40 pages • 1 hour read
Saints at the River
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Part 1, Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
After the meeting, Maggie drops Allen off at a hotel and reluctantly drives home to stay the night with her father. The reunion is awkward. The two have not really talked for years. She is relieved that it is too late for conversation. Rather, Maggie walks back to her old bedroom and thinks about when her mother died during her junior year in college. She alludes again to some memory about her brother, a memory too painful to face.
In the morning, before her father wakes, she Googles Allen Hemphill. To her astonishment, she finds an article dated a year and half earlier about the deaths of Allen’s wife and his nine-year-old daughter in a car crash during a heavy rainstorm in northern Virginia. When her father joins her for coffee, she notices the effects of the chemotherapy. He has lost weight; his face is pale. He dribbles from his coffee cup. The father mentions Luke, and Maggie remembers years earlier when her father kicked her out of the house for spending the night with Luke. Before Maggie leaves for the community meeting at the river, her father tells her about a dream he had right after the girl died in the river. He was looking down into the swirling channel of the river and could just make out a face. But it wasn’t the girl, he says darkly—it was Maggie.
At the river site, Maggie stares into the churning whitewater pool that holds the girl’s body. She imagines the pain Allen must feel, given the loss of his own daughter: “Death was too close here” (85). She meets up with Luke—after all those years, she is still drawn to his deep-set eyes. She finds him unmoved by the father’s dilemma. Luke dismisses Allen Hemphill contemptuously. He dismisses Allen’s reputation as an objective reporter and says that, underneath, his reportorial objectivity he is nothing more than a sentimentalist and that his reportage will inevitably side with the family. For his part, Luke extols his love of the river, “the purest kind of love” (91). For a moment, Maggie recalls during their time together Luke had taught her much about the river, its ecological life, and its complex integrity. Then, however, she recalls how their relationship fragmented because of Luke’s serial infidelities.
When the two local divers again fail to get close to where the body is lodged, Maggie impulsively takes a photo of the girl’s father standing on the slab of stone beneath which his daughter rests. A single tear rolls down his face: “He stared into the water—alone now, no rescue workers or environmentalists or gawkers” (97). It is, she hopes, an impactful image.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Spending one night with her father is more than enough, and Maggie takes a room in the same hotel with Allen. The two agree to meet Luke for dinner. Maggie is conflicted: she primps with perfume and makeup for what she sees as a kind of date with Allen, but she thinks about her time years ago with Luke. During dinner, Allen and Luke spar over the campaign to preserve the river. Luke is adamant in his argument: “[T]he moment [Ruth] stepped in the shallows she accepted the river on its terms. That’s what wilderness is—nature on its terms, not ours, and there’s no middle ground” (106). He warns that the proposed temporary dam not only would invite future alterations to the river but that it won’t work anyhow. The river is too wild. Any temporary dam would not hold. Allen learns for the first time about Maggie’s college years in the local environmental movement.
After dinner, Maggie takes Allen over to the town’s convenience store, where the locals gather for a night of picking and singing. For Maggie, the gathering reminds her of the most painful years of her adolescence. For the first time, she opens up about her brother Ben and how, during her high school years, he was adjusting to bad burns that disfigured his face and to the cruel taunts of his school friends. For years Ben kept to himself, and in the aftermath of whatever had happened, Maggie had vowed to study hard, earn a scholarship, and get out of Tamassee.
The night features local talent singing centuries-old Appalachian ballads accompanied on the store’s rickety piano and on banjos and fiddles. Amid the raucous atmosphere, Maggie cannot help but think of her father alone in his home, dying a moment at a time, and of the Kowalsky family, alone in the nearby hotel and grieving without any comfort: “Did they talk of their loss or turn on the TV or merely wait in silence” (117).
After the music is over, Maggie and Allen walk across a bridge over the Tamassee. Hesitatingly, Maggie mentions that she knows about the deaths of Allen’s wife and child. Allen asks about Maggie’s feelings for Luke. She dismisses the idea that she carries a torch for him. They kiss. When they return to the hotel, Maggie hopes Allen might come to her room, but he does not.
Part 1, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
Maggie is back home and feels compelled to revisit her past. In these two critical chapters, Maggie emerges as the central character, but as a first-person narrator, she is reluctant to share with us the specifics of her emotional trauma. We expect honesty and candor from a first-person narrator, but here, we get only hints of a past too difficult to confront. We get a sense of Maggie in full retreat.
We understand something is wrong with Maggie, but what that something is, she will not make clear. Her conversation with her father is halting and fragmentary—we do not know why the two are so distant. We also are kept at a distance. She tells us about the time she spent helping to tend to her dying mother, but the larger trauma of her brother remains beyond her capacity to share. We are unsure why her relationship with her father is so strained. We are only given hints: she notes, for instance, that in her brother’s bedroom, there are no mirrors. When she goes to the river, she recalls a cave where Ben spent much of his time, where he could safe from the hard comments of schoolmates. Rash doesn’t yet reveal the circumstances of Ben’s scarring and uses this mystery to build tension.
We only begin to understand the complexity of Maggie’s character and that is largely from what she will not share. We understand only that she is in deep emotional trouble and that she is burdened by conflicts that are too buried to bring to the surface. The dream of Maggie’s father disturbs us: Maggie, we understand, is at risk, drowning as it were.
Thus, these two chapters function much like the Prologue: we have a sense of a character’s dilemma but without any real explanation of its cause. Even as Maggie uses the reach of the Internet to unearth something of Allen Hemphill’s background and his tragedy, she resists sharing her own history. We learn the culture of her childhood—the Saturday night festivities that feature the music of the region. The interlude in the convenience store/bar, the impromptu concert, gives us (and Maggie) a sense of her Appalachian roots. Rash pays homage to the culture of the Appalachian South. The local talent is celebratory and raucous. The music is both vigorous and lively, and the locals find joy and community. Maggie, however, is both a part of this and apart from it.
Here, Rash foregrounds not so much the controversy over the river but rather the emergence of Maggie’s interest in Allen. That interest comes to suggest Maggie’s movement toward authentic healing, her redemption, and her recovery from the past. Her recovery will not be easy. First, Maggie must be willing to confront the past she has run from for 10 years. It is time for Maggie to heal.
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