Go as a River

by Shelley Read

I would come to learn that Wilson Moon didn’t experience time the way most people do, or few other things for that matter. He never rushed or fiddled nervously or found a length of silence between two people an awkward vessel to fill with chatter. 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.

How does one live for seventeen years without ever considering whether she is known?

Small things: a drunken boy’s loose grip, a dropped bottle, a sprained ankle, a torn dress sleeve. But it is often the small fateful twist that alters our lives most profoundly—the beckoning cry of a coal train whistle, a question from a stranger at an intersection, a brown bottle lying in the dirt. 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.

I had left the farmhouse that morning an ordinary girl on an ordinary day. I could not yet identify what new map had unfolded within me, but I knew I was returning home uncommon. I felt as the explorers I had once studied in school must have when they glimpsed a far and mysterious shore from their seemingly eternal sea. Suddenly the Magellan of my own interior, I knew not what I had discovered.

Wil turned without looking at me and strolled steadily through the yellow field back toward town. The lavender horizon seemed to sip at him until his form grew minute and disappeared. I wondered if he was heading back to the rails. If one place was as good as another to him, a different place on the line might now do him better than the town where Seth lived. It never occurred to me that he was pondering the opposite as he grew tiny in the distance, that Iola had become for him a place above all others, a place not to flee because of Seth but to remain because of me. “The whole time I was walking away,” he later told me, as we lay tucked together in the blankets of his bed, “I was figuring out how to get back to you.”

I learned from a young age the tenacity of ruin.

at that point in my life, I knew nothing about the untamable wildfire of revenge.

Since the day he’d returned from war, Og’s fury was surely the lion concealing the lamb of his sorrow.

Above our farm, the arid earth was patchworked with pale-green sagebrush, red scrub oak, and raggedy pinyons. Scattered clumps of yellow aspen trees quaked like little celebrations across the otherwise solemn hillside. A few ponderosa pines rose above the rest and spread their wide, dark skirts. The sun beat down on it all as if uninformed that summer had ended.

A girl of seventeen can be foolish, especially one who knows nothing of love’s extraordinary power until it overtakes her like a flash flood.

Just as I had stepped into a motherless life, I would step into the life of a mother. I would heed the call of necessity. I would rise.

Panic gripped me every time I came up empty. Finally, a flash of iridescent scales glinted in the sunlit pool and I plunged my net. What I pulled up wasn’t much—not eight inches long—but I rushed the fish back to camp, eagerly gutted and speared it, then roasted it briefly over the remains of my morning fire. I devoured it in seconds, bones and all. Splinters caught in my throat and I hacked and gargled to free them. Still, I craved more, even the bones, especially the bones. In retrospect, I know I was starving.

The contractions intensified for days, and I became more raw and more feral and afraid with each. It was the inescapability of the birth that most panicked me, as if I had mounted a wild stallion and had no choice but to ride until I was thrown.

All these months I had believed this being inside my body to be a stranger, mere creature of mystery, or, perhaps, deserved atonement. Never had I imagined he would be someone I would recognize from somewhere deep and unnamable within my being, this baby with these dark eyes, uncannily familiar. He knit his tiny brows and we stared at each other a long while like two souls reconnected after being a universe apart.

Sorrow tried but did not claim me.

But sneaking over to that long black car, laying my baby down on the warm leather back seat, and leaving him behind unleashed a billowing grief that overtook my every cell. I didn’t realize this at first, so dazed was I from hunger, so accustomed to enduring, to doing what needed to be done. When I clicked the car door closed and walked away from him, I did so almost as if I had set down a mere stone. Or if not a stone, a puppy then, or a hatchling, something I had needed to care for then pass along, a practical change of hands like the sale of a piglet from the sty or a sapling from the orchard. I did not nuzzle him one last time into the hollow of my neck or brush my cheek against his downy head in farewell. I did not inhale his smell and commit it to memory as I placed him on the seat or take one final gaze at his perfect lips through the open car window. Farm kids learn early on not to get attached to the babies whose fates are beyond us.

Had there been forest eyes to witness my retreat, they would surely have believed something dark and hungry chased me. No one could have guessed that my only predator was my own unimaginable act.

Falling in love with Wilson Moon had been the most honest act of my life. 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.

