Where the River Darkens

The old wooden bridge echoed each step as the heel of my black leather boots tapped the slats that spanned the winter-cold river below. I let my fingers trail the railing—habit, comfort, curiosity—feeling for the cool heads of the iron nails sunk like stars in the weathered wood. Splinters pricked where the grain had lifted, sharp as little teeth. Each sting made me lift and set my hand again, like a pianist searching for the right key.

The air above the water was colder than it should have been. Summer had baked the fields to a shimmer all day, but here the river exhaled something clean and cutting. Spray leapt up from the rocks and kissed my cheeks in glassy shards. The smell of it was spring and stone: grass bruised underfoot somewhere upstream, wild violet and dandelion, a breath of roses from a bush blooming out of season near the far bank—and underneath it, a faint metallic tang as if the current had been sharpened on a whetstone.

Birdsong threaded the canopy—jay and sparrow close by, a hawk’s scream farther out, slicing the air into ribbons. It was music, but pitched just a degree too bright, as if the notes were being drawn tight. I told myself not to be dramatic. Bridges creak; rivers chill; birds call. And yet the timbre of it slid under my skin and stayed there.

At the midpoint I paused. The boards rocked the smallest fraction with my weight, and the river, swarming white over the boulders, tugged at the corners of my eyes. There is a way water can pull at you without touching you—how the mind leans toward its motion, how the body sways to match it. I stood still and made myself breathe. The spray dampened my lips. I tasted iron and green.

The road on the far side ran alongside the river, companionable and familiar, leading left toward camp in a long, pale ribbon of dust. To the right it curved into shade I hadn’t tried yet. The light under those trees was the kind I crave: not dim, but cooled; a hush made of leaves. I turned right.

Gravel gave way to packed dirt. The road softened into a track. Ferns rose in generous fronds that brushed my shins, nettles catching my calves with their ghost-sting. Black trunks of oak and pine leaned inward, old and knotted, their bark furrowed like the palms of elders. The river’s roar faded to a rush under words and then to a memory of sound. Birds quieted. The air thickened with the smell of warm bark and green things breathing. Somewhere out on the plain, wind moved like surf through grass; in here it only tapped the high leaves and moved on.

The path necked down to a single-file ribbon and then slipped without announcement into a swamp.

I didn’t know Indiana light could turn that color. The sky looked as if someone had diluted all the blue and poured in green. Not the flat green of paint; the kind of green that glows from within—moss on stone, a leaf held up to sun with veins like rivers. It was as if the woods had drawn the daylight down through themselves and steeped it.

A mat of moss lay quilted across black, sucking earth. I bent, curious, and touched it with the tips of my fingers. Velvet. Cool. Alive in the way a sleeping animal is alive. The surface trembled. I jumped as a bullfrog the size of a small loaf let out a croak so deep it seemed to vibrate in my chest. Two more answered from lily pads nearby, their throats ballooning, eyes shining like wet coins. They didn’t flee; they watched. When I moved, their heads pivoted in unison to keep me in their gaze.

“Guardians,” I said to no one, and laughed softly to make it a joke. The sound of my laugh didn’t travel. It fell in front of me like a stone into mud.

The musty, stale air tickled my nose on every breath. A dragonfly the color of petrol arrowed past and then stopped mid-air as if held by a string. The only sounds were frog and the hush of my clothes moving over my limbs. The wind from the plains was a rumor, the river a story I had told myself earlier.

There was a way across. The path raised itself on old roots and knuckled ground, a suggestion of footing that would keep a careful person out of the worst of the muck. I tested each landing. The swamp took my weight and let me go, resentful but permitting. On the last step a slick patch betrayed me. I windmilled and saved myself with a handful of cattails that bent and did not break. Their papery heads brushed my lips, leaving ghost-fluff. A frog, offended on principle, sank into the water with the heaviness of a stone.

On the far side, the light opened a little. Something human lingered in the air—char and ash and the sweetish note of paper burned and wetted. I followed it to a small clearing, no wider than a dining room, sheltered by the tilt of big trees. In its center lay a ring of stones blackened on their inner faces. Someone had built a fire here not long ago. The ash was clumped, not blown thin; the faintest hint of smoke tainted the damp.

