Free Black River by S. M. Hulse Page A

by virtue of their familiarity, offered up notes in a low voice for the hymns. He put a twenty in the collection plate when it passed. Didn’t take communion. Never did.
    When Wes was fourteen, his father switched from evening watch to day watch at the prison. It was a change he had waited years for, but it meant he was now inside the gate Sunday mornings. They began attending evening service, and it was a habit Wes held to as an adult; he was sorry to see it had been done away with. At evening service, the sanctuary was peopled mostly by men who sat alone, wide gaps between them in the pews. The pastor’s voice was tired but unyielding, and the hymns took on an appealing strangeness when sung only in low men’s voices. It was during that spare, solemn hour, in the largely empty sanctuary, the bright candy windows dark, that Wes came closest to believing.
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    His father died on a Sunday. It was autumn, but the long arctic summer evenings lingered, and the sun was just beginning its slow sink below the mountains when the service let out. His father sent him to walk home alone, said he had an errand to run in town. When he thought back on it later, Wes realized this was a mere veneer of a lie; everything in town was closed on Sunday evenings. He hadn’t recognized it then, though, and for years he felt guilty, wondered if his father had been intentionally clumsy with this untruth, hoping his son would catch him in it. But Wes had accepted it easily, and his father had smiled and said, “Help your mother.” Another warning there, maybe, a deeper meaning, but Wes missed it, too, and when he arrived home, he didn’t go straight for his fiddle as usual but went instead to the kitchen and helped his mother chop carrots and peel potatoes.
    They said later that his father didn’t jump from the trestle before the train hit him. How they knew this with such certainty went unsaid, but Wes was old enough to imagine. He took a macabre pride in the knowledge. Wondered if he, too, would have the fortitude to stand his ground with a freight train bearing down on him, no railings restraining him and the river black and heavy far below, the water offering a chance, however distant, of rescue, reversal.
    Wes had been up on the trestle twice. Once was days afterward, when he made a white-knuckled climb of the iron scaffolding and walked between the rails in a frightened crouch. At the midpoint, the river evenly split below, he found a dark stain on one of the wooden ties that might have been blood or might have been grease. The other time was years later, the night his relationship with Dennis had shattered. A harder climb, not for age but because even then his hands were halfway to useless. There was a chill breeze blowing on the trestle that he’d been sheltered from at the bottom of the canyon. It lifted his short hair and cooled his skin almost to the point of pain. Wes walked straight that night, his arms held slightly out from his sides, maybe for balance, maybe to better feel the movement of the air around and against him. The height was seductive, and he didn’t stay long.
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    Late Sunday afternoon the storm broke into pieces and drifted apart, and Wes and Dennis decided to go up the mountain. The suit he’d brought stayed on its hanger in the closet, and he wore his good jeans and a green shirt instead, the one Claire bought for him because she said it matched his eyes.
    He found Dennis outside, tying the black horse to a heavy hitching rack beside the shed. The red horse was tied too, already saddled. Wes crossed the yard, mud pushing up from beneath the gravel and squelching over the sides of his boots. The red horse skittered sideways at his approach, jerking its head up and startling itself all over again when it hit the end of its rope. Dennis reached out to the animal, laid his palm flat on its neck. “Easy, Serrano,” he said, voice low.
    â€œThe hell is