Go as a River

by Shelley Read

a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well.

As if attached by some invisible string, he slowed as well.

Cue Taylor Swift.

What, once tied together, have bound destinies? The answer: Puppets on the same string.

He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise.

I admire this type of presence, as I've never been able to live in that space for very long.

He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living.

How does one live for seventeen years without ever considering whether she is known? The idea had not previously occurred to me, that someone could see into the heart of things and there you’d be.

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

Best quote from the entire book.

No one in the clapboard church that day could have predicted that within three months, politicians far across the world would decide to send bombs falling on a Hawaiian harbor that we had never heard of and the result would be the snatching away of Ogden and Jimmy to war.

Character development.

The war did to Ogden just what that train had done to Mr. Massey’s sleek automobile: taken something of unique beauty and promise and crushed it. One year later, the accident that stole Cal, Vivian, and my mother did the same to my family. I learned from a young age the tenacity of ruin.

I was thinking about Wil, weighing my desire to see him again against the stab of clarity that the wise thing to do would be to let all notions of him go while he was still beautiful and whole.

She's assuming he hasn't experienced a full life full of hardship before her, idolizing him a little bit.

But I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth.

so my child’s imagination concocted the image of their entire house being swept into the sky, swirling amid hundreds of squawking turkeys celebrating the exquisite discovery of flight in their final moments,

LOL

Never had my mother seemed more dead to me as when I walked to school that day, bleeding from my private place, fearing the tissues would slip, muscle cramps firing across my abdomen, certain I would collapse and die from this mysterious ailment before I reached the schoolhouse.

I remember feeling embarassment and shame when I first bled, unsure what to do and who to tell.

I was a girl alone in a house of men, quickly becoming a woman. It was like blossoming in a bank of snow.

But the one benefit of having a dead mother is the ability to turn her into an unwavering ally, whether she would have been one or not.

Once, I came around the back of the barn to find Seth and the three Oakley boys from down the road pouring kerosene over bullfrogs and lighting them aflame, rolling with laughter as the poor creatures hopped about in terror.

Sick fucks - are babies (read: boys) born this evil or is it learned?

For the first time, I consciously considered the comfort of being where Seth could not be, and, in doing so, I realized far down inside my sister self, in a deep place I could not name, that I was frightened of my own little brother.

Character development

I didn’t often get a hug from Daddy, so I took the opportunity to embrace his neck, to bury my face in his shoulder and inhale him.

Something about a little girl feeling safe in her daddy's arms warms my heart. The father daughter bond is special.

It was not until long after both Roosevelt and Og had passed away and wheelchairs were no longer made of wood that I saw one of only two known photographs of the president in his chair, and I wondered how many war veterans, legless and miserable like Og, might have suffered a little bit less had the president not hidden his chair in shame.

And that's on american idealism, never showing weakness, and toxic masculinity.

Viv lamented with uncensored volume why, if Og now hated life and everything to do with it, he didn’t just die on the battlefield, didn’t leave his body right there on the beach next to Jimmy’s.

Battle of Normandy?? :(

God will pluck your mother, your cousin, your aunt from this earth like peaches pulled from the branch too soon.

This prose is deeply sad yet beautiful and moving. I'm crying.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

For in those eyes, I had seen not only an unexpected kind of man, but some new part of myself that I didn’t want to let go.

Seeing herself the same way someone who truly sees her as.

We had been picking and selling fine peaches since July, but it’s the cold nights and warm days of early autumn on Colorado’s western slope that sweetens the fruit sugar.

I really want to eat a peach now.

My heart sank. The long arms of my lies reached everywhere.

This writing! It all flows (like a river) showing the interconnectedness of everything.

They joked about his war paint, his moccasins, called him a godless savage, a prairie rat. “Long gone by now, I’d reckon,” said Davis. “Better be,” grumbled Uncle Og. “Damn well,” replied Seth. “I’ll kill that redskin bastard if I ever see him again.” “That’s enough,” Daddy piped in for the first time.

