Patterns of Swallows (12 page)

"Well, at least he's gone,
and I'm glad," Wynnie said.

But, in the end, neither of the
girls was glad that Joshua hadn't waited for them.

When Ruth got back to her house,
her mother was waiting for her in the doorway. Joshua was there,
looking scared and guilty.

"Joshua told me where
you've been," Mother said. "What have I told you about
playing on the trestle?"

"But
we weren't
playing
on the trestle," Ruth protested feebly. The logic that was
sound when Wynnie proposed it fell flat just then.

"But you were on the
trestle?"

"We just walked on it to
get to the other side. It's fine, it really is. It's not scary at
all."

"That's deliberate
disobedience, Ruth."

"But you said not to play
on it. We were just walking across it."

"You knew very well what I
meant. I meant, stay away from it all together. And you've
deliberately disobeyed me."

"I didn't mean to. I just
thought ..."

"I tell you these things
for your own good. Don't you know that a man died there? Come with
me, Ruth."

"But, Mother ..."

"Come with me."

Mother wasn't very big, but she
was wiry and strong. Her switchings hurt as much as a man's would
have. Maybe more because she wasn't overburdened with pity when her
blood was up.

When it was all over, Ruth fled
the house, intending to run to the giant firs in the back pasture.
But there was Joshua, still standing outside the front door. He
could hardly have helped but overhear the whole thing. If there was
ever a stricken face, like they talked about in books, it was
Joshua's.

"I'm sorry!" he
whispered. "I didn't mean it."

Ruth hadn't intended to speak to
him ever again, but she had to ask.

"Why did you tell her? Why
did you go running home just to tell on us, you little tattle-tale?"
she said between clenched teeth.

"I didn't. She asked. I
was going by, and she was coming down the lane, and she asked me if
I'd seen you. She asked me where you were, and I couldn't lie to
her. Besides, it's not safe for you to go to that cave. I didn't
want you to get hurt."

Ruth changed her mind about
going to the firs. She didn't want Joshua to know about her spot
that was just hers, and he seemed intent on following her. She
headed straight for the railroad tracks instead.

"Ruth! Where're you going?
Wait for me," Joshua said, trailing in her wake.

Ruth said not a word to him but
kept marching. His shorter legs couldn't keep up to hers. He had to
run every other step to stay even with her.

"Are you going back there?"
he asked incredulous when he saw the direction she took. "Don't
go back there. Please."

But she wouldn't stop or look at
him or acknowledge his existence in any way.

"Aren't you ever going to
speak to me again? Please say something," he pleaded. "I'm
sorry. I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me forever."

She knew he wouldn't cross the
trestle, so that was exactly where she was going. She didn't care if
it did mean another whipping.

But he was in such a state of
distress by the time they reached the trestle he didn't seem to
notice the height of it. He crossed directly behind Ruth, begging
her forgiveness the whole way.

Was there no escaping him?

On
the other side, she turned to him and broke her vow of silence.

"Go away, and leave me
alone!" she shouted directly in his face. "I HATE YOU! I
HATE YOU!"

She couldn't look at his face.
She climbed down the trail to the cave at a mad pace, sure this was
one place he wouldn't dare to follow.

Her feet slid on the loose dirt
as a result of her carelessness, heading straight for the edge and
that horrible, empty, gaping hole that was the canyon with the river
rushing away on the bottom of it so far, far below. She wasn't
usually one to scream, but she screamed involuntarily.

The drop wasn't a sheer one, not
as sheer as it looked when she began to slide. She slid until her
feet found a narrow shelf of earth, wide enough to stop them, six or
so feet below the cave.

"RUTH! Hold on! I'm
coming, I'm coming!"

She had never seen a face as
pale as Joshua's. He swayed back and forth slightly before beginning
the climb down to the cave, and Ruth, for one instant, believed he
was going to plunge head-first into the canyon from giddiness.

She wanted to tell him to stay
where he was and not come down, that she could climb back up without
his help, but terror had removed her capacity for speech. She told
herself she had to try and climb, but fear held her still. All she
could picture was climbing inch by inch on the cliff face only to
lose her grip and go sliding backward, this time missing the ledge
she was on. She was effectually paralyzed with that picture in her
mind.

Somehow, he arrived safely at
the cave, and there the trail ended.

"I'll get into the cave and
hang my head and arms out and reach down to you, so I can pull you
up. You'll have to try to climb a little. I don't think I'm strong
enough to pull you up without help. But I can keep you from falling
if you start to slip," he said to her. He sounded almost calm
now.

She nodded, and reached her arms
up, hating even to make that movement.

He caught her hands, and began
to pull with all his might. Her feet scrabbled desperately in the
loose dirt of the cliff, searching for a toehold as she tried to
climb, but there was no toehold to be had. Just loose dirt that
refused to support her weight. After several attempts, they could
both see they needed a new plan.

Ruth wanted to tell Joshua to go
for help and she'd sit tight, but she couldn't bring herself to say
it. She couldn't stay on that ledge all alone until help came. She
just couldn't do it.

"Don't worry! I'm not
going to leave you," Joshua said as though reading her mind.
"We'll think of something."

"I know," he said
suddenly. "I think there's room for two down where you are. If
I was down there, I could boost you up. That would be a lot easier
than trying to lift you. And you're bigger than I am. You'd be able
to lift me easier than I can lift you. Or if not, you can climb up
and run for help, and I'll wait there."

