The River

by Peter Heller

He’d always thought of it that way: that there were portals in reality, in time and space, in geography, in seasons, when and where the dead or the very far away rubbed up against the living. It was in that hour or two before dawn, when the slip of ruddy moon was sinking like a lightship over the mesa at home, that he would hear his mother singing. That he would call to her and she would answer back in a voice as quiet as those lights.

And they started laughing so hard they almost did barf. Relief. Just the laughter. It was like a warm rain. A rain that would tamp and douse the forest fire and rinse away the sweat and the fear.

If one concentrated on one thing and then another—the good things in each moment—the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter.

The question was flat but tinged with concern or fear. Jack was less startled by the question than by her composure.

firmament,

scintillant

equanimity

The sun rose and burned almost crimson through the smoke that lay over the eastern horizon like a weather front, not even visible as sun until halfway to the zenith, and even then it was a hot red disk that looked more like some molten planet than a star.

She was very still. Not the stillness of passivity, but the stillness of holding oneself rigid in the face of some emotional wind.

Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

The raw sun rose clear of the smoke and let a white sky rinse clean the blood.

desultory,

Wynn wondered if a tree had some analogy to pain. Or what pain would look like for a being without nerves.

It was a blackwater creek like the others and scattered with white ash that must have drifted. In the eddies was a fine dust that filmed the water like pollen.

The land rose gently away from the river eastward, there must have been some broad uplift beneath the soil, and so he could see the creek for a long way like some sinuous creature glinting in its scales and slithering down through the seam between the green and the black, life and death.

He could hear warblers and thrushes. The black side was burned to soil; it had not much to say and was startlingly eloquent in its silence. Wynn thought the boundary was as stark and sad as Hades.

Soon the channel of firmament would pulse with a star, then three, then a hundred, and it would keep filling and deepening until the stars sifted and flowed between the tops of the trees in their own river, whose coves and bends would mirror the one they were on.

He had thought it before, and he loved thinking about the two rivers. The river of stars would find its way to its own bay and its own ocean of constellations and Wynn imagined, as he had before, that the water and the stars might sing to each other in a key inaudible, usually, to the human ear.

Wynn thought that if wolves sang, and coyotes, and elk and birds, and wind, and we, too, it was probably in response to a music we didn’t know we could hear.

In the saying nothing and in the hushed tones of the fire there was a hum of something persistent and barely registered, the twang of a bass guitar string long seconds after the last note was struck.

The tide of night seemed to flow up the river and settle over the water and spill over the banks. Ever so slowly. Where there were trees the gathering darkness was rising up into the shaggy tops, which had gone still.

The night was dark. The waning moon had come and gone, settling down like a curve of bone in a west where no smoke lingered.

caesura.

And the smells would hit him, of a family in the midst of their lives, the morning’s bread on the board, the woodstove, stone scent of the slate at the entrance crumbed with mud, the Lab, Leo, knocking the leg of a table with his tail, the pine and oak exhalations of the old house. The smells wafted in intertwining tendrils and filled a space in him he was used to having empty. It was almost painful.

He looked out into the bay where the line of the horizon was gray against gray. Sky and sea the same.