The River We Remember

by William Kent Krueger

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. BUDDHA

Most folks who’ve grown up in Black Earth County have swum in the river, fished its pools, picnicked on its banks. Except in spring, when it’s prone to flooding, they think of it as an old friend.

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.

when they could legitimately give themselves permission to relax and enjoy life, they did a pretty fair job of it. Decoration Day was the first real celebration after the relentless work of spring. By then, the ground had been plowed, harrowed, planted.

What had come by the end of May was the smell of promise.

Absent that year, as usual, was Brody Dern, sheriff of Black Earth County. Brody would have been among the most decorated of veterans had he chosen to march with the others, but Brody never did. He had duties to attend to, he would say as an excuse, and folks let it go at that.

The sheriff was thirty-five years old, tall and lean. His hair was the color of acorns. He wasn’t handsome, not in the way of Hollywood. In fact, the Amish of the neighboring county would probably have called him very plain and meant it as a high compliment.

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

He was feeling a burning resentment because this was a place that had meant much to him, that was almost sacred in its way. On many occasions in his youth, this placid pool had offered him the beautiful nakedness of the only woman he’d ever loved. Now it felt to him desecrated, ruined by that damn Jimmy Quinn.

The children from his first marriage were of no help to Quinn. They’d deserted him, or that’s how he was prone to characterize it. So he demanded much from his second brood, especially the eldest, James Patrick Quinn, Jr., eighteen years old in that summer of 1958.

One was of Jimmy Quinn alone. He was a huge man, with a great shock of red hair, hard green eyes, and enormous hands like an ape. He wore a three-piece suit and was posed in a way that might make one think of those great robber barons who so horribly misshaped America’s history with their greed and hubris. A lot of farmers came into town in their faded, patched, and soiled biballs or dungarees, their boots crusted with barn muck. Not Jimmy Quinn. He claimed to be descended from Irish kings, and he always rolled into Jewel looking like gentry.

So he’d been raised by women, his mother and grandmother. Because of that hole in his heart and because they’d lost every man they’d ever loved, these women fussed over him and were full of cautions that made him feel sometimes as if he couldn’t breathe.

Very early in his life, Scott Madison had come to believe that loneliness was the normal condition of people, and he didn’t think of it, his own or that of others, as a terrible thing.

“You wanted easy, you should’ve been a shoe salesman.”

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

Brody watched her go, and he thought he understood now his father’s feeling about those butterflies long ago, that once their wings were pinned to cardboard they lost their spirit and ceased to be what had so captured your eye and heart and became something instead that you might study forever but never really know.

Not the best piece of land but one nobody else wanted. Never productive enough to sustain a family, so the Bluestones always did other work as well. Noah’s father worked for Jimmy Quinn. Noah, too. An ironic situation, working for the family that basically stole the land from you.”

“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.”

the boy understood that the man felt he’d communicated something important, some truth that was essential to Scott’s grasp not just of Bluestone’s situation but of what it was to be a man, to be a soldier. And those scars on his face and his missing leg were all testaments to his ability to bear witness to that truth. But Scott was only a boy, and a boy with an imperfect heart that would keep him out of whatever war might erupt in his future. So what he said, he said only to please the man. “I see, sir.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?” The question seemed to startle the sheriff, and the boy was immediately sorry he’d asked. But it was done. Scott watched as so many painful changes crossed the man’s face. “That’s okay, you don’t have to answer,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” “It’s all right,” Brody said. “And the answer is yes. And also the answer is that I would undo it all if I could.” “That was in the war, right?” Scott said. “The war,” Brody confirmed. Scott knew that Brody had come back a hero. Everyone in Jewel knew.

When Scott passed through the office on his way out, the sheriff was staring out a window, too. And Scott had the sense that these men were looking at things he didn’t understand yet. But no matter how awful those things might be, he wanted to know what they were and to understand them, too. And then maybe, even with a hole in his heart, he might feel like he was finally a man complete.

competing on a playing field that was traditionally male made Charlie an item of consternation and even disapproval. Which she always thought odd, considering that not many years earlier, when men on that prairie were either giving up or going crazy because of the hard work the land demanded, it was often the iron-backed pioneer women who endured and saved the homesteads.

not only did the disapproval in Black Earth County not bother her, but Charlie rather reveled in it.

“Charlie, you and I both know that justice isn’t always about what the law dictates. Hell, maybe it never is.”

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.

You know how big the human heart is?” Graff balled his hand into a fist. “About that size. I continue to be amazed at how much hate such a small thing can hold, even in people who think of themselves as decent and Christian. There are a lot of folks in this county with a lot of hate stored up, and those small hearts of theirs are just ready to burst from it. You can work miracles with a jury, Charlie. I’ve seen you do it. But I’m afraid you’d have to be God himself to get a fair hearing for Noah Bluestone. And he knows it.”

And so it was agreed, and the course it would eventually take Scott Madison and Del Wolfe down was set and the sun went on rising and the morning went on around them as if the world either had no idea of the sorrow ahead or did not care.

