Two Rivers (14 page)

E
ight of the eleven missing bodies had been found. The victims’ families came to retrieve their loved ones’ remains. They arranged for burials. They left white painted crosses at the place by the river where the train derailed. Most of the families came and went quietly. A few banged on the door of my office demanding to speak to the person responsible for the accident after they had exhausted every other ear that would listen. I offered them water, a place to sit. I listened to each of them, allowed them their anger. I rarely bothered with the canned explanations I’d been coached to provide by the railroad representative. The NTSB was still investigating, but they believed that the derailment was likely due to a fracture in the rail. The break was small enough to go undetected during routine inspections and maintenance, but under the passing train it simply split. It was an accident. Simple as that. But I knew this was not what they wanted to hear. In a true accident, no one is at fault. What these people, in their tremendous grief, wanted—needed—was to have someone to blame. I could understand this.

The families of the victims whose bodies had
not
been found (the twenty-five-year-old father of four from North Carolina, the eighty-year-old woman from Georgia) came as well. Both of them wanted to visit the place where it happened. And because the representative sent by the railroad was unfamiliar with the area and wouldn’t have been able to find his way through the woods, I took them.

The widow of the missing man arrived at my office door with four children in tow. Though I suggested that I show her the way to the river, she insisted she could find it if I gave her directions. But as the children started to follow behind her, the baby clinging to her hip, I said, “You can leave them here. I don’t mind.”

She looked at me suspiciously, and then sighed,
“Thank you.”
She lowered the baby to the floor and accepted my scribbled map. She placed the remaining three children in chairs facing my desk, shook a finger at them, warning, “Don’t y’all tear nothin’ up.” And then to me, “I’ll be back real quick. Promise.”

“Please take as long as you need,” I said. “They’ll be fine.”

When she came back just a half hour later, her eyes were rimmed red, her makeup smeared. She grabbed a tissue from a box on my desk and smiled at the children, who had, despite her request, left my office in shambles. The youngest had found contentment sorting through the crumpled papers in my wastebasket, but the others were climbers.

“Come on, y’all,” she said, peeling the biggest one off the windowsill and gathering the littlest one in her arms. The other two clung to her legs. She said quietly, “I’m so sorry, sir. Thank you.”

I knew that she’d likely had only enough time to get to the river and turn back around. Not nearly enough time to actually grieve. “Did you have enough time, ma’am?”

She looked at me confused, eyes filling again, and said, “He was
twenty-five years old
.”

When the old man whose wife had been on her way to visit her sister in Montreal came to the station, he accepted my offer to take him on the trek south from the station to the river. We walked slowly side by side through the woods; he had a cane, and his breathing was labored. When we got to the site of the crash, there was little evidence of the wreckage remaining, only the flowers. The crosses.

“Here?” he asked, gesturing toward the river with his cane.

I nodded.

He walked toward the water’s edge, and for just a minute I worried that he might accidentally fall in.

“How long were you married, sir?” I asked.

“Sixty-five years,” he said without looking back at me.

“That’s a lifetime.”

“A lifetime and a half.”

When it was clear that he wasn’t in danger of falling in, I sat down on a moss-covered stump and watched him.

He knelt down next to the river, cupped his hands, and drank a handful of the cold water.

Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. Without saying a word, he pressed the letter to his mouth and then rested it gently in the water. It was chilly out, and a shiver passed through my body. The current quickly grabbed the envelope from his hands and carried it downstream. The pale paper dipped and bobbed, and then disappeared around a bend in the river.

After a while, I helped him stand back up.

“Okay,” he said. “Time to go home.”

T
he summer of 1964 was the shortest summer in all of my memory, each day like a grain of sand, slipping through my fingers despite every attempt to hold on. From the moment I tossed my cap up into the blue sky on graduation day, time seemed to accelerate. Because Brooder was gone, shipped off to Vietnam by then, and Ray was working full-time at the mill, it was just Betsy and I again. But the lazy days of summers past were an anomaly to what I now knew to be true. Summer was fleeting, and Betsy Parker was as evanescent as summer. Before autumn arrived, before we parted for our separate futures, I knew I had to do something.
Say something
. I was running out of time. There was urgency to every minute of that summer. I must have been the most desperate man alive.

