Deep River Burning (13 page)

“Have you ever seen her, Father?” Denver asked.

“Have I ever seen who?”

“Isabel. On the beach, walking, waving her lantern?”

“No, but then again I am a priest. The only ghost I believe in is the holy one.”

“Yes. I suppose that is true,” she replied and smiled.

“Why do you ask such a question?”

“Because I have seen her.”

“What do you mean? Isabel?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I saw her on the beach wearing a long, sheer, light-colored dress waving a lantern out toward the water.”

“When did you see this?”

“The first night I came to North Carolina. You found me the next morning sleeping.”

Denver didn’t know if Father Allen believed her. They both looked at one another very deeply. It was one of those times when he looked more like a man than a priest to her, standing there in front of her with the wind blowing his dark hair in the pale blue and silver light of dusk. He paused and narrowed his eyes like he always did just before he told her an important story or revealed a truth he’d been keeping.

“Why did you tell me that story?” she asked as they stood in the sand and watched the waves crest and fall in upon themselves.

“Well,” he said, pausing for a moment. “You said that Isabel Beach saved your life. But the sea can also take away life. That’s how this beach got its name. You and Isabel both came to the beach with your own will. Isabel wanted to die. You wanted to live.”

“I don’t understand what you are trying to say.”

“It wasn’t Isabel Beach that saved you,” he said. “It was
you
who saved you.”

They said goodnight, and Denver walked back to the campsite. She tried to brush the sand from her legs and clothes. She crawled into her tent and closed her eyes feeling the wind fill the tent and then release as if the tent were breathing. She believed Father Allen when he said that it is important to accept that which cannot be changed. We can fight our circumstances all we want, dream them away, deny them, smoke or drink them into oblivion, but we are going to be left with the same clarity at some moment when we least expect it, when the clouds pull away from the stars. And it is a blessing, just like the stars, a space of infinite possibilities. It means giving up a part of ourselves to something larger, something wiser, and something far more compassionate than humanity.

On Bear Island, by the broad reach of the sea, there was no doubt about what that meant. Josh didn’t like priests. He thought they were all frauds, with an honesty that reached only about as far as their hands would stretch when they passed you the collection bin. He thought their attempts to raise themselves above the seedy side of humanity was merely a front supported by a fancy robe and string of stock phrases of encouragement and religious rhetoric. That was how Josh used to feel about priests. He might not feel that way anymore. Father Allen didn’t hide his humanity. He lived by his philosophies, or at least made every attempt to. She placed her head on a small camping pillow and finally felt tired, gratefully tired, and much to her surprise, she fell asleep.

When the sand began to brighten and colors came back to the seascape, she heard Jimmie’s voice and a few others preparing coffee and breakfast. She only had three hours of sleep, but she awoke and pulled herself out of the tent feeling stiff and old. Every square inch of her body was covered in salt and sand and her back hurt from sleeping on the lumps. The sand flies were out in full force, and it was clear that the one absolute about beach camping is that sand gets into everything. She remembered something Jimmie told her on the canoe trip over to the island. “There is this interesting phenomenon about camping. People tend to enjoy it the most once it’s over.”

Morning is a magical time of day. It’s hard not to feel hope when there is the promise of a new beginning hanging on everything. Even the air was a little sweeter. The breeze was lighter and cooler, and she easily forgot the harshness that would come to the beach as the day progressed.

It was easy to forget about a lot of things when standing next to the sea. The enormity puts it back into perspective, reminds us of what is not important by swallowing it whole. The colors of morning are foggy, muted peach, blue, and pink. The waves are gentle and their white tips somehow look whiter in the morning light. The sun effortlessly, ceremoniously cracks over the horizon, unobstructed and fiery. It doesn’t take long and the day has officially begun with new shells to find and pieces of seaglass curled up in seaweed.

