Black River (2 page)

He hardly pauses, but she hears the edge come into his voice. That's fine, he says.

He's my husband, Denny. I love him.

I know, Mom. I said it's fine. He's angry now, talking through his teeth.

I want to be with you, she says. You and Wesley both. When it's time.

She wishes she had said,
When I die. When my heart stops beating. When this disease takes the little I have left and kills me.
He needs to hear it. He needs to understand. But even Wesley still says
if something happens.
If.
Never
when.

 

Something she has never told Wesley: when they left Black River eighteen years ago, without Dennis—when Wesley made her choose—Claire didn't go because she needed him. She didn't go because she thought he was right. She went because she knew her son, even at sixteen, would be all right without her. She couldn't say the same about her husband.

 

Wesley is glad to have tasks. Over the next days, he approaches each with single-minded purpose: calling her doctors here, calling the hospice there, arranging time off work (Claire suspects this is harder than he reports; he has already taken so much). He counts out her medications, checks labels, calls in refills. Lays out more clothes than she'll ever wear. Sorts through photographs and mementos, wraps everything she could possibly want in layers of newsprint and bubble wrap. He stacks the things he packs in their bedroom, against the far wall. Two suitcases, one duffel, three boxes. He is packing for the time he hopes she will have. For more time than the doctors have suggested she will have. Is this delusion, she wonders, or denial?

He sits on the edge of the bed. We can go tomorrow, he says.

I'm glad.

They're predicting sun the whole way. Ought to be a pretty drive.

Where's your fiddle?

A sharp look. What?

You haven't put your fiddle with the other things. You have to take your fiddle.

Claire.

Get it.

He stands, slowly. Goes to the closet and reaches to the top shelf, pulls the worn chipboard case down and sets it on the foot of the bed. His fingers leave clean black streaks in the dust on the lid, linger over the tarnished brass clasps at either end of the case. He speaks without looking at her. Ain't no reason to bring this.

Don't leave it behind, she says. He won't come back after.

 

Something else she has never told him: she still wonders if she made the right choice.

 

Sometimes she can't put it out of her mind. She's dying. Not
Hey, we're all dying from the day we're born,
but really dying. Here. Now. When she can't stop the panic in time, when it threatens to take hold and overwhelm her, there's one way to hold it at bay: she thinks about her last moments. About what will happen when death arrives. People see things. Loved ones. A tunnel. White light. Science thinks it's explained all this. Electrical impulses. Firing synapses. Chemical reactions.

Claire doesn't care. She's never been a believer, and if it is only science, isn't that wonderful, too? A built-in safety net, an evolutionary shield to protect a person at her most desperate moment. It doesn't matter if what she experiences as she dies is real or not; what matters is that she experiences something. Claire already knows what it will be. Sound. Song. Wesley's song. “Black River.” He first played it the day they met, at Harvest. It came to be his most well-known tune, though it wasn't fast, didn't end with impossible cascades of notes and broken strands of horsehair dangling from his bow. It was slower, wistful. Bittersweet.

Everyone loved it. Claire loved it. Wesley, though, was never quite satisfied. Every day it was the last tune he played before his fiddle went back in its case, and every day it changed. Just a bit. The changes became smaller and subtler over the years: adding a grace note, dropping a double-stop, digging his bow more deeply into a string. Each time he played it, Claire knew she was one day closer to hearing a masterpiece. And then the riot. Bobby Williams. Dust on a chipboard case.

 

Claire got the musical terms mixed up, always called it a lament. Wesley would shake his head. It's an air, he'd tell her. Laments are for the dead.

 

Claire is the first to know that they won't be going to Black River. She wakes in the dark with a pressure building in her chest, a hand closing on her throat. Wesley is asleep beside her, his teeth clenched tightly, the line of muscle along his jaw taut. He is never peaceful when he sleeps, and this lets her wake him without guilt.

Sit up with me, she says. The words come out more quietly than she intends, but he is awake.

