Chapter 1

Winter 1975

It was green along the banks of the Selah, but the body was white. A few feet from shore, it floated face down in the shallows over smooth grey slabs of rock left by the last ice age. The water was quiet there, a small eddy off to the side of the main flow. An arm had snagged on an alder branch and pulled the torso into a small swirl of debris – leaves, styrofoam cup, river froth, naked body, stretch of yellow cord, white gallon jug – things that do and do not decay.

Ogden Wilson had gone fishing for steelhead on the second day of the new year. He’d be back in school on Monday. The water was the right color after the recent storms, calmer than a week before when snow run-off and a warm rain from the southwest pushed the Selah above its banks to flood a dozen homes in the small town that shared the river’s name. By local standards, the deluge was more inconvenience than catastrophe.

Ogden had driven to his favorite fishing hole nine miles north of town – an eddy deep enough to offer steelhead a resting place from the winter currents and an ample supply of bugs and worms. A narrow side road wound east from there to the county seat, Athena. Route 59 stayed with the Selah for a few more miles then veered north and west through the coast range to Astoria and the mouth of the Columbia. The shoulders at the little junction were wide enough to pull a car off to the side of the road. It was a good place to catch steelhead, never an easy task.

A quarter mile back toward town, the largest logging company in the northwest had a maintenance yard for its trucks. The place was non-descript, mainly a huge tin shed, but across from it a small diner had the best burgers and fries in the county. The restaurant’s original owner named it the Widow Maker, but when he sold it after the second great war, the new owners found the name a little grim, so they changed it to the Pine Cone. Now it was the Logger’s Den. Miraculously, despite changes in name and management, the quality of the food had not declined. If anything, it was better. Walla Walla onion rings were the specialty and, in season, marionberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

When Ogden’s parents were feeling festive, they would take him and his younger sister, Olivia, for a Sunday afternoon drive that looped out of Selah into the woods then back to town on Route 59. The Logger’s Den was about midway. The stop would be the high point of the week. They went on that adventure once or twice a month when he and his sister were in grade school. He was now a senior, his sister a sophomore, and they hadn’t done that drive for over a year.

Ogden had been prepared to stand in the winter drizzle of early January for three or four hours, threading his monofilament line through wet and freezing fingers, casting the red day-glo lure that, to a steelhead’s eyes, was supposed to look like fish eggs or a minnow. He’d brought coffee in his father’s old thermos, a small bag of corn chips, and a white bread sandwich, but he was going to treat himself at the Logger’s Den when fishing was over for the day. It would be his consolation for standing in the rain and catching nothing but a chill that wouldn’t leave him until the middle of the night. He looked forward to the warmth of the cafe, to onion rings and a bacon cheeseburger before heading home.

He saw the body when he moved downstream. Its whiteness was what he first noticed. He reached into the water and touched an arm, cold as the river that flowed around it.

Chapter 2 – Olivia

Summer 1974

It was July. Ogden’s younger sister Olivia couldn’t remember the exact day, but it wasn’t a weekend. She knew this because, she’d gone to work that day. She knew it wasn’t June, because it had been hot and dry. Proverbially, summer never began in Selah until after the Fourth. June was cool and cloudy enough to take any pleasure out of trying to swim in rivers that were freezing, but after the Fourth of July the weather changed, and swimming was at least conceivable. As summer passed, the red arrow on the forest fire danger sign in front of the old mill office moved from low to medium to high and then extreme. Olivia checked the arrow whenever she passed it. It must have been early or mid-July, because some odd fragment of her mind knew that the fire danger was high, but not extreme.

On that partially remembered day, Olivia had seen the young man her brother found. He was swimming.

Walking to the river was for Olivia Wilson as simple and common as walking to school or the grocery store.

Her house sat at the bottom of Selah Avenue – a street to which, like a younger sibling, the town and river had handed down its name. Her parents moved to 1002 Selah with her and Ogden not long after she was born, leaving behind a two-bedroom apartment in a boarding house originally built for men who worked in the mill. Her new home sat in the right angle made by her street and railroad tracks that ran from town into the woods.

Small wooden houses built during the mill’s good years lined the narrow avenue that ascended from the tracks for six blocks before running into a wall of trees. Selah Avenue – Olivia liked the word avenue, even if her street looked like all the other streets around it – was the most popular spot in town for sledding. In the winter, on those two- or three-days schools closed for snow, the end of the run was her front yard.

