Unbend the River

Nominated for the Pushcart Prize

Words by Devin Murphy

Art by Kyle Collyer

Bilhorod, Bulgaria

The Orlo River Basin

Year 991 C.E.

It was the height of summer when Silas came back from the river, out of the woods, and into the family fields. He saw what looked like a black thunderhead that was too close. It moved too fast. At the opposite edge of the field he heard it all at once. A dense black fog of grasshoppers burst from the sky and cascaded onto the crops. In minutes the fields shimmied like the skin of a great serpent. Silas hunkered to the earth until their short-horned, armored bodies blanketed him with a manic tree song that wormed deep into his head and leapt from his fingertips.

"Silas. Silas. Help me start a fire," His father, Jaren, yelled from the barn. "We'll smoke them out."

Jaren's voice yanked Silas free of a crippling sensation that the insects lifted him off the ground on their raw silk wings. He tried to concentrate. Gather and pile wood. Bring a smoldering log from the hearth. Blow on the kindling. Each step crushed grasshoppers, and he slipped on their soapy insides.

Jaren handed him two long willow boughs wadded with oil-soaked sheep fur to light in the new flame. In that moment Silas felt like his father was about to save their crop. Silas pulled the torches free and ran toward the edge of the field, but right away it was clear his efforts were insignificant. His fires useless. Grasshoppers flew through the burning wool, drifted off on flaming wings, and disappeared in the swarm.

His siblings, Juta, Harriet, and Darrell, screamed at the terrifying touch of so many insects, and the creatures perched on their tongues and edges of their eyes for moisture. Juta fell to her hands and knees and dug the insects from her throat with her dirty fingers.

Silas stood over her and waved the torches. He was fifteen years old. The swarm pelted his skin and cleared a path for an immense feeling of helplessness to enter. His family, and most of the neighboring farms, had poor crops for the last two years. No rain in the spring. Cold, dry winters. The wells were low. They’d spent the last of their resources to yield a crop—wheat—that for a time in the midsummer, began to sprout with the rich green-and-gold-tasseled fringe of a full harvest. Now the swarm stripped away the wheat and swallowed the golden, russet, fully bloomed leaves and buds of the trees, leaving only a pulsing dark wave that reflected the light off its million-backed thrust forward.

The grasshoppers flooded into their hovel and up the river-rounded stone walls, covering nets of dried venison. Silas’s mother, Zenobia, swatted at the walls with a horse-hair broom. Each stone she cleared filled in with the black shifting of more insects.

"They're destroying everything." She swatted the broom in front of her as she ran from their home.

Jaren dragged dried skins over the dye pits. The surface of the purple and red pits twisted with insects sinking into dyes. He took a dried skin, ran toward Silas, and snapped it out into the air so it fell flat over Juta.

"I'll get Harriet. You get Darrell."

Silas looked around but didn't see his younger brother. He searched the field until the tiny outline of the boy emerged from a gyrating black clot. Darrell was choking, and the sound added to the treacherous new noise of the world.

Throughout the day the insects writhed forward. Chickens pecked at the covered ground, gorging on the finger-length bugs until their stomachs burst. Silas imagined his stomach full of the churning mass of snapping wings and the whisper touch of endless legs jumping against his insides. He stopped in front of the bonfire to rest his hands on his knees and pray to whatever force sent the grasshoppers, asking it to call them back.

Throughout the night the furious snapping of wings grew even louder. Their dark bodies blotted out the sky. Embers sparked and drifted, hot orange stars against the animal darkness. The three youngest kids hid in the back of the hovel, under piles of skins where Zenobia wept over them.

"We're going to be fine," she said in penitent, dreadful sighs.

Silas heard her when he walked inside. He sat next to his siblings. He picked up Juta's tiny foot and squeezed it. A small squeeze so she knew he was there. He wanted to gather up all the skins and furs and stuff his whole family, his home, the fields, and the world beneath them to hold onto what little they still had.

By morning, when the insects had destroyed everything, the shrill, half-scream, half-plaintive cry of gulls hovering over the back part of the fields began.

Jaren pointed to the sky. "Another plague."

But the birds came upon the ruined wheat and began devouring the devourers. The sky became a deafening swirl of insects and birds colliding. Thousands of tireless gray-white birds. The gulls ate until full, went to drink at the river, vomited, and went to hunt again.

The gulls pushed the grasshoppers over the field, from east to west, from Silas's plot to the neighbors', and the swarm receded the way floodwaters seek out their previous borders. When the back end of a field had cleared, the soil was covered with crushed, stomped, burned, and spewed-out grasshoppers.

