Go as a River: A Novel

Victoria returns to consciousness inside Wil’s hut and is comforted by the morning light after the storm. She remembers her fear when her mother died years ago, but she also recalls the courage she drew upon to persevere through her grief day by day and become the woman of the house. Victoria relaxes into the rhythms of the forest and begins to develop her skills for survival in the wild. She digs a latrine when the ground thaws, elevates her food to keep it from bears, and plants seeds for a vegetable garden.

As her son grows inside her, Victoria feels more and more connected with nature and the lives of plants and animals. She realizes that she is less afraid of living alone in the woods than she is of living in a house with her violent brother and friends, who were often threatening. 

In June, Victoria is still struggling to find good sources of food. The canned goods and pickled items that she brought from the farmhouse are now dwindling. She climbs a hill to pick berries but is too weak to return for more. She craves meals rich with animal fats and carbohydrates, and sometimes she cries when she thinks of food. She struggles to catch trout in the river, only managing to catch and eat one small fish. In the middle of the night, she wakes up starving and pulls beets up from her garden before they are fully grown, eating mouthfuls of dirt along with them.

Then, she has her first contraction. After days of contractions, she goes into labor on some blankets on the floor of her hut. When the baby is born, he is not breathing. She imagines that Wil appears, rubbing the baby back to life like the stillborn puppy he saved. She massages her son and sucks the mucus out of his mouth to clear his airways until he cries his first cry. Looking into his eyes, she feels that they are two souls reconnecting after having been apart for a long time.

Still bedridden after giving birth, Victoria wraps herself and the baby up and begins breastfeeding him. She names him Baby Blue, after Wil’s last name and the song “Blue Moon.” Her only food sources are the small vegetables that grow in her garden, for she remains too weak to go foraging or hunting. Two weeks later, snow falls and destroys the garden entirely.

After the storm passes, Victoria leaves the hut to seek help, knowing that she will starve if she stays there. As she wanders, not knowing where she is headed, she comes across a family of deer that she had observed near the hut in days past. The smallest and weakest fawn is missing, and Victoria feels desperately sad, as though it is a bad omen.

Victoria comes across a parked car in the mountains. It belongs to a young couple with a baby who have stopped for a picnic. Victoria decides to abandon her baby with them in order to save him from starvation or from being linked to her and Wil, so she quietly puts Baby Blue in the back seat of the couple's car and runs away. When she returns to the site of the picnic that night, the couple is gone, but there is a peach set out on a boulder like a gift for her. Victoria eats it greedily, realizing that it is a peach from her family’s fruit stand. This reminds her of home.

Hungry for more food and the comforts of home, she wanders down the mountain until she reaches the highway, hitching a lift back to Iola. She asks to be dropped off near Ruby-Alice's house, believing that Ruby-Alice will take her in as she once did for Wil. Ruby-Alice greets Victoria at the door and wordlessly nurses her from starvation back to health. When she is physically strong again, Victoria leaves Ruby-Alice and heads back to her family farm.

Victoria returns to her family home and her father, unsure of the welcome she will receive. Both Seth and Uncle Ogden’s rooms are empty. She has matured and changed and wonders what her new relationship with her father will be like. When he sees her, he is silent but prepares dinner for her in the kitchen. As the week passes, they become more accustomed to each other’s company. He tells her that the sheriff questioned Seth about Wil’s death, and she tells him that she thinks Seth killed Wil. Her father admits that he suspected it to be true.

Victoria notices that her dad has a cough that is increasing in severity, and he begins coughing up blood. Within a few weeks, his lungs collapse. As he is dying, he tells her that she looks beautiful like her mother did. Victoria feels like she is losing her “last link on earth” (154).

At her father’s funeral, Victoria learns from Sherriff Lyle that it was her dad who tipped off the law to Seth as a suspect in Wil’s murder, but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest him. Instead, Lyle warned Seth and Forrest Davis to leave town. Lyle also tried to locate Wil’s family but was unable to find them to let them know of their son’s murder.

Several years pass. Victoria takes over the family farm, tending to the peach orchard despite being constantly reminded of the memories of those she has lost. In 1954, a plan to build a reservoir over Iola and dry up the Gunnison River infuriates the townspeople, who protest the development. A government representative comes to offer to buy out Victoria’s land, and she accepts. She is the first person in town to sell her property, and the townspeople ostracize her for her betrayal.

Ruby-Alice falls ill, and Victoria returns her kindness and nurses her, eventually taking her and her animals in to live with her at her peach farm. Victoria decides that before she leaves Iola, she wants to save the peach trees, her family’s legacy, from being destroyed by the imminent development of the reservoir. She rallies the help of a team of botanists from a local university to transfer the rare peach trees to a nearby valley. The scientists visit the farm and begin to gather data while Victoria begins to consider which of her family’s keepsakes she will bring when she leaves.

Suddenly, Seth returns to Iola from California, and a local named Millie Dunlop stirs up trouble by telling him about the government settlement money, which she tells Victoria should be split between the two siblings. When Victoria hears from Millie that Seth is back, she runs back to the farm in a panic, worried that he will do harm to Ruby-Alice if he finds her there. As a show of strength, she starts carrying her dad’s old rifle around with her, which she learned to shoot when she was younger but hasn’t used since.

When Seth arrives, he knocks on the door, and Victoria goes out on the porch to talk to him, carrying the rifle. She is afraid to let him in the house where Ruby-Alice is. He seems changed to her, apologetic and beaten down by hardship. He explains that he was not the one who killed Wil, but that he stood by and watched while Forrest Davis tied Wil’s hands to the car and dragged him. Victoria demands that Forrest be brought to trial, but Seth explains that he was killed in a fight on their travels together. Seth wants to come back and farm the land when Victoria leaves. Angry and unable to forgive Seth, Victoria threatens to burn down the orchard and the farm if Seth returns before she is gone.

When spring arrives, the team of botanists come to remove the orchard, transplanting all the trees to their new location across the mountain. While the orchard is being moved, Ruby-Alice dies peacefully. The whole town shows up for her funeral, reminding Victoria that despite their flaws, they are decent people. After the orchard is moved, Victoria packs up her truck, her chickens, and Ruby-Alice's dogs and looks at the farm one last time before leaving.