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.

Amazing how in the middle of hell something as simple as dawn can be the most beautiful thing imaginable.

Everything that died became a part of the earth where it lay, and maybe more than just flesh and bone was involved in that kind of transfer.

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.

“Terrible business,” Wicklow said. Business? An odd word, Scott thought, for something that dealt with one man killing another. It was a word that suggested handshakes and agreements and civil exchanges, not the giving and receiving of a load of buckshot.

“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.”

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

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.

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.

Stories are like those seeds we plant in the soil. They just grow and grow. So this story, which began with a man found eaten by catfish in a river, is not yet finished. Some of the players are no longer part of it, but the story goes on. The river continues to flow.

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.