There was a Dylan song on the radio that summer, though it wasn’t very popular, not part of the usual play list. If it had been, I probably would have quickly grown bored with it. But I only heard it maybe once a week or so, sometimes just catching the tail end as I got in the car and turned on the radio. Betsy loved it too, but because it wasn’t on the Top 40, I couldn’t find the forty-five anywhere. I wanted to surprise her with it. Wrap it in gold tissue for her. But instead, it became a running challenge, to catch it on the radio—to take the DeSoto out for long drives, suffering through “Chapel of Love” and “My Guy” in the hopes that those first few notes would take us by surprise. I thought of it as
our
song; it captured all that wild desperation I was feeling. All my crazy hope. One afternoon in July when it had easily been a week since the disk jockey had played the song, Betsy showed up at my house looking listless.

I had a part-time job that summer, mowing the sloping lawns between the tombstones at the cemetery. I’d gotten a scholarship to cover my tuition at Middlebury, and so I didn’t need to work much that summer, just enough to save some extra cash for school. (I hadn’t managed to save much though; I’d spent all of my graduation money and my first two paychecks on a brand new 35 mm camera, which I planned to give to Betsy for her birthday at the end of the summer.) I made my own hours, usually Monday and Thursday afternoons, when traffic through the cemetery was at a minimum. It was a Monday, and I was putting the mower into the trunk of the DeSoto when Betsy arrived.

“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “It’s too hot.”

“Okay,” I said. No one was waiting for me at the cemetery.

Betsy and I usually went swimming in the river. There was a good spot not far from Paul and Hanna’s. We’d swim all afternoon and then Hanna would make us dinner, hang our suits and towels out on her clothesline. Not too many kids knew about the spot, so we almost always had it to ourselves. But today as I started to turn down the road that would take us there, Betsy grabbed the wheel. “Let’s go to Gormlaith.”

Lake Gormlaith is up in the Northeast Kingdom, near Quimby and the Canadian border. It was mostly tourists up there this time of year, lots of rented camps. It’s a beautiful lake though. There’s a small island in the middle, and legend is the lake has no bottom. It was about a forty-minute drive; Betsy was quiet but restless. She rolled the windows down and leaned her head out, letting her hair get tangled in the wind. After about twenty minutes, she sighed and said, “I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m so tired of this place. There’s nothing to do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Ugh. Don’t you get sick of this? Church, pastures, cows. River. Church, pastures, cows. River.”

It was true. The small towns and hamlets were like loosely strung beads, between which was nothing but green pastures and so many cows. But I loved this repetition, this pastoral rosary. It was predictable.

“Where would you
like
to be?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, leaning back into the car. “Anywhere but here, I guess.”

“Hmm.”

“You mad?”

“Nah.”

“You’re
mad
,” she said.

“No I’m not,” I said, feeling mad.

“Sure you are. I know you, Harper.” She laughed knowingly and rolled the window down again.

“You don’t know me,” I said, a lot more loudly than I intended.

She turned toward me, her smile fading into a frown. “Where would
you
like to be then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you grow up. When you realize that there’s nothing here but small towns and small minds and cow shit. A whole lot of cow shit.”

I sat silently, staring at the dirt road that curled like a gritty ribbon in front of us. I gripped the wheel tightly and reached to turn on the radio so that I wouldn’t have to speak. I didn’t know how to tell her that I didn’t really care where I was, as long as she was there too. And so we drove for a while longer, not talking, until we were so deep in the woods that the DeSoto no longer had any radio reception.

“I only meant that I’m bored,” Betsy said, touching my right hand. “Don’t you ever get bored with all of this?”

“Sure,” I lied. I wasn’t ever bored as long as Betsy was around.

“Uncle Paul’s got a camp up here. There’s no running water, but there’s electricity, and if you want to stop at Hudson’s, we can get some hot dogs to make for dinner later,” she offered, like an apology. “Marshmallows and Hershey’s for s’mores?”

We spent the afternoon swimming at the boat access area of the lake, a rocky beach with a small grassy shore. The water was warm on the surface from the sun, but colder in the depths. My legs were numb as I crawled out of the water and onto the grass. Betsy had spread out two towels. She was lying on her stomach, fast asleep. I lay down next to her on the other towel, moving her hair out of her face so that I could see her better. She smiled in her sleep. I could have stayed there until the sun went down. I had never felt so content. God, I adored her.

