Free The Narrows by Ronald Malfi

rural western Maryland town of Stillwater, his career choices were cripplingly limited: he could either join the police department or toil away at one of the various factories around town. And while he certainly possessed an affinity for the job, it sometimes seemed like he had just opened his eyes one morning and found himself in uniform. The department had been larger back then and he had found the anonymity of the khaki uniform with the numbered badge at the breast comforting and, sometimes, even freeing. He’d grown up in Stillwater, knew pretty much everyone straight out to the Cumberland Gap (which made the job easier), and he had always considered himself to be one of those rare individuals who found contentment in mediocrity.
    He’d gone to college just outside of Baltimore, in Towson, where he’d been an average student. Debt piled up, but it had been Ben’s father who had paid the bills, and the old man never said boo about it. Ben had majored in criminal justice and minored in English literature, a combination that granted him a wealth of diverse friends, and he had   been groomed for lofty aspirations upon graduation—aspirations he most likely would have followed had his mother not passed away immediately thereafter.
    So he had returned home to Stillwater and to the Journell family farm. Ah, Stillwater! The town existed only because a foolish man named Jeremiah Barnsworth had stumbled upon its crooked valley bookended by two grand mountains back in 1829, arriving just in time to witness a vista of black, stagnant water after one of the great floods had drowned the land. Why Barnsworth had thought this land would be the perfect location to establish some semblance of civilization, one can only wonder. Who proudly plants a flag at the center of decimation? Yet, still waters run deep, as they say, and Barnsworth—who had been a drunkard, a gambler, and a career adulterer, according to some of the descendants of families who had actually known the man—had created a town.
    Nearly two centuries after Barnsworth’s usurping of the land, twenty-one-year-old Ben Journell had returned from college to bury his dead mother and attend to his heartbroken father. Four years spent at Towson, and returning to Stillwater had been like returning to youthful memories—the type of memories that are so distant that they might have never happened to begin with. Yet he’d returned, and the hot summer dust rolled up off the roads as he drove back into town, the dust settling at the back of his throat and the smells of the land—the farms with their pig shit and chicken coops and tractor fumes, mingled with the brackish stink of the Narrows—practically clawing at his lungs. Remember me, remember me! Stillwater cried, as if to forget where he came from was to lose some important part of himself. Remember me, remember me! Indeed, how could he forget?
    Like a good son, he remained until he felt that his father had moved beyond the grief of losing his wife, Ben’s mother. Ben moved beyond that, too, feeling that the grief had been replaced by some unspoken allegiance between the two remaining members of the Journell family, father and son. They had their roots already firmly planted in Stillwater; where else did he need to go? Back then, there were jobs to be had in Stillwater. With a college degree in hand, Ben already had a leg up on ninety percent of the workforce in town. Hell, he could do whatever he wanted. So what did he want to do? As it turned out, what he wanted to do was put his criminal justice degree to work and join the police department.
    He had only been on the force for five years when his father, William Journell, a retired sustenance farmer who still lived in Ben’s childhood home off Sideling Road in Stillwater, began seeing and speaking with Ben’s dead mother. Bill would speak of seeing his dead wife out in the field behind the house, which had once been lush with crops but had slowly become overgrown as