Saints at the River

Saints at the River is the first novel of a practicing and accomplished poet. The turning point in the tense community showdown over the fate of the river comes from the power of a single photo that Maggie takes of the father of the dead girl staring blankly into the water. It is an image, a moment otherwise lost. “In photography,” she acknowledges, “there is no such thing as memory. The image is either caught on film or it doesn’t exist […] I’m just an observer, showing what’s already there” (98). At several points, as part of their evolving working relationship, Allen, a journalist, and Maggie, a photographer, discuss the impact of the camera’s eye, and the striking image rescued by the photographer-observer from an otherwise neutral landscape.

Before he turned his talents to narrative, Ron Rash was by training a poet. Throughout Maggie’s narrative, she uses words to create arresting images of the Appalachian wilds, the woods and the forest, her childhood; images of the trees, the hanging fog, of blackberries bursting on the bushes, the glint of sunlight against the river; images that create in language that same sort of angle, light, and texture of photography.

For Rash, there is much about the poet that parallels the photographer. The narrative pauses at critical moments to allow Maggie, as photographer/poet, to convert her keen eye for the astounding, random images around her into images that provide the narrative with immediacy and suggestion. As poet-observer, Rash refuses to indulge heavy-handed ornamentation and refuses to idealize or sentimentalize nature. He offers the images drawn from the Appalachian wilderness in stripped, clean, precise prose that draws on the senses to create the effect. Poetry, then, is photography transcribed into words. 

Central to the argument of Saints at the River as a narrative about the South is the tension between the fundamental Christianity of the Appalachian culture and the untamed wilderness that surrounds it. Rash draws on the metaphors and symbolic implications of both to suggest that the natural world, represented here by the river, is far more complicated than organized religion allows with its upbeat perception of nature as the handiwork of a loving God and as an avenue of salvation.

Consider how the narrative uses water. Within the Christian tradition, water is associated with the redemptive cleansing of baptism, the purification of souls as an avenue of grace and salvation. In Revelation, in passages that are shared at the memorial service on the banks of the Tamassee, water is associated with the vibrant energy of the living Creator. The wisdom literature of Christianity, reflected in the preacher’s inspirational sermon and the soulful hymn performed at the service, offers the consoling image of rivers as the waters of life and manifestations of God’s grace animating the world. Water then suggests nothing less than God’s loving presence. Despite the evidence of the river’s dark energy (the town’s long history suggests a near-constant battle against the river’s flooding), the town’s Christian culture embraces that sense of the blessings of water with its symbolic suggestion of redemption and ultimate salvation.

Against that radiant symbology, however, Rash juxtaposes the symbol of the river’s hydraulics, a scientific term to describe the place in a undammed river where a swift current hits an unyielding obstacle, such as a protuberance of rocks, that generates a fierce kind of circular motion with the suction force of an ocean riptide. “It’s like being inside a washing machine” (24), Maggie explains to Allen. It is the river’s hydraulics that have trapped the girl’s body and that have stymied any rescue attempt.

Herein, for Rash, is the duality of water as a symbol. For Rash, wisdom begins with accepting the contradictory nature of the world itself. Water is neither transcendent nor diabolical. It is stubbornly and irrefutably both. As such, water (and by extension, the river itself) represents both life and death, grace and damnation, and hope and despair. 

Amid the controversy over the river’s fate, Maggie hears from Billy Watson, the proprietor of the town’s only service station, about a cougar he swears he saw roaming the hills when he was a child. Cougars, or panthers, are rare, as their habitat has been destroyed. Despite his aw-shucks back-hills affectations and his ZZ Top-styled beard (all done for the tourists), Billy holds an agriculture degree from Clemson. He is no fool. For years, he has searched for some evidence of the cougar with the yellow eyes and black-tipped tail.

Just before the controversy over the dead girl’s body, Billy found a gutted carcass of a six-point buck. He took photos of the bloody carcass and has petitioned the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission to confirm the sighting. Later, he receives word from the commission’s mountain lion expert who describes Billy’s photos as “very intriguing” (193). Billy is beside himself with delight. “[T]here’s still enough wild acreage left up here to hide a few things” (194). And as Maggie prepares to leave the town after the death of her father, she pauses on the bridge over the Tamassee and ruminates over the possibility of catching sight of the cougar before it vanishes “back into the realm of faith” (237).

In a narrative in which just about everyone is more than ready to understand the river and its implications, Billy’s cougar represents all that we still do not know about nature. The cougar exists just outside the realm of verification and exists entirely a tantalizing mystery that defies all the environmentalists, cartographers, developers, zoologists, botanists, and state wildlife agencies. The wilderness, even in these latter days of massive expansion and development, stays just a step ahead of people who like to pretend they understand it all. As such, the cougar suggests the life force of nature and that, despite the concerted efforts of generations of reckless people to despoil the wilderness, nature will not accept our attempts to catalogue its vastness.