40 pages • 1 hour read
Ron RashSaints at the River
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary
Maggie and Allen return to Columbia to file their story. Maggie’s editor is impressed by Maggie’s gripping photo of the girl’s father. Maggie stops by Allen’s office, and Allen, without prodding, shares with Maggie the story of the accident that killed his wife and daughter. What pains him most, he admits, is that the two were on the way to pick him up at Dulles Airport outside Washington, and how mad he had been that no one had showed up to pick him up on time. He had grumbled all the way from the airport in the cab, even as it passed the traffic snarl on the other side that indicated an accident.
Maggie and Allen agree to have dinner that night in Maggie’s apartment. Over wine, he admits that he sees the article he is writing (which focuses on the family’s grief rather than the preservation of the river) as a second chance to be the father he never could be while he traveled: “I’ve been given another chance to be a good father by helping get another man’s daughter out of that river” (141). After years overseas on assignments watching the suffering of others, he can never forget the agonizing moment identifying his daughter in the morgue: “I felt death, not just observed it” (143).
After Allen leaves, Maggie gets a call from Ben. Her brother wants to talk about how to handle their father’s medical status and the possibility the two might need to care for him, should he become bedridden. Ben now lives in California. After years of painful surgeries and skin grafts on his face, he made his peace with his disfigurement. Unlike Maggie, he never held the accident against his father. Out of high school, he joined the military and is now happily married with a baby on the way. He asks Maggie whether she might be able to take some time off and stay with their father. She curtly refuses.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary
Allen’s article with Maggie’s powerful photo is picked up by the state’s news wire services. The article stirs much reaction and creates support for the family from state politicians, who see the human factor in the story for its political value. The editor tells Allen and Maggie to go back to Tamassee—a meeting is to be held to decide a course of action before more spring rains come. Maggie receives an angry email from Luke castigating her for turning her back on her neighbors, her town, and the river. With a heavy heart, she deletes it. She recalls first meeting Luke when she was a sophomore at Clemson and home for the summer to help tend her dying mother, and how easily she came under the influence of his uncompromising campaign to save the river then from touristy development. They had taken a long canoe trip down the river in the early fall, and along the way, Luke eloquently preached his gospel of the river as a spiritual, holy place.
Maggie and Allen drive to Tamassee. As the town meeting starts, Maggie is surprised to see her father, weak from chemotherapy, rise to the defense of the local rescue teams: “The girl made a mistake when she tried to cross that river, she paid the highest price of all” (168). It is then that the girl’s mother, dressed in black, rises to address the meeting. She pleads to the parents in the crowd—nothing, she says, is more important than our children, not even the river. She appeals to them as Christians—it is not Ruth’s body in the river, it is also her soul, and she deserves a burial. According to the mother’s faith, until the body is buried, the soul languishes in Purgatory. The townspeople are moved by the mother’s sincerity. All Luke can do is quote verbatim the federal legislation that protects the river, but he knows he has lost. They vote to try the dam. Luke is escorted out of the meeting.
Maggie drives her father home. Before he gets out, he makes a plea for Maggie’s forgiveness: “Your Momma forgave me. Your brother with the most right to be hard-hearted, he forgave me. But you ain’t” (176). To herself, Maggie dismisses this plea as little more than a cynical pitch for forgiveness by a dying man. She says nothing as he climbs out of the car.
She returns to the community center. There are only a few locals left. Allen, in a moment of unexpected honesty, looks straight at Maggie and declares that he is falling in love with her. He’s uncertain how to handle his emotions. He wants the two of them to spend the night together. Maggie agrees. Later, as she waits for Allen to come to her room, she thinks that perhaps the ghost of Allen’s wife is watching her preparing to make love to her husband: “Or perhaps the dead were beyond such concerns” (180).
Part 2, Chapters 6-7 Analysis
Even as the town begins to move toward recovering the body of the dead girl, we begin to move toward recovering (or to borrow from Rash’s Christian vocabulary, resurrecting) the walking dead: both Maggie and Allen. Buried for too long in regrets that neither can bring themselves to let go of and trapped in deep guilt for accidents they could not have prevented, both Maggie and Allen edge toward recovery in these two critical chapters. Theirs is an emotional and psychological evolution that Rash parallels with the town’s decision to go ahead with the engineering project that they hope will free the body.
For both troubled characters, resurrection begins with honest confrontation with their past and communication of that past with a sympathetic other. Like Ruth by herself lost to the river, the self alone is insufficient. Indeed, we are surrounded by the synergy of support: friends, congregations, rescue teams, and family. Allen shares his guilt over the accident that claimed his family; Maggie begins to sort through her levels of emotional heartache associated with both her father and her former lover. Both characters use the opportunity of sharing to explore deep heartache they have long opted to ignore, content (to borrow from Rash’s metaphor) to be lost in the river of their troubled and troubling past. And there is the phone call from Ben on a rescue mission of his own, reaching out to his sister in his effort to bring her the peace he has found. He counsels her to get involved with their father’s last weeks, certain that his death without that effort will leave his sister emotionally dead for the rest of her life.
As the town’s complicated rescue efforts suggest and the eloquent testimony of Ruth’s Christian mother reveal, there is nothing easy or quick about resurrection. Maggie’s movement toward rescue is halting. She flat out rejects her father’s offer to talk; she refuses to even consider helping her brother tend to their father, despite the inconvenience to Ben, who lives across the country. It will take a lot more dynamite to dislodge her from the past. For now, the novel hints that recovery is at least possible in her movement toward love. Rash is no sentimentalist. He does not sprinkle pixie dust over Allen and Maggie—she is no princess, he is no prince, nor does their movement toward spending the night together herald love. Rather, we are given what Maggie describes as she waits for Allen as “the onset of love” (179). That is at best promising. Indeed, moments later, Maggie is dwelling again on the past (this time thinking what the ghost of Allen’s wife). Her thoughts indicate, for the first time, that perhaps ghosts do not have that sort of reach and the past is just that. The night before the narrative moves to the river and the actual resurrection of Ruth Kowalsky, that thought provides us with the first hope that Maggie will end the narrative moving toward a new life now among the living.
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