The River Burns Read Online Free PDF

past the county limits where his brother’s jurisdiction ended. Down the road, those tickets were whoppers.

4
    W henever Alexander Gareth O’Farrell went to his knees to rout the latest trespass of weeds to sully his garden, past glories snared him like a vice. He’d grunt. Wince. Remember a time. Oh , there’d been the romance of those days, driving logs downriver for milling. Being a river rat and regarded as one of the very best helped him to woo his wife, a woman he considered above his station. There was that. Yet an infatuation with the river worked more powerfully within him than in others. As a boy on the verge of manhood he opted for the life through pure attraction, not because he found himself bereft of better choices. Now that he was on the cusp of old age he doubted that he could disentangle the various sentiments involved to explain himself, but the romance, or so he believed after a night of drinking and reminiscing, guided him as securely as a well-paddled canoe throughout his working life, up and down the humps of injury and perpetual pain, hardship, sacrifice, and fear. To be out on the water on a fall day, driving rafts downstream after the hills corroded to brilliant yellows, reds, and oranges, the ping of winter in the crisp air, signalled that he was distinctly alive, and the romance of those times aided him to overcome an abiding weariness and bequeathed to him his legendary endurance. He’d balance on a spinning log, strut across to the next raft, and work his peavey to free a jam against a rock, an obstacle he recalled from the previous year and the year before that, and never was he imperilled on that precise spot but in other places, yes. Often in relatively benign situations. He nearly mangled a foreleg once, a finger was amputated, an ankle got turned and jammed, a knee was twisted in unholy screaming disarray, his tailbone was battered, his scalp wickedly thumped after his hard hat flew off. Other assorted agonies. At times he would arrive back ashore bloody and bent, half-drowned, spitting up the river from his thorax and lungs. Romance helped him sail through the experience and now the romance of his memories encouraged him to carry on. For Alex, now retired, going down onto his knees mimicked the prayerfulness of others as he muttered involuntarily, as if to a host deity, wincing, fretting, obliged with each expression of soreness to reclaim that brief yet ancient time.
    He’d taken his lumps on the water.
    Now he scratched in the dirt.
    Gardening was never his thing.
    After his wife’s passing he foresaw a choice. Permit the care and labour that she invested in her gardens over their lifetime together to go to seed, and probably go to seed himself, or pick up a gardening spade and dig in. He dug in. He was even beginning to fathom her enjoyment in the wonders of a garden, and successfully compiled a catalogue of dos and don’ts. Begrudgingly, he admitted that despite the perpetual body aches the work bore upon him he was probably better off for it than if he just put his feet up and napped. Not that he did not nap. And hoist a few glasses. Yet he felt more comfortable taking it easy having first put in a few faithful hours on his knees.
    A way to handle this pending old-age thing.
    The heat was coming on. Toxins, he surmised, the crud from a life lived without regard for his eating and drinking habits, oozed from his pores.
    Alexander O’Farrell lived by a mountain stream that seemed quite still unless the viewer concentrated on observing the flow, the water cast into a lull by a small dam downstream. His was the first of six homes constructed above a straight patch of bank. The opposite side of the dead-end road that served their locale fell vacant, a farmer’s field fallow this year, so he was surprised when he heard a rattletrap percolate towards the cluster of homes, then stop before it reached any. Through a clump of birch he spotted an orange