on the lamp and read until my eyes blurred. Only then did I sleep. When I woke, light streaked through the cabin’s back window and someone was knocking on the front door.

  “It’s my father,” I told Luke.

  Luke sat on the side of the bed and reached for a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

  I grabbed his forearm. “Go on and answer the door.”

  Luke sta
red at me, waiting for some explanation.

  “Don’t put your clothes on.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Luke said, jerking his arm free. He put on the shorts and shirt, then walked across the gray, rough boards and opened the door. Daddy stared at Luke, then past him to where I lay in the bed.

  “I’ve packed up your things and they’re on the front porch,” he said. The words were spoken softly, which was more unsettling than the anger and self-righteousness I’d expected.

  Then Daddy looked at Luke, his voice still low but the inflection sharp as a scythe blade.

  “If I thought it to make any matter of difference, I’d beat the hell out of your worthless ass.”

  I did not sleep in my father’s house again until Christmas, when Ben begged Daddy into letting me come back, begged me to be willing. But I stayed only two nights, and my visits ever since had been even briefer.

  I WALKED INTO THE FRONT ROOM. DADDY STOOD BY THE front door. He had weighed over two hundred pounds most of his life, but now he wouldn’t have pushed a bathroom scale’s needle past one-fifty. His clothes hung as loose on him as they would on a scarecrow.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said and tried to brush past him. His hand reached out and held my arm. There was still enough strength left in that hand to hold me for a few moments.

  “The first night after I heard that girl had drowned I dreamed about it,” Daddy said. “I dreamed I was looking down in the water and her face was looking right back at me. The water was clear and still, and I could feature every part of her face like it was a picture under glass.”

  I jerked out of his grasp, my suitcase bumping his leg as I passed. My back was to him as he finished speaking.

  “Only it wasn’t that girl’s face in the water, Maggie. It was yours.”

  WOLF CLIFF IS A PLACE WHERE NATURE HAS GONE OUT OF ITS way to make humans feel insignificant. The cliff itself is two hundred feet of granite that looms over the gorge. A fissure jags down its gray face like a piece of black embedded lightning. The river tightens and deepens. Even water that looks calm moves quick and dangerous. Mid-river fifty yards above the falls, a beech tree thick as a telephone pole balances like a footbridge on two haystack-tall boulders. A spring flood set it there twelve years ago.