Page 123 of The River We Remember

In the war, he’d seen castles and great monuments that had been built centuries ago. He’d witnessed the kind of carnage that had, time and again, waged around them. In the end, no matter the rhetoric, it was always about the land, about wanting more of it. He thought about Jimmy Quinn, who’d acquired more acreage in Black Earth County than any man before, and where had it got him? Behind his back, people had spoken of him with distaste and often with open hostility. Had he ever been a happy man? Had all that land ever made him content? Graff still didn’t know the truth of Quinn’s death, but he absolutely believed that at its heart was the unhappiness of a man who’d labored and fought and connived to gain the world, and in all that effort had lost everything of real value.

At this simple farmstead, Noah and Kyoko Bluestone had cultivated more than the crops they’d planted. They’d cultivated love, cultivated happiness. Graff believed this because it was what he’d experienced in his own life with Myrna. They’d never been rich by Jimmy Quinn’s standards, but during his years with Myrna, he had harvested an abundance of happiness, which he’d stored in the silo of his heart.

He lay a long time listening to the storm move in over Black Earth County and finally closed his eyes and let himself slip under the thinnest blanket of sleep, ready, at the smallest sound of threat, to rise and stand between Kyoko Bluestone and danger.

NO ONE BOTHERED to call Charlie Bauer. So in ignorance, she sipped good whiskey that night and went over once again the photographs that Sam Wicklow had shot of Jimmy Quinn’s ravaged body, and thought about Fiona McCarthy’s adamant refusal to speak to her, and considered the evidence gathered so far, which included an expensive sapphire ring with no adequate explanation. All the evidence against Bluestone was circumstantial, but it was still compelling, and she’d seen juries convict with even less. She tried to construct a reasonable scenario of self-defense, though it was all speculation because Noah and Kyoko were still no more forthcoming than Fiona McCarthy had been. What was it about Jimmy Quinn that, even after he was dead, scared people so much?

That’s when the storm rolled in.

Charlie had heard it coming for a long while, thunder rumbling across the fields and down into the narrow valley of the Alabaster. She stepped onto her porch. Beyond the big, open meadow that ran down to the river, the trees along the bank flared white in the lightning flashes. Charlie stood at the railing of the porch and recalled another storm, forty-five years earlier, the summer she was fourteen.

Charlotte Bauer’s mother had died birthing her. Her father never remarried, and he incessantly reminded Charlotte as she grew up that the reason he remained a widower was because he considered her a punishment and didn’t need any further suffering. Charlotte’s first transgression was her mother’s death. Charlotte’s second was that she didn’t resemble her mother at all but took after her father, hence her big nose, wide face, and ungainly frame. Also, she was a disobedient child. She challenged her father at every turn. And finally, she was, as he was fond of saying, too smart for her own good. He was an old Mennonite with a crusty heart, and although he put a roof over Charlotte’s head and made certain that she never wanted for food or clothing, he never gave any visible sign that he loved her. She couldn’t recall a single comforting word or gesture.

In the summer of her fourteenth year, they had a terrible confrontation. Her father didn’t believe that a woman needed an education. He allowed her to go to school only because it was the law, but at home, he would not tolerate the sight of a book in her hands, unless it was the Bible. Charlotte used to sneak books home, however, and read them at night by the light of a candle. The summer she was fourteen, he found her out. He came into her room late one night and discovered her reading Jane Eyre. He tried to snatch the book from her hands. Charlotte would not yield and clutched it to her breast. He pulled her from the bed, book and all, so furious she thought he would beat her, a thing he’d never done. They screamed at each other, and he finally muscled the novel from her grasp.

There was a storm that night. When her father finally succeeded in taking the book from her, Charlotte fled the house and ran in her bedclothes into the storm. She stumbled to the meadow and stood there, the tallest thing for a hundred yards in every direction, weeping bitter tears. Lightning illuminated everything in brilliant, angry flashes. She saw, in those moments of electric explosion, her father standing under the safety of the porch roof. As he watched, she raised her hands above her head to make herself a better lightning rod, a show of ultimate defiance. But she also did it with the hope, so deep-seated she couldn’t even acknowledge it then, that he might risk his own safety to come into the field and bring her home. It was a hope unfulfilled; he simply stood there. Across the whole of her life, Charlotte had no idea why. Was he proving he could be just as stubborn as a fourteen-year-old girl? If so, what kind of victory was that? Maybe he was too afraid of the lightning. That, at least, would have been forgivable. But what Charlotte truly suspected was that deep down he wished her dead for not being the child he wanted.