Each cough was like a fraying of my final family thread. When I had pictured the faraway farm from my retreat in the Big Blue wilderness, I had assumed it carried on essentially unchanged below. But I had been so wrong. Everything except the peaches had waned, and I returned to an even more broken relic of who we used to be. I’d always believed it was the men in this house who held the place together. 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. As Daddy weakened, the orchard and I were all we had left.

“You should know your Daddy was out looking for you every day after that, driving to Gunnison, Sapinero, Cebolla, riding Abel into the hills,” he said, moving the food around his plate but not eating. “I think he figured you’d come home if you knew Seth was gone. Asked me to keep a lookout.” I considered that information, wondering what all Daddy knew, wondering if roaming the hills had given him the cough that grew to claim his lungs, if I was the cause of my father’s undoing, like I was the cause of Wil’s.

I had loved Cora Mitchell, just as I had loved a hundred other particulars of my life in Iola. But tragedy and grief had gnawed at every last thing I knew to be true about that place.

He looked puzzled at my compliance. But I had not given him anything I hadn’t already promised to the flood. What happened to the farm once the trees were saved and I started my new life meant nothing to me. Seth, I told myself, meant nothing to me. If he did come back, the orchard would be gone, the farmhouse would be empty, but the ghosts of his regrets would linger. 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. I lifted the gun, aiming the barrel directly at his chest. “Now get the hell off my porch,” I said. Seth rose, looking at me with a face so worn and troubled he appeared eighty years old instead of twenty-two. He looked so sad that, just for an instant, I was again the little girl who loved her brother and wanted to untangle that love from fear and confusion, wanted to save him from himself and balance out all the bad in him, all the bad in the whole world, by being good. I wanted to tell him there had been more inside me than I’d ever thought possible, and, maybe, there was more inside him too.

Day after day, we continued, one tree at a time, until a flatbed was filled and hauled away and a new one took its place. The giant holes left behind in the orchard were like open wounds. I worried that the land felt the pain of extraction, a bloodless, quiet suffering of ripped soil and displaced rock and root, just as it would feel the final gasp for breath when the floodwaters rose. 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. Still, some evenings I sat in cool blue twilight in the ransacked orchard and apologized for what I had done.

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.”

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

I could now only think of one thing to say to him. Two useless words when even a thousand could not convey what needed to be said.

carrying your sorrows all alone isn’t strength, V. It’s punishment, plain and simple.

Eventually, I gave up the notebooks and novels I pointlessly carried in the diaper bag and stopped longing for the life I might have had. Instead, I surrendered to motherhood. The choice was motherhood or madness.

Vietnam was a death sentence, if not to their lives at least to their innocence.

We began with birdcall, and so, too, did we end.

Max would not be joining Lukas in Vietnam. To my surprise, the unexpected reprieve did not soothe me. I feared that Max’s own personal war might be war enough to claim him.

Still, last April, I found myself glued to the television set like everyone else, watching the Apollo 13 drama unfold. The irony did not escape me that the entire country held its breath for just three men while dozens died every day fighting a war no one understood. But I was hooked for those eight long days until the Apollo crew came home,

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.

I tell you my story because Lukas’s story is not mine to tell. For his entire life I told him that he was one thing, and then I broke his heart by admitting to him that he was something else. My precious boy now believes he is nothing from nowhere. Only you have the answers he needs.

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

Yes, Zelda was right that I, like my orchard, had been resilient in new soil, uprooted by circumstance yet able to get on with things anyway. But I had also faltered and fallen, lost my resolve, and curled into fear more times than I could count. 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.

I had lived my life willing to face what came to me, and that I’d always tried to do the next right thing. I would explain that what I had learned most about becoming is that it takes time. I would say I had tried, as Wil taught me, to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself. I had been shaped by my kindred—my lost family and lost love; my found friendships, though few; my trees that kept on living and every tree that gave me shelter; every creature I met along the way, every raindrop and snowflake choosing my shoulder, and every breeze that shifted the air; every winding path beneath my feet, every place I laid my hands and head, and every creek like the one before me, rolling off the hillside, gaining strength in gravity, spinning through the next eddy, pushing around the next bend, taking and giving in quiet agreement with every living thing.