She had forgotten about so much of her past in this world of water and ships that sometimes she feared the sea, especially when it came in for high tide. She thought that one day it would never turn around, but just keep seeping toward her until it engulfed her. At the thought of it, she remembered her swim the night before. The darkness can hide many things. But here was morning, the metaphor for all firsts—a first kiss, the first rain after drought, the first time to shake the curl of a baby’s hand, the first few strokes of a violin concerto. Here was the reminder that starting over was not only possible, but necessary.

Chapter 19

Bernita

Two years later

Denver’s dreams were filled with the voices of those she lost, and when she saw other people who reminded her of them in some way—with their hair color, the shape of the nose, a jaw line, or freckles—she would lose herself for a while in memory, the way a bird flies through fog and reappears a few moments later in a ray of sun.

She had successfully pushed Adena far back into a place in her mind where the windows were closed and the shades drawn. There was no need for it at Isabel Beach and rarely anything that happened on the coast reminded her of coal. Still, North Carolina had its own strain of sorrow. When she first moved to Isabel Beach, Iris had told her that if she decided to stick around that someday she would get to experience a hurricane. It seemed that this was the day she would get that opportunity.

It was late September, and Hurricane Bernita was a category three storm that was moving toward Wilmington, North Carolina, and gaining strength. Iris and Jimmie boarded the windows of the sanctuary and bought the necessary supplies to stay in town for the storm while many others were leaving the coast for inland towns. Father Allen opened up the church as a storm shelter for people who had nowhere else to go or couldn’t leave for one reason or another. The sturdy, brick church had been through many hurricanes and had always been able to withstand the high winds. The building was set back just far enough so that it was protected by the dunes and was rarely flooded by storm surge. Because the church had often been used as a storm shelter in the past, it had a backup power supply in case there was a power outage.

As the winds began to stir and the sky took on a gray, blank countenance as far as the eye could see, Iris backed up her truck to the back of the church where Jimmie, Denver, and Father Allen were waiting to unload the bottles of water, food, blankets, and other supplies into the back entrance of the church where there was a large mess hall with a kitchen. They unloaded the goods and then Denver went home to pick up a few belongings. She still lived in the apartment down the street near the church, so it was a short walk, but already the rain was blowing sideways, with a heavy, sustained rhythm.

It was early evening and the hurricane was expected to make landfall around 1 am. She huddled under a yellow raincoat and ran down the street toward her apartment. The streets were already desolate and most of the cars that were usually parked on the street and in the driveways were gone. She got her backpack out of the bedroom closet and looked around her room, wondering what to take with her. Clothes, a book or two, toiletries, a camera?

She realized that it was another one of those moments when you are supposed to decide what possessions are most important to you, and stuff them all into a bag and hope for the best, like when she packed her bags before she boarded the bus in Pennsylvania to leave her childhood behind. She found herself tucking away into her backpack some of the same items that she packed back then, a small stack of photographs, Aunt Rosemary’s postcard, books, an engraved pen that her father gave her when she started college, the piece of bloodstone, and a note her mother placed on the top of her dresser on the morning of her seventeenth birthday that read,
Happy Birthday, Denver. I love you. Have a great day!

In the meantime, people began to arrive at the church to ride out the storm. Father Allen’s church was not the only shelter open in Isabel Beach so they weren’t expecting a huge crowd, but many of them would be disappointed vacationers. During the winter months, Isabel Beach was a quiet, sleepy, seaside village, but during September, the town bustled with people looking to escape their gritty, landlocked cities.

She finally returned to the church, but she waited until the rain began to blow completely horizontal and the dark of night was only a short time away. She didn’t want to go, but at the same time, she didn’t want to be alone.

When she arrived at the church, Father Allen was circulating through the church comforting people and shaking their hands, reassuring them that everything would be all right while Jimmie was keeping an eye on the non-stop weather forecast on television. Hurricane Bernita increased in speed and was upgraded to a category four storm, which meant the damage could be devastating and that widespread power outages were expected that could last for weeks. Windborne debris would be deadly, roofs and windows would be destroyed, and many trees would be down blocking the roadways. Power lines could be snapped and live wires could fall into pools of water in flooded areas.

