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 8-10 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
It is raining in the morning. When Allen and Maggie arrive at the river site, the equipment is already there to erect the temporary dam. Although Luke and his environmentalists vociferously object, and despite concerns over the river’s swelling after a night of rain, work begins. Before Luke departs to watch the engineers from a safe perch, he confronts Maggie: “I hope this isn’t just some twisted way to get back at me for what happened between me and you years ago” (186). And then, turning to Allen, he coldly dismisses Allen’s part as some misdirected way to make up to his dead daughter.
The work on the river begins. Townspeople, as well as local business owners and representatives of an array of state government offices, ring the river. A helicopter hovers overhead. Upstream, along the riverbank, Ruth’s mother waits alone. A bulldozer moves in, and the polyurethane walls of the temporary dam are fitted into the rocks with supports. Slowly, the river recedes, pressing against the A-frame dam. The current proves stronger than the work crews anticipated. The dam bows against the river pressure. The engineers, however, reassure the local rescue team that the dam will hold and that pulling out the girl’s body should take no more than two minutes. The Mosely brothers have the go-ahead to dive, but only Randy agrees to do such dangerous work: “Got to,” he says to his brother.
When Randy moves into the river, however, the dam collapses, first the middle section and then the two side flaps. The collapse sends a massive, powerful wave over the rescue site, swamping Randy. Randy’s brother runs to the riverbank and searches the swirling tailwaters for any sign of his brother. He makes a move to go into the subsiding waters himself, but the sheriff and the deputy restrain him. His brother, he realizes, is lost.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Reeling from the river catastrophe, the engineers initially recommend trying the temporary dam again, that the conditions in the river would only worsen. Maggie, however, returns to the hotel. Watching the rescue operations brought back memories of when her grandfather died, and she and her brother had run off to the river. It is then she remembers a tender moment when her father retrieved them and, far from yelling at them, uncharacteristically said, “You all know better than to come down here alone […] It would near about kill your daddy if one of his babies was to get hurt” (211). At the hotel, Allen tries to comfort her, but Maggie is too distant, thinking about that memory.
Wracked by a headache, Maggie walks to the convenience store for aspirin. There, she is told that a memorial service will be held the next morning at the river site, despite the hazardous conditions. Before she heads back to the hotel, she drives out to see her father. The two talk about the river accident. Maggie reassures her father, “I want things better between us” (216). That night, she dreams of a face staring up at her from the murky bottom of the river—slowly the water clears and, startled, Maggie recognizes her own face emerging from the water.
The following morning, even as the engineering team gathers to mull over trying again to dam the river, the town gathers at the river for Randy’s memorial service. The local minister leads the crowd in a prayer for guidance in times of trial before Maggie’s aunt, her eyes swollen with tears, sings two verses of “Shall We Gather at the River,” a Christian gospel standard that draws images from Revelation to suggest that, at the end of time, God’s love will flow from His throne like a generous, crystal river to wash clean the sanctified. Her voice is powerful and echoes off the cliff walls; the song moves the crowd. The preacher reassures them of the Easter promise of resurrection, that their prayers will raise Randy’s soul from the river. And the minister adds their prayers will raise the dead girl as well “body and soul into the light” (223).
When the engineering team recommends waiting, perhaps for weeks, to try a rescue again, Ronny takes matters into his own hands. Before anyone can stop him, he pulls three dynamite sticks out of his backpack, quickly lights them with his cigarette lighter, and tosses them into the rocks on the right side of the falls. The explosion shakes the ground and sends up a thundering geyser. The preacher stares into the churning pool in horror as the bodies of both Randy and Ruth break the river’s churning surface.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
Months later, Maggie boxes up her father’s belongings after his death. She admits that, although she tended to him dutifully in his last months, they had struggled to reconcile. The ghosts of their past were difficult to quiet. She is content, however, with their “tentative, sideways gestures of reconciliation” (234). Before she drives out of town to return to Columbia, she pauses on the bridge over the Tamassee. The river, she says, does not acknowledge Ruth or Randy: the two are “now and forever lost in the river’s vast and generous unremembering” (237).