Olivia liked being at the bottom of a hill on the west side of town, so she could watch the sun disappear behind ridges of trees on long July evenings. She imagined it moving west over miles of nothing but forest until it came to the ocean and a horizon without any ridges, a sight that almost always made her feel small and empty and sad. On blustery spring days when warm winds blew up the coast from the southwest, her grandmother swore she could taste salt in the air. (Olivia, at the age of twelve anyway, agreed.) She liked that she lived on the north side of a grand avenue, the side nearest the woods. For as long as she could remember, she’ preferred north and west to south and east. She felt blessed to live by railroad tracks – even if they hadn’t been used since she was in kindergarten – and found it particularly perfect that they ran through a cut fifteen feet below her yard. As if there was this other river, a steel Selah, flowing through a valley just beyond her bedroom window. She would imagine on certain days that she lived on the wrong side of the tracks. The idea made her feel a bit like an outlaw or a character in a story, even if the other side was rougher than hers. But most of all, Olivia loved the word Selah, the way it felt in her mouth: sell-uh, the sell of celery followed by an uh that was more exhalation that anything else. If she ever had a child, she’d give it that name, even if they hated her for it. They would learn to love it in time.

These affections were what her older brother thought of as the dizzy side of Olivia’s brain, the part that sat in the back seat of the car singing quietly and soulfully to herself when, after visiting their aunt in Portland, the family drove back to town at dusk. Ogden found her poetic reveries annoying, sensing in her semi-delirium a moodiness that would tear-up over someone’s misfortune long before she would try to alleviate it.

When Olivia heard who it was her brother had found, her thoughts went immediately to the walk she’d taken to the river on a hot July day when the fire danger was high but not extreme – a walk not to the Selah where Ogden fished for steelhead – but to its proudest tributary, the Little Selah, an over-sized creek that flowed into its namesake near the center of town.

On the day she saw the young man her brother would discover on the other side of the year, Olivia walked the tracks from town to her house after working the morning at the Selah Public Library. She was going into her sophomore year of high school and proud of her summer job, even if it was only part time. It was easier than getting up at four to pick strawberries, which was what she’d done since she was ten.

After lunch, and an attempt to read A Tale of Two Cities that only made her sleepy, Olivia decided to walk the tracks to the Little Selah and the narrow field that ran along its bank. It hadn’t rained for weeks and wouldn’t until the middle of September. With every other step giant grey bugs, she wasn’t sure of their name, some sort of locust startled her. Grasshoppers – grey, green, brown and of various sizes – also hopped about her feet, but their larger cousins sprang from the dry grass like startled quail with a loud clacking sound. Their movement was so fast and spontaneous, the noise was almost all that registered.

Other than bugs with noisy wings, the only other sound accompanying Olivia on her walk that July day was a choir of crows. They gathered in a huge chestnut that towered over the neighborhood, beyond the apple trees and fence at the back of her yard. Every fall the giant tree produced hundreds of shiny brown nuts wrapped in prickly green cocoons. Her mother called them horse chestnuts, but Olivia was never sure whether that was their real name or one of the made-up names people gave to plants. The only chestnuts she knew were the ones roasting by open fires in Dickens. She was pretty sure her chestnuts were different. Nobody ever tried roasting them.

Once, when they were younger, she threw one of the shiny brown nuts at Ogden, hitting him soundly on the back of his head. The blow didn’t draw blood or leave much of a lump, but she had not meant for it to hit him that cleanly and with so much force. She was aiming for his back or shoulder, but the missile got away from her and clobbered him. Ogden could have lost an eye, so he said, if he’d turned around which according to him he was about to do. He mined that grievance for a month, doing his best to make Olivia feel even more than usual like the only child in the company of three adults.

The chestnut was the largest deciduous tree in their neighborhood, maybe in the whole town – a bare but lovely skeleton in winter, a ball of strange green leaves in summer – the highest convenient perch for the murder of crows that made Olivia’s neighborhood their domain. Usually the avian choir gathered in morning or evening hours to communicate with one another, but on that hot, dry afternoon a rare mid-day session had been convened, all the more cacophonous for its singularity. It was the pervasive silence of Selah that made their clacking and cawing so present and distinct, a quiet so encompassing it turned the blatting air brakes of distant log trucks hurtling down the hills into a sad and lonely arpeggio.

The stillness of a small town surrounded on every side by miles of trees made it possible to listen to the world in a way you couldn’t in places where cars and people are always in motion. And listening was what Olivia’s grandmother Celia Eugene, her mother’s mother, had taught her to do on walks like this – if you wanted to give the meeting of tennis shoes and small stones a chance, if you wanted to know the brush of dry grass against skin, the parting of lips, the shifts of the tongue, the breathing in and out, the full stillness between. Celia Eugene wasn’t around anymore. If Olivia wanted to listen, she’d have to do it on her own.

Less than a quarter mile beyond her house, the banks on either side of the cut fell away, the tracks entered the woods, and the temperature dropped ten degrees; a half-mile more, and the tracks split. Olivia stayed to the right, walking down a short spur that ended in a narrow meadow. She stepped through the barbwire fence and walked to the Little Selah’s edge.