Bloated and dead seagulls and chickens lay scattered in the furrows.

"Gather all the dead chickens and birds," Zenobia said.

"Why?" Jaren asked.

"We can salt them. Eat them."

"You want us to scavenge?"

Zenobia squared her shoulders to him. "What choice is there? Gather the birds."

Silas watched as his father's shoulders slumped, and he got down on his knees. The bluntness about their impending hunger was a gut-punch truth that crumpled something weight-bearing.

"We're going to be fine," Zenobia said.

Silas walked to his stooped father to lift him back up.

"This isn't happening," Jaren said.

"Go get the birds," Zenobia said.

"There has to be something else we can do," but Jaren went out and began piling the dead birds

Silas gathered baskets of the dead insects to soak in water, boil, and let the sun dry to be salted and stored for food, if needed, during the worst parts of the coming year. Zenobia hunted the field, pulled at the remaining crops, and dug down for the tuberous roots in a feeble attempt to salvage their total loss.

"I can't believe this," Jaren mumbled when he came back and saw his younger children sitting in a circle pulling feathers until their legs and laps were covered like filthy, molting birds. "We'll make this work for us. Something will work for us."

"I know," Silas said.

"I'll do something," Jaren said to himself now.

Silas knew his father, a tanner and farmer by trade, had lost his whole crop. The vegetable garden Zenobia used to feed the family had been chewed to a vegetal pulp. A bad year was coming. Another would lead to famine.

"We'll do everything we can. Do you understand, Silas? We'll find a way."

"Yes," Silas said, but he found no comfort in the words or the desperate ceremony of their repetition. The words felt false. Fill-ins for what he wanted to say. Help. Help. Who cares from where. Help.

Harriet reached over and tickled Juta with the end of a feather.

Jaren went to the dye pits and started ladling out the clumps of insects. He was tall, broad shouldered, and flat muscled, with coiled black hair over his pocked brow. His face was now gray and exhausted. His arms red up to the elbows from berries crushed in the pit. His eyes a startling cornflower blue.

Silas watched as his father held two fistfuls of goopy red insects and stared at them with a look of mystery and nausea as if he'd pulled them from his own body. Jaren squeezed his hands into tight fists, threw the gobs down and ground them into the earth with his foot.

"Okay." Jaren held his red dyed hands up to cover his face and stood like that without moving. "Okay."

Silas walked closer to his father. To comfort him. He took a large inhale. The inky smell of the dye pits stung the back of his throat. Jaren mumbled something to himself that Silas couldn't hear. He turned to his family. His eyes and cheeks red from his hands.

"I'm going to find work at the pilgrim camp." He walked to the barn where he began to saddle a mean and hungry old mare to his wagon. The mare had thinned since spring and her ribs now showed.

"Can I come with you?" Silas asked.

"Me too," Darrell said.

"You stay here."

"I can help," Silas said.

"I know, but you stay here. Help your mother with the kids. Please. That's the end of it."

"What will you do?"

"Try to get work with the pilgrims."

"Please, can I come?"

"Please, me too," Darrell said.

"No!" Jaren's voice was harsh. His face inked. He looked down at his sons. "It will be okay."

Jaren loaded his tools and supplies and set off to the pilgrim path.

Silas watched his father's wagon rocking away.

"I'm going for more bugs," he told his mother and went out into the field. Among the rows he knew he'd have to cut back the dead stalks and plow them under. He liked to work and the feeling that he controlled what the fields produced. It was as much his work as his parents' that was destroyed. He got on his hands and knees and brought his face close to the soil to see all the bent legs, shelled husks, whisper-thin wings. The field was covered with hard insect bodies.

When his father's wagon turned the corner out of their property, Silas ducked into the woods. He stared at the last veins of chewed leaves. He stuffed several leaves into his mouth and tucked them into his cheek.

He walked fast for over an hour until he got to where the river bends in a series of tight curves. At the start of the drought they brought buckets to water the garden, but it was too far to carry the full buckets. Too slow. Water sloshed out and onto the forest along the way so there was never enough for the plants. Now along the banks he searched for the exact spot the current touched closest to his lands. He imagined walking straight back from each curve, surveying where the land rose and rolled, dipped and valleyed. He'd find the straightest route to dig a trench to divert the river water. He imagined his family waking to him digging the last section of an irrigation channel that would save them from the dry growing season. A flood clearing the field. The astonishment on his father's face. His mother's arms reaching out to grab his siblings to hug them close. The water rushing over the fields and washing the insects away.

