Gates - A Short Story
God doesn’t make mistakes.
My horse stopped on the low levee above the river. The ford was upstream about fifty yards, but the water had risen to cover much of the surrounding countryside. I had ridden along the levee from far downstream and hoped to cross at the ford. My side of the river was flat, and the levee extended only as far as I had ridden. The land upstream had been inundated.
On the far side, the land rose steeply away from the rising water. The far-off rise of the Horse Heaven Hills was nearly invisible in the low cloud cover. I pulled my collar up again, tugged at my felt hat, and contemplated the crossing that was to come. The ford had never been so deep that a man could not cross on a good, stout horse, but neither had the river ever run this high. The levee was safe, but I was called to cross the river. I had business on the other side, so I needed to decide soon whether to cross the river before the rising water took the decision out of my hands.
***
I have not always worked on horseback. I spent much of my youth in the suburban deserts that surround Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.
I used to make my living with words before they stopped.
Then for a while, I stood daily in front of a room full of children. In the arrogance of my fading youth, I believed I spoke to a deep need in their lives. Then one day I discovered the arrogance and realized the need was not theirs, but mine.
So, I stopped.
Now, every day I rise in the dark and drive 20 miles back to a time when words meant something, carved as they were from hard labor in the sage deserts and prairie grass hillsides. Families lived deep and hard on the dry land. My earlier lives had been built on a shallower foundation. The end of each life was abrupt, nothing like the slow drowning of the countryside beneath the persistent floodwaters before me.
The first of these abrupt endings came many years ago when I was a reporter for a newspaper in a small town near Tacoma. In the early spring the town was surrounded by fields of daffodils, their seasonal gold sprung from the deep, rich earth of a fertile river valley watered by glacial runoff from Mount Rainer. In my memory, the flowers stretched from the foothills of the Cascade Mountains to the very limits of Tacoma, a gritty old town on Puget Sound, better known in those days for the hard labor of its docks and the chemical poison of an antique aluminum smelter than for botanical grandeur.
Tacoma fancied itself the gateway to Mount Rainier. But most tourists streamed by the verge of the tired, old town on their way to view the mountain’s glacial grandeur and, once a year, to mine the daffodils’ gold. Even though the flower-filled valley softened Tacoma’s hard edges, it was the city’s lethal urban sweep that eventually turned me away from that first life.
My working days and nights were filled with city councils, school boards, and occasionally high school football and basketball games. My job with the only newspaper in the valley put me in touch with the area’s movers and shakers and, strangely, with Tacoma’s seamier elements. I stumbled over words on an electric typewriter and tried a little to tell the day-to-day story of the little valley town resting peacefully in the real shadow of a great mountain and in the figurative shadow of a failing city. At first, I was amused by the ritualistic simplicity of people determined to preserve a quiet life. But then, slowly, I came to realize that, as a counterpoint to and refuge from the mechanical buzz of the city, the soft rhythm of dark earth and golden blossom had much to recommend it. People in the city disdain country life because “nothing happens there”. They would be surprised to learn that the quiet life of the valley people is stillness by design. City folk often mistake “nothing” with the simple, willful act of being still.
The stillness of the small town ended one September morning when word came from the city that one of its children had died violently at the hands of an unknown serial killer. The girl had been missing for several months when her body was found along the banks of a brown river in another valley to the north. Much later we learned she was one of more than four-dozen young women killed by a worker on the docks of Seattle, Tacoma’s larger, more prominent, and more sophisticated sister city to the north. She had not lived in our small town since long before she died, but when she was found, we mourned as if losing her in another place had caused the studied stillness to shrink in on us.
When I first went to work for the paper, the editor was a sixty-ish veteran of more than 30 years in the business of telling the town’s stories. He understood the value of the valley’s still life. He had certainly written a short article announcing the dead girl’s birth. It is a tragedy for the town that he was not there to write her obituary. He would have gently retold the story of the girl’s short life, softening the more grisly details of her death. The much younger, and thereby more reckless, man who replaced him as editor, left the grisly details to me:
Find out how she died. Are there pictures?
Find out what she’d been doing. She was a hooker, right?
If her parents still live here, go see them. Get quotes.
