Combining unforgettable characters and a breathtaking natural setting, it is a sweeping story of survival and becoming, of the deepest mysteries of love, truth and fate.
Prologue
“Imagine what lingers on the black bottom of a lake. Debris, rivered in or tossed from boats, grows shaggy and soft. Pouty fish swim their strange lives, far from the hook, in inseparable breath and motion. Imagine patches of lake weed dancing like lithe, unobserved women. Stand on the edge of a lake, the low waves gulping at your shoes, and imagine how close you are to a world as silent and alien as the moon, out of reach of light and heat and sound.
My home is at the bottom of a lake. Our farm lies there, mud bound, its remnants indistinguishable from boat wreckage. Sleek trout troll the remains of my bedroom and the parlor where we sat as a family on Sundays. Barns and troughs rot. Tangled barbed wire rusts. The once fertile land marinates in idleness.
A history-book version of the creation of Blue Mesa Reservoir might portray the project as heroic, part of the grand vision to carry precious water from the Colorado River’s tributaries to the arid Southwest. Good intentions may have plugged the once wild Gunnison River and forced it to be a lake, but I know another story.
I used to stand knee-deep in this section of the Gunnison when it still rushed fast and frothy through the valley of my birth, the vast and lonely Big Blue wilderness rising above it. I knew the town of Iola when it woke each morning to fragrant breakfasts and bustling farms and ranches, how the sunrise illuminated the east side of Main then inched uptown, across the train tracks and schoolyard, to ignite the tiny church’s one round red-and-blue stained-glass window. I timed my life by the hollow whistle of the 9:22, the 2:05, the 5:47. I knew all the shortcuts and townsfolk and the oldest gnarled tree consistently producing the sweetest peaches in my family’s orchard. And I knew, perhaps more than most, the sadness of this place.
Good intentions relocated the Iola graveyard high on a hill—each of my family’s headstones hopefully matched with their appropriate remains—where it still sits behind a white iron fence, bent and twisted from the weight of snow. Good intentions otherwise drowned the entirety of Iola, Colorado.
Imagine a town silent, forgotten, decomposing at the bottom of a lake that once was a river. If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pain of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not. The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.
PART I : Dark and shiny as a raven’s wing
One
1948
He wasn’t much to look at.
Not at first, anyway.
“Pardon,” the young man said, a grimy thumb and forefinger tugging at the brim of his tattered red ball cap. “This the way to the flop?”
As simple as that. This ordinary question from a filthy stranger walking up Main Street just as I arrived at the intersection with North Laura.
His overalls and hands were blackened with coal, which I assumed was axle grease or layers of dirt from the fields, though it was too dark for either. His cheeks were smudged. Tan skin shone through trickled sweat. Straight black hair jutted from beneath his cap.
The autumn day had begun as ordinary as the porridge and fried eggs I had served the men for breakfast. I noticed nothing uncommon as I went on to tend the house and the docile animals in their pens, picked two baskets of late-season peaches in the cool morning air, and made my daily deliveries pulling the rickety wagon behind my bicycle, then returned home to cook lunch. But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.
“The way to everything,” I replied.
I was not trying to be witty or catch his notice, but the angle of his pause and slight twist of smile showed that my response amused him. He made my insides leap, looking at me that way.
“Real small town, I mean.” I tried to set things straight, to clarify that I was not the type of girl that boys noticed or paused to smirk at on a street corner.
The stranger’s eyes were as dark and shiny as a raven’s wing. And kind—that is what I remember most about those eyes from that first glimpse until the final gaze—a gentleness that seemed to fountain from his center and spill out like an overflowing well. He studied me a moment, still grinning, then pulled again at his cap brim and continued walking toward Dunlap’s boarding house near the end of Main.
It was true that this one crumbling sidewalk led to everything. Along with Dunlap’s, we had the Iola Hotel for fancy folks and the tavern tacked on the back for drinking folks; Jernigan’s Standard station, hardware, and post; the café that always smelled of coffee and bacon; and Chapman’s Big Little Store, with groceries and a deli counter and too much gossip. At the west end of it all stood the tall flagpole between the schoolhouse I once attended and the white clapboard church where our family used to sit, polished and proper, every Sunday when Mother was alive. Beyond that, Main Street dove abruptly into the hillside like a period after a short sentence.
I was heading in the same direction as the stranger—to drag my brother out of the poker cabin behind Jernigan’s—but I wasn’t about to walk right on this boy’s heels. I paused there at the corner and shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun to study him as he continued on. He strolled slowly, casually, like his only destination was his next step, his arms swinging at his sides, his head seemingly a tad behind the pace. His dingy white T-shirt stretched tightly beneath the straps of his overalls. He was slim, with the muscular shoulders of a workhand.
“My heart quickened when the distance between us crept from three houses to two, then one, and I realized he was ever so gradually slowing down.”
As if he felt my gaze, he suddenly turned and flashed a smile, dazzling against his soiled face. I gasped at being caught eyeing him. A rush of heat tickled up my neck. He tugged his cap as he had before, turned, and strolled on. Though I couldn’t see his face, I was pretty sure he was still grinning.
