David Guterson - East of the Mountains

Harcourt Brace & Company
NEW YORK SAN DIEGO LONDON

Copyright 1999 by David Guterson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guterson, David.
East of the mountains/by David Guterson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-100229-0
I. Title.
PS3557.U846E22 1999
813'. 54dc21 98-40512

Endpaper map copyright 1998 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp

Text set in Centaur MT
Designed by Lori McThomas Buley
Printed in the United States of America

First edition
E D C B A

To Robin, always,
and for Henry Shainhe loved the mountains

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

ROBERT FROST, After Apple Picking

On the night he had appointed his last among the living, Dr. Ben Givens did not dream, for his sleep was restless and visited by phantoms who guarded the portal to the world of dreams by speaking relentlessly of this world. They spoke of his wifenow deadand of his daughter, of silent canyons where he had hunted birds, of august peaks he had once ascended, of apples newly plucked from trees, and of vineyards in the foothills of the Apennines. They spoke of rows of campanino apples near Monte Della Torraccia; they spoke of cherry trees on river slopes and of pear blossoms in May sunlight. Now on the roof tiles and against his window a vast Seattle rain fell ceaselessly, as if to remind him that memories are illusions; the din of its beating against the world was in perfect harmony with his insomnia. Dr. Givens shrugged off his past to devote himself to the rains steady cadence, but no dreams, no deliverance, came to him. Instead he only adjusted his legshis bladder felt distressingly fulland lay tormented by the unassailable fact that he was dyingdying of colon cancer.

Three hours before first light in the east, wide awake and in defeat, he turned on his lamp, put his feet on the floor, and felt the pain bearing down in his side that plagued him through all his waking hours. He felt it where his colon, on the left, made a turn before dropping toward his pelvic cavity; if he pressed his hand into the flesh there, it produced a sensation of irritability seeping through his abdomen. Ben Givens put his fingers against it and began the insistent, delicate caress that had of late become his habit. He plucked his glasses from the side table, fitted their stems behind his ears, and once again probed his side.

To the west the city where he had passed his adult years lay incidental to the force of the rain, and mostly obscured by it. Eastward the rain fell hard against the hills, but higher up on the flanks of mountains it turned to snow dropping silent against glaciers, on slopes of broken talus rock, and on wind-worn buttresses and outcrops. East of the snow-covered crests of the mountains the sky lay almost clear of clouds; save for a few last spectral wisps of vapor floating beneath the chill points of stars, one's view of the heavens was unimpeded. October moonlight illuminated hay fields, vineyards, sagelands, and apple orchards, and the land lay dry and silent. On the sloping, dark verges of the Columbia River, where Ben Givens had entered the world, the apples hung heavily from fragrant trees, and the windfall fruit lay rotting in the night, gathering a pale sheen of frost.

Ben thought of lonely canyons, of how today he would travel eastward to wander in pale, autumnal light with his dogs quartering the ground in front of him and the quail holding when the dogs went on pointand then he rose with the unsteadiness of morning, shuffled to the bathroom still rubbing his side, propped one hand against the wall above his toilet, and waited with bitter, desolate impatience for the muscles of his pelvic region to recollect how to pass night water. He reminded himself that by dusk of that dayif everything went according to his planhe would no longer be in this world.

Dr. Givens was a heart surgeon, retired, who had specialized in bypass operations. He had been admired by other doctors for his steadiness of hand, his precision, his endurance, his powers of concentration, and his grace. His assistants knew that when the heart was isolatedwhen everything human was erased from existence except that narrow antiseptic window through which another's heart could be manipulatedfew were as adroit as Dr. Givens.

Now he lived in a much-contained fashion: a restrained, particular man. At seventy-three he had a thick chest and broad shoulders, though the muscles in his limbs had gone soft. Since youth he'd climbed mountains and more mountains, and hiked many miles in all seasons. He'd walked in the high country every winter and snowshoed into lonely canyons. These past nineteen months, since his wife died, he'd returned to a haunting, autumn pastime: he'd hunted birds to shoot on the wing for the first time since he was a teenager. This was a pursuit that stole his soul shortly after Rachel's death, after he'd turned from his work as a surgeon and found himself with too much idle time.

His face was weathered and furrowed, his eyes two dark shields. His coarse gray hair looked permanently wind-tousled, and he walked a bit gingerly, with a bowlegged gait, to keep the weight from his instep. He was so tall that, without thinking about it, he ducked his head to pass through doorways. His patients, in past years, had admired his hands: precise, large, and powerful. When he palpated their chests or listened to their hearts, they were infused with his professional confidence. Dr. Givens had believed fervently in medicine and deferred only grudgingly to its limitations. He had not readily accepted defeat and had struggled with the weaknesses of his patients' hearts as if those weaknesses were an affront to him personally. In this way he had removed himself so that when patients died on the operating table he did not have to feel unduly burdened. He did not have to feel haunted. The main questions for him had been tactical; the rest, he'd felt, was all mystery, and so beyond his governance.

None of this meant that Dr. Givens was devoid of tenderness. His heart wavered when the truth of another's lay exposed and irreparable before him. Always at work he had been aware of his divine power of intervention, and of his helplessness, too. He understood the mortality of human beings and the fallibility of their beating hearts, though these things had kept their distance from him, until his own diagnosis. Now he'd been toldit was the dark logic of the worldthat he had months to live, no more. Like all physicians, he knew the truth of such a verdict; he knew full well the force of cancer and how inexorably it operated. He grasped that nothing could stop his death, no matter how hopeful he allowed himself to feel, no matter how deluded. Ben saw how his last months would be, the suffering that was inevitable, the meaningless trajectory his life would take into a meaningless grave. Better to end it now, he'd decided; better to avoid pain than engage it. Better to end his life swiftly, cleanly, and to accept that there would be no thwarting the onslaught of this disease.