The first part was easy. Police shortly determined that, like the killer’s other victims, our girl had been strangled and had been dead for at least several weeks when her body was found in heavy brush near the river shore. And, like the other victims, she had been working as a prostitute along the “airport strip”, a seedy stretch of old highway near the airport between Seattle and Tacoma that attracted desperate young girls and soulless middle-aged men.
The girl’s father had disappeared many years before, but her mother still lived in our small town, so, as instructed, I went to see her.
*
The girl’s story often comes to mind when I’m horseback. As I sit here on the levee above the river, the water is slowly rising, and with the rising water, an image of the girl’s face, which I never saw in person, floats to the surface of my mind and swirls for a moment at the center of my attention. The only time I saw her face was when I visited the house where she once lived. There, taped to the inside of a window and visible from the front porch, was a faded school picture of the girl. She was thin and wan, smiling awkwardly, her wide-eyed face framed by crooked pigtails.
The surging river water would not stop rising until the levee was breeched. I would not be able to cross at all if I waited any longer. I gently spurred my horse upstream and when we reached the ford turned him into the rising flood. He hesitated for a moment and then stepped off the bank and into the water. I felt him lean hard against the current as we began to cross the river, step by careful step. The water soon reached my knees, and I was not halfway across.
*
The girl’s mother was not home when I went unannounced to her house. There was a straight concrete walkway that led from the sidewalk to the front porch. A rickety gate protected the cracked walk, but there was no other sign of a fence. I carefully opened the gate, walked to the porch, and knocked softly on the door. When there was no answer, I went to the single window at the front of the house and was surprised to see the girl’s picture staring out from the safety of her mother’s living room. I peered in past the photo through the streaked glass and cloudy curtains. The rooms inside appeared to be neat and clean. The few furnishings were old and worn.
“Can I help you?” The voice was that of the girl’s mother, who had just returned on foot from a trip to the store. She put a small grocery bag down on the porch and stared at me.
“Are you her mother?” I said pointing at the girl’s picture. Then, without giving her a chance to answer, I explained I had come from the local paper, and I was sorry to hear about her daughter, and could I ask her a few questions.
“You left the gate open.”
I looked toward the gate at the end of the walk and saw she had closed it before she came up to the porch. I had to ask:
“Ma’am, there’s a gate, but no fence . . .?”
“Her father was going to put up a fence so she could play in the yard. He did the gate first. I always thought that was funny. He never got around to the fence. She grew up and he got tired, and they both left. But she always closed the gate every time she came home and every time she left. Even the last time.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t bother you again.”
I went back to the newspaper office, put my few belongings in a small box, and told the reckless young editor someone else would have to write the story. I decided not to be an intruder in the tragedy of this girl’s short life.
*
We reached the middle of the stream and the water surged. The dirty brown flood had reached my thighs and I could feel the horse’s feet lose the river bottom. Still, he continued, swimming hard for the far shore as the rushing water eased us downstream. If we drifted below the ford, the bank on the far side would be too steep, and we would not escape the river. I leaned forward and calculated the distance to the far bank against the speed of the rising water.
We would make it.
*
After that newspaper job, I drifted among several of our state’s middling institutions of higher learning. After several years I earned, by default, the right to teach books to high school kids. A series of awkward false starts (my students always seemed to be one step ahead of where I wanted to take them) led me to a large school in a small town in the south-central section of Washington state, only a little downstream from the ford in the flooding river. The sere landscape could not be more different from the lush green of the valleys beyond Seattle and Tacoma. Endless miles of irrigation canals water the green, red, and gold of alfalfa, apple, and wheat, but the rest is brown sand, prairie grass, and faded green sage.
Water is pumped from the Columbia or Yakima rivers or from deep underground to make the desert bloom. Without all this man-made moisture, the countryside would remain brown and barren, and empty. Where the water cannot reach, the land remains good only for cattle, for sage and prairie grass, and for lost souls. I came here to lead children out of the wilderness but discovered I was still lost myself.
***
The schoolgirl was 17. She did all the things we want our very best kids to do. She got mostly ‘A’s on a fast track to college. She was just popular enough not to seem presumptuous in the presence of adults. She was a useful athlete, middling attractive with long blond hair and a complexion that might have seemed ruddy on a young woman less refined or more boisterous. She was quiet and respectful, appropriately deferential to adult authority; so all the teachers loved her. She seemed, in every category that mattered, a model student.
