Benn Jeffries

River Vein

Excerpt

Neither Obie nor I had fathers growing up, and we were both angry because of this. Obie’s mum, Martha, knew how to deal with that anger better than my own mother, and for that reason I spent a lot of time at their house. In my mind, Martha had remained unchanged from the day I met her as a boy, playing in the tōtara tree that sat outside their kitchen window.

           Seeing her at the funeral, I realized just how much she had aged. The death of her son had drained what little youth she’d clung to. She was no longer a mother, and with that went her vigor. Deep crow’s feet fanned out from her eyes and reminded me of an uprooted tree. When we hugged, I felt the bones beneath her arms and the shoulder blades beneath her back.

           The funeral was decidedly local, as Obie would have wanted. The town we grew up in is isolated, and to all who drive through it, it is a cold and hard place to live. Most of its people are forestry workers or cray fishermen or gang members—the sort of people who look after their own and ignore the rest. To us who call it home, it is a paradise that gets into your bones and cannot be shaken. 

           Almost everyone in the town knew Obie, and almost everyone turned out for the funeral. The men wore black suits and black dirty dog shades and carried cans of rum and coke, their tattoos spilling out from their collars or their cuffs. The women wore dresses, and as the night progressed, hoodies were pulled over the top. They smoked in large groups out the back of the town hall, corralling the children with husky yells. People got drunk and a bonfire was lit and cheers were made in Obie’s honor. 

           No one knew why Obie had killed himself. For a while, it looked like we would never know what happened, and I came to accept that belief. Grief had made me tired, and I did nothing to counter it. I woke each morning with a sinkhole in my chest and let it drain me. 

           In the months that followed the funeral, as winter set in, people stopped gathering in the local bars or down at the black pebbled beach where Obie would always come up in conversation. It was over that winter that he started fading from people’s minds. Despite my apathy, I felt a need to hold onto him and took to visiting Martha on the weekends. We never spoke about Obie, but my being there seemed to be enough to nurse the memories each of us held. Each time I visited, I brought her wild venison or pāua or duck and chopped firewood for her while she brewed a large pot of tea. I was fulfilling some imagined oath I had made to Obie that let me keep him alive and delay my grief. I guess that’s why I was so surprised when Martha broke our silently agreed arrangement and pulled me from my stupor. 

           It was December, over six months since the funeral. At first, I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted and just nodded along while she rattled off things I knew nothing about. She was offering me something, but what, I wasn’t sure.

           “And that’s why it has to be you, Luke,” she said. “Tell me you’ll do it? Please.” She was crying and reached for my hand and that’s when I realized what she was asking. She wanted me to find out what had happened to her son. 

O

Few people born in our town stray far from it. Obie was one of the exceptions, and his name used to be whispered in the halls of the local high school like a myth—a model only the bravest dared aspire to. Now his name would be used as a warning. 

           I had just turned thirty-one when Obie was offered the job in the States. He was a waste management systems engineer, which might not sound glamorous, but Obie was good at his job and people pay good money not to smell shit. He once said his brain worked like an air traffic controller’s, but for sewage, which I always liked and told people. He wrote a thesis on something or other that impressed his industry and ended up being headhunted by an American firm. He joked that he’d made the big leagues funneling the black water of New York. 

           Obie was to be part of a team doing a redesign of an entire borough’s sewage system. His stint in the States was meant to be a year or two—nothing more than a blip in our lifelong friendship. Like a migrating bird, he would find his way home and our friendship would be unchanged. I imagined us in a few years’ time, out on the water fishing together. Maybe he’d tell me a story from those years he lived in America, and I would smile as if I’d been there with him. That would be it— nothing more would come of it.

           I remember the feeling of dread after high school when we parted ways for the first time. He was going up to Victoria University in the capital and I was going to Otago. We never said anything, but we both knew we’d end up back together in our hometown after university— and we did. Neither of us had any desire to live elsewhere. I was working in forestry science and spent a bit of time away, but New Zealand is small, and I was never that far from home. Obie’s work was the same: he once got flown to Rarotonga by the government and spent a summer there, but he said it was just like New Zealand, only you were still allowed to drink-drive and the beer wasn’t as cold. It was that summer he was away when I started writing a lot. I’ve always written stories, but never with any real intent. Martha believes I’m a better writer than I am. When Obie and I were teenagers, she used to tell me that one day I would write something to define our country. She stopped saying that when I became a man and went into forestry, but I knew for some inexplicable motherly reason she still believed in my scribblings. I’ve had a few things published in a local newspaper, but nowhere I’m really proud of. 

           That summer Obie was away in Rarotonga, time passed as it always had, except I began to measure it by the stories I wrote in the cab of a ute while whole forests were felled. I still measure time like that. Everyone does, in a way; they just don’t realize it. Stories represent periods in a life—not a date on a calendar or a forestry block where you worked. I can never remember the forests we cut down. A pine tree plantation is a single thing to me. A place loses its significance when it’s turned over to a uniform crop. More often than not, it loses its name, too. An ancient rainforest becomes Block 246. 

           Obie never got sentimental about things, and we never talked about my writing. Though I was once in his ute and found a copy of the newspaper one of my stories had been published in. It was well-creased and stained with grease, so I knew he’d read it on a lunch break somewhere. That was enough for me. He was a good friend like that; we didn’t need to say everything out loud. 

           When we were kids, we were completely inseparable. From the outside, it didn’t look like there was much to do in our town, especially in winter when the smoke from the chimneys settled over the place like a lid that kept everyone inside if they weren’t working the boats or the bush. Obie and I were always busy, though, and we used to brave the cold and trudge off into the hills whenever we could. When summer came, we’d spend whole days out on the water in his uncle’s tinny towing lures as we explored the coastline. It’s odd to think about that. Those memories seem to belong to someone else. The Obie there is not the Obie who killed himself. I guess that’s what Martha wanted from me: a story that she could sit down and read to learn the why. She wanted to be right there in New York with her son when he did it. She wanted to feel his desperation, to hear what went through his mind. She wanted to wallow in her grief. We all did.

About the Author

Benn is a fiction writer from New Zealand. His work has appeared in a handful of publications including Reservoir Road Literary Review, Capital Magazine, and ArtZone.