The Water

She lived four days, which was four days longer than any doctor expected, and I sat in a hallway in a hospital in Pittsburgh and slept on the floor and did not go back to the city.

Vera came once, in black, and stood at the end of the corridor and would not come in, and I understood why, and it was one of the two things I have ever understood about her without being told.

Then, on the second night, the money stopped.

Mr. Voss called me from the lobby of the hospital. He did not do condolences; he did clauses.

The arrangements were suspended. The person who had made them was in custody: he had come a long way to be in a certain hollow on a certain night, and he had met Lyle Deakin at the water's edge below the old mine road, and Silas Rudd had come out of that water and Lyle Deakin had not.

They found Lyle Deakin four hundred yards downstream with his good coat full of river.

They charged Silas Rudd with manslaughter and with the parole violation, and the trust that held everything he owned was seized under civil forfeiture, which took a lawyer two attempts to explain to me. The money had gone into an arrangement with a straw name on it so that the county could not reach it while he was on paper; but an asset that belongs to nobody is an asset a court can take, and the county took it, and there was nothing left in it for me and nothing left in it for him.

There was no more tuition. There was no more lodging. There was no more quarterly. There was, as Mr. Voss explained on the telephone in a corridor while my hands were bandaged and I could not hold the receiver and had to use the wall, a considerable quantity of my own debt, incurred in five years of arguing with a stone.

"Be expensive to keep," said Mr. Voss, and hung up.

I came home in June with a suitcase and no coat, and the first thing I saw at the bottom of the ridge was the light on the stack, and I stood there a while and simply hated it.

Della had been dead since February.

I had not been told, or rather I had been told in a letter I had read in a cloakroom and put in my pocket and then put through the wash. For years I called that an accident. It was not an accident, and I did not write to Emmet for nine months, and the two facts are the same fact, and this page is the first place I have ever put them next to each other.

It had been Sadler. Vern Sadler had come into the trailer on a Tuesday afternoon with a length of chain and left her on the floor, and she lay there eleven days and never came back to herself — that part I have from Ruthie, standing in a doorway with a basin, years later. They found Sadler in Ohio in the spring and he is serving a life, and I have never been able to make myself care whether he is.

Emmet was in the shop when I got there, welding a gate, of all things, with the door open on the summer.

He stopped. He took his hood off. He looked at my bandaged hands and then at my face and something in his own face came apart and got put back together inside about three seconds, which is, I have come to believe, what most of what we call love actually consists of.

"Vern Sadler," he said, when he could talk.

"I know."

"You wrote it down," said Emmet. "You were eighteen and you wrote it down and I signed it because you asked me to, and it cost the man his card and his work, and it was right, and it was yours. And I am not going to stand in this shop and tell you it was not."

"Boy," he said. "Sit down. I'll get you something."

And I did the only thing I did in that whole year that I am not ashamed of, which was to sit down.

I got the fever in August and it took my hair and four months and most of the money I had left, and there was one person in the world who sat by that bed and changed the water and read out loud from a book I still cannot look at, and toward the end of it I came up out of the sleep one evening and there were two people in the room.

Emmet was asleep in the chair.

Ruthie Milam was in the doorway with a basin, and she looked at me the way she had looked at me at the culvert, which is to say without any sympathy at all, and she said, "You want to be a thing they gave something to, or you want to live?"

I said the second thing, because it was the answer she would accept.