The River We Remember

by William Kent Krueger

With people, we fall in love too easily, it seems, and too easily fall out of love. But with the land it’s different. We abide much. We can pour our sweat and blood, our very hearts into a piece of earth and get nothing in return but fields of hail-crushed soybean plants or drought-withered cornstalks or fodder for a plague of locusts, and still we love this place enough to die for it. Or kill. In Black Earth County, people understand these things.

A man made his own choices for his own reasons, and unless any of those choices put him in opposition to you, you simply let them be.

But war does something vile and irreparable to the human spirit, leaves thick scars on the soul.

“People who make other people unhappy are generally pretty unhappy themselves,” she said.

“In the end, a soldier kills because all the circumstances of a moment drive him to it. It isn’t for freedom or God or for the people back home. It’s because he has no choice but to kill. And in that moment, he’s not thinking of it as a good thing or a bad thing. He’s not thinking about ethics. He’s thinking about keeping himself alive and keeping his comrades alive. And in all that mess, the only thing he wants is for it to end and for him to be alive to see that end.”

Grief—both Charlie and Brody knew this well—doesn’t come in the immediacy of the moment. Nor does it send a calling card for later. It arrives unannounced, springing from some unexpected incident, grabbing the heart in moments of total surprise.

Finally, she wrote: The most frightening thing we do in our lives is to love.

When the world throws at you nothing but stones,

maybe to survive you

Charlie just felt tired in the way she used to feel when fighting battles she knew she could not win. But then, that’s one of the beauties of life. That we still fight on.

OUR LIVES AND the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.

We all die, but some of us—those who are blessed or maybe just lucky—have the opportunity before that end to be redeemed. We can let go, forgive others, and also forgive ourselves for the worst of what we are or have been.