King - Truth and Bright Water

For my mother.

The dissertation was never enough.

T he river begins in ice.

Grey-green and frozen with silt, the Shield shifts and breaks out of the mountains in cataracts and cascades, fierce and alive. It plunges into chasms and dives under rock shelves, but as the river leaves the foothills and snakes across the belly of the prairies, the water warms and deepens, and splits the land in two.

Truth and Bright Water sit on opposite sides of the river, the railroad town on the American side, the reserve in Canada. Above the two towns, the Shield is fat and lazy, doubling back on itself in long silver loops as it wanders through the coulees. But as the river comes around the Horns, it narrows and drops into the deep chutes beneath the bridge. It gathers speed here, swings in below the old church, and runs dark and swift for half a mile until the land tilts and the water slows and drains away towards Prairie View and the morning sun.

At a distance, the bridge between Truth and Bright Water looks whole and complete, a pale thin line, delicate and precise, bending over the Shield and slipping back into the land like a knife. But if you walk down into the coulees and stand in the shadows of the deserted columns and the concrete arches, you can look up through the open planking and the rusting webs of iron mesh, and see the sky.

The church sits on a rise above Truth, overlooking the river and the bridge. Built at the turn of the century, it is a plain, squarish building with a raised porch, high windows, and a dark steeple that leans slightly to one side. Instead of being long and sharp with a hard pitch like the steeple on the big Presbyterian church in Prairie View, this steeple is squat and flat with a set and angle that make it look as if a thick spike has been driven through the church itself and hammered into the prairies.

The church was built by the Methodists as a mission to the Indians. The Baptists owned it for a while in the forties. They sold it to the Nazarenes, who sold it to the First Assembly of God, who sold it to the Sacred Word Gospel, who left the church standing empty and moved down the river to Prairie View just after construction on the bridge stopped.

By then, the roof was missing most of its shingles, and the clapboard siding was cupped and pitted. The north side had been completely stripped by the cold and the wind, leaving an open wound of wood that had scabbed over grey and brittle. To the west and the south, the paint that was left had blistered and split and curled up in twists like pigs tails.

But on days when the sky surges out of the mountains, gun-metal and wild, and the wind turns the grass into a tide, if you stand on the river bottom looking up at the bluff, you might imagine that what you see is not a church gone to hell but a ship leaned at the keel, sparkling in the light, pitching over the horizon in search of a new world.

The Horns, like Truth and the old church, are on the American side of the river, twin stone pillars that rise up from the water and meet to form a shaggy rock crescent that hangs over the river like the hooked head of a buffalo. It is an old place, silent and waiting, and from the high curved shelf of the outcrop, you can turn into the wind and feel the earth breathing or watch the Shield glow black and bright, as the evening shadows run out across the land like ribbons in a breeze.

In daylight, the river valley is bright and dry, wolf willow and cottonwood. Seagulls crowd the tops of the coulees, thrown up into the air like kites, while between the cutbanks, squadrons of pelicans skim the face of the river, single file, searching for their reflections in the shoals and the deeper pools.

At night, the light goes to ground and gives the world up to the insects and the stars. Bats flood the river bottom and tumble in swirling eddies over the water. Coyotes come out of hiding and range the coulees chasing rabbits and the moon, and everywhere the air is warm and sweet.

But beneath the bridge, trapped between the pale supports that rise out of the earth like dead trees and the tangle of rebar and wire that hangs from the girders like a web, the air is sharp, and the only thing that moves in the shadows is the wind.