Deep River Burning (18 page)

“What is it?”

“It’s about Helena. I tried to reach her because I wanted her to meet us here tonight.”

“What happened? Where is she?”

Josh paused and the lightning flashed a look on his face that she would never forget. “She’s gone, Denver. She killed herself about six months ago.” None of the thoughts she had that followed this news were going to give her any answers to the flood of questions that rushed to her mind. How bad must it have gotten? She thought Helena was indestructible, an immortal little powerhouse. Denver was the one who fell apart. Denver was the loner with the broken heart who was always on an endless search for something that even she could not identify. Helena was always able to fold the world away at the end of the day, or wave a hand at anything or anyone who tried to bring her down. What was the last moment? How did she do it? Could Denver have saved her if she would have stayed in Adena? Did Helena feel abandoned by Josh, her husband, Adena, by Denver?

“She took pills. Her mother told me,” Josh said half talking, half whispering.

“I shouldn’t have left,” Denver said feeling the guilt radiate from her chest and move down her arms.

“It’s not your fault, Denver.”

“Yes it is. I could’ve helped her.”

“If it’s your fault, then it’s mine too. I also left.”

“Do you remember that silly little pact we made a long time ago when we were kids? That silly, childish blood pact where each of us put a drop of blood on a rock that we buried somewhere over on that island?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Maybe so, but I never forgot it.”

“We had to leave.”

“Did we? Why?”

“You know why.”

“Yes,” she conceded while looking down at the ground.

“We were doing what we had to do.”

“I know, Josh, but that wasn’t the agreement. Everyone for themselves was not the agreement. We are here to help one another and we couldn’t even do that. Don’t you see? When someone commits suicide, it’s everyone’s fault!”

They sat for a while on some rocks on the riverbank watching the force of the river quietly move in the night hour. In the dark, it seemed to slip away without them noticing. Even in the silver light of the full moon, she couldn’t see what it was carving or taking with it. She could only feel the full force of its current with an undefined part of herself, with her own wholeness, and then the rest was imagination.

“She left a note to have her ashes scattered over the river down by the train trellis,” Josh said finally. “She’s thousands of miles out to sea by now. Perhaps that’s what she wanted.”

“Did she say anything else in the note?” Denver said, still in disbelief. “Or did her mom say anything to explain why?”

“The last thing she said to her mom was that she felt she didn’t belong.”

“Where . . . didn’t belong where?”

“Anywhere.”

The following day, Josh and Denver took a dozen roses, of all different colors and shades, over to the train trellis and slowly dropped them one by one into the river. It was early morning so they saw a few fishermen in the distance, casting their lines in the glow of a morning sun, and then waiting for the line to tug with only a slight turn of the head once in a while.

There was nowhere else they wanted to be. The train trellis was where people smoked their first cigarette, got drunk their first time on Vodka and orange juice, and then tried to walk across the trellis without falling in the river, practice for being able to walk the white line. It was the place where people made plans to do things they didn’t want to talk about in daylight. It was also a place for first kisses and where some even fell in love.

Denver wasn’t sure why Helena wanted her ashes scattered there. Perhaps she had made other pacts that she and Josh didn’t know about, but there under the trellis, in the early morning orange sun, was a deep river burning. It was narrow, rocky, and swift, so she could only assume that Helena was in a hurry.

“I am so angry I could scream,” Denver said suddenly.

“Angry? Why?”

“I can’t believe she did this! She took the easy way out. You can’t give up and check out like that. You have to fight. You have to figure it out! How many people really feel as if they belong in this world? No one that I know. We’re all lost! She wasn’t special. She was screwed up like the rest of us.”

“I don’t think she had a strong person she could look up to, and her mom didn’t pay any attention to her.”

“Yes I know. There should be a law against having children you don’t want.”

Denver and Josh sat on the train trellis and cried while their feet dangled over the rushing water. They were silent for a long while. The roses had floated far down river. The trees on both sides of the river were thick and dark green, a mid-summer green of complete bloom. Denver looked at Josh and noticed how he had such a handsome face. She asked him about the day he left. He looked up from the water and gazed into the distance as if the memory lived out there somewhere in front of him and he needed to locate it, sitting on the water perhaps like one of those fishing boats, or hanging in the trees like a bird disguising itself in a veil of leaves.

