Chapter 2
January 23, 1968
It might have had a very different result, and the record of this interaction and event might never have never been put down in words. No sense would have been made of it at all. It would just have been left as a thing that happened or, worse yet, speculation about a thing that happened - except for two men who were there in the ravine, under the bridge, standing on the shore, fishing for brook trout, in the frigid January water near the bridge’s stone piling.
One of the two men saw a car pull over up through the steel grate of the bridge dozens of feet above, and then the driver and passenger doors open. He saw a man walk around to the passenger side and take the hand of a girl who moved with hesitation out of the car with what appeared to be a swollen belly.
It was the man’s voice first. “This is the place. It’s the only place we’ve seen for a thousand miles. Don’t be scared.”
And then the girl’s: “I don’t even care anymore. I just want it to be over.”
The air was still and cold and their voices carried down under the bridge.
“Right here. You ready? You know I love you” said the man’s voice.
“No. No, let’s just keep driving. Just keep going. I’m not ready.”
“We can’t keep going. It’s the only way. You said so yourself. You know what’ll happen if they catch me, especially if they catch me with you? You really want that?”
“Don’t say it. I know. Don’t say it again. I know we promised.”
“And you know you can’t go back there either. You heard what she said about you.”
The men below the bridge could hear the girl begin to cry.
“This is the place,” he said again.
He led her out through steel supports of the bridge until they were standing together on a steel girder inches from the edge.
The two men below, as if compelled by similar instincts, set down their fishing gear and began to climb up the steep sides of the rocky bank. One of them moved with quick, light steps, looking down and jumping from rock to rock up the terrain. The other, taller and much slower, used his hands to feel along the ground, but hurried nonetheless.
If the sound of their movement or dropped tackle alerted this couple on the bridge, it didn’t make any difference. Before either of the two fishermen made it very far out of the ravine, they heard a suppressed cry. One of the men looked back up, and watched the girl fall from the edge of the bridge, and as she did she twisted back to grab at the man who had pushed her. She dropped and landed in the freezing water in a loud splash that cut through the otherwise soundless morning.
It was the faster of the two men under the bridge, who went back down jumping from stone to stone to the river, angling himself as he went so as to be downcurrent of the girl when she surfaced.
After what seemed like a long time later, she did. She came up, her body motionless in the swift current of the river.
When the fisherman reached the edge of the water, he didn’t think. He waded in as fast as he could with water up to his chest and then swam the few strokes to reach her. Luckily, she had gone in on the upstream side of the bridge, and so the man was able to pull her out of the current just ahead of the whitewater.
By that time, his taller friend had made it to the spot on the sandy bank. He knelt beside the girl and his friend.
“How is she? Did she make it?”
“Hard to see if she’s breathing. My hands are too cold to feel a pulse.”
The dry man felt for her wrist and said, “Well, let’s get her out of here anyway. You grab her under the shoulders and lead. I’ll follow the best I can. What about the fella?”
The rescuer looked up and saw the man from the car’s face, only for a second, peering over the downstream side of the bridge. When he knew he was seen, he bolted. He climbed in the car, put the fire to the engine, and drove off, tires slipping a little on the wet, steel grates.
The two men focused on the young girl with the swollen belly in their arms.
It was lucky they were there to witness it and luckier still to have played a part in it.
It was both men who carried the girl from the water under the bridge, but only the shorter one, the man who had swum out to rescue her, drove her to the hospital.
Though it was nothing he had planned or intended, he was in it now. He was entirely in it, and he chose to stay in it.
He took long shifts in the hospital, sometimes sitting by the sleeping young girl, beautiful, broken, and unknown, and sometimes watching the baby who had by some miracle survived and who would have otherwise lain alone in the hospital nursery.
The whole of this ordeal was now this man’s wonder now to reckon, and he wanted to have all the signs of it there in front of him.
But he was not there when the girl left, and so that part of the story was hers alone, and he could only speculate. It was nearly a week after she had been pushed off the bridge when she finally awoke in that strange stone-walled hospital. She must have felt the pain and emptiness in her lower abdomen. Yet, when she heard no baby crying and saw no nurse or doctor standing over her, and no loving man desperately holding her hand, she must have felt wholly alone. Her baby, her man, her former life, all gone. She must have slipped weakly out of her bed, dressed in the new clothes laid on a chair beside her, and walked unnoticed and ashamed out the front door of the hospital. There were a lot more people in the hospital then, and the exit of a small, beautiful, sad-faced girl made an impression on no one.
As for the unnamed baby who was indeed still alive, he was sleeping in the hospital nursery. The man who has saved him sat for days watching him. No one wanted to see the baby put in an orphanage, and no one doubted the man’s devotion to him or means to provide for him. It was a town of more faith back then, and if it was Stone Mire who saved the life of the mother and child and Stone Mire who was there to first rock the cradle of the baby he called Trenton in the nursery of the hospital, then it could be Stone Mire who could care for him through the rest of it all as well - until that baby was old enough to see him to his own grave. No one said any different, not even the law.