I knelt, as if I had arrived after a festival and could read the remnants. A matchbook with “Hilton—Lafayette” embossed in tired gold. Two cigarette butts mashed into the ash, one with lipstick, not red but a calm rose. A rusted can without a label. I brushed the lip of the fire ring; black smudged my fingertips and stained the crescents under my nails. On impulse I laid my palm flat on one of the stones. It was not warm, exactly, but it was not as cold as it should have been.

Footprints? I turned slowly, scanning the soft ground for sign. There were scuffs where someone had stood and pivoted, a smear where a heel had slid. In the hush, a twig cracked somewhere that wasn’t me. I looked up quickly, into green-on-green, and saw only the place where my looking had been.

I told myself it was nothing, that plenty of people cut through the woods and teenagers come out here to smoke and try on adulthood where the trees can keep a secret. Still, the ordinary things felt wrong, like a hotel keycard on a church altar.

The raspberry thickets began beyond the clearing, growing as if they had been waiting all season for someone to notice. Canes arched in dense clumps, heavy with fruit: marbles of red and purple set like jewels in the dull green of leaves. I reached without thinking. The first berry gave at the lightest touch and slid onto my tongue, cool and sweet with that faint, wild bite that makes domesticated fruit taste like a lie. I ate another, then another, and felt the juice stain my mouth. The smell of them rose warm and tart, summer distilled.

The thorns were fine and vicious. They did not politely let go. A catch, a hold, a pull—the berry mine and the plant asking for a tithe. Little red beads rose where the spines found my skin. For a second I couldn’t tell if the color on my fingers was juice or blood. Both, it turned out. Red on red. It felt like an initiation I had not been asked about.

As I reached deeper I saw a thread of pale fabric snarled in the canes. Not the fluttering kind left by a careless sleeve—this had been tugged and torn. I worried it loose and held it up. It might have been part of a pocket. It might have been part of a dress. The edge was frayed and recent. When I lifted it to my face, the cloth smelled faintly of smoke and something like lilac.

A shiver walked my spine the way cold does when you step out of a pool.

I stepped back—and almost missed the staircase.

It had been there all along, I think, but so simply made and so colored to the hill that it belonged to shadow until the moment it didn’t. Old logs and railroad ties had been set into the slope as risers, the dirt between them packed by feet not mine. Ferns feathered the edges. The grade was steeper than it looked from below. I set my boot on the first beam and felt, under the rot and the give, the memory of hands that had dragged it here. The stairs climbed toward a brightening that made me squint.

By the time I reached the top I was breathing hard. Heat met me like an open oven. I took one step into the field and then another, the sun pouring itself over my shoulders as if I had been asked to carry it. The light was golden to the point of fever. I shaded my eyes and waited for the glare to thin.

When it did, I saw beauty.

Grass stretched, thigh-high, rolling in a wind I could see but not hear. Seedheads tipped like brushed metal. The sky had recovered its blue, a deep enamel above. Trees stood at the far edge of the field: a hard line of dark green like the rim of a cup. I could make out the place where the river must be by the way the land fell, but the sound of it had gone. No birds sang. No insects sawed. The field was a held breath.

Shouldn’t there be noise? Even silence has a texture: the tick of heat on leaves, the distant thrum of something alive. Here there was nothing but my own blood in my ears. I tipped my head to listen harder and heard the hum of it, tide in a shell.

“Hello?” I said, for the foolish comfort of hearing my own voice.

It landed wrong. The word drifted away like a feather and did not come back.

Something moved at the tree line. Not a deer. Taller than that, narrower. It was the kind of movement you see when someone decides to step out of a doorway and then chooses not to. I stared until my eyes watered. The space held. Nothing stood there but the idea that something had.

Heat pressed on me until it wasn’t heat anymore but weight. The field was perfect: gold, green, blue. The view would have been a postcard if postcards could hold air and silence. And yet my skin crawled as if a hand had trailed along my arm and then disappeared.