I knew I had to do something, say something. I’d been carrying the words around in my head, at the tip of my tongue for so long now, they were no different than song lyrics to a favorite song anymore. While Betsy slept, I reached over her and quietly grabbed a pen and scrap of paper from her beach bag. I checked to make sure she was still asleep, and started to write down all of the things I’d been wanting to say. Couldn’t say. It was like a relief, a release, but it also felt dangerous: the simple union of ink and paper making everything I’d been feeling and thinking concrete. In the world. I felt anxious. Exposed.

I thought about tearing the paper up, shoving it into a pocket and tossing it onto the fire later. But there, on the back of an old envelope, was my entire heart. How could I deny that? Destroy that? And so I left Betsy on the grass asleep, folded the envelope into a tight square, and put it between my teeth. I jumped into the water and swam all the way out to the island. It had to have been a quarter mile away, and by the time I got there my body was tired. I crawled through some heavy brush and spit the piece of paper out. Close to the shore was a big shady tree, where I sat and reread all those words. When they started to blur together, I folded the paper back up into a tiny square and stuffed it into the hollow of the tree. Then I jumped back in the water.

My body was shaking with exhaustion as I pulled myself out of the lake again at the access area and stood, dripping wet, next to Betsy. She woke up, disoriented and groggy. “Harper! I’m burned to a crisp! Why didn’t you wake me up?” Her shoulders were bright red with sunburn.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Here.” I handed her my T-shirt, which she gingerly pulled over her bathing suit.

“Let’s get inside,” she said.

We made a feast of hot dogs and potato salad and a few beers I’d stolen from our fridge, and ate on the porch of her uncle’s hunting shack, sitting in a couple of ratty overstuffed chairs. Later, when the sun melted into the water, we stoked the fire and toasted marshmallows. Betsy’s kept catching on fire. “You can’t let it get too close,” I said, meticulously turning mine, keeping it a safe distance from the flame until it was golden. “Here,” I said, and sandwiched it with chocolate between graham crackers. A pile of charred marshmallows at her feet, Betsy sighed and said, “What would I do without you, Harper?”

If I’d been smart, I would have kissed her then. I would have reached to wipe the bit of melted chocolate that had touched the tip of her perfect nose and then kissed it off instead. But that moment, like every single moment of that summer, was gone before it had a chance to live.

She must have sensed that something was bothering me. That I was dying inside.

“What do you really want, Harper?” she asked softly.

“What?” I asked, sure now that she’d figured me out.

“Do you
really
want this?”

“What?”
I asked again.

She picked a marshmallow up off the ground, blew on it, and studied it. “I’m never going to make perfect marshmallows.” She smiled, shaking her head. “I’ll
always
burn the marshmallows. I’m not patient. I’m not careful. Around me, things catch on fire. Things get ruined.”

“No,” I said. Reaching for the marshmallow. It was charred. Covered with dirt and grass.

“I’m contrary. I’m restless. I’m never happy. I’m a big messy mess.”

I looked at her, at my beautiful Betsy. At her wild hair and big eyes. Then I looked at the dirty marshmallow in my hand. “I do. Want this,” I managed. Then I popped the marshmallow in my mouth, the blackened skin gritty between my teeth. But the inside was still warm, sweet. I knew then that she would taste like this: that on my tongue, she would have this same warmth, this same sweetness.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “Certifiable. And I should know.”

We drove home just after ten o’clock, and right as we were reaching the Heights, our song came on the radio.

“Pull over!!! Pull over!!!” Betsy squealed.

I pulled the car over, lurching to a crooked stop. Betsy turned up the radio and threw open the door. She came around to my side of the car and used both hands to pull open the heavy door. “Come on! Dance with me!”

“Nah,” I said, shaking my head.

“Come
on
.”

And then I was out of the car, and she was scrambling up onto the hood of the DeSoto. She reached for my hand and motioned for me to join her. I shook my head again, stubborn, and she yanked my arm. Hard.
“It’s almost over.”

Betsy meant the song, but it meant so much more, so I joined her on the hood of the DeSoto. And then Betsy Parker was, finally, in my arms. We danced until the song ended, but I held on. I held on, careful of her sunburned shoulders. I held on, trying to figure out how to say the words I’d been reciting in my head like a prayer. I held on, silent, smelling the sweet soapy smell of her hair, until finally she whispered breathlessly, I thought, though it could have just been my imagination,
Soon.