When he approached the camp along the river he went deeper into the woods so he could watch his father's wagon arrive. But he didn’t see it come. Instead, he saw his father slip through the woods on foot. Jaren wore his deer hide hunting tunic, but he didn't have his bow. Slung over his shoulder was a leather pouch Jaren used to sprinkle powder around the barn and hovel to kill rats.

Silas followed at a distance. Knee-high clouds of last night's fog still floated over the dewy forest floor and when Jaren stopped, Silas lay down, and the wet white breath of the ground engulfed him. The shredded leaves caught no wind and were still. The pouch bounced up and down against Jaren's back as he walked. Silas kept low and slipped behind the trees the way his father taught him to do while hunting to stay hidden.

Jaren stopped north of the pilgrim camp along the Orlo River. The river wound wide and slow arcs through the whole region. It flowed from what Jaren said was an unknown land to the west and downstream past a half dozen communities and into the heart of Bilhorod, Tsar Samuel's coastal city, where Silas had never been. The river had been enough to imagine the rest of the world. He pictured himself picking up the rope of water and snapping it straight enough to see everything along the unknown banks, everything shifting through the woods, to unbend the river to see what fate rushed closer.

There had been no travelers for weeks, but as he trailed his father into the next bend in the Orlo River, he caught the sweet, charred scent of cooking meat. He snuck up through the trees. The camp was full. The first wave of pilgrims headed to the distant Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem pitched sand-colored tents on the banks. In the fenced-in corral, tired horses nipped at each other with long, yellow teeth. Their roan hides, slick with dew, gleamed in the sun as they arched their long swan necks to eat moss and stray sprigs of clover. They shook their manes and shoulders to shrug flies, and their deep sighing, nickering, and whinnying carried through the trees. He saw campfires. Several guides cooked on one fire. The guides had black beards and wore red sashes tied in knots around their necks.

Two dozen horses filled the corral. Little ghosts of breath puffed free of their mouths. Jaren crouched low and snuck toward their watering trough. He pulled a fistful of white powder from his pouch, plunged his red stained arm in elbow deep and swirled the water.

Silas wanted to reach out through the woods to his father's wrist, grab hold, and wrench him back. But as quickly as he had snuck up on the horses, Jaren turned away. He stopped in the trees to rub his hand in the grass and scrub it with mulch. Then Jaren turned toward where Silas hid.

Silas dropped down even lower through the last thin wisps of fog. Only the river moved, all else in the world was still. On his stomach, he listened for his father moving away. The dirt and mulched leaves scratched at his skin—the feeling of insects covering everything again. He imagined crawling to the corral's watering tank and tipping it over, letting all the water his father stirred seep into the earth and away.

When he looked up again he didn't see his father. He got to his knees. Then a hand pushed him back into the dirt.

"Don't move," Jaren said.

Jaren lay down next to Silas. Jaren put his hands on the ground and his face into the dirt as though he were about to sleep.

"Don't move."

Silas stayed down in the dirt next to his father. They lay side by side until they heard the noises of the camp breaking down to depart. He imagined the guides by the camp. Each had weathered brown skin that pinched at the eyes.

"Years of traveling," Jaren said when Silas had asked about them. "It takes a toll."

Silas had always been interested in the pilgrims and the places they had gone to and come from. He had seen all manner of pilgrims. Men and women. Their ages varied, but most were older and wore fine, colorful clothes. Clothes dyed in pits like his father's. At night, when he was close to sleep, Silas saw himself easing his mud-caked clothes into the pits and lifting them out, splendid as the travelers.

The first time he snuck up to the pilgrim camp one of the guides in the group spotted him through the trees and made a hand signal to the others who all fell silent.

"We have a curious bird in the woods," the guide pointed to Silas. Silas was about to spring up and run when the man said, "Come talk with us little bird," and waved him over.

One of the guides stood up and sat back down to make room for him by their fire.

Silas inched closer.

"Did you hear us telling stories?"

Silas nodded.

"Well come closer to hear better little bird."

Silas sat with the men, scared, but alert to every word. They spent the evening telling him stories of far-off places with crocodiles and hippopotami.

"He's a farm boy," another guide said. "Tell him about the wheat field where statues of gods poke out of the ground. Fists and crowns. Nothing else left."

He was still in his revelry when his father shook him.

"Come along. You may as well help me now."

They walked through the trees toward the road without speaking. The mare was still hitched to the wagon and tied to a tree. Rendering tools and a large bladder sewn from sheep stomachs and filled with water for the horse were stowed in the back. Jaren untied the horse and sat in the wagon without moving.