I looked behind me to memorize the way I had come. Seat of the stairs, notch of fern, the particular gray of a fallen limb, a dip where a boot had sunk in spring. It should have been easy to fix in my mind. The path was not there anymore in the way it had been. The hill behind me was just hill. The stair had become slope. I took a step back, and another, and felt for the rise of a tie with the heel of my boot. The ground did not give me what I asked for.

A thread of panic unspooled, thin at first and then stronger. I picked a spot in the trees and moved toward it, the grass clutching at my legs. When I glanced back at the field I had just crossed, the place where my moving should have made a wake looked smooth.

I found the stairs not by sight but by accident, the toe of my boot catching the edge of the first log with a knock that sounded too loud in the silence. Relief flooded so fast I almost laughed. I put my hand to my chest and felt my heart working.

On the second step down I heard it: the smallest whisper of my name.

Not the way a person shapes a name, with consonants and breath. The way a place does. The air moved against my ear. It could have been the wind if the wind had existed in that field.

I did not look back.

Going down took longer than going up. The light changed in degrees, gold cooling over a handful of breaths to something ordinary. Heat loosened its grip. When the trees closed around me again, I felt—ridiculously—safer, as if shade were permission to exhale. The frogs announced my return to their kingdom with three notes like drums. One hopped onto the path with the proprietary air of a landlord and then thought better of it.

At the clearing the fire ring sat as I had left it. The ash had shifted itself into slightly different shapes, as ash will when the world pays it no mind. I bent to pick up the Hilton matchbook again, and a gust—small enough to be a breath, nothing like a wind—puffed ash onto my fingers. When I wiped them on my jeans, the streak it left looked like a hand had been laid there and then removed.

I stepped into the swamp. The moss took my foot and then let it go, like lips releasing a word. When I reached the last tuft and leaned for the cattails, the dragonfly was back—whether the same one or its twin, who can say—and hung motionless as if hung on an invisible pin. I brushed under it and it did not move. The green light sighed and thinned.

At the place where the path met the road, the river’s voice returned at once, as if it had been waiting for me and not the other way around. The sound ran up the trunks and across the bridge and folded itself into the rush I knew. The chill wind off the water climbed my bare arms and told each hair to stand as if I had stepped into a shadow. I told myself I was simply wet with sweat and cooler air wanted its due.

Midway across the bridge I stopped and looked down. The boulders wore their white caps like old kings, and the water knifed itself bright around them and then turned dark where the depth began. I watched the color shift from glass to iron and felt again the way a river can pull your gaze and then, if you let it, your mind. On the rail my fingers found a nailhead worn smooth by other hands, other crossings. I pressed my thumb to it, a human thing against the wood’s memory of winter.

By the time camp roofs appeared through the trees, the heat had slouched back into the day and lay across the field like a sleeping dog. The ordinary world presented itself bravely: voices thin as thread, a screen door slammed, a laugh. When I reached my cabin and eased the door, I put my hand on the table to steady myself and left a small, rust-colored half-moon where a thorn was still lodged in my palm.

I sat and worked it out with the corner of a credit card. It came free with a sting and a dark bead that swelled up and held for a moment before it ran. On a paper towel the blood looked almost purple, like the ripest raspberries. Berry juice stained the inside of my wrist where I must have brushed my mouth and forgotten. I held both stains in the light together until I couldn’t tell which was which.

I could tell myself any of a dozen sensible stories: that the bridge is old; that swamps make their own weather; that kids bring matchbooks where they shouldn’t; that fabric snags because thorns are mean; that fields feel silent when you step out of a loud place; that shadows shift because the sun does; that dragonflies hesitate for reasons we do not need.

All of them could be true.

And yet when the dark came on and the air cooled, I could hear the river change its voice—bright where it broke itself, black where it went deep—and I knew there is a bend where the water holds more than current. A place where the view is perfect and the world seems made for postcards, and something in the trees remembers your weight and the heat of your breath and the way your name sits in your mouth.

Where the river darkens, the woods are not asleep.

They have eyes. And they keep what you bring them.