Part 2, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
For all Rash’s poetic perceptions of the wilderness and the river for their metaphoric and symbolic import, the presentation of the engineering work at the river site in Chapter 8 is as meticulous as it is careful and scientifically accurate. We understand the complexity of the attempted rescue and the precarious position of the girl’s body pinched between rocks just below the surface near the raging falls. The temporary dam is not a mere metaphor. This is the voice of Maggie the journalist, the photographer capturing events with precision and clarity. Like the ring of gawkers from the town, we watch as the engineering team carefully lowers the flexible structure into place; we see the need to drill into the rocks for the supporting poles; and most grippingly, we witness the rapidly building pressure from the rain-swollen river that eventually caves the structure and dooms Randy Moseley.
Rash delivers the chapter without the ornamental, even lyrical, detailing of the earlier chapters. Chapter 8 is more journalistic and reportorial. Indeed, when the dam walls collapse, there is no theatrical emotionalism—more the precise, careful observation of a photojournalist. The chapter also recalls Allen’s work in Africa. Much like the reports Allen filed from the brutal refugee camps of Rwanda, accounts that were at once objective and yet revealed the emotional complexities of the camps, this chapter works to both distance us and immerse us in the river site catastrophe.
Notably, the pastor decides to hold the memorial service for Randy Moseley, not in the Damascus Pentecostal Church but rather out in the wilderness along the river. He is not prepared for what happens. We recall the words of Luke Miller during the community meeting: if you go into the wilderness, you must play by its rules and accept its terms absolutely. So even as Chapter 9 turns the narrative to Christian spirituality, it shows how little value the wilderness puts in the complicated hope that Christianity traditionally offers through the elaborate metaphors of resurrection. The service is spare and somber; the hymn’s language is soaring and affirmative; the pastor’s words, promising eternal life, are radiant and uplifting: “Randy Moseley, our brother in Christ, may be in the river,” the preacher intones while standing calf-deep in the river, “but if God wills it he will rise from it this morning and be among us […] And this child who lies with him […] Lord, raise her too, body and soul into the light” (222, 223).
It is the traditional logic of how Christians both accept and deny death all at once. Nature, however, only knows two types of matter: the living and the dead. Nature confirms no real relevant data on the entire construct of a soul. Even as we listen to the gospel hymn sung at the river, even as the saints gather at the river, the river cannot abide by the pleasant poetry of Christianity.
Without conscience, without logic, without any operating system at all, the river has already killed a child and a selfless river rescuer. If Christianity struggles for explanation and accountability and if that is how the Appalachian people maintain their optimism while dealing with the vicissitudes of the nature, Rash is not so easily swayed. If you want resurrection, he says, so be it. Dynamite the river and the river, will resurrect the bodies, bloated and decomposing. Randy and Ruth indeed rise and join the congregation. That, Rash affirms, is nature’s resurrection. It’s a dark irony.
Rash understands that death is never the last word in nature. We close the novel six months later. It is autumn, and Maggie boxes up the last of her father’s clothes, preparing to depart Tamassee after his death and return to Columbia. Their last months together helped Maggie—her epiphany that her father did care about her enabled her to spend these last months nursing her father. Rash resists sentimentalizing the father-daughter reunion. Nor do we get any information about the relationship between Maggie and Allen.
Rash is too much of a realist to pretend Maggie can somehow miraculously heal her heart. Maggie’s heart is scarred, and, like her brother’s disfigured face, those scars will never entirely heal. But at last, like her brother, Maggie has begun to understand how to live with the scars, her complicated and painful past now part of her decision to begin to unremember, the phrase taken from the prayer she whispers on the bridge over the Tamassee on her way out of town that the river will take Ruth Kowalsky and Randy Moseley into its “vast and generous unremembering” (237). She is at last pulled from the riptide of her past. She is at last rescued.
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