"We'll go after them. See if we can catch up." Jaren looked at Silas. "We're running out of options." The need in his voice unsettled Silas as the wagon rocked along the rutted path, beneath trees that were now bare well before fall. The wheels screeched because there was no animal fat to lube them with. Piles of horse and human excrement lined the way. From a distance Silas could tell the pilgrims had broken camp and left. Gray, ashen circles from fire pits lay around the riverbank.

"Now what?"

"We'll see."

Their horse crossed the river, plodding over the slick stones and dragged the rocking wagon up the opposite bank.

After an hour ride up the path, farther than Silas had ever gone, Jaren pointed ahead of them. "Look there."

Into the trees lay the mound of a roan horse. There were tracks on the dried trail from what looked like the wild stomping and circling of a horse. Silas studied the ground around the horse.

"Look at this," Silas said.

There was a large cleared puff of dirt where the horse and rider had fallen. The path they followed was a steady stream of prints in the dust going one way or the other. Around the dead horse were the markings of a break in routine. A pilgrim's guide trying to calm the animal as it reared up before it fell. The long skid in the dirt from the rider pulled free by guides.

"What happened?"

"We'll see," Jaren said. He jumped down from the wagon and went to pull his tools from the back. Silas watched the story the dirt confessed and a feeling crept up the back of his neck. He studied the horse, stripped of its load, abandoned amid the markings of its last struggle. It wasn't an old horse. Not thin, either.

As if he could read Silas's face, Jaren said, "Maybe it had too many crickets in the belly?"

Jaren kneeled next to the horse, unfolded his leather satchel of carving tools, and pulled out his skinning knife. The first incision he made across the neck was deep enough to carve away at the fat tissue yet spilled no blood. Silas was amazed at how efficient his father was at working his knife lengthwise down the chest and stomach, curving his blade around the giant penis, and cutting to the base of the tail.

"Hold the leg up," Jaren said.

Silas held the horse's leg straight back by cupping both hands on the hoof. His father reached between the marbled pink muscle and the hide until his fists looked like living things tunneling inside the animal's body. Silas hadn't seen meat in almost a month and imagined the large flanks of horse over a fire, fat dripping and hissing on the ash, his family gorging on the haunches.

Silas hooked a rope to their wagon and knotted the other end around the horse's back leg. Jaren eased the wagon forward to roll it over so he could skin the other side and pull the hide free.

Jaren stripped away the entire hide in one piece leaving the fur around the horse's dirt-covered lips. He made easy work of the skinning. He used a handsaw to cut off the four hooves. The saw ground loose a fine, gray powder with each thrust. Specs of hoof dust sparkled in the slant light. Silas ran to the wagon and began gathering the tools to section the meat, trying to anticipate what his father needed. When he turned back, Jaren wiped the blade in the grass and packed away his tools.

"What are you doing?" Silas asked.

Jaren ran his hands back and forth over his chest.

"We need to carve the meat," Silas said.

"The meat's no good."

"What do you mean no good? We need it."

"Come on, son."

"Mom will want the meat. I want the meat."

"Not this one. Come on."

Silas studied his father as Jaren climbed into the wagon and patted the seat where he wanted Silas to join him. A thrumming unease burned through him. He looked at the skinned horse—red marbled, dirt smeared, grotesque. He imagined the white powder mixing into the water in the horse corral. That water coursing through the animals, seizing and locking up something in each of their bodies.

"Come on, son."

They went farther down the pilgrim trail, away from their home and the dead horse. After several rutted turns through the woods Silas saw another prone horse and knew for sure. That shifting uncertainty that began to flower in his chest exploded into full panic. He squeezed his eyes shut.

His father was a good man—a good man who had done this foul thing.

When Silas felt his father's hand cup the back of his neck and give a gentle squeeze, his body went rigid.

"We'll do whatever is needed to take care of our family," Jaren said. "Family is everything."

The two stared at each other as the wagon approached the second dead horse.

"I wish you hadn't followed me but there's nothing to do about it now. We have to keep ourselves well. Your mother and the kids. You understand? We have to take care of them now."

Silas dwelled in the first rush of a wave of discontentment that was about to crash on him.

They cleaned the second horse, sawed off the hooves, loaded the hide, left the carcass for wolves and carrion birds, and went further down the pilgrim trail until they found the next circle of trampled dirt where another animal began to get sick. The third horse had its throat cut, a dreadful, unsteady gash mercifully thrust in after it fell and the riders could now guess its fate.