It was a fateful moment, I know in retrospect. For I could have turned and headed back down North Laura, toward home and fixing supper, could have let Seth stumble to the farm on his own accord, stagger in the door right in front of Daddy and Uncle Og with his own hell to pay. I could have at least crossed over to the other side of Main, put the occasional car and a row of yellowing cottonwood trees between our two sidewalks. But I didn’t, and this made all the difference in the world.
Instead, I took one slow step forward and then another, intuitively feeling the significance in each choice to lift, extend, then lower a foot.
No one had ever spoken to me about matters of attraction. I was too young when my mother died to have learned those secrets from her, and I can’t imagine she would have shared them with me anyway. She had been a quiet, proper woman, extremely obedient to God and expectation. From what I remember, she loved my brother and me, but her affection surfaced only within strict parameters, governing us with a grave fear of how we’d all perform on Judgment Day. I had occasionally glimpsed her carefully concealed passion unleash on our backsides with the black rubber flyswatter, or in the subtle stains of quickly swept tears when she stood after prayer, but I never saw her kiss my father or even once take him in her arms. Though my parents ran the family and the farm as efficient and dependable partners, I didn’t witness between them the presence of love particular to a man and a woman. For me, this mysterious territory had no map.
Except for this: I was looking out the parlor window on that gloomy autumn twilight just after I turned twelve years old when Sheriff Lyle pulled up the wet gravel drive in his long black-and-white automobile and hesitantly approached my father in the yard. Through the steam of my breath on the glass I saw Daddy slowly collapse to his knees right there in the rain-fresh mud. I had been watching for my mother, my cousin Calamus, and my Aunt Vivian to return, hours late from making their peach delivery across the pass to Canyon City. My father had been watching too, so antsy about their absence he spent the whole evening raking the soggy leaves he’d normally allow to compost on the grass over winter. When Daddy buckled under the weight of Lyle’s words, my young heart comprehended two immense truths: my missing family members would not be coming home, and my father loved my mother. They had never demonstrated or spoken to me of romance, but I realized then that in fact they had known it, in their own quiet way. I learned from their subtle relations—and in the dry, matter-of-fact eyes with which my father later walked into the house and somberly shared the news of my mother’s death with Seth and me—that love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.
Beyond that, I knew nothing, especially not of love’s beginnings, of that inexplicable draw to another, why some boys could pass you by without notice but the next has a pull on you as undeniable as gravity, and from that moment forward, longing is all you know.
There was merely a half block between this boy and me as we walked the same narrow sidewalk at the same moment in this same little nowhere Colorado town. I trailed him, thinking that from wherever he had come, from whatever place and experience, he and I had lived our seventeen years—perhaps a bit longer for him, perhaps a bit less—wholly unaware of the other’s existence on this earth. Now, at this moment, for some reason our lives were intersecting as sure as North Laura and Main.
My heart quickened when the distance between us crept from three houses to two, then one, and I realized he was ever so gradually slowing down.
I had no idea what to do. If I also slowed, he’d know I was pacing myself off him, paying too close attention to a stranger. But if I carried on steadily, I would quickly catch up to him, and what then? Or worse yet, I’d pass him and feel the sear of his gaze on my own back. He’d surely notice my gangly walk, my bare legs and worn leather shoes, the outgrown fit of my old maroon school dress, the ordinariness of my straight brown hair not washed since Sunday bath.
So I slowed. As if attached by some invisible string, he slowed as well. I slowed again, and he slowed, barely moving. Then he stopped dead still. I had no choice but to do the same, and there we were, like two fool statues right there on Main Street.
He didn’t move out of playfulness, I sensed. I stood frozen out of fear and indecision and the disorienting first rumbles of desire. I had known of this boy for mere minutes and less than a town block, yet already he had my insides tumbling like pebbles in a stream.
I didn’t hear the doctor’s plump wife or the steel wheels of her baby carriage coming up behind me. When Mrs. Bernette and her toddler suddenly appeared at my side, trying to maneuver a pass, I spooked like a squirrel.
Mrs. Bernette smiled suspiciously, her thinly plucked brows raised to indicate an unspoken question as she snipped a terse, “Torie.”
I barely managed to nod politely, couldn’t even remember the baby’s name or reach out with a friendly tousle to his blond hair.
The stranger took one sly sideways step so Mrs. Bernette could pass. She looked him up and down curiously and smiled feebly when he tipped his cap and said, “Ma’am.” She looked back at me with a frown, as if struggling to figure out a riddle, then turned and continued to waddle uptown.
We actually were a riddle, this boy and I. The riddle went like this: What, once tied together, have bound destinies? The answer: Puppets on the same string.
“Victoria,” he said with casual familiarity, as he finally turned and faced me squarely. “You following me?” It was apparently his turn to be clever, and he grinned with equal amusement at his own wit as with what he’d mistook for mine.
I stammered like a child caught stealing a nickel before managing a curt, “No.”
He crossed his tan arms and said nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was pondering his question or me, or perhaps the happenstance of the moment.
“I knew that the fiercest storms, dark and ominous as the devil, nearly always blew in over the northwestern peaks and that every songbird and raven and magpie would silence just before the sky unleashed.”