You're burning, he says, and goes to stand.

Stay, Claire says. With me. She wonders if he will. If he'll be able to let this be.

He stays at her side all day, sits with her in bed so she can lean her body against his. He is very still. A nurse comes, one Claire doesn't know. She is kind, and does less to Claire than she is accustomed to nurses doing. Wesley goes to the hall to talk with her. Claire cannot hear them, though they are near enough she should be able to. Wesley keeps his hand on the doorframe, and she watches it until he comes back to her. Something is wrong with his fingers.

Time becomes untrustworthy. It is day, the only one Claire remembers since waking Wesley. But her fastidious husband has more than a few hours' worth of stubble on his face. (It is gray, not blond, and this makes her feel peculiarly sad.) And this is not the gown she wore to bed. Is it? She's angry; if time has ever mattered, it matters now.

Breathing becomes a conscious, messy act; she is choking on her own saliva, on the mucus in her nose and mouth and lungs. There's a strange sound in the room, a wet rattle, and at some point she realizes it is her. She's afraid Wesley will be disgusted by these things her body is doing, but he wipes her face and strokes her hair and rests her head on his chest.

I can hear your heart, she tells him.

That's good, he says.

For a long time the light in the room is a slow, sweet gold. And then it is dark, and Claire cannot understand how a day has gone by. (One day? More?) She wishes the window were nearer, so she could look out and see the mountains, black against black. She has always loved the mountains here.

Play for me, she says.

Wesley's body stiffens beneath her cheek. What?

Play, she says again. Play your fiddle for me.

He sighs. A long breath like she will never have again.

Not for long, she tells him. One tune is all.

Claire . . .

Please?

 

A lament.

 

He sits on the edge of the bed and rests his fiddle on his knee, cradling the neck in his left hand. Golden varnish, unblemished ebony, the bright lines of the strings. He holds the bow loosely in his right hand, the stick lying across the bed. The horsehair leaves a fine white line of rosin on the blanket. Wesley passes his thumb lightly over the fiddle's strings, and even Claire can hear the discordant notes, knows it isn't in tune.

Wesley looks over his shoulder at her. What do you want to hear? he asks.

You know, she says.

“Black River.”

Yes.

He watches her for a long time, and it's been thirty years—thirty years—but she cannot read his expression. She wants to tell him that the color of his fiddle is like the color of his hair, which is like the color of summer evening sun, but the thought of forming the words overwhelms her, so she closes her eyes and waits. The bed moves as Wesley shifts his weight, and Claire wants to look at him again so she can see the fiddle under his chin—he looks almost haughty when he plays, and she has always loved this about him—but she is so tired. She hears the brush of his skin against wood, the light touch of the bow as horsehair comes to rest on wound steel. The breath before the note.

She listens.

 

 

 

 

Wes Carver was sixty years old and had been a widower five days. He was in his truck, struggling up the Idaho side of Lookout Pass, not quite two hours into a four-hour trip. His fiddle was in its case on the floor, the DOC letter and his revolver in the glove compartment. And Claire's ashes there beside him on the bench seat, in a small box wrapped with brown parcel paper and labeled with a bar code sticker. They'd warned him the package would be small, but he'd still been surprised when he signed the papers and they handed it to him.

Tractor-trailers eased into the left lane and passed him, their hazards flashing. Years ago, when Wes was still living in Black River, he'd come through here in January. Couldn't say why anymore. The storm had been bad enough he shouldn't have been driving—the left lane impassable, the right invisible against a snow-filled sky—but by the time he realized, it was too dangerous to pull off. At the top of the pass, at the Montana state line, he'd come upon an accident in which a little sedan had thrust itself beneath the trailer of a semi. Never saw it, most likely. Wes must've arrived just after the state patrol, no ambulance yet. The patrolmen were standing on the side of the road with the driver of the truck, collars turned up against the blowing snow. The way the car had folded under the trailer, there was no doubt. When he drove by at five miles an hour, Wes saw blood melting the snow beneath the union of twisted metal, illuminated by the chemical glare of the nearest flare.