So they sat together, the sheriff, a slowly sobering drunk, and a woman from the bayou country, sharing a little food and the easy company of people who had a common history. It was part of what had brought Brody back to Black Earth County, part of the reason Felix Klein had stayed after his wife passed on, and one of the blessings that Angie Madison had discovered when, through marriage, she’d migrated there. And the Wagon Wheel? It was one of those places that exists everywhere, in which, small though it may be, somehow there’s always enough light inside to go around.

What Jolie Rae had read in the Bible remained just stories to her. And praying? In a way, it was like singing. It made her feel better sometimes, but it didn’t change a hard thing and she didn’t really believe anyone was listening. What she believed was that goodness and badness came out of people because of how they were treated. And if you wanted goodness from others, that’s what you let come out of you. And the badness? Well, sometimes it slipped out, too, because no one was all one thing or another, but you forgave yourself when you were not who you wanted to be and you did the same with others. It was a pretty simple way of being, but it was one she could understand and believe in and follow.

“There’s a story my people tell about that star,” Bluestone said. “They say that all the stars in the sky are actually made inside the earth. Then they seek out the roots of cottonwood trees, where they patiently wait. Inside the branches of the cottonwoods, they’re dull and lightless, like you see here. When the Great Spirit decides that more stars are needed, the wind shakes the branches of the cottonwoods, and the stars are released. They fly up and settle in the heavens, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.”

They strolled the lane between the barn and outbuildings, then between the fields of young corn and soybeans. Beneath the broadening leaves and rising stalks lay the rich soil from which the county took its name, and the beauty of all the fresh green against the bed of deep, black earth on that sunny afternoon made Brody’s heart ache for the kind of peace it seemed to promise.

“Why did you destroy the evidence?” “I couldn’t help thinking that there are a lot of good people here who had good reason to hate Jimmy and wouldn’t mind seeing him dead. What if it was one of our neighbors? This is the kind of thing that can tear a place apart, Angie. I thought that no one in this whole county would grieve Jimmy Quinn, and if I got rid of evidence that might say it was anything other than a terrible accident or, hell, even a suicide, we could all get back to our normal lives pretty quick, and things could just go on the way they always have. Maybe even a little better without Jimmy, you know?” “Holden Caulfield out there in that rye field protecting the innocent,” she said. “Something like that.”

He watched her go, longing to tell her, wanting to be free of the burden he carried now. He couldn’t understand how everything could change so quickly. Only yesterday he was a hero. And now? Now he was the worst kind of person imaginable.

Noah and Kyoko Bluestone had cultivated more than the crops they’d planted. They’d cultivated love, cultivated happiness. Graff believed this because it was what he’d experienced in his own life with Myrna. They’d never been rich by Jimmy Quinn’s standards, but during his years with Myrna, he had harvested an abundance of happiness, which he’d stored in the silo of his heart.

As she’d grown older and had put so many battles behind her, she’d come to a different understanding about herself. Although she had never been a beauty, she’d finally learned to see what was beautiful about her, and she tried to look at other people with the same forgiving eye, and this had made a vast difference in how she embraced what life offered her.

She thought about everything that had happened in Black Earth County, all the death associated with the Alabaster, and she understood that there had been no intent in the river, either good or evil. If the river did possess spirit, as the Sioux believed, then that spirit seemed to Charlie so vast that it was probably blind to all the small things that occurred along its course. If the spirit was aware that she dangled her feet in its current, it gave no sign of caring. And Jimmy Quinn and Hannah Klein and Noah Bluestone’s great-great-grandfather and the nameless white woman whose life, legend said, had been lost on Inkpaduta Bend, none of this mattered to the spirit of the Alabaster. What mattered was the serving of its ultimate purpose, which God alone knew. And what was the point of Charlie’s life or anyone’s but to run its course and serve its purpose, though that purpose might remain a mystery?

Bluestone’s face, as usual, revealed nothing. She wondered if his stoicism was a part of his Native heritage or his training as a soldier, or maybe both. When the world throws at you nothing but stones, maybe to survive you simply become stone yourself.

Charlie had listened to people on a witness stand swear to a lie that they believed in their hearts was necessary in order for justice to be done.

she understood Marta’s action so clearly and there was, odd as this may seem, a beauty to it. Death is as ordinary in this world as birth or breathing. Though we may fear that journey and what awaits us there, it’s a revelation that will come to us all someday. To Charlie, the truly interesting aspect was the manner of the death itself. That great gaping hole Marta Quinn opened in her husband shattered the sixth commandment, went against all the law of most lands and, in reality, tore a hole in Marta herself. But to Charlie’s way of thinking, it was justice.

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.

Charlie recalled The Catcher in the Rye, the last book they’d read for the Prairie Blooms so many years ago, and she imagined Brody, during his lifelong silence, envisioning himself standing alone out there in some great field of rye, protecting the innocent.

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.

And so, she sips her whiskey and reads her books and every once in a great while allows herself the pleasure of a cigar, and she awaits without fear her own passing, when she will be lowered into the soil of Black Earth County and laid to rest forever beside the moonlit, milk-white flow of the Alabaster, a river she remembers fondly as an old friend.