The River

He came back in October when the light had gone flat and the cottonwoods stood stripped along the bank like things long dead. He had not intended to come. He had driven south out of Cheyenne on the interstate and somewhere past Wheatland he had turned onto the state road and then onto the county road and then onto the dirt track that had no name and when he saw the line of trees ahead dark against the pale sky, he stopped the truck and sat with the engine running.

The river was low. It always was in October.

He cut the engine and got out and stood in the cold and looked at the trees and beyond them the glint of water moving slow over pale stone. A meadowlark called from somewhere in the brown grass and then was still. The sky was the color of old pewter and moving with high thin cloud and in the west the mountains stood white and indifferent as they always had and as they would when he was gone and when everyone who remembered him was gone and the mountains would not mark the difference.

He walked down through the grass. His boots were wet before he reached the trees.

There were the remains of something here. A concrete footing cracked and heaved by winters. Cable rusted to a deep umber coiled in the grass like a thing that had died trying to get somewhere. A post still standing, its wood gone silver and soft with rot. He did not look at these things directly but felt their presence the way you feel the presence of the dead when you walk in places where the dead have been. He went on through the cottonwoods and stood at the water's edge and looked across to the far bank where the willows grew dense and low.

She had been standing there. That was the first thing he thought and then he pushed it down.

The water moved over the stones with a sound like breathing. A cold wind came downriver and moved his hair and the last few leaves let go from the branches above him and fell without sound to the water and the water took them. He stood watching them go. There is a patience in rivers that shames everything that stands beside them.

There is no reason to be here, he said. He said it aloud to the river and the river paid him no mind.

He had sworn it in the cab of a man he barely knew on the morning they lowered her down. Sworn it the way men swear things when grief is new and total and before they understand that grief does not honor oaths any more than rivers do. He was twenty-three years old and he had not known then what he was swearing against. He had not known that a man could keep such a promise for twenty years. Could keep it and keep it and still find himself here with wet boots and nothing resolved and the same water moving past that had moved past on that first morning when he drove away believing that not looking back was the same as leaving.

He sat on a flat stone at the water's edge. The stone was cold. In the willows across the river a red-tailed hawk appeared and perched looking at him with that particular contempt that hawks have for everything that cannot fly and then it opened its wings and was gone upriver and the willows bent in its wake and were still again. He watched the place where it had been.

He thought about what it meant to come back. Whether it meant anything. Whether coming back was a kind of defeat or a kind of courage or merely what happens when a man runs out of other directions and finds that the roads he has not taken have been waiting for him all along with a patience equal to rivers. He did not know. He had not known her long enough to know what he owed her. That was the truth of it, and he had spent twenty years not saying it and in the not saying it had made it the largest thing in his life, larger than the women he had loved after and the work he had done and the miles he had put between himself and this bend of water. You can measure a man, he thought, by the size of what he will not say.

The water moved and moved.

A mule deer came down through the brush on the far bank, a young buck with velvet gone from his antlers; antlers pale as driftwood. He came to the water's edge and drank with a grave and particular attention and then raised his head and looked at the man on the stone. They regarded each other across the width of the river. Then the deer turned and went back into the willows and was gone without sound as if he had never been.

After a while the man picked up a stone from the bank. It was smooth and gray and fit his hand the way river stones do, worn to that shape by thousands of years of water asking something of it. He held it a moment and felt its weight and its coldness and then he threw it not into the river but across into the willows where she had stood and it fell through the branches with a sound like breaking and then was quiet. Like that, he thought. Like that is how it goes. You carry a thing so long it becomes part of the weight of you and then one day you put it down and the putting down feels like nothing at all, feels like throwing a stone into willows, and the willows don’t care and the river don’t care and the sky is the same sky it was when you were twenty-three and certain you would not come back.

He sat a while longer. The light was going and the cold was coming harder off the water and finally he stood and walked back through the cottonwoods and through the wet grass to the truck. He did not look back at the river. This was not out of resolution or ceremony but only because he was tired and because the river would be there when he was not and when everyone who had ever stood at its edge was not, and this seemed sufficient, and it seemed like enough.

He drove north. The mountains went dark behind him and the plains opened out flat and enormous in the last of the light. The stars came out hard and cold and brilliant over the high plains, and he drove under them and did not stop and the road ahead was the same road it had always been, and he was not the same man and this was either everything or nothing and he drove on either way.