Page 120 of The River We Remember

Brody didn’t answer that. He said, “ ’Night, ma’am,” and started away.

But she spoke again. “He was the best of all my boys.”

Brody turned back. “Beg your pardon.”

“Tyler. He was the best of ’em all. The sweetest. The softest. Then they called him up to fight. It was them damn Germans, they done something to him.”

He could see the sorrow in her sagging face, the loss in those sad, dark eyes. He’d never paid her much attention when he visited the hollow except to ask about her wayward son. She’d always seemed to him a woman whose heart was as dry and wrinkled as her skin. Now he saw a mother who long ago had lost the son she’d loved.

“The war killed what was best in a lot of men, Velma,” he offered.

“You want to know something, Sheriff? Sometimes I wish they’d just shipped him back to me in a coffin. And I told him that to his face.”

“Good night, Velma.”

“You find him and you take him in, don’t call me to bail him out.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Brody gave a nod in parting.

HE DIDN’T FIND Tyler Creasy. In the end, Brody drove back to Jewel, the whole way trying to figure someone like Tyler Creasy, who’d gone to war a quiet kid and had come home the kind of man who’d shoot a dog. Who’d steal gas and blame it on somebody else. Who’d throw a fist at the least provocation.

Them damn Germans.

Maybe Tyler’s mother had been right. Or maybe it was something more than just the war. He thought about what the woman had said, that she wished her son had not come home alive and that she’d told Tyler so. He thought that if he’d heard such a thing from his own mother, the cut would have been too deep to heal. There were many ways of being wounded, Brody understood. Tyler Creasy? Maybe he knew them all.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

SLEEP WOULD NOT come, and for hours Scott Madison lay awake watching moonlight inch across his bedroom floor.

After the terrible incident at the Bluestone farmstead, he and Del Wolfe had sped away as quickly as possible. They hadn’t stopped at Fort Beloit to gather their things but had gone straight home. They hadn’t talked about what had occurred, a series of missteps more horrible than any nightmare Scott could ever have imagined for himself. When they’d parted, Del had said only “You can’t tell anyone, Madman. Not anyone. Not ever. Promise.”

He’d given his word, even though he knew it was unnecessary, because how could he ever admit to what he’d been a part of?

He heard his mother come home from her evening with Sheriff Dern. She lingered in the rooms below for a while, then turned out the lights and came slowly up the stairs. She paused as she passed his doorway and finally stepped in. He pretended he was sleeping, but she sat on his bed, so he looked at her.

“Anything wrong?” she asked.

“No.” He wondered if she could see on his face the lie in that word.

“You and Del decided not to spend the night at Fort Beloit?”

“Mosquitoes,” he said.

She leaned to him, kissed his forehead, just as she had before the whole terrible evening began. “All right, then. Good night.”

“ ’Night.”

He watched her go, longing to tell her, wanting to be free of the burden he carried now. He couldn’t understand how everything could change so quickly. Only yesterday he was a hero. And now? Now he was the worst kind of person imaginable.

He heard the clock on the living room mantel strike midnight, and he could no longer lie there suffering. He slipped from his bed, dressed, and so quietly that he might not even have existed—and wouldn’t that have been best, he thought miserably—left the house. Spring field crickets chirred in the darkness but stopped as he passed, and their sudden silence felt to him like censure. The moon poured silver over the town, and his black shadow kept company at his side. He walked without particular purpose, walked because he couldn’t be still, walked mindless, walked dead.

The river, when he came to it, was a milk-white flow between trees ghosted with moonlight. To his right, the Alabaster ran smooth and fast. Left was the old spillway that had been built to hold back the river in order to power a mill that had been the town’s first large enterprise. Below the spillway, the water churned and foamed and eddied in dark currents. He stood a long while, staring down as if all that turbulence called to him.

“Different, isn’t she?”

He spun, startled. The voice was near and familiar, but at the moment, he could neither see nor identify the speaker. It was as if the words had come out of the night itself.

“Who’s there?” he said.