What the River Took

The road into Hartsell came down off the ridge in long curves, and then the valley opened up below him the way it had in his dreams for years, green and narrow, the Tarn running silver through the middle of it, and Danny had to pull over for a minute because his hands weren't steady.

He had told Erin he was going to ask someone who'd been there. That was the plan, such as it was. But you couldn't just walk up to a stranger's door after thirty-two years and ask them to relive the worst night of their life for you, so first he did the only thing he knew how to do, which was go and stand at the river and try to make himself believe it was real.

The town had not changed and it had not forgiven. He drove down Main slowly and a couple of older people on the sidewalk watched the unfamiliar truck the way small towns watch any unfamiliar truck, and Danny found he was hunching, instinctively, the old flinch, as if someone might still recognize the shape of his father in his face and say the name. Nobody did. He was just a stranger now. That was almost worse.

The memorial was where it had always been, in the little green by the new bridge. A new bridge, built after, wider and higher, with concrete piers, the river engineered now so it could never do again what it had done. The stone was dark granite, taller than a man. He'd been brought here as a boy, once, by an aunt, and had never come back. He came back now.

IN MEMORY OF THE THIRTY-FOUR TAKEN BY THE WATERS OF THE TARN, OCTOBER 1994, it said across the top. And then the names, two columns of them, in the plain order of the alphabet, and Danny made himself read every one even though he was only looking for three.

Carol Anne Reed. Annie Reed. Samuel J. Reed.

There they were, his whole first family, three names in a list of thirty-four, and the cruelty of the stone was a quiet one and he hadn't been ready for it. Because the stone said taken by the waters. It did not say anything about whose fault the waters were. It listed his father among the victims, in alphabetical fairness, Samuel J. Reed, right there with the children and the old people the town grieved. And yet everyone who read that stone, every single person in Hartsell, knew. They knew that two of those Reeds were the drowned, and one of them was the reason. The stone said taken. The town said by him. His father's name sat in the middle of the list of his own victims, and that was the whole story of Danny's life, right there, carved in granite: a man counted among the dead he was blamed for making.

Danny stood there a long time. A part of him, the tired part, the part that had spent forty years swallowing this, said see, it's true, it's carved in stone, go home. But standing in front of the actual names, the actual river, something else moved in him, low and stubborn, and it was a memory.

He had a memory of that night. He had never trusted it. He'd been eight, and he'd been asleep up at the cottage, where his father had taken him for the night shift while his mother and Annie slept at home down in the valley. Trauma does what it wants with a child's memory, so for years he had told himself the memory was a thing he'd invented to make himself feel better, the way an abandoned kid invents a father who's secretly a spy. But standing here, he let himself have it.

He remembered being shaken awake in the dark by his father. He remembered his father's face close to his, wet (was it rain, was it the river, he didn't know) and his father's voice saying stay here, Danny, you stay right here, don't you move, no matter what you hear, you stay up here where it's dry. He remembered his father's hands, hard on his shoulders, and then his father turning and going out the cottage door into the roaring dark, going down, down the hill, down toward the town and the water and the noise, not away from it. He remembered standing at the cottage window watching a flashlight bob down the hill and disappear, and that was the last time he ever saw Sam Reed alive: a man running toward the river.

That was not a man who froze. That was not a man who got drunk and slept through it. The memory had the shape of a man who knew exactly what was happening and ran into it.

But a memory was just a memory, and he'd been eight, and he knew what the town would say. They'd say: of course you remember it like that, he's your father, you've spent thirty years making him a hero in your head, that's what motherless boys do. And maybe they'd be right. A flashlight bobbing down a hill could mean a man running to help, or it could mean a man running away in a panic from the post he'd failed, and an eight-year-old at a window couldn't tell the difference, and a forty-year-old at a memorial stone couldn't either. Memory wasn't proof. Memory was just the thing he'd been arguing with his whole life.

He needed someone who hadn't been eight. He needed someone who had been down there, in the town, on the river road, the night it came. Someone who had seen Sam Reed with grown eyes and could tell him whether his father had been running toward the water or away from it.

He went into the diner on Main because diners know everything, and he ordered coffee he didn't want and, when the woman behind the counter had warmed to him a little, he asked the only careful question he'd planned. "I'm doing some family history," he said, which wasn't even a lie. "From the flood. Is there anybody still around who lived down on the river road back then? Somebody who was here that night?"

The woman thought about it, refilling a sugar jar. "River road's all gone, hon. They never rebuilt the low part, it's all park now." Then: "There's June Halloran. She was down there. Lost her husband that night and never moved more than a mile since, ornery old thing." She tipped her head up the valley. "Out the Tarn road, white house, blue mailbox. She'll talk your ear off if she likes you and run you off with a broom if she don't." She looked at Danny a beat longer than was comfortable. "What'd you say your name was?"

"Daniel," he said, and left it there, and paid, and went out before she could ask the rest.

A white house, a blue mailbox, an old woman who had been on the river road the night the river came and had lived to be ornery about it. Danny sat in the truck with the engine off and his heart going. June Halloran had seen that night with grown eyes. She would know whether his father had been a coward or something else. And Danny realized, sitting there, that he was more afraid of the something else than he was of the coward, because the coward he already knew how to carry, and the something else would mean he'd been ashamed of the wrong man his whole life, and he didn't know yet if he could survive that.

He started the truck and drove out the Tarn road to find the blue mailbox.