“I needed to go. We all needed to go. There was nothing here anymore. And I thought I had lost you,” he said, looking down again.

“You didn’t lose me. I lost me.”

“Eventually, I came to understand that, but it took me a while. I packed a few things and walked to the westbound highway and hitched a ride to anywhere. I went wherever the drivers went. I ended up in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and Alaska for a while. I spent most of the time in Montana. I spent a night in jail for trying to steal a car.” He laughed at himself. “But then I got some work on a ranch and earned enough money to buy the truck. When it felt like it was time, I tried to find out where you were. Nobody knew. It seemed as if you had just slipped off the face of the earth.” He paused for a while. She waited until he was ready to speak.

“You can’t run away from anything in this world,” he said. “It will follow you. It will find you. When I was in Alaska, I met this couple who lived entirely off the land. Their story was about oil, and how its excavation was affecting the people there, so I told them about Adena and old king coal. We had a lot to talk about. But they were still happy. They made it work somehow. Everything is bigger out west. The sky is bigger, the spaces are wider, the lakes are deeper, and the mountains are higher.

“In Montana, I lived near an old ghost town, where I met a man named Jack Weleda who let me travel with him for a while. He was from Michigan. We explored old ghost towns together. He knew I was drifting from place to place so he let me stay with him. He lost his wife to cancer a few years ago. We found one town where a few people still lived in houses on the outskirts, but the people didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them.

“But you know what I learned by visiting all these ghost towns? That in some ways the story of Adena is an old, old story. A story so common it is almost cliché. Most of the ghost towns we visited were once mining towns that attracted settlers because of silver and gold, and once the minerals were exhausted, the people moved away. We saw old brothels and other buildings that were barely recognizable, and in one town. We heard stories about the old days, when the towns were self-sufficient and thriving. But there is still energy there, Denver. Out west. There is a strong presence that never dies, no matter how the land has changed or how the lives of people have changed. You can still feel that past, alive and strong, vibrating in the hearts and eyes of people. I tried to write about it and all of the places I had been, but the words seemed small when I finished.”

“When did you decide to return?” she asked.

“There wasn’t one precise moment when I made the decision. It had been slowly building for a while. I believe it may have started one day when I was on the ranch gathering wood and a shadow passed over the ground that I knew must have belonged to a very large bird. When I looked up, an eagle had landed on a lower bough of pine tree near where I was standing. We looked at each other for a moment. It reminded me of you.”

“Why?”

“I heard someone say once that birds flock together but eagles fly alone. You’re an eagle, Denver. And I mean that in only the most spectacular sense.” The sun began to rise higher in the sky and the heat quickened the dragonflies skimming the water. “And what about you? How did you end up in North Carolina?”

Denver told the whole story about how she got on a bus that was heading south, how she wanted to go someplace where there was more light, more summer, someplace that had nothing to do with coal. She told Josh about how she fell asleep on a beach and was woken up by a priest who changed her life. She told him the story, as much as she could remember, as much as she wanted to tell, and he listened with a smile on his face most of the time.

“I’m sorry to bring you back here,” he said.

“No, I’m glad you did. I needed to come back, and seeing you again has made every moment worth it.”

They left the train trellis that morning knowing there was much more to talk about. They needed to get to know one another again. They said goodbye to Helena and to the innocence they once rounded into small blood droplets and blended on a stone that would remain underground on Desert Ring Island. Josh never told Denver where it was buried, and she never told him about the vision she had at Pilner’s old cabin.

Adena was still a news story. It was a place where a fire continued to burn, a place where fear and fascination continued to rage. They walked along the downtown streets and were not particularly surprised at what they saw. There was trash everywhere, as if the town had become a dumping ground. There were spots where weeds were growing up through the cracks in the road and other spots where it was hard to find a single blade of vegetation. A piping braid of steam was rising by the cemetery, and in some places the steam hung stagnant in the air when the breeze was still. Denver knew now that the fog she saw the night before while driving was fire fog.