When I could no longer stand my own discomfort in the quiet, I straightened in faux composure and asked, “How do you know my name?”
“I pay attention,” he said. He was blunt yet somehow modest. “Victoria,” he said again, slowly, seemingly for the pure pleasure of the syllables rolling in his mouth. “A name fit for a queen.”
Charm belied his disheveled appearance and, despite my best attempts at aloofness, he could tell I thought so. His dark eyes extended the invitation before he spoke it, and then he said, “Care to walk with me? I mean right here,” he pointed by his side, “in a proper way?”
I stalled, because, yes, I wanted to walk beside him, and yet either propriety or genuine teenage awkwardness held me back. Or perhaps it was premonition. “No, thank you,” I said, “I couldn’t . . . I mean . . . I don’t even know your . . . .”
“It’s Wil,” he interjected before I could ask. “Wilson Moon.” He let his full name hang in my ears for a moment; then he moved toward me with an extended hand. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Victoria.” Suddenly very earnest, he waited for me to step into the space between us and place my hand in his.
I hesitated uneasily, and then I curtsied. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. I hadn’t curtsied since I was a little girl in Sunday school, but the gesture rushed through my mind as the only thing to do, so afraid was I to touch his hand. I immediately felt foolish and expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. His grin spread to a full smile, bright, immense, genuine, but not the least bit mocking.
He nodded knowingly, lowered his hand, let it slide into the pocket of his dirty overalls, and stood still before me.
I couldn’t fathom it then, standing there suspended by his gaze, but I would come to learn that Wilson Moon didn’t experience time the way most people do, or few other things for that matter. He never rushed or fiddled nervously or found a length of silence between two people an awkward vessel to fill with chatter. He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise. I couldn’t know any of this as I stood stock-still on Main Street, but I would come to learn the wisdom of his ways and, in time, apply that wisdom when I needed it most.
So, yes, I changed my answer and accepted the invitation to stroll side by side down Main Street that October afternoon with a boy called Wilson Moon, who was no longer a stranger.
Though the conversation was mere pleasantries and the walk short, by the time we reached Dunlap’s and scaled the worn steps to the porch, neither of us wanted to part. I lingered with him in the splintered doorway, my heart racing.
Wil didn’t offer much about himself. Even when I asked if Wil short for Wilson was spelled with one l or two, he just shrugged and replied, “As you like.” One thing I did learn about Wilson Moon that day was that he had been working in the coal mines in Dolores, and he had run away.
“I just up and had enough of that place,” he said. “ ‘Go,’ I heard a voice inside me say, ‘Go now.’ ” The coal cars heading to the Durango-Silverton line were filled and ready to be hauled, he said, and when the train’s whistle blew, it sounded like it was calling for him, long and shrill and insistent. All he knew was that those cars were going somewhere other than where he was. As the train started its slow grind forward, he scurried up one car’s rusty ladder and hopped atop a warm black bed of coal. The boss caught sight of him and chased the train a spell, hollering and cursing and furiously waving his hat. Soon the foreman and the mines were minute in the distance, and Wilson Moon turned his face to the wind.
“You didn’t even know where you were heading? Where you’d end up?” I asked.
“Doesn’t much matter,” he replied, “One place is about as good as another, ain’t it?”
The only place I had ever known was Iola and the surrounding land along a wide, straight section of the Gunnison River. The small town huddled against the foothills of the Big Blue wilderness on the south side and the towering Elk Mountains to the west and north. A patchwork of farms and ranches unfurled like a long tail along the river’s edge to the east. My brother and I had been born in the farmhouse my daddy inherited from his daddy, in the tall iron bed that took up half the pale-yellow room tacked onto the back of the house, the room that was just for birthing and visitors until Uncle Og came to live with us after the accident. Our farm was nothing special, nor was it very big, just forty-seven acres, including the barns and the house and a gravel driveway as long as a wolf’s howl. But from the barn to the back fence line our land produced the only peach grove in all Gunnison County, where the fruit grew fat and rosy and sweet. The curvy banks of Willow Creek carved the east border of our property, its icy water fresh from the mountain snow and eager to spill onto our trees and modest rows of potatoes and onions. At night, the creek sang a lullaby outside my bedroom window, hushing me to rest in the spindle bed where I had slept nearly every night of my life. The sunrise over distant Tenderfoot Mountain and the long whistle of three trains per day pulling through the depot on the town’s edge served as my most reliable clocks. I knew just how the afternoon sun slanted into the small kitchen window and across the long pine table on winter mornings. I knew crocuses and purple larkspurs would be the first wildflowers to emerge across the farm each spring, and fireweeds and goldenrods would be the last. I knew that a dozen cliff swallows descended on the river with every mayfly hatch and that this would be the exact moment a rainbow trout would rise to Daddy’s cast.
And I knew that the fiercest storms, dark and ominous as the devil, nearly always blew in over the northwestern peaks and that every songbird and raven and magpie would silence just before the sky unleashed.
So, no, one place was not just like another in my mind, and I wondered why this boy didn’t seem to know a thing about home.”
Extracted from Go as a River by Shelley Read, out now.
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