Go as a River

by Shelley Read

When the sun topped the ridge and unleashed its full warmth and brightness, I tilted my chin upward to face it. In the steady rise of morning, I recognized that I had been given another day. Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be given yet another.

Presence. Seeing every waking moment as a gift worth LIVING for.

I remembered what I had tried to forget: the few times I was awakened by my bedroom door handle being jiggled in the dark—by one of Seth’s friends, or maybe even Seth himself, testing the lock, succumbing to a dare or mad desire or a dark, desperate weakness—and then footsteps shuffling away, defeated, saved.

The disgusting lengths men will go to to be disgusting, and the awareness GIRLS are born with that senses when we are in danger, even amongst our own families.

I kneeled and pulled the first beet. It was no bigger than a grape, but I ate it, including the dirt residue and much of the stalk. I pulled another, and another, knowing I was ruining the crop, eating it before it had any real value, but I could not stop. The dirt crunched between my teeth, a grit both insufferable and somehow pleasurable, and soon, inexplicably, I was scooping handfuls of the soil into my mouth. The act was both so wrong and so right—I began to cry, overwhelmed by confusion. The tears salted the dirt as I licked my filthy palms. The baby kicked ferociously as if asking for more.

This is starvation!

But I do remember this: I knew I was too weak to do what needed to be done, and yet I understood I must do it anyway.

All I clearly recall of my son’s entrance into this world is that he was not moving.

He knit his tiny brows and we stared at each other a long while like two souls reconnected after being a universe apart.

Foreshadow. After finishing the book and coming back to this, the line means even more now.

I shook my head and began to walk, a lifetime older than that silly girl who’d arrived in April.

her transformation made a girl into a woman in near days, weeks.

Farm kids learn early on not to get attached to the babies whose fates are beyond us.

I always wondered about this.

I kept meaning to look back, to watch from a hidden place until one of the picnickers noticed my son—to know for certain he had been discovered, to see him lifted and embraced—but, instead, I ran.

I cannot imagine how difficult of a decision this would be for any mother.

I wondered at the possibility that on the day Wil and I had lain together—maybe even at the exact instant my back had arched in love’s ecstasy—this hawk might have returned to her nest to discover it had been robbed, her babies gone. Was it possible that I had been lost in my own elation as the hawk’s disaster struck, just as she was oblivious to my tragedy now?

Maybe this is how nature balances out universal life forces?

For the first time, I wondered exactly what I had been doing the instant my family’s automobile had missed the curve.

This is an impossible thought to have. The type that will drive you crazy. You cannot torture yourself wondering why tragedy strikes when it does.

sack, I realized that our lives—mine and the family in the shiny black car—had intersected even before I had happened upon them. They had been to our roadside stand.

I have a feeling this won't be the last we hear of this family.

I would never have known Ruby-Alice as anything but a crazy old lady in need of God’s help had it not been for Wilson Moon.

It takes goodness to see goodness. Ruby Alice Akers is proving to be one of the only honorable citizen in Iola, and she's seemingly only known hardship and cruelty.

I took my place at the table and waited to see if he would serve me. Finally, the skillet appeared near my right shoulder and a heaping spoonful landed on my plate.

You might not always like each other, but family is family. I still think Daddy's tolerance and open-mindedness goes unnoticed.

He glanced up at me with the look of an animal who knows the end is near, that sad mixture of fear and resignation,

This is the look I saw in Cooper's eyes near his end. Wish him only mercy.

It never occurred to me that I was more than housekeeper and hand, that the heart of our family and home had somehow become me.

Because she was never shown any appreciation or acknowledgement.

Nearly everyone in Iola showed up for Daddy’s graveside funeral beneath the bluest autumn sky.

Seems he was a well-respected man.

I learned from Sheriff Lyle that it was Daddy himself who had turned in Seth. Lacking solid evidence, Lyle couldn’t make an arrest, but he assured both Seth and Forrest Davis they’d be in for trouble if they stayed.

Wow. A man of few words, but at least honorable morals. Perhaps he would have loved his grandson more than Torie realizes.

Instead, only one good thing remained on our land, and that was the peaches.

Interesting that Torie doesn't include herself here. She must carry tremendous guilt and shame.

I longed for erasure. I told the man I’d think about it and sent him on his way. I was the first in Iola to sell out.

Didn't Take long lol.

Regardless of what Cora or anyone else had to say, I knew with certainty that Daddy would have supported my chance to flee this town and all its memories. That is, as long as I did right by the orchard, as I intended to do.

Sitting there in this stranger’s messy office, I was suddenly certain I simply would not be able to go on without the orchard. I could not save Wil or my family members or our farm. I could never again hold my baby. But I could save our trees.

he had found a university grant to pay the bill.