And she was pregnant.
Some days my pedagogical shortcomings in the service of Shakespeare and Donne and both Shelleys made it impossible to face them, so . . . “Take out your books and read quietly.” Then I’d make some excuse for myself: papers to grade or plans to make. Some days I’d say anything to keep from having to stand in front of the room pretending that what I had to say mattered more than their plans for the weekend. She was there every day, sitting in a back corner opposite my desk. I could look straight across the back of the room and see her staring off into an empty spot above the dusty chalkboard in the front of the room. At such times she’d often close her eyes. She would appear to be humming silently or singing very softly, her lips barely moving, the song always slow. Some days she seemed to whisper prayerfully as if in response to an unheard voice.
I learned of her pregnancy in a paper she wrote after reading the “Book of Job”. The title of the assignment was “Hardship: the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.” I envisioned a stack of papers about breaking up with boyfriends or showing Dad a report card with a ‘B’ on it.
I read her paper on one of those days when I could not face their indifference to my inadequate literary meanderings. The room was hot, and I was bored, and disinterested in what my students might have on their minds. Their own disinterest certainly included anything I might have to say. I called each of their names from a list and made a mark in a book for each student not present in the room. I said something to the class about taking out whatever book they were reading and stood motionless in the front of the room while they rustled papers and dug through backpacks. With nothing else to do, I sat at my desk and picked up a stack of recently turned-in papers. I was not planning to read the papers. I intended to shuffle through them in order to make a little show of giving a damn about what they had written. The girl’s paper was on top of the stack.
The first line read, “I’m pregnant.”
I put the paper down and glanced over to where she was sitting silently, staring again at the spot above the chalkboard. I looked up to the same spot and saw the face of the dead girl staring out at me from the faded school picture in her mother’s front window. When I looked back to the rear of the classroom, the girl’s eyes were closed, and I felt the same deep dread I’d felt when the dead girl’s mother confronted me on her porch.
Was I an intruder again?
The second line said, “This is not a confession, and I am not Job.”
The rest of her paper recalled the dread she felt at having to tell her deeply devout mother that she had failed the sternest test of earnest devotion. The child’s father was not mentioned.
Then, her final terse sentences:
“I looked at my mother and just blurted it out. ‘I’m pregnant. I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ I may have been crying. My mother bowed her head, whispered something to herself and then looked across the table at me. She folded her hands and said, ‘But God doesn’t make mistakes.’ My mother got up and walked around the table to a spot directly behind me. She squeezed my shoulders gently and left the room.”
I looked again to where the girl was sitting. Her eyes were closed again, her head was bowed, and she gently massaged her belly. The face of the dead girl flashed across my mind, but the image did not linger. I got up from my desk and walked to where the girl was sitting, handed the paper to her, and said, “I’ve read enough.” She smiled up at me. I left the room and, as before, did not return.
*
With the deepest point in the river behind us, my horse once again found the bottom. I felt the water recede from my thighs, and then drop suddenly to my knees just as he began to struggle up through the shallow water and deep mud of what had been a dry riverbank just two hours earlier. In two quick, lunging steps we were free of the river. We continued up the gentle slope until I found a nearly level spot. I dismounted and stroked my horse’s wet neck as I surveyed the now submerged landscape on the far side of the river. The levee had been breached.
The rising water began to scrub the desert landscape on the far shore and two familiar faces floated back into the damp swirl of my mind -- one wide-eyed, framed by crooked pigtails, and the other mouthing silent prayers. Soon the rain would soften and eventually it would stop. The swollen river would recede, and the clean desert would bloom for a time.
God doesn’t make mistakes.
My business up the slope would not wait much longer. I remounted stiffly and spurred my horse away from the river. Two hundred yards from the flood, I came to an old gate hanging open. The fence on both sides of the gateposts had long ago fallen down. I rode through the gate and dismounted. With a great effort, I closed the old gate and secured it with a rusty length of ancient bailing wire. I was soaked to the bone, to the very core, and my saddle was wet, but I could see the trail clearly, even though the low clouds had slid over the top of the Horse Heaven Hills and into the valley to form a nearly impenetrable fog. I remounted and rode steadily up the slope and away from the closed gate.
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