Chapter 1 in Down River (rough draft)

    It was just suicide until I found this damned thing. His death came as a surprise to me but not a shock. The will of what most of the us considered essential to life, fell from him years ago. To me his death was just an inevitable and obvious next step. Him comiting suicide wasnt a surprise or a shock to me either. I knew he was capable of just about anything, especially something selfish. The only surprise came with the timing and finality of it all. The death of your father is something that you can never be on guard for. Even when you see it coming straight at you like the words on this page. When it finally reaches you, it finds these far away and protected places inside you and shoots through them. Shaking everything loose and shattering it all like glass on stone so you can never put back whole again. In that instant, as you stare at the splintered pieces of yourself. You realise its not just about his life and death, but your own, And how they are now and for all time twisted brutaly into one.

  He shot himself in the chair by the wood burner in the front room . Knowing this, I thought it would be better to come through the back door of the house. I had not set foot in the house for months, but the place looked better than it had since before mom left. the blinds were open and the ash dust that blanketed everything was gone. the cleaning crew let the sun and air in for what seemed like the first time. It smelled of fresh paint and pine.  Before all this the house felt hollow, stale and hopeless. Now it at least casted a shadow. 

  My father did not have much and of those few things he did have, only one item was worth going in there for. It was a rosary. My grandmothers rosary. She carried it with her every day. The day she died they took it from her hands and gave it to my father to carry. He brought it home that night in a plastic bag, placed it in a shoe box with a few photos of her, and then he put the lid on and never spoke of it or her again. 

I knew where it was buried in the closet, but I never went for it. I just thought of it some nights when I felt alone. I thought of how it travled around life with her, carrying all her hopes and prayers for the world. I thought of how She would come into my room at night, turn out the lights and share these dreams with me while she ran the onyx beads through her fingures and quietly layed grace over the dark heart of the cold hard night. My father saw the meaning in this for me, and buried it anyway. I hated him for it. I would have taken it out myself, but he had to be the one. It could never be me. He had to be something and someone that he simply was not. In a way I think he needed me to hate him for it. As if it was somehow easier this way for him to go on.

Like I said, it was just a suicide until I found this. Now, just about every part of me wishes i had never went in the house. If I would have just burried him and all of the passed with him, I could have gone on with my life in peaceful ignorance without knowing what i know now. But I did go in, just like he knew i would.

He placed it in the back of the closet, right where the shoebox used to be. It was a red spiral notebook and the cover read "fishing log 2001". This wrinkled, dingy unsuspecting thing would change everything I thought I knew about my life. Everything i thought i knew about this town. everything i thought i knew about people, and of course how I would forever see the man who was my father.

The cross of my grandmothers rosary hung from the bottom of the book. The rest of it was layed through it about thirty pages deep. The page it marked was headlined "may 6th".

This is when it starts.