Territorial Claims

Heldt Creek: stream, 4 km (2.5 mi.) long, heads at 46°19′15″  N, 123°36′03″  W, flows WNW to the Grays River 0.4 km (0.5 mi.) SW of Rosburg; Wahkiakum Co., Washington; sec. 22, T 10 N, R 8 W, Willamette Mer.; 46°19′40″  N, 123°38′38″  W; USGS map—Rosburg 1:24,000. Not: Impie Creek. 
           — Decisions on Geographic Names in the United States, July through September 1988, List No. 8803, United States Department of the Interior, Washington, DC. 

​​​​Isaac 

There’s no such thing as a worthless person, but my brother-in-law comes close. When he married my sister, I told her, he’s going to bring you both to ruin. She didn’t talk to me for three years after that, but I was gone for most of that time anyway, out on the Kenai fishing boats. Sometimes, lashed by the storm winds and pulling in the lines, I would think about him and howl with laughter. He might have lasted half an hour out there, and not because his hands were weak, but because he wouldn’t use them. A man like that, who couldn’t bring himself to help a house full of women move furniture from one side of a room to another, just makes no sense to me. 

On the water, in the darkness, laughter drives away the fear. And it’s a way to spend a faithless moment, no matter where you are. Even those of us who know that the Bible is real and that God’s wrath is justified need a reprieve from that daunting prospect from time to time. There are ways to hold onto your faith by keeping your distance from the answers it demands. Like Alaskan waters, life is deep and darkness fills it—you can stare into its face, try to control it, endure it, but never come any closer to understanding what it means. It means what it is. What is is, what will be will be, and much of what is real and true is held beyond our reach while we’re alive. We’ll understand it all in the by and by. That’s what the people where I come from believe. 

With this in mind I tried to accept my sister’s choices, but I never came any closer to taking her husband as he was. It wasn’t clear to me whether he instilled his thinking into her or if her own hesitancies found expression in his reticence, but either way, once they settled down it was the end of all adventure. She stayed in the house, keeping it up, I suppose, and from what my cousins told me, the two of them passed the time by themselves and never set out on the land. Maybe they were content to just sit there and stare at it, and see how the seasons changed its surface. When we were young, it was different. We explored the fields and forests for days on end. We turned over every rock and climbed every tree, and didn’t go home until we had to. It is true that my sister always stopped short at the water’s edge when there were rivers to be crossed by bridge or boulders. The waterways on our land were more like creeks in any case, and except for the hours after a heavy rain they didn’t run too fast. Nothing that could have swept her away. With my calling her, she always made it over, past the momentary fear and into what was waiting on the other side. I’d tell her, that’s the reward for braveries large and small. 

It seems to me that people have forgotten what it means to have courage. It’s right there in the classics. In the first place, it just means looking into the face of what you fear, and confronting it. We all have to come to terms with the things that provoke us to weakness, however different they may be. For my sister, it was crossing the water. And for me, it was our father. At least, it was for a time. 

When I was growing up, I was taught to speak plainly the truth as I saw it. That is how people speak to each other in Rosburg and on the homesteads along the Grays River, even to children—unvarnished. It often conveys more hardness than it should, landing blows like the back of a hand to the head. But just like that violence, which always proves what it sets out to show—who is stronger, who is more powerful, who is in control—the hardscrabble language of the northwest backwoods leaves no question in the mind of the hearer about the meaning of the words. It is a clarifying way to live, forever in the knowledge of exactly where you stand. 

As children, another lesson was told to us endlessly: blood is thicker than water. But I have come to learn that truth, when spoken, dispels both of these substances in time. What I mean is that family and friendship dissipate under the harsh radiance of its light. The truth alone separates and severs—it does not bind us to each other. What is required to keep people knit together is a different set of things entirely: grace, and forgiveness, and faith. The truth by itself is too exacting; no one can bear it, and it will take its price if it’s not paid for constantly with these tithings. 

When I considered all this by the river one morning, I realized I needed to retrace the steps that I’d taken to get where I was, and go a different way. So I got quiet, looked into my sister’s eyes, and apologized, and I started blankly smiling, just in time for my nephew’s birth. 

Beth 

My brother is the kind of person who quotes Dante to show that he has some kind of wisdom, without thinking about the hell he’s putting you through in that very moment. It’s enough to push a person to the edge of what they can stand, but he doesn’t mean any harm by it, so I’ve always smiled and let him solemnly recite poetry and scripture in the moments when he wants to remind me that he’s older than I am, and that he knows something about life. He thinks he knows about mine: he always tells people that his first memory is of the day I was born, since he was just old enough then to recall forever after it the waiting hours, watching the rain on the windows in my aunt’s house, where he’d been put for safekeeping while my mother labored in the hospital in Astoria. I believe there’s a debt we incur to any living person who can remember a part of your own life that will always be obscure to you. So when he told me he was sorry, even though I’m not sure he even knew what he was apologizing for, I took him as he was and I forgave him. We hadn’t talked in a long time then, and those lost years between us have been covered over now, sedimented like the layers of rock beneath our land. 