Ruth didn't answer. Her teeth
were beginning to chatter from shock. Before she could stop him,
Joshua had lowered himself down gently onto the ledge, hanging onto
the edge of the cave by his fingertips. He dropped the last few
inches lightly.

"Okay," he commanded,
taking charge. "Put your hands into the cave as high as you can
reach. I'm going to get my hand under your foot, and when I count to
three, I'll give your foot a push, and you push off for all you're
worth, and try to get as much of yourself into the cave as you can.
Then you can turn around to pull me in. I think I can climb with
just my arms better because I'm lighter. It will be easier for me.
You'll see. It'll work. Okay, ready? One, two, three."

Ruth found most of her upper
body in the mouth of the cave without too much trouble, and she was
able to pull herself easily in from there. But when she turned
around to help Joshua, all she could see was his face, with his brown
eyes wide and desperate, and his arms outstretched, fingers clutching
avalanching dirt, reaching for anything to catch himself as he began
the long descent to the rocks and the water below. The shelf of
earth had given way under their combined weight, and his last thrust
of her foot had been the final straw for the crumbling soil of the
eroding cliff.

Ruth screamed again, but what
good did screaming do at such a moment? As much as she wished she
could, she couldn't pull her eyes away from the boy's slight mass,
tumbling and rolling now as he gained momentum, now rebounding from
rocks on the way down, now landing with a splash she could hear and
see in the river. And then she saw the river carry him away until
she could see him no more.

Why? Why hadn't she done any
one of a million things differently? Why hadn't she gone to her fir
trees? Why hadn't she gone anywhere but to the cave? Why hadn't she
watched her footing on the way down? Why hadn't she tried to climb
back up on her own? Why hadn't she told him to run for help, and
she'd wait there alone? Why hadn't she told him under no
circumstances was he to come down to her? Why hadn't she turned
around faster in time to catch him? Why hadn't she said, "I'm
sorry. I didn't mean it. I don't hate you"? Why hadn't she
said, "I do love you, Joshua"? Why hadn't she even said
thank you? At the very least, couldn't she have thanked him for
giving his life to save hers? Couldn't she have called it to his
body as it fell against the rocks and into the water? Maybe he could
have heard, "thank you," as the last words he would ever
hear of hers rather than, "I HATE YOU!" Wasn't there
something she could have changed?

But maybe there was a chance!
Maybe he was still alive. Maybe some miracle had occurred and the
fall hadn't killed him, and maybe another miracle would occur and
he'd survive the river. Maybe if she hurried, she could find a
rescuer who could pull him out of the river, battered and unconscious
but alive. She could almost picture the scene. She could picture
him opening his eyes to see her tear-stained face and the hope coming
back into his eyes as he realized that she did care. Then he'd
recover, and she could go on living. Or even if he didn't recover,
at least his last sight could be of her face and the last words he
heard would be her, "I love you." Even then she could go
on living.

She pictured it to herself on
the scramble up the trail from the cave to the top of the cliff. She
pictured it all the way running to the canyon bridge. She pictured
it as she was jumping out in front of the first car that came, waving
her arms wildly. She pictured it until it seemed to her that it must
be true. Joshua was alive. He would be rescued.

The driver of the car took an
agony of ages to understand her tale and made her repeat it three
times.

"You mean there's a little
boy that fell into the river? From up by the trestle?"

"Yes, near there."
What did it matter where he fell from? Couldn't he understand that
every second counted if Joshua was going to be rescued?

"Well, not much hope for
him then, but you hop in the car. We'll go to the R.C.M.P. right
away and get a rescue party out."

The words rescue party were a
straw of hope for Ruth to clutch at. It was all true, all that she'd
been picturing. There was still a Joshua to be rescued.

But for all her picturing, there
had been no miracles. They found his body an hour later half a mile
downriver.

And then Ruth knew that she
wouldn't go on living.

*
* *

It wasn't until years later that
she told anyone the whole story.

The idea got around that Joshua
had been playing on the trestle and Ruth was there watching and saw
Joshua fall over the side. It was unclear how he fell. It was all
the man in the car could glean from Ruth's incoherency in her shock.
He told the story to the police, and they told the story to Ruth's
mother, and she told the story to the Bellas. All the adults
accepted it as plausible. After all, one man had already died on
that trestle. It was certainly a dangerous place. Normally as
honest as the daylight, Ruth did nothing to correct the false
impressions that had circulated. There were some things that just
couldn't be told, even for a girl as basically truthful as Ruth.

No one ever again had to tell
Ruth not to play on the trestle. She developed a paranoia of
heights. And of bedtime.

Bedtime became a terror. On one
end of sleeping, the words that had plagued her in her younger years
played over and over in her head. "Thou fool." "Raca."
"Whosoever is angry with his brother without cause ..."
"Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer..."

And when she would fall into
uneasy sleep, on the other end of sleeping night after night she sat
straight up in bed, her heart pounding and her mouth dry, seeing yet
again Joshua's face and the cliff slide away together below her and
her arms just too short to reach him.

*
* *

A person doesn't ever really get
over something like that. A person doesn't soon recover from
committing murder.

She knew the truth of the words
from the Bible now. Now she understood them. The murder she'd
committed had nothing to do with the moment she had watched the cliff
crumble away and Joshua fall with it. The murder had already
happened. The murder was in the last words she'd ever said to him.
Joshua's death only made his murder irreversible.

Alone, she carried the burden of
the knowledge that she was a murderer around with her everywhere she
went. For years and years, she had no one to help support its
insupportable weight.