Go as a River

by Shelley Read

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to use smell and a gentle touch to determine the ideal ripeness, how to lightly lift and twist each peach from its stem so as not to gouge the fragile flesh, how to know which rosy fruit was ready for market, which for delivery, and which for eating off the tree. Unlike an apple or a pear, a meager span of days—three, perhaps four—determines the crucial moment to pick and eat a peach.

“You should leave this place,” I told him, both believing and despising my words. Wil let the idea hang a while in the crisp air between us. Then he grinned at me—as he had on our first exchange at the corner of North Laura and Main, and as he had when I stood naked before him at the hut—with appreciation for something within me that no one else, least of all myself, had ever perceived. I felt crazy inside, my suggestion so at odds with my desire that it was as if some other girl had spoken. He shook his head. “There are more folks like Seth than stars in the night sky,” he finally answered, meaning to be dismissive and comforting but having the opposite effect. For what he said was surely true: Where was Wil to go where there wasn’t a hate-filled boy like Seth ready to blame his troubles on a brown-skinned boy like Wil? I knew he wouldn’t run. “I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”

I began plotting my exit as if for another girl. I had not had many friends growing up, imaginary or otherwise, so it wasn’t for anyone in particular I began stashing supplies in an old canvas backpack—rope and jerky and matches and candles, a pot, a hatchet, mason jars and tins of pantry staples, a knife, vegetable seeds, knitting needles, yarn, a cake of soap wrapped in waxed paper, one of Og’s giant sweaters—just for some girl who was in trouble, some girl who had to flee.

I added a woolen hat to my long mental list of supplies I had either forgotten or hadn’t wanted to steal from Daddy or foolishly never thought of or simply couldn’t carry: a proper shovel, a tarp, a bucket, pencil and paper, a gun.

They say there is a merciful amnesia that accompanies giving birth, and perhaps this is true, for I cannot recall many details of my son’s arrival. 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.

The unforeseen ripple effects of an honest act do not make the choice less truthful. All one can do, I had learned from Wil, is to meet those ripples—as unimaginable or horrific or beautiful or desperate as they may be—with the best you had.

I often recalled the government man who had sat on the same sofa during his second visit, his thin legs crossed and his smooth hands folded delicately on one knee, and the casual way he’d informed me that everything I left behind would either be auctioned off, burned, or drowned. I had turned from his eager blue eyes to survey the parlor. My mother had lingered in each precise stitch of the muslin pillows and framed embroidery; her porcelain cross collection was displayed on the high white shelf; her favorite pale-blue vase sat atop the white doily on the oak end table. Daddy was in the shiny chestnut radio he’d brought home against Mother’s wishes, Cal in the handmade checkerboard, Vivian in her favorite chair. I shook my head and assured the man that nothing would be left behind.

Yet once the bushel baskets waited, I couldn’t wrap a thing. I tried. But the sofa without Mother’s pillows and the end table without the blue vase felt all wrong, so I put them back. The radio hadn’t worked for years. The checkerboard contained both Cal and Seth; to bring one boy with me meant to also bring the other. Vivian’s chair was terribly uncomfortable. Mother’s desk, then, I thought, but as I delicately opened the drop leaf, I found it to still be entirely her own, the contents perfectly organized.

My trees had finally sprouted shiny green leaves and, among them, pea-sized buds, the miraculous promise of life and flower and fruit tightly bound in each. But that day, I went from branch to branch with clippers and killed every last one. Each snip upended all I had ever known about the sacredness of a peach bud, about caring for it like a jewel until it unfurled into a delicate pink blossom. Greeney’s research had convinced him there could be no fruit the first year after transplanting, maybe even two. Clipping the buds turned the tree’s energy back down into its roots, he said. Sacrificing these buds meant stronger growth later on. I had to believe him. But with every clip, with every precious bud dropping to the ground in waste, my gut ached and I wondered what Daddy would say. When the rain started up again, light and misty at first, then fierce and hard like falling pebbles, I just kept clipping, my tears mixing with the rain on my cheeks. I turned my face to the sky, eyes closed, arms out in a kind of surrender, and let the shower soak me clean through.

I’m sure the boy was remembered as a hero and the daughter as a rogue, but the same wild boldness to walk out this front door had driven them both to elsewhere.

Truth’s blade had stabbed so many wounds that day that I lied and said I hadn’t seen him.

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

Our eyes locked and Inga lurched toward me. She clutched my hands between both of hers, pulling them to her chin and holding them there as if in prayer. 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. I whispered into her sweetly scented hair the words I had for two decades been longing to say: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

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.