Well that sure is miraculous + would never happen in trump's department of education. He'd call it a waste of funds.

But, as I approached town, I thought of how this place also held the cruelty of ignorance, where some folks believed a lonely old woman was a devil and a beautiful tan-skinned boy was an outlaw and a skunk.

“Yeah, I reckon I couldn’t decide what to do,” he said. “I always told myself I’d never come back here.” I considered how he’d break that promise for a payout but not to attend Daddy’s funeral.

They both thought they would never come back, but for completely different reasons.

“If you were there,” I said when I again found my voice, “why in the hell didn’t you stop it?”

That's What i'm wondering.

But I didn’t blame you. You didn’t know nothin’ about his kind, their spells and trickery and whatnot.”

He hasn't changed one bit.

My revenge, and the only justice Wil would ever receive, would lie in Seth’s haunting and the day the Gunnison River would rise to erase it all.

But if these mountains had taught me anything, it’s that the land endures, riding out human folly when it must, reclaiming itself when it is able, and moving on.

I figured that if my trees could survive, uprooted and against the odds, then, damn all bad fortune, so too could I.

I was wise enough to know only one thing: the land would decide my fate.

Sacrificing these buds meant stronger growth later on.

Can we say the same about human growth?

when no place will receive you, everywhere becomes a kind of nowhere,

I wanted to tell him I was ready for him now. I wanted to tell him I knew the pain of displacement and how sorry—how deeply, profoundly, unutterably sorry—I was that I had given him away, that I hadn’t known any other way to save him.

Each day, I was building a life of my choosing, and it was a good life. I knew what was missing, but I was also appreciative of what was there.

This hit me hard.

But it wasn’t until that moment I’d truly believed that towns could actually be erased from the map, from their own land, that people could be forced out, their homes and livelihoods burned and drowned.

This is exactly white privilege. I think about this often as well. It feels like a far away idea when the reality of it isn't close to you personally.

I’m just saying the government can do anything it damn well pleases, and people suffer,” she said. “And we don’t learn one scrap from history.”

PREACH ZELDA! I think we'd be besties.

If Iola would soon be erased, my family would want me to save some proof it had once existed.

I wish I had more mementos of my family's past, especially from germany.

I wondered at the limits of progress and if we’d ever know when we hit them.

GIRL in 2025 I have this exact thought at least once a day.

Fishermen and a few picnicking families dotted a sandy stretch of the reservoir’s south shore, mistaking the scenery for nature.

Easy to erase what is natural versus manmade.

I wept when I learned that she immediately, instinctively, pulled him to her breast to nourish him.

A woman will always know to do what is right, when able.

When your quivering hand manages to turn the knob and the two figures are not army officers but policemen, and relief wrestles with the rise of new fear—there are no words.

The pain or relief, guilt, and anguish that you have a favored child and that child might still be alive and okay.

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay. “Lukas!” yelled the desperate woman. He turned as he reached the curb. “Thank you for coming,” said the proper woman.

My precious boy now believes he is nothing from nowhere. Only you have the answers he needs.

So like his father.

“Torie?” she asked in surprise. “Oh, everyone called me Torie when I was young.” “I didn’t know that,” she said. “I do remember that time I asked if I could call you Vicky and you flat out said, ‘Absolutely not.’

Me when someone tries to call me Becky.

She was unfazed by my defensiveness and threw her arms out in dismay. I was testing my resolve on her—someone capable of receiving full honesty and tossing full honesty right back—and she knew it.

We all need a strong friend who tests our thinking from time to time like Zelda.

Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.

ANOTHER BANGER OF A LINE!

Her brimming tears told me she had held me in her heart these many years, just as I had held her, in such an odd but certain way, two mothers of the same beautiful boy. I freed a hand to wrap my arm around her shoulder, and this stranger who was not a stranger collapsed into the embrace. For a long moment we both disappeared into the brutal ache of all we had given and lost, clinging to each other as if we might be torn apart by a sudden gust of wind.

This is to truly know someone. To make space for their own lived experience that is messy and tangled up in your own. To allow human connection. This is the stuff we are made for.

My heart pounded. My family had never bothered to own a camera. I had no photographs of my past, of the people and land I had loved and lost. And yet, there, right before me, was a square Kodachrome of Wil.

IMCRYINGGGGGG - V needed this!!!

Zelda’s face lit with triumph, as if helping me to find my son had soothed her own pained heart, as if reclaiming him was a small victory for mourning mothers everywhere.

This is clearly a healing experience for more than just those who are involved.