Denver heard all of this news and went into the bathroom at the church and cried. She was twenty-two years old, and she felt like a child. She hadn’t felt this level of fear since she thought the ground was going to collapse beneath her back in Adena. At least in this situation, maybe people would pull together since there was no one to blame. They wouldn’t hate each other because of the disaster. They would help each other. There would be no one in denial, and the only target for blame would be God.

It was a long night. She didn’t get much sleep but neither did most of the people who were at the shelter. The sound of the building shaking and debris being whipped onto the roof and sides of the building were enough to unnerve anyone, even Jimmie who thrives on survival, self-reliance, and an adrenaline rush. The howl of the wind kept her awake along with the sneezing and coughing of others in the shelter who didn’t want to be there. Jimmie was different. Denver wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a look of glee cross over his face when the power went out. Perhaps he thought he would finally get the opportunity to use his skills for surviving dangerous and primitive conditions.

She shifted several times on her cot trying to find a comfortable position while Jimmie handed her a pair of earplugs, which she gratefully accepted. At some point, she may have fallen asleep for a short time, but she wasn’t sure. Dream and reality merged together in a swirl of strange images. Christ, candles, and the crucifix merged with blinding rain, an angry sea, and battered trees. Earlier, Jimmie told her that he saw a group of hurricane chasers out on the beach.

“You should have seen it, Denver. One guy was trying to snap a photo of the other guy who was standing in front of a big wave with a huge, ominous black cloud in the background, but the wind kept blowing his hood across his face, and he couldn’t stand up straight, and he kept trying to look intense into the camera but the rain stinging his face made him wince, and then some of their stuff started to blow away. Some people are crazy,” he concluded. Some people are fearless, Denver thought to herself, but she was not one of them.

Around 2 am when the storm was all anyone could hear or think about, a woman, who had been nervously flipping through a thick book all evening, and using a small flashlight to see the pages, stood up and turned an otherwise tolerable evening into something close to a nightmare.

“We’re all going to die, you know,” she announced. Every eye in the room turned in her direction. “You are all such fools, sitting there with your headsets and potato chip bags and blueberry muffins, pretending this is only an inconvenience in the grand scheme of your life when this is just the beginning of the hell you are all going to have to endure.”

Father Allen quickly approached the woman and said, “I understand that this is very stressful, but—”

“Don’t you talk to me priest,” she interrupted. “You are the biggest sinner of us all. I listened to you all evening lie to these people about the presence of God being with us, about having faith in God’s love to provide protection, about God’s light shining through even the darkest night. They are all lies. God has forsaken us because we have forsaken him for too long, and this is only the beginning of how we are all going to pay. If we survive this hurricane, it won’t be because of God. When are you going to realize that God doesn’t care about us anymore? He doesn’t care that we are bottled up in this musty church room listening to the ocean try to swallow us whole. And yet, you sit there in your holy collar and pray as if someone or something is actually hearing you. You make me sick.”

“Maybe we can talk about this elsewhere,” Father Allen suggested, “so the others can sleep. Will you come with me?”

“No, I won’t go anywhere with you. The others deserve to know the truth: that we are all sinners being punished for our sins, and you, priest, are the false prophet who will lead us to hell and damnation. It is time. The time has come. I can feel it.” The woman looked around the room and up into the ceiling where the wind could be heard pounding the main floor of the church. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “That’s the sound of God’s rage coming forth to punish his children. We are all in the hands of an angry God, trembling in his palms, and now he is ready to open those hands so that we fall into the underworld where our souls will live out eternity in a state of tormented hell. Oh, there is a God, you can be sure of that, and he is ready to unleash his wrath upon the world, and he is starting right here, right now. It’s too late to repent. It’s too late for us all!”

“Fine,” an old man said. “If the world is going to end, the last thing I want to hear on my dying day is your fanatic regurgitation of the revelation, so please just shut up.”

