Page 150 of The River We Remember

The boy gave a weak nod.

Brody wondered what he could say to Scott that would make any difference and finally offered the only the thing he had: “It’s over now.”

But he knew it wasn’t, and it never would be.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

THE DAY KYOKO Bluestone left Black Earth County for good, Charlie gathered at the farmstead with the others who’d come to know, to respect, and even to love the young woman. The pigs and chickens had been sold. The land itself Kyoko had deeded to James Patrick Quinn, Jr., for reasons she never explained to anyone. But Charlie knew. And Marta Quinn knew. All the belongings she cared to take with her were packed in the back of Connie Graff’s pickup. She was headed to California, where she had distant relatives near Sacramento who would take her in. Graff was going to drive her there, deliver her safely. Angie Madison had prepared lunches for them to eat on the road that first day.

The morning sky was soft blue and nearly cloudless. Beneath it, the young plants in the fields were deep green and promising. Kyoko stood in the farmyard and turned in a slow circle, taking in her final view: the outbuildings, the empty hog pen, the fields of amaranth and millet, the line of trees that marked the Alabaster River, Fordham Ridge, the young orchard, the Dutch elm tree with the iron bench beneath it, the small house.

“It’s a fine place,” she said.

“J.P. will take care of it well,” Graff assured her.

Sam Wicklow was there. Kyoko had been especially grateful to him because of the way he’d championed Noah Bluestone in a number of pieces in the Clarion. She knew the reason for his scars and that prosthetic leg, and she had thanked him many times for not holding anger in his heart and for speaking out so eloquently in defense of her husband’s character.

Brody, of course, was there. And Hector, who played gently with Kyoko’s old dog, Fuji.

Scott Madison had come, too, accompanying his mother. But he held back a bit, as if terribly uncomfortable with the emotion of the moment. There was more to it than that, of course, much more, a great deal of guilt, but Charlie didn’t know the whole story then and just thought him shy. He’d agreed to take care of Graff’s horses until the old deputy returned. His plan was to ride his new Columbia three-speed out to Graff’s place twice a day. Such a physical exertion concerned Angie and Ida, but Scott was determined, and with the recent events in Black Earth County, he’d become older than his fourteen years and independent in many ways.

“Are you ready?” Graff finally asked.

Kyoko and Charlie hugged goodbye. Then Kyoko called to her dog and they climbed into the cab of Graff’s pickup.

“Take good care of her, Connie,” Charlie said.

“Like she was my own daughter,” Graff promised.

They stood together, those who’d come to see her off, and watched Graff’s truck raise a little rooster tail of dust as it sped down the lane. Black Earth County might not have welcomed her well, but those who were there that day were sincere in their sadness at seeing Kyoko Bluestone leave. Sam Wicklow, who’d taken photos, wrote in his little pad, notes for yet another editorial he would compose about the whole Bluestone affair. Brody Dern and Angie Madison held hands and were quiet. Scott stared off into the distance, and Charlie couldn’t say whether the young man was seeing the past or trying to see the future. Charlie just felt tired in the way she used to feel when fighting battles she knew she could not win. But then, that’s one of the beauties of life. That we still fight on.

EPILOGUE

OUR LIVES AND the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.

Charlie Bauer still sometimes thinks about the death of Jimmy Quinn and the part she played in the events of that long-ago summer. These days she’s staring her ninetieth birthday in the face. Her skin is covered with liver spots and her hands shake a bit. Her eyes are good, and her thinking clear. She spends most days sitting on the porch of her little house, reading and admiring the view across the fallow field where once, in the middle of a raging storm, she’d stood like a lightning rod. Beyond are the trees that curtain the Alabaster River, and beyond that, the gentle roll of the land all the way to the horizon. To the south stands Fordham Ridge and below it Inkpaduta Bend. Not far from that is the acreage once farmed by the Bluestones, now turned and planted every year by a good man who calls himself Patrick Quinn. There’s a little orchard, too, which produces some of the sweetest apples you’ll find in Black Earth County. Charlie can’t help but think how wrong that early explorer Stephen H. Long was when he stood atop the ridge and surveyed the land below and called it the Great American Desert, deeming it unfit for cultivation. There is a profound tenderness in this land, she understands, and life has been brought forth from it in wondrous measure.

Stories are like those seeds we plant in the soil. They just grow and grow. So this story, which began with a man found eaten by catfish in a river, is not yet finished. Some of the players are no longer part of it, but the story goes on. The river continues to flow.

Over all these years, Angie and Brody Dern have been Charlie’s good friends, and on occasions of legal necessity, Charlie has acted as their attorney. Because of that special relationship of client privilege, and also because of their deep friendship, Charlie has sometimes been their confessor as well and has heard the truth of their past, or the truth as each of them remembered it.

Whenever he returns to Jewel, Scott visits her, too. He’s a lawyer, lives in Saint Paul, and works for the public defender’s office there. When he was twenty, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic for a new procedure to repair his faulty heart. The surgery was gloriously successful. During his recovery, he had two constant visitors who weren’t family: Del Wolfe and Holly Coleridge. In his first year of law school, he and Holly married.