Now the truck badly needed the long coasting down the Montana side of the pass. Wes took the curves a little too fast, riding close to the white line. The sun was low, streaming through the passenger window, burning at the corner of his eye. The mountains crumpled up around him, ravines and canyons everywhere, all a uniform green. A few brief moments here near the summit to see it all before descending back into the deep valleys that blinded a man to all but the path ahead or behind. (The day before she died, Claire opened her eyes just as the sun went down. A softness to her gaze. Maybe the morphine. Maybe the first haze of death. Are we still going to Black River? she'd asked. He'd put his hand over hers. Yes, he said. Of course we are.)

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn't. All that space, waiting. Wes never could've planned a suicide, couldn't have swallowed the pills or loaded the gun or climbed the trestle. But this would take only a single moment of conviction, an instant of courage that could be abandoned almost as soon as it had been summoned. The briefest contraction of the muscles in the arms, a short jerk of the wheel to the right—a few inches would do it—and then: through the low guardrail and into the air. The truck, the fiddle, the ashes, the letter. Him. Falling like flying.

 

He'd waited there a long time, fiddle on his collarbone, bow touched to string. Poised beside his dying and then dead wife in a mockery of something he could no longer do. His arms must have begun to ache, but he didn't notice. In the dark it had seemed possible to stay there like that: Claire just a moment from breath; he just a moment from music.

Hearing was the last sense to go. The last filament connection to life. Dr. Harmon had told him that, and it was knowledge Wes didn't want, knowledge he'd have given anything to refuse. Why not sight? Why not touch? A reassuring gaze, a comforting hand. Those things he could've offered her. But she wanted his music. So he'd taken his fiddle and brought it to his body and laid horsehair down and then could do no more. Even if he'd drawn the bow across an open string, the pegs had slipped long ago, the strings gone flat.

How long had she waited?

Her eyes had closed, and the rattle of her breath crescendoed and dwindled and still he held his fiddle and his bow. Suppose she wasn't gone yet. Suppose she still waited to hear him play. Suppose she thought he was unwilling, not unable. He waited. Prayed. Considered trying to tune and rosin and play, knew he could do none of those things because he'd tried so long and so hard so many times before.

When dawn began to edge out night, he lowered the fiddle. Lowered the bow. Thought about smashing both against the wall. But instead he smoothed the blanket over her body. Laid the fiddle back in its case. Closed the lid. Fastened the latches.

 

It was impossible to be lost in western Montana. The mountains were always there against the sky, their unchanging silhouettes as sure as any map. Wes felt them closing in as he followed the interstate into the Elk Fork valley: the Sapphires melting into the Bitterroot Range to the south, the Sawtooths behind him, the Whitecaps, Missions and Swans to the north. The Garnets still ahead, to the east. Peaks appeared he could put a name to, some distant and dusted with snow, picturesque, others closer, immediate, covered with dry brown grasses or green pine or black slashes of basalt. Mount Sentinel, Blood Summit, Squaw Peak (he thought they'd changed the name of that one, the Indians upset or some such, but he couldn't remember what folks were supposed to call it instead). Elk Fork—a city in Montana, a town in any other state—was nestled in the shallowest part of the valley's bowl, sharing space with three different rivers that laced together and parted again at regular intervals. On the east side of the city the mountains began to draw together, and the valley narrowed, a single strand of water winding through. Black River lay thirty miles into the canyon. Wes remembered one of his grade school teachers telling them how this landscape had come to be—one of those geological phenomena involving ancient, vanished glaciers and lakes—but as a child he had thought the slopes of the mountain ranges looked like the hands of giants, or maybe of God, each ravine and peak delineating fingers and knuckles, just visible above the edges of the earth. A person in Elk Fork's wide valley felt like he was cradled in the palms of those giant hands. In Black River he was between two clenched fists about to collide.