The River

I come from down in the valley, that place where the hills swallow the sun at night and the dust rises in the mornings like it’s been there a hundred years, waiting, knowing that every man in the valley, mister, when he’s young, is taught to stand in his father’s shadow, to work the fields like his daddy done, to keep his mouth shut and never ask too many questions because it’s the way it’s always been and the way it’ll always be, the way it will break you and remold you, never asking if you wanted it, because you don’t have to want it; you just do it, and that’s enough, and there’s no thinking of it at all except for the hunger that rises in you like a bird with its wings clipped, and you never know if it’s the hunger for something more or just the hunger to feel something, anything, like the cold water of the river that we’d dive into when we were still young enough to believe that anything was possible.

I met Mary when she was seventeen, like a moment you can’t hold in your hands, like a sliver of the sky that you didn’t notice until it’s too late and you’re already in it, and she had that light in her eyes, that look, you know the one, the one that makes you think you might just run, run from this valley and this life and everything that’s been handed to you like it’s your inheritance, like you’re born to it, and all you’ve ever known is the weight of it around your neck, but she — she had the light, and I could see that she was meant for something else, something big, something beyond the air of dust and the work of hands worn ragged with a lifetime of toil, but she wasn’t meant for here, and I wasn’t meant for her, but we didn’t know that yet.

We’d drive out of the valley, down to where the fields stretched wide, endless like the dreams we didn’t know how to keep, the kind of dreams you can only touch with the edge of your fingers and never get the full grasp of. We went to the river, and it didn’t matter what the world was doing then. The river was always the same. It didn’t change. It didn’t care what we were or what we would become, just cold and sharp like it always was, like it had been since before either of us were born. We’d dive in, and for a moment, everything was nothing. The river, the sky, the hills — they were gone, and it was just us. And then she was pregnant. And man, that was all she wrote. That was everything we never talked about, never said out loud, because it wasn’t a thing you needed to speak. You just knew it, like the earth knew it, and the air knew it, and we were bound in it, bound like the earth was bound to the sun. She was pregnant, and the world didn’t care, but it was a kind of reckoning that we hadn’t been prepared for.

I was nineteen then, and for my birthday, they handed me a union card and a wedding coat like I was supposed to feel proud, supposed to feel something that wasn’t just a weight, the weight of the thing that had been put on me without a word. We went to the courthouse. It was all so quiet, so dry, the judge didn’t smile, didn’t say a thing, just scribbled his name on the paper and sent us away, not even a breath to mark the change. No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle. No flowers. No wedding dress.

That night, we went down to the river. We dived in again, the water cold and sharp, and it felt like we were still the same, like nothing had changed. But it had, and we both knew it, though neither of us said anything. Oh, down to the river we did ride.

I got a job with the Johnstown Company, working construction, and that was supposed to be the answer, wasn’t it? Work hard, keep your head down, don’t ask for anything more, and you’ll be fine. But lately there ain’t been much work, on account of the economy. Now all them things that seemed so important … well, mister, they vanished right into the air. Now I just act like I don’t remember. Mary acts like she don’t care.

But I do remember. I remember her body, tan and wet, lying in my brother’s car after we went down to the reservoir, the way the moonlight caught in her hair like she might’ve been some kind of angel who just wandered down from the hills for a minute and didn’t know how to leave. I remember those nights on the banks, the way the silence settled between us, I’d lie awake and pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take, and it was like holding onto something real in a world that felt like it might slip away any minute. And those memories — they don’t leave. They don’t fade, and they don’t forgive. They haunt me, like a curse you can’t outrun, a ghost that’s tied to you, tied to the valley, tied to that river that kept running (he jes keeps rollin’), even when everything else was still.

And there spread before me an expanse of water embraced by a blue dissolution of shoreline and the glitter-broken small waves slapping and whispering at the pier, but no sound, no tremble even, the waves like something out of a book, years ago, of Owen Wister’s, the wife in the pink ball dress who drank the laudanum and the cowboys taking turns walking her up and down the floor, that’s what the small river ripples were like, keeping her on her feet, keeping her alive, remembering and forgetting in the same instant. Down to the river, my baby and I. Oh, down to the river we ride.

I wonder if a dream is a lie when it don’t come true. Or is it something worse that sends me down to the river, though I know the river is dry?

Oh, down to the river we did ride.