HIS MOTHER, a tall woman, long legs skinny as dowel rods, waded into the still part of the river before the fifteen-minute break they got at nine-thirty She was twenty, named Devin, after a great grandmother, five times back on her mother’s side. She left two other women smoking at the picnic tables set in back of the plant, gave one the rest of her smokes. She took off her shoes and her clothes, folded the blue work shirt and trousers to a neat pile beside her black, ankle high work boots. The water was peat black, tinted green where light came through the high trees, littered with yellow and red leaves, and old white pollen strewn like shudders of paint. She got waist deep, kept her hands near her chest. Against her stomach the water felt rock cold, older than mountains. Then she lay back and floated that way, head up. The water moved faster a little ways down. She picked up speed, swept quick with the water like a branch dropped, fluttered hands at her sides, legs straight and long, feet up, soles at the rocks, and then she was at the smaller of the two falls, bouncing through. She went over the big drop, before the boat lock, before the dam, and went under for good.

Of his mother, Terry remembered waking slowly, as if there was no dark, only slow lumbering through morning half light; he remembered morning smelled of pine resin. He remembered the red divots on her temples and cheeks from the tight band on the work goggles she wore most day hours. Nothing else.