They walked by the Veterans Memorial Bell and passed the houses that were still standing but had been abandoned. They came close to one of the iron vents constructed by the State Department of Environmental Protection. “If you touch that pipe, you will probably get a third-degree burn,” Denver said.

They found twisted and heat-contorted pieces of bottle and curious yellow growths on the ground that resembled some kind of moss. “Are those sulfur crystals?” Josh asked.

“It looks like it, and smells like it,” Denver replied. As they continued down the street, Denver crossed to the left side of the road and picked up a bright orange piece of paper that blew onto the shoulder of the road. It was a flyer from the year before advertising a bus tour of Adena on Halloween.

“Do you think they saw any ghosts?” Josh asked with a grin on his face.

“One person’s pain is another person’s pleasure,” Denver replied.

They left downtown and kept walking until they arrived at the front door of Denver’s old house. The grass was overgrown and the yard and the front porch was littered with small tree branches as if a thunderstorm had passed through, but no one was home to sweep away the debris. Denver felt a little sick but strong, a little tired but alert, a little sad but resigned. She walked up to the front door and tried to open it. The door was locked.

They went around to the back of the house to a window that was always left unlocked. It was harder to open than she remembered, but the two of them were able to force open the window and they crawled inside. It was the window to her father’s office. The house was empty, except for dust and the images of people she knew well who lived their lives the best they knew how. Her body was stiff and she felt herself shaking. She stood in the spot where her father used to keep his desk and tenderly lowered herself to the floor until she was laying on her side with her head resting on her right arm. She ran her hand lightly across the floor and found a small paper clip, a tiny memorial that someone once lived there, that someone once worked there, that someone once had papers to bind. She put the paper clip in the front pocket of her jeans next to the piece of bloodstone she still carried with her for courage.

After a while, she finally pulled herself up from the floor and walked around the rest of the house. She stopped in the middle of the kitchen where the dining table used to rest. The endless series of memories passed through her mind like a string of pearls. The kitchen table was the place where ideas were born, where plans were made, where battles were fought, where love was shared. She left the house with Josh and a paper clip, pulled some raspberries from the bushes in the back yard, checked the mail for the last time, and walked onto the road. “Do you want to go see your old house?” she asked Josh. He shook his head no, but didn’t say anything.

Before Josh and Denver left Adena, they found a few houses deep in the surrounding hillsides where it looked as if people still lived. The houses were lonely and isolated at the ends of dirt roads or buried up in the trees. They stopped at one house. Weeds had grown up high around the mailbox, but there were cars parked in the long stone driveway and a dog chained in the back yard. When Josh got out of his truck and slammed the door, the chained dog went wild with barking. Promptly, a man wearing a hat pulled down to barely above his eyes, came out of a side door of the house holding a shotgun. He pointed the gun and yelled, “Git away from here!”

Apologetically, Josh said, “Sir, we just wanted to talk to you a little about Adena.”

The man replied, “Well, I don’t wanna talk to you so git back to wherever you came from.” The man with his gun still pointed toward Josh took slow methodical steps down the driveway.

“But sir, we’re from Adena. We used to live here,” Josh replied.

In a tone beginning to grate with anger and impatience, the man replied, “Then you should know there’s nothing here to talk about.” He fired a shot into the trees behind them as another man, much younger, came out of the house also carrying a shotgun. Josh recognized the younger man as Gabe Winston, the same Gabe who chased him through the forest with a handgun some time ago and threatened him.

Josh and Denver got into the truck and slowly drove away without saying a word. They went back to the river. Summer was buzzing richly in the trees and shrubs on the riverbank. She took a glance over the expanse of the river into the trees of Desert Ring Island. There was a figure moving about. It must have been Mr. Pilner making his morning rounds. She would have waved to him, but he always had his back to Adena. She imagined that he understood Adena better than anyone. Eventually the land had had enough and found a means to drive everyone away. It would take care of itself with or without human interference. Relationships had been ruined, families had been fractured, and there she was standing on the riverbank of the Susquehanna thinking how compassionate the earth is to teach its lessons without utterly destroying them all.