“All right,” the woman resumed. “I’ve said everything I needed to say. You’ve all been warned. I forgive you. I am at peace. You all will come to know the truth . . . in time . . . you’ll have no choice.” The woman slowly slinked back to her cot and sneered back at a guy who whistled the cuckoo call. She had black hair that hung down the middle of her back in a long braid with strands of gray woven throughout. She had a wide face and a nose that slightly hooked at the end. Her top row of teeth were somewhat squared off at the sides, giving her mouth a boxed look. What Denver noticed about her, was that her eyes were a dull blue, flat looking, as if nothing lived behind them, like the eyes of the dead.

Father Allen walked over to Iris and quietly spoke to her. By this time in late summer, his dark hair was gold-streaked from the sun and his face was lightly tanned. It didn’t seem to her that he had aged at all since she first met him. She liked that he was serious. She liked that he was deliberate in his words and actions, and she liked that he was contemplative. He lived a mindful life, an awake life, and it seemed that the evil in the world never found a crevice where it could seep into his soul. If there are dark forces in this life, they are wasting their time on people like him. He was immune. The woman with the long, black braid seemed to have no soul at all, but Father Allen seemed to be all
soul. No wonder the woman hated him.

Others in the room were not immune to negative influence. A child began crying in annoyance at his mother who had been holding her hands over his ears when the woman spoke. Through some strange work of cause and effect, the stirring inside increased the stirring outside, or perhaps it was the other way around, but a sudden round of debris pummeled the boards on the small windows and the rain lashed the church with greater intensity. The sneezing and coughing started again as Iris, who had a stunned look on her face, passed out more water bottles to those who wanted more water. The woman with the long black braid mumbled something that only those who were near her could hear, but they were happy to ignore her. There were a few people who slept through it all.

What agonized Denver was not the coughing, or the crying, or the cold-eyed woman with the long, black braid, but the feeling of being trapped. She hated being holed-up somewhere with all the connections to the outside tightly closed. It’s the reason why she often had a hard time during the winter months, because she hated being closed in. She wanted to appreciate all of the seasons alike, but she couldn’t always fight off the affect the colorless landscape had on her, and the cold, the ice, and the heavy clothes made her feel tired, tense, and claustrophobic.

Her aversion to winter was somewhat eased living in North Carolina where the winters were shorter and more mild than in Pennsylvania, but a winter beach has a cold sting all of its own, and if it snows, it might be a week before the roads were clear. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that the most important things that have happened to her in her life seemed to happen when she was outside or when the temperature was gentle against the skin. This may not be true. This may just be how she chose to remember things.

Early morning was approaching and the wind had died down. With the first light of dawn, people were anxious to go outside, to see how the world had changed, and to see evidence of the strength and power of the storm. Father Allen, Jimmie, and Denver went outside first without telling the others in order to get a sense of the damage. She looked up to the sky and saw a small patch of blue trying to peek through fast-moving clouds. The streets were littered with debris and leaves from shrubs were scattered everywhere. Jimmie noticed that in the immediate vicinity, all of the utility poles were standing and there didn’t seem to be any broken wires dangling. Denver felt a surge of gratitude rise up from her heart that flushed into her face. Father Allen brushed her hair away from her eyes. “You survived your first hurricane, Denver,” he said smiling at her. She smiled back and uttered a small, nervous laugh.

As it turned out, the strongest winds of the hurricane made their mark inland. The category-four storm weakened as it reached the shore line but then picked up speed again after moving over the coast. Towns 50 to 100 miles inland along the I-95 corridor received more damage than the coast and were flooded with waters from the Tar River, which reached near the rooftops of one-story homes and buildings. Pig farms were devastated as the animals and their debris had been washed several miles downriver. Denver had a hard time imagining it, pigs and all their waste being swept away in a torrent of water. It sounded like the ideal conditions for an infectious disease outbreak.