It seemed to Charlie, standing on the porch now, watching the storm break over the Alabaster River, that what anyone knew of love began early and the lessons stayed with them a lifetime. She’d learned from her father that she was somehow unworthy of love, that no matter what she did, she could never win it. For a long time, that’s how she’d lived her life. It had often been a lonely existence. But there was more to life than love, she’d told herself. There was camaraderie, and many times, in the midst of some battle for justice, she’d found herself steeped in the affection of her comrades. There was gratitude, and she’d received her share. Of course, there was friendship, which was perhaps the purest form of love, and she’d certainly known friendship. So all things considered, Charlie had never assessed her life as a particularly empty one. It hadn’t been easy, but it also hadn’t been without reward. And there was something else. As she’d grown older and had put so many battles behind her, she’d come to a different understanding about herself. Although she had never been a beauty, she’d finally learned to see what was beautiful about her, and she tried to look at other people with the same forgiving eye, and this had made a vast difference in how she embraced what life offered her.

The night the Bluestones’ dog was shot, the sky cleared quickly after the storm and the moon returned. Charlie still didn’t feel like sleeping. On impulse, she did something that she’d often done as a child. She found a path worn long ago through the trees to the bank of the Alabaster. She sat on a rock whose contours she knew by heart and took off her shoes and put her feet into the cool water. Under the bright moon, the river lived up to its name and flowed white before her.

She thought about everything that had happened in Black Earth County, all the death associated with the Alabaster, and she understood that there had been no intent in the river, either good or evil. If the river did possess spirit, as the Sioux believed, then that spirit seemed to Charlie so vast that it was probably blind to all the small things that occurred along its course. If the spirit was aware that she dangled her feet in its current, it gave no sign of caring. And Jimmy Quinn and Hannah Klein and Noah Bluestone’s great-great-grandfather and the nameless white woman whose life, legend said, had been lost on Inkpaduta Bend, none of this mattered to the spirit of the Alabaster. What mattered was the serving of its ultimate purpose, which God alone knew. And what was the point of Charlie’s life or anyone’s but to run its course and serve its purpose, though that purpose might remain a mystery?

Yet the deaths mattered to Charlie. They mattered to a lot of good people in Black Earth County. And her guess was that no one who cared about these things was sleeping well that night. Which was unfortunate. Because the next night, they were to get no sleep at all.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

IN THE MORNING, Brody Dern gave an early call to Asa Fielding and filled him in on the events of the previous night. Though the sun was barely peeping above the horizon, Fielding came in immediately to cover the jailhouse. Brody took Hector and drove to a wooded rise overlooking Creasy Hollow. He let the dog run free while he used a pair of binoculars to observe the sad-looking constructions that housed the families there. Eventually Creasy’s brothers and an uncle drifted out, all of them looking unkempt, and they went about opening the gas station and garage. He could see no sign of Tyler Creasy or the mold-colored, rust-chewed truck the man drove. But he was pretty sure that Creasy would, at some point, try to contact his family. A man might leave his home, his wife, his livelihood, but he would need something to tide him over, some cash and whatnot. For that, Creasy had nowhere to turn but the people in the hollow, the people of his blood.

The sun had climbed well above the lazy roll of the eastern farmland when the sheriff finally decided to take the bull by the horns.

“Come on, boy,” he called to Hector.

He drove into the hollow and pulled up to the garage. Creasy’s uncle, a man named Luther, came out, wiping grease from his hands with a dirty red rag.

“Heard about my nephew,” he said to the sheriff. The man needed a shave, always needed one, in Brody’s experience. He could have used regular visits to a dentist as well.

“Seen him, Luther?” Brody asked.

“Nope. But his wife has and that boy of hers.” He gave a sly smile, the kind that made Brody want to slap it from his face.

The other Creasys stood watching from the dark of the garage. They made Brody think of hyenas in a cave. He tried to let go of the enmity he felt toward the clan, tried to tell himself most people had no control over the forces that shaped them, but it was a hard sell.

“You’ve seen them this morning? Ramona and Del?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Brody had wasted enough time with half answers, and he headed to the trailer and knocked. When the door was opened to him, his stomach gave a fierce twist.

Del Wolfe’s face was agate colored, a mottle of red and purple bruising. His left eye was swollen nearly shut. His lower lip bore a clotted wound like a leech.

Brody said, “Jesus, son. Did Creasy do that?”

“Yeah.” It seemed to hurt Del even to speak that one word.

“Your mom?”

Del gave a jerk of his head, indicating that Brody should come inside.