There were only a handful of books in our house growing up: the Inferno, the Bible, the Odyssey, and Irving’s stories from the beginning of the country, next to Walden, which was my favorite. I suppose these books made more of an impression on my brother than they did on me, seeing as he’s got half of them memorized and all I know by heart are a few lines from the Psalms and Proverbs. I go to those words in times of trouble, more often than I’d ever go down the paths that lead me to my family’s doors. I promised myself when I was young that when I had my own home and walls built around me, I’d keep my own counsel and marry a man nothing like the father who raised me, a man who would never hit me or my children. And I would rather be alone in any darkness than ask for help from the aunts and the uncles who knew and stood by. Civility is all I have to offer any of them now. 

But it took more than politeness to bury my father. It took all of my strength and some borrowed grace from above. My brother was gone while our father was dying, and gone when we laid him to rest. My brother says we have to face our fears and speak the truth. But he worked the nets on distant waters and was silent when words were needed. It was my hands that held steady by that terrified bedside, and my voice that spoke on that morning. 

You couldn’t speak a true word of my father without a recognition of his sins against us. I smoothed over the truth like the water flows over the river rocks until they soften into sand. My father was a strong man, I said. A man who provided for his family. A man who was always of this land and now goes back to it, though he has never left it, not for an hour or a day. My father’s life was hard and it hardened him, and against that solid surface, like the side of a mountain, my mother and my brother and I found shelter and strength. Everyone knew that the shelter we needed was from the shale that fell from that crumbling surface, and the avalanches of hard-packed snow that crashed down on us from the coldness of his heart. But words like the ones that I chose on that day bear the truth without damaging the person you speak of. I could not speak ill of the dead. But if everyone who heard me knew what I meant, then the falseness that my words overlaid on that moment of elegy can never be a lie. 

I knew when I met my husband that he would be the man I would marry, if I could meet his gaze. The son of a schoolteacher and a seamstress, lapsed Catholics with no inclination toward judgment or violence, he was like a saint without the trials and suffering. Together we could talk about the stories and the books, mend the worn and broken garments of my family’s shadowed closets, and be peacemakers. He would never hurt me, he would never put himself above me, holding brimstone threats for my submission, and he would never, ever leave me to go into the forests or harbors to work with his hands. He would be like a tree planted by the rivers of water. Of all of this I was certain, so I walked right up to him and started talking. 

Christopher 

On the day that our son lost his footing and fell into the Grays River and his uncle pulled him out, the sun was shining, late September. I was grading papers at a table that had been built there on the shoreline a generation ago by my wife’s relatives. Their family name was carved into its faded surface; like the houses and the fenceposts, it was made from trees felled by the men who had settled here and taken the land, given it down over generations. We wanted our son to feel the weight and coarseness of that inheritance, and even as he claimed it as his own, to be able to see further than the ridgeline. Maybe it was arrogance on our part, and maybe it was our own sense of what had been withheld from us as children here, but we wanted him to find his way across a wider world—we wanted the world for him, not just these hills and clouded skies. 

I heard the sounds all at once—the crash of something hitting the water, the screams, and the rushing after. I stood up without thinking and ran as fast as I could to the riverbank. I was only a moment away from them, but by the time I was able to see what had happened, my wife was on the ground in silent shock. Our son was wailing and crying. And my brother-in-law was treading water, holding him, afloat like a broad flat-paneled raft held together by ropes. In different circumstances, they might have been smiling, splashing at play. But we’d had a hard rain that weekend, and the current was more than fast enough to have pulled that small boy under and into the darkness if he hadn’t been caught and lifted back up. He was only two years old at this time, fierce and fragile, in need of our constant protection. 

Their two forms became one writhing outline as they were carried together downstream. My brother-in-law was a fisherman by trade and had spent half his life on the water. He knew how it moved and knew better than to fight its direction. He drifted with it, kicking calmly toward the other side, charting an uneven line that would take them safely to shore. I watched as he held onto our son with a grip that was stronger than the storms I imagined he’d lived through on the northern waters, with hands that were rough from the wind and the lines. I had always considered him a makeshift sort of person, built from what was at hand by chance, not deliberate, not careful. He made grand pronouncements that felt baseless to me, patched together from words that he’d heard from his parents and grandparents and read in the scattershot books on their shelves. He was hard—a hard worker, hard drinker, hard to change. I had been sitting apart from them that day in the knowledge that he was set in his ways against me, holding my peace. But now I was able to see him whole. His hardness was how he had endured it, the battering and shouting, the cold and the rain. His life had given him the look of washed-up wreckage; it had also made him taut and capable, prepared for the worst without warning. 

What I knew then was that I had to be with them; I had to retrieve what had been lost in those moments, my steady sense that all would be well. I leapt in. The swim stroke came easily, an ease that was unnerving in the midst of my panic. I drew closer, moving quickly, cold and alert. I skimmed through the water and held them firm in my sight as the sharp colors of autumn blurred together, water in my eyes, the river, the fear. On the shoreline, I sprinted to them and bent down to embrace the child who had been, up to that day, always safe. He cried as I carried him westward along Heldt Creek, back to the main road into town. These years later, I still remember his face as it was when he was a boy, and all of the resemblances that it bore, even then, to the people now gone from this life. Most of all, from that day, I remember the sound of the laughter of the man who had saved him, his unmistakable laughter, and how he said that on the water, laughter drives away the fear. 

RACHEL ARTEAGA

Rachel Arteaga is a writer based in Seattle, Washington. Her scholarship in literary studies has been published in Early American Literature, Literature Interpretation Theory, and the Flannery O’Connor Review. Her short fiction has appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Washington.