On Scott’s trips to Jewel, Holly and their two children usually accompany him. Sometimes Scott and Brody have hauled out their guitars and put on a bit of a hoedown on Charlie’s front porch, playing new tunes together and old ones and, as a tribute, a song or two Scott learned from Wendell Moon, who left this earth long ago. Across these years, Scott has slowly revealed to Charlie the events of that summer in which he played a part and which still trouble him. He’s still plagued by the demons of if only. If only he hadn’t befriended a boy as troubled as Del Wolfe, maybe none of it would have happened. If only he and Del hadn’t gone to the Bluestone farm and shot the dog, who would have later barked a warning, Kyoko Bluestone might not have been raped and Noah Bluestone might yet be alive. If only… if only…

After graduating from high school, Del Wolfe attended the University of Minnesota. He had little money, so to help foot the bill for his education he joined ROTC. On graduation, he went directly into the army, figuring to make a career of it, as his father had. A year later, he was deployed to a faraway place barely on the radar of most Americans at that time, a small Southeast Asian country called Vietnam. When he finally returned home, it was in a coffin draped with an American flag. Every Memorial Day, Scott puts flowers on Del’s grave at the Fort Snelling National Cemetery, along with one page of text torn from an old paperback copy of The Naked and the Dead.

Kyoko Bluestone settled in Davis, California, first living with relatives, then marrying a Nisei farmer named David Kimura. She sent Charlie letters and Christmas cards, and sent them to Connie Graff, too, until lung cancer took him. Kyoko passed away a year after Connie, succumbing to leukemia, the seeds of which were probably planted in her by the bombing of Nagasaki long ago.

Here’s something that always makes Charlie smile. Seven years after the deaths of Jimmy Quinn and Noah Bluestone, Sam Wicklow published his first novel, a fictionalized account of the events of that fateful summer. He titled it Spirit River, and it enjoyed great success. He didn’t know everything that Charlie knew, the secrets revealed to her over the years, but it was nonetheless an epic story. In Charlie’s opinion, it should have won the Pulitzer Prize. Sam has written a number of other fine novels since, all of which he’s signed for Charlie and are now shelved beside her inscribed Steinbeck, a position they occupy well.

Brody Dern died a year ago. He was atop his brother’s barn, helping repair the roof, when the scaffolding plank gave way. Brody grabbed Tom and kept him from falling, but in the moments that followed, Brody lost his own footing and plunged. He was in a coma for two days, then slipped away. Shortly after his funeral, Angie visited Charlie and brought something from the safe deposit box that she and Brody kept at the bank. It was a sealed manila envelope with Charlie’s name written on the front. Charlie broke the seal and tipped the envelope. A ring fell into Charlie’s palm, small and silver and set with a sapphire. She looked at Angie, and it was clear that the ring was unfamiliar to her. Although Charlie had never actually seen it, she knew that piece of jewelry. A slip of paper was also in the envelope. Written in Brody’s hand was this: Colleen Quinn.

Whenever she looks back at the summer of Jimmy Quinn’s death, she’s certain that somehow Brody understood the truth of Quinn’s murder, and he knew that Charlie understood it, too. That ring was the telling clue. At some point after his official investigation, some moment he never revealed to anyone, the light must have dawned. Charlie recalled visiting the Quinns sometime after that tragic night on Inkpaduta Bend and noticing that the old shack where Jimmy Quinn had died was gone. When she asked J.P. about it, he told her the sheriff had ordered it dismantled because he considered it a fire hazard. Marta simply said she was glad to see the thing torn down. But with that ring in the palm of her hand, Charlie wondered if, after he finally grasped the truth, Brody had approached Marta, and she’d told him everything. If so, he’d sworn her to absolute secrecy and had made sure any evidence that might have soaked into the boards of the old shack was gone forever. Charlie recalled The Catcher in the Rye, the last book they’d read for the Prairie Blooms so many years ago, and she imagined Brody, during his lifelong silence, envisioning himself standing alone out there in some great field of rye, protecting the innocent.

She spends her days much in solitude, but never really lonely, awaiting that end which comes to us all. She will be buried in the cemetery in Jewel, on the hillside that overlooks the Alabaster River. You may find it strange that she’s purchased the plot next to her father’s grave, a decision she made because of a small, beautiful piece of wisdom Jimmy Quinn’s death offered her. And here it is: We all die, but some of us—those who are blessed or maybe just lucky—have the opportunity before that end to be redeemed. We can let go, forgive others, and also forgive ourselves for the worst of what we are or have been. Jimmy Quinn didn’t have that chance, and even given the opportunity might not have had the inclination. For Charlie, Quinn’s death has always been a reminder that we need to be kind to each other and ready to forgive. Brody Dern understood this, and Angie. Charlie believes that Scott will, too, someday, where his own guilt is concerned. Charlie Bauer doesn’t intend to leave this life filled with rancor or regret or plagued by the demons of if only. She intends to lie down in peace.

And so, she sips her whiskey and reads her books and every once in a great while allows herself the pleasure of a cigar, and she awaits without fear her own passing, when she will be lowered into the soil of Black Earth County and laid to rest forever beside the moonlit, milk-white flow of the Alabaster, a river she remembers fondly as an old friend.