Nothing better to bond miserable people together than ganging up on someone else. Also, I don't think Daddy's understated tolerance gets enough credit.

Legend had it that my grandfather framed that permit the day he picked it up in Gunnison and hung it on the parlor wall like it was art instead of tacking it up in the stand as he was told.

Pride, or just dumb? Lol.

“Oh, I ’spect most folks aren’t ’fraid of her so much as just naturally wary of peculiar.

But this same wariness isn't given to non-white people.

The morning I sped away from her, she was reaching out, not to push me, but to alert me. Wil had stayed in Iola, hiding at Ruby-Alice’s place. The old woman had given him refuge. I was sure of it.

Plot development

Never before had I bathed on a Wednesday,

I always forget and am curious how cleanliness habits have changed over time.

His only concern was sufficient ham sandwiches and sweet tea in the refrigerator,

What would men do without women to take care of them?

Making love to Wil felt like arriving somewhere I had been crawling to get to for a very long time. In his arms, I became all the things it had never occurred to me to be before we met. I was beautiful and desirable and even a little dangerous.

I know this feeling. Embracing your sexuality with someone who invites you to embrace it, too.

I wondered at the extraordinary power of his touch, how his caress had restored not only my ankle but something deep inside me I had not fully known was ailing.

This line hit me. Emotional wreck. The soft vulnerable tenderness of a lover who truly SEES you is a magical thing not all get to experience.

As we held each other in the autumn moonlight, breathless, aching, I could not have fathomed it, but our child began to grow.

Saw this coming. Already angry and anxious at what comes next.

After years of watching Seth tinker with the faulty engine, I never expected the car to actually drive.

His final transcendance into pure evil.

“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”

A small dog crept to my side in curiosity at my whimpering and licked my pant leg. I kicked it away and it snarled.

I hate humans. Why do we revert to hurting innocent animals at the hands of our big emotions? It's so disturbing and inexcusable.

“I hate you, Seth.” I spit it into the darkness like sour bile that had been building in my gut my entire life.

A body. Bottom of Black Canyon. That Injun boy. Nearly skinless. Drug behind a car. Tossed.

Holy shit. So gruesome. The fucked up mind that could come up with something like this deserves worse and then some. Fuck Seth and fuck the Iola people.

It was not until the first flutters of life—so subtle at first, like a butterfly winking an eyelash, then stronger, like a tiny bird in my belly—that I fully understood the true source of my bloat and fatigue.

I felt a pang of guilt at not getting the garden in before leaving.

These men haven't helped her a day in her damned life and yet she feels bad for not doing more labor for them?!? THIS is what it's like to be a woman.

My young mind couldn’t quite comprehend that a horse who had not existed moments earlier suddenly had a body, a name, a life, had become a part of our farm, just like the peach trees and the creek.

I found another rock and threw it, hitting him just above the tail. I threw another, then another, sobbing now at the absurdity of my actions against an animal I loved, and he started lumbering down the hillside, reluctant, frightened, occasionally looking back at me as if to pose a question he didn’t know how to ask.

How can you harm someone you love so dearly?!? I'm crying!!

Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.

POWERFUL

Every rock I threw at him taught him what I had learned: for every ounce of good in this world, two ounces of bad outweigh it. You can be a good girl, a good horse, you can obey, you can love, but don’t expect that if you do right then right will come to you.

It occurred to me then that it was Torie who lacked the wherewithal to rise and move forward, but Victoria—Wil’s Victoria—had a woman’s strength to go on.

She's transforming.

I had to keep my sanity, to center my attention on what made me want to stay alive rather than dwell too long on why I might rather not.

It's an easy, blurry, slippery slope into depression and suicidal ideation that I don't think are talked about enough.

but I could recognize the long trill of red-winged blackbirds,

Dad's favorite bird.

the chatter of chickadees

Allan's favorite bird.

A force larger than myself moved me forward, from primal hunger to that initial curious creep out of my bedroom and down the stairs, to eventual regularity and the assumption of my mother’s role as caretaker of the family. I did not choose so much as succumb to necessity.