We both brought flashlights though once we were out of the Flats they were almost unnecessary because the moon had risen nearly full before us and it was easy to see our way along the railbed.
“She’s ok-k-kay,” Jake kept repeating.
And I repeated to him, “She’s fine. She’s fine.”
In this way we reassured ourselves because Ariel’s death had shattered any sense of normality, any firm sense that what any future
moment held was predictable. If God could allow Ariel to die—allow little Bobby Cole to be so gruesomely slaughtered as well—then Mother who was not at all on good terms with the Almighty was, I feared, stepping directly into harm’s way.
Moonlight turned the polished surface of each rail silver and we followed the tracks through the dark all the way to the trestle where we found our mother sitting above the flow of the Minnesota River. As soon as we saw her, I turned to Jake and said, “Go back and tell Liz where we are. I’ll keep Mom here and make sure she’s okay.”
Jake looked back at the long dark tunnel of the night between us and town. He said, “Alone?”
“Yeah, stupid. One of us has to go and I need to stay here.”
“Why c-c-c-can’t I stay?”
“What if Mom decides to jump or something? You want to go in after her? Go on. Hurry.”
He thought about arguing some more but finally accepted his duty and headed back following the jerky finger of his flashlight beam.
My greatest fear was that a train might at any minute come roaring toward us and, with Mother in the middle of the trestle in God knew what mental state, I wouldn’t be able to get her to safety in time. The good thing was that it was night and the headlight of an engine ought to be visible a long while before it reached the river. I crept out onto the railroad bridge. Mother didn’t look my way and I wasn’t certain if she even realized I was there. But when I was a few steps from reaching her she said to me, “This is the place isn’t it, Frankie?”
I stood beside her and looked down where she looked. The river below us was all moonlight. I said, “Yes.”
“What did you see?”
“Her dress. Her hair. That’s all.”
She looked up at me and I saw thin iridescent trails down her cheeks and I realized she’d been crying and still was.
“I used to swim in this river,” she said. “When I was a girl. There’s a deep clear pool a couple of miles downstream where Cottonwood Creek comes in. Have you ever been there?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Sit down. Here.” She patted the crossties next to where she sat and I did as she asked.
“I never thought of the river as dangerous, Frankie. But you found someone else dead here.”
“Yeah, the itinerant.”
“Itinerant.” She shook her head faintly. “Someone’s entire life reduced to a single word. And little Bobby Cole, didn’t he . . . ?”
“Yeah. Him too.”
“It’s pretty here,” she said. “You wouldn’t suspect all that death, would you? Do you and Jake come here often?”
“We used to. Not anymore. I think we should go home, Mom.”
“Are you worried about me, Frankie? I know everyone else is.”
“You kind of scare me sometimes these days.”
“I scare myself.”
“Come home, Mom.”
“See, it’s like this. I can’t talk to your father. I’m too angry with him. I’m angry with everybody.”
“With God?”
“Frankie, there is no God. I could jump right now into that river and there would be no divine hand reaching out to save me. It would simply be the end.”
“Not for me or Jake or Dad.”
“My point exactly. There is no God to care about us. We’ve got only ourselves and each other.”
She reached her arm around me and pulled me gently against her and I remembered how when I was small and afraid she’d done the same thing.
“But your father, Frankie, he cares more about God than he does about us. And to me that’s like saying he cares more about the air and I hate him for that.”
I wanted to tell her about the night I’d seen him cry in Gus’s arms at the altar. And I wanted to tell her about his sermon the next day and how from that air she faulted him for caring about he’d somehow taken remarkable strength. Instead I just leaned into her and felt her weeping and looked up at the moon and listened to the frogs along the river’s edge and then I heard voices coming from the dark in the direction of town and I saw flashlight beams approaching along the railroad bed.
“Damn,” my mother said quietly. “Saint Nathan to the rescue.” She looked at me, looked me straight in the eye. “Will you do something for me, Frankie, something that you can’t tell your father about?”
The lights were not far down the tracks and in only a couple of minutes they would reach us. I had to decide and decide quickly. She seemed so alone, my mother. And because God and my father wouldn’t listen I figured I had to.
I said, “Yes.”
• • •
In the dead of night I rose. When I was getting ready for bed I’d folded my clothes on a chair and because I was not known for my neatness Jake had watched me with suspicion. But it had been a strange evening and everything was strange those days and so Jake didn’t question me.
I grabbed my clothes and went into the hallway where the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. I wondered if she was awake listening for the sound of my leaving. I crept down the stairs careful to avoid the steps I knew would cry my presence to my father who had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the living room. In the kitchen I saw by moonlight that the hands of the wall clock read two-thirty-five. I slipped out the screen door into the yard where I put on my pants and shirt and socks and sneakers. I folded my pajamas and carried them to the garage and put them on a shelf beside an oilcan. I rolled my bicycle out, climbed on, and followed the road that was milk white in the moonlight into town.
I’d lived other places before New Bremen, other towns where my father had been the pastor, and although I got to know them quickly and discovered easily what was special and fun about them none had been as close to my heart as New Bremen. Ariel’s death had changed that. The town became alien to me and at night especially threatening and I biked each deserted street with a sense that menace was all around me. The unlit house windows were dark eyes watching. Awful things lurked in the shadows cast by the moon. The whole two miles to the Heights I pumped hard on the pedals as if chased by demons.