April
They were all just waiting in their different ways, by the river that didn’t care, under the sky that did...
The river was not much to look at. Around these parts, they called it an afterthought by the Almighty. Slow, brown water looping behind the town, carrying bottles and branches and furniture no longer cared for. Long ago, four cows came down it distended and stiff, turning slow in the current, the way the dead do when the river has no opinion about them. You could smell them before you saw them, and they stayed that way in people’s mouths long after. Folks swore the river remembered things. The old ones said as much and meant it, especially those with a drink in their hand, then laughed afterward so nobody could say they’d gone soft in the head.
On the far bank, where the cottonwoods stooped over like they were listening, the Peterson place too leaned toward the water. Even the metal mailbox door hung open. Stuck. Like it had been waiting for a handout, or at least for a good letter, now that the war was over and the fighting boys were getting home.
Eli Peterson sat on the front steps with his muddy boots and his hat in his hands. He kept turning it the way you turn a question you’ve decided not to ask out loud. The notice was still in his pocket. He hadn’t taken it out since morning. Saying a thing made it real in a way the paper alone didn’t, and real was more than he could take just now. So he just looked at the river and the cottonwood tree.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said out loud, to the river or to the cottonwood or to God Almighty, “how the sky can look that blue and still have bad intentions.” He looked up and squinted at the thin line where green met blue, as if staring hard enough and long enough might change what was coming. As if refusal were the same as prevention.
Behind him, the screen door breathed open and shut and open again — once, twice — like the rusty squeeze box he carried a tune with as a kid. The squeeze box, too, ended up downriver. It was Maria. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she kept moving between the kitchen and the porch as if motion itself were a kind of prayer. She brought out a chipped plate with three biscuits. Sat it down. Picked it up. Carried it back inside untouched. He didn’t turn around. He heard the biscuits come and go and understood what that meant without needing to see it.
The children had gone quiet, which likely meant they were in trouble or something was wrong. They leaned over one another at the edge of the porch, counting bottles as they floated downriver, making up stories about the people who’d thrown them in.
Eli listened. When Rosie said, “That one there is from a man who had to leave in a hurry,” he smiled a little and ran his thumb along the brim of his hat.
He was still sitting there when the truck came down the road.
It was Deacon Purvis’s truck, which meant nothing good. Deacon Purvis drove his truck the way a man delivers news he’s been carrying too long — slow, deliberate, as if speed might make it worse or better and he’d given up believing in either. The truck eased to a stop at the edge of the dirt drive and sat there a moment with the engine running. Then the engine quit.
Eli didn’t move.
Purvis got out. He was a large man who moved like a smaller one, carefully, as if he’d learned somewhere along the way that his size made people nervous. He had his hat in his hand before he reached the gate, which told Eli everything the man’s face was working hard not to.
“Eli.”
“Deacon.”
Purvis stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked at his hat, then at the river, then at Eli. “You heard anything?”
“I heard plenty,” Eli said. “Mostly from my own pocket.”
Purvis nodded slowly. He turned his hat in his hands the same way Eli had been turning his, and for a moment the two men just sat with that — the same gesture, the same question, two different versions of the same dread.
“Raymond Holt got back this morning,” Purvis said. “Come in on the six o’clock from Baton Rouge.”
Eli said nothing.
“He asked about the boys.”
“What’d you tell him.”
“I told him I didn’t know anything for certain.”
“That’s honest,” Eli said.
Behind them, the screen door opened. Maria had heard the truck. She stood in the doorway with a dish towel in her hands, not drying anything, just holding it the way you hold something when you need your hands to be occupied with something that isn’t shaking. Eli heard her breathing change when she saw Purvis. He didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to.
“Mrs. Peterson,” Purvis said, looking past Eli’s shoulder.
“Mr. Purvis.” Her voice was even. Eli had always admired that about her. The way she could make her voice do one thing while the rest of her was doing another.
Purvis looked back at Eli. “Raymond said Daniel come through Bologna with him. Said they were together as late as April.” He paused and took a breath. “Said after that he didn’t know.”
The river went on. A bottle turned slowly in the current near the bank, catching the light once before it went under the shadow of the cottonwoods and didn’t come back out.
“Thomas,” Eli said. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t asking about Daniel.
Purvis looked down and turned his hat once more. “Raymond didn’t say much about Thomas.”
“No,” Eli said. “I don’t expect he did.”
The children had stopped counting bottles. Rosie was watching Purvis with the particular attention children give to things they almost understand. The boy, who was five and understood nothing and therefore understood everything, had climbed down from the porch and was crouching at the edge of the yard pulling up grass in small fistfuls and letting it fall.
Eli reached into his pocket. He held the notice flat against his knee without unfolding it, feeling the paper’s particular stiffness, those straight government creases that never softened no matter how long you carried them. The way the government made everything stiff, even bad news. Then he folded it back on itself and returned it to his pocket.
“You want to come inside,” he said. It was not quite an invitation.
“I won’t trouble you,” Purvis said.
“You’re not troubling anybody.”
Purvis looked at the house the way a man looks at a church he’s not sure he deserves to enter. Then he came up the steps and Eli moved over on the step to give him room, and neither man said anything for a while.
Maria went back inside. They heard the sound of her in the kitchen. Water running. A drawer opening and not closing. Eli understood she needed to be in there the way she needed to keep moving. Just indoors now.
“His boy’s growing,” Purvis said, looking at the child pulling up grass.
“He is.”
“Looks like Thomas.”
Eli looked at the boy. He did look like Thomas. He’d been trying not to notice that for several months and here was Deacon Purvis noticing it out loud in the afternoon sun and there was nothing to be done about it.
“He does,” Eli said.
Rosie had gotten down from the porch and gone to stand near the boy, her brother, in the way older children stand near smaller ones when something is wrong — not touching him, just near, as if proximity were its own form of information. The boy kept pulling up grass. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. None of them did, exactly. They were all just waiting in their different ways, by the river that didn’t care, under the sky that did.
“Raymond said he was well,” Purvis said. “In Bologna. Said he seemed well.”
“April,” Eli said.
“April,” Purvis agreed.
The word settled between them, and neither man picked it up again.
After a while, Purvis stood and put his hat back on. He looked at the river. He said he’d let Eli know if he heard anything further, and Eli said he’d appreciate that, and they shook hands in the way men shake hands when they’ve agreed on something neither of them wanted to agree on. Then Purvis went back down the steps and across the yard and got in his truck and drove back the way he’d come. Slow. The same as arriving.
Eli sat back down on the steps. The notice was in his pocket. The river was going where it always went. He looked at the cottonwood, where the green met the blue.
After a while, Rosie came and sat next to him on the step, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her small arm against his.
“Where do you think the bottles go, Granddad?”
Eli looked at the water. “Further on,” he said.
She thought about that. “Is further on good or bad?”
He put his arm around her. “I don’t know, Rosie,” he said. “I honestly don’t know.”
Luciano Conte, born in Formia, Italy, roots himself in tactile arts like film photography, painting, bread baking, and house building. He writes in order to probe those persistent, buried forces that shape us from beneath the surface. For him, silence is not absence but presence: a pause that resonates the loudest, like the pause in a conversation that carries more weight than words. He speaks his lines aloud while writing, tying rhythm to breath, making language a living, physical act where sound and sense fuse, just as photography captures light and shadow. He urges readers to read his work aloud to unlock layers that silent reading misses, letting the cadence shape the experience in the same way as kneading dough or laying foundation stones, where each gesture is deliberate and consequential.
I'm glad you didn't finish with a resolution. The unknowing adds to the tragedy of this story. Thank you, Luciano.
Emotional suspense