Olivia almost never saw anybody else along the river here so this spot felt as if it belonged to her, her family, and one or two friends. When she was there, it always seemed as if she was way out in the woods, though she knew she wasn’t much beyond the city limits. Less than a mile downstream the Little Selah ran through the center of town and under First Bridge before joining its namesake.

Most out-of-towners couldn’t tell one stream from the other, but to Olivia and others who lived around them every day, each of the rivers, neither all that wide, had its own personality. The Selah (no one felt the need to add the word river) with its shallow stretches running over smooth slabs of rock and deep holes was queen of the valley; it and Route 59 rolled along together for mile after mile through the northern coast range of Oregon before going their separate ways. The Little Selah flowed down the hills above town from a spring fed by melting snow. It ran fast and bright, rippling over beds of smooth-rounded stones.

The Selah was the better place to fish for steelhead, the Little Selah for trout. Each May the state would dump hundreds of rainbows upstream and folks would come out from Portland on the first day of fishing season and crowd the banks. They’d soon go away and the rest of the summer was left to local fishermen like her brother, who loved to waste his time admiring spinners at the hardware store. Each fall around Thanksgiving a flood of salmon would come back to town, thrash up the Little Selah, and die. Even though she didn’t fish, on her way home from school in November and December, Olivia would look each day when she crossed First Bridge to see if they’d returned. Selah was unthinkable apart from the confluence of these waters and their enclosing forests. The town accepted the winter floods when they came as the price of their pleasures.

A half-dozen cows, and the bull attending them, rested from the heat on the other side of the river. She was glad they’d chosen the opposite bank. She often waded in the ripples there, but on that day she walked up the narrow field until she came to the bend in the Little Selah where she saw the young man her brother found – Myron Gaines – swimming with someone she did not know.

It startled her to see two young men in the river’s bend. If they hadn’t been there, she would have gone for a swim herself. That’s why she’d walked up the field. It was a day hot enough to make her want to do more than wade, even though the water would be cold.

Myron and his friend had nothing on as they dove from shallows into a pool of deeper water. That was not so unusual. Olivia had never skinny dipped, but when they were kids her brother and his friends stripped down to their underwear once or twice on trips to the same bend, and from there it wasn’t much more to go naked.

When Olivia didn’t have a suit, she waded in her cut-offs, tennis shoes, and t-shirt. After she got used to the cold, she’d dive in clothes and all. On the walk home, her shoes would squish most of the way, but her shirt and shorts would be nearly dry by the time she got back to the yard. On the patio, she’d pull off her sneakers, wash out pebbles and bits of sand, then shower to rinse away the river smell. The Little Selah was as clear as any stream she’d ever seen, but it always left a musty smell on her skin, a distillate of all the life the valley held. Cleansed, she’d put on clean cut-offs and one of Ogden’s old dress shirts. It made him angry when she wore his clothes, but she enjoyed the feel of them – the absence of frills, the economy of fabric, the straightness of lines.

Dried and freshly dressed, Olivia would sit on a lawn chair in the shade of the pear tree near the edge of her patio and read. She would eat an apple from her back yard (sour, green, with salt), an appetizer to her favorite dinner – barbecue salmon, baked potatoes, and corn on the cob. Refreshed, she waited for dinner, and the hills above town to fade from green to purple and black. The late afternoon sun slowly brought warmth back to the core of a body recovering from the river’s assault, but her toes were white and shriveled from their time in the water, drained of color and life.

The day she saw Myron and his friend in the Little Selah, Olivia did not go in the water. As soon as she saw the two young men, she started to leave, but hesitated, stopped, turned back, for just a moment she told herself, to look at what she knew she was not meant to see.

As Myron and his companion came up from the water, they kissed. The friend moved his hand down Myron’s chest to the flat of his stomach until it disappeared beneath the water. Myron arched his back, taking in a huge, shivering gasp of air. In turn, he ran his hand down the center of the stranger’s back and it too disappeared. It was then that Myron’s head looked in her direction, and for a moment, through the stand of willows that stood between them, they spied each other.

Olivia immediately turned to leave, embarrassed to be caught watching. As she moved away, she could hear the boys wading out of the water. At the fence on the edge of the field Olivia – over her shoulder – saw Myron and his friend half-dressed moving quickly in the opposite direction. Sweaty, tired, and confused, she walked home alone. She did not see Myron Gaines again that summer.

Chapter 3 – Ogden

Winter 1975

Ogden stood at the side of the road, waiting for someone to arrive. He had called the police from the Logger’s Den, then returned to the place along the highway where he’d walked down to the river. He could see a white arm slowly bobbing in the water . . .

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