The pilgrims got more efficient at dispatching the next seven horses. The cuts across their throats became cleaner. They came earlier. The wild, stampeding circles in the dust turned into an agitated swaying. All the horses had dirt in their mouths. Silas pictured them scraping their teeth over the path, trying to dilute the sickness coursing through them.

"Most are pack animals," Jaren said.

Silas knew there was no knowing what the animals were used for. It was clear by the end of the day, before it got dark, that the pilgrims' tracks they followed now had men walking, and he didn't know how the pilgrims would get on with their journey.

After working through the night they slept on the stinking skins in the back of the wagon. The stars were bright and low slung. They filled the sky. As a child, Silas remembered his father lifting him up at night and spinning him around so the stars blurred, streaked, and fell closer.

In the morning they returned home with a heap of furs in the wagon. The musk of large animals rose from the back with the incessant racket of flies.

Zenobia and Juta met the wagon at the barn. Juta had dirty, bare feet that danced off the ground as she waved to them, then she jumped and clung to the side of the moving wagon.

"There's so many," Juta called in her sing-song voice.

"Why not bring the meat?" Zenobia asked. Her huge, slightly slanting, hazel eyes locked on Jaren. Her luminous skin blushed up from her neck to her cheeks like a promise.

"The meat was bad."

"How bad?"

"Too bad to bring home."

"We can't eat the furs. You should have tried the meat. We could have tried."

"Zenobia. Stop. This is what we have."

"Not even a scrap?"

"It wasn't good, love. I'm sorry."

"We don't need good. What's wrong with you? Good is beyond us. Can't you see that? We'll take anything."

Silas's throat squeezed off the truth. A need to protect his mother from what happened emerged with a visceral animal want that surprised him.

Jaren ushered the wagon into the barn to unload the skins.

Silas and Darrell helped prepare the dying pits. Silas felt a vague pinch of fear as he began peeling horse furs off and stacking them at the pools. All summer the pilgrims camped by the Orlo River. The guides would know not to camp there on their way back. They would pass word along or leave notes to the waves of travelers behind them about the campsite. They carved messages into trees for each other. Hieroglyphic symbols that told of their passage. He imagined himself hunting the woods for those notes and scarping away the bark with his knife to make it look like a buck had rubbed it raw with its horns.

They soaked the giant horse skins in the round stone and mortar baths built for boiling and dying furs. The boiling tank was perched over a fire pit, and when the flame was stoked a broth of horse flesh and damp fur stifled the air. His father skimmed the fetid surface of the tank with a cup and tried to drink the foul soup but couldn't swallow it and spit it into the ground where the liquid soaked into the dry dirt.

"Can I try?" Silas asked.

"It's no good," Jaren said.

"I'm hungry enough to try."

Jaren was slow to share the cup, and near tears when he handed it over. Silas held the cup to his nose, pushed it away, then brought it back to take a sip. The rotten taste tightened the skin around his teeth before he had to spit it out too.

"Terrible, isn't it."

"Yes."

"Sorry son."

Once the skins boiled in the dye pits, Jaren added buckets of dried elderberries and beetroot shavings. He tossed in iron salt and mordant to keep the dyes fast.

"Why this color?" Silas asked.

"The treated hides bring a greater price from the merchants at the market. The money from the hides will buy food and seeds for another planting. The money can save us."

"I see," Silas said.

He wished he hadn't followed his father. A good man. Though with the money from the horse furs would come new seeds to plant and grains which his mother could boil into a thick mush and flavor with wild fennel. If they could keep taking the hides perhaps the lost crop would not ruin them. Perhaps his father had found a way to save them—a dark toll on others overlaying their own salvation.

They stirred with long poles until the lighter shades of horse fur bloomed into a deep crimson. Silas let his eyes blur and imagined he was using his pole to drown a red-brindled devil.

About the author

Devin Murphy is a national bestselling author of the novels The Boat Runner (WWII historical) and Tiny Americans published by Harper Perennial. These books have been selected as Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers, Illinois Reads, and book of the year by both the Chicago Writers Association and the Society of Midland Authors. His recent short stories appear in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and New Stories from the Midwest as well as many others. His nonfiction can also be found in LitHub, The Millions, and New Ohio Review. He is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University and lives in Chicago.

About the illustrator

Kyle Collyer is a student artist, currently studying animation. He has been drawing since 2015. Kyle enjoys drawing cartoons and has even developed his own art style that reflects this. Kyle has also taken up selling commissioned pieces, such as painting papier-mâché letters. In the future, he would like to work with a team to produce cartoon shows. Visit his website at https://linktr.ee/AStrokeOfArt.