Page 44 of The River We Remember

“Off with you now,” she said, but waited to leave until he’d closed the door and she saw a light wink on inside.

She walked back to the Wagon Wheel and to the house behind it that was home to her now and had been for nearly fifteen years. Her mother-in-law had left a light on in the hallway for her. Angie turned it off and mounted the stairs in the dark. She passed Ida’s bedroom, where the door was closed, and then her son’s, where the door was not. Scott lay asleep on his bed, the sheet kicked aside. Above the bed hung a poster of the Grand Canyon, a place Scott wanted badly to see someday. His guitar stood leaning against the bedpost. He’d probably practiced some before he went to sleep. She’d given him the instrument for Christmas, and Wendell Moon, who was amazing with a guitar, had been teaching him chords and picking and strumming. Scott would listen to the radio or to the 45s he bought and try to play along. Other boys had baseball, but Scott would never have that. He might have the guitar and music, however, and that made Angie happy.

Blessed, she thought.

In her own room, she prepared for bed, but she didn’t immediately slide under the covers. As she usually did, she turned on the lamp that sat on her writing desk. A small key hung from a gold chain around her neck. She bent and used the key to unlock one of the desk drawers, from which she removed two journals. The cover of the first was old and worn and bore no title or other indication of the contents. She’d been given that volume of blank pages when she was twelve years old. Across the next few years, she’d filled that journal, then bought herself another, and then another. She kept them all in her desk under lock and key. She made several entries per week. Sometimes she wrote only a line or two, sometimes more. In a way, it was her testament to what Felix Klein had said about his own life and was, she believed, an apt characterization of the lives of most people: They were broken and they were blessed.

Every time she sat down to write in a newer volume, she would begin by reading from that old, worn first journal, to remind herself of the place she’d come from and all that she had to be thankful for now. She leafed through the pages, and her eyes fell on an entry composed more than fifteen years before, written in small, careful script.

March 11, 1943… I don’t know why, but I still count the men who come to me. Today they were numbers 88, 89, and 90.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BRODY ALMOST NEVER attended Sunday Mass anymore, using his duties as sheriff for excuse. But what he couldn’t get out of was Sunday dinner with his family.

Brody didn’t look much like his older brother. Tom was taller and broader and, in the stern aspect of his face, very much resembled their father. Brody took after his mother, a softer look. Tom was also a good deal heavier than his brother, but that was due in large measure to Garnet’s fine cooking. He’d begun to bald early, a worry for him. He usually wore a seed cap—to protect himself from the sun, he said—but Brody suspected it was due equally to his brother’s vanity.

Tom and Garnet had three children: Mary and Rita, ages twelve and ten, and Jack, age seven. They were great kids and loved their uncle Brody, and he loved them in return. But there was always that knowledge in the back of his mind of what he and their mother shared but shouldn’t, so even as he enjoyed them, he understood that if the truth were ever known, he’d hurt them all terribly. Like so much of his life, it was something he didn’t understand and had stopped trying to.

Brody’s mother still lived in the farmhouse where she’d raised her children and where now she helped raise her grandchildren. In the only wedding photograph Brody had ever seen, she was a girl of sixteen in a simple white dress, a bouquet of flowers in her hands, staring up at her new husband with a look that said he was her world now and she knew absolutely that it would be the best of all possible worlds. It had and hadn’t been. His father was not a communicative man. Sentiments such as I love you or You look lovely today never fell from his lips. He spoke in concretes: Rain again today, Em. Looks like I’ll be getting those beans in late. Or Tore this shirt on a nail. Needs mending, Em. Or if he was feeling particularly loving, Good pot roast, Em. From that beaming young girl, his mother had grown into a farmer’s wife, thin and quiet and busy sunup until well after sundown, with hands every bit as hard and cracked as her husband’s and a face plain as barn wood. And, as nearly as Brody could tell, happy. She’d been widowed early and had never remarried. When Tom and Garnet had tied the knot, she moved into one of the smaller bedrooms and gave the big one she’d shared with her husband to the newlyweds. When the children had come along one by one, she’d moved again and again, until finally, she lived in the attic, which Tom had made into a cozy living area for her, a small place of her own in a house that had once been all hers. And still, as nearly as Brody could tell, she was happy.

Gatherings always included Brody’s younger sister, Amy; her husband, Sean Cassiday; and their son, Benny. Amy was one of the soft spots in Brody’s heart and was much of the brightness in his memories of life on the farm.

Sunday dinner was always at one. When Brody and Hector pulled off the highway and onto the short lane leading to the farmyard, he could see the kids on the grass in front of the house, playing a game of croquet. The dogs came barking, and as soon as Brody opened the car door, Hector bounded out and the animals greeted one another with yips and nips and sniffings and wagging tails. Brody was greeted with shouts from his nieces and nephews and pleas to join in their croquet game. He begged off for the moment but promised that after dinner it would be a different story.

Inside, the men had changed out of the clothes they’d worn to church and were dressed in clean khakis and sport shirts. Garnet and Amy and Brody’s mother were in the kitchen. Brody shook hands with his brother and brother-in-law, then went to the kitchen and kissed each of the women in turn on the cheek. They gave him a glass of iced tea and shooed him out, and he joined the other men in the cool of the living room.

Tom, as always, sounded so much like Brody’s father that the minute he spoke, Brody felt himself go tense.

“Catfish ate Jimmy Quinn. True?” Tom’s tone indicated that he thought it had to be an outrageous story someone had concocted.

“They nibbled on him some,” Brody replied.

“I heard he killed himself,” Sean said quietly, as if speaking of a sin. Which, in the Catholic tradition they all shared, it would have been.

“We’re still sorting things out,” Brody said.

“A lot of people are going to be very interested in how they get sorted,” Tom said.

“I also heard that it might have been something else,” Sean said. “That maybe someone killed Jimmy.”

“Like I told you, Sean, we’re still sorting it all out. Something like this, you have to be careful. You understand.”

“Noah Bluestone, we heard,” Tom said.

“You know, Tom, an accusation like that does nobody any good.”

“Only saying what others are saying.”

Brody could hear the children in the front yard, and the honest to God truth was that he longed to join them in their game, to forget about Quinn for a little while.

“Word is he was shotgunned,” Tom said. “Hell of a way for a man to die.”

Tom had been exempted from service in the war from which Brody had come home a hero, and Brody was tempted to tell his older brother about all the horrible ways there were for people to die, but he held his tongue and said instead, “Where’s all this information coming from?”

“Church this morning,” Sean said. “Everybody’s talking about it.”

“Something not right in what we’ve heard, Brody?” This was said as a kind of challenge, spoken in the way Tom often addressed his brother.