Empire Falls

down. Generations of Whitings had been flushing dyes and other chemicals, staining the riverbank all the way to Fairhaven, a community that could scarcely complain, given that its own textile mill had for decades exhibited an identical lack of regard for its downstream neighbors. Complaints, C.B. knew, inevitably led to accusations, accusations to publicity, publicity to investigations, investigations to litigation, litigation to expense, expense to the poorhouse .
    Still, this particular dumping could not be allowed to continue. A sensible man, Charles Beaumont Whiting arrived at a sensible conclusion. At the end of a second hour spent kneeling at the river’s edge, he concluded that he had an enemy all right, and it was none other than God Himself, who’d designed the damn river in such a way—narrow and swift-running upstream, widening and slowing at Empire Falls—that all manner of other people’s shit became Charles Beaumont Whiting’s. Worse, he imagined he understood why God had chosen this plan. He’d done it, in advance, to punish him for leaving his best self in Mexico all those years ago and, as a result, becoming somebody who could be mistaken for his father .
    These were unpleasant thoughts. Perhaps, it occurred to C.B., it was impossible to have pleasant ones so close to a decomposing moose. Yet he continued to kneel there, the river’s current burbling a coded message he felt he was on the verge of comprehending. In truth, today’s were not the first unpleasant thoughts he’d been visited by of late. Ever since he’d decided to build the new house, his sleep had been troubled by dreams that would awaken him several times a night, and sometimes he found himself standing at the dark window of his bedroom looking out over the grounds of the Whiting mansion with no memory of waking up and crossing the room. He had the distinct impression that the dream—whatever it had been about—was still with him, though its details had fled. Had he been in urgent conversation with someone? Who?
    During the day, when his mind should’ve been occupied by the incessant demands of two factories’ day-to-day operations, he often and absentmindedly studied the blueprints of the hacienda, as if he’d forgotten some crucial element. Last month, his attention had grown so divided that he’d asked his father to come down from the paper mill to help out one day a week, just until the house was finished. Now, down by the river, his thoughts disturbed, perhaps, by the proximity of rotting moose, he began to doubt that building this new house was a good idea. The hacienda, with its adjacent artist’s studio, was surely an invitation to his former self, the Charles Beaumont Whiting—Beau, his friends had called him there—he’d abandoned in Mexico. And it was this Beau, it now occurred to him, with whom he’d been conversing in all those dreams. Worse, it was for this younger, betrayed self that he was building the hacienda. He’d been telling himself that the studio would be for his son, assuming he would one day be fortunate enough to have one. This much rebellion he’d allowed himself. The studio would be his gift to the boy, an implicit promise that no son of his would ever be forced by necessity or loyalty to betray his truest destiny. But of course, he now realized, all this was a lie. He’d wanted the studio for himself, or rather for the Charles Beaumont Whiting thought to be either dead or living a life of poetry and fornication in Mexico. Whereas he in fact was living a life of enforced duty and chastity in Empire Falls, Maine. On the heels of this stunning realization came another. The message the river had been whispering to him as he knelt there all afternoon was a single word of invitation. “Come,” the water burbled, unmistakable now. “Come … come … come …”
    That very evening C. B. Whiting brought his father and old Elijah out to the building site. Up to this point he’d been secretive about the house without comprehending why. Now he understood. He and Honus sat his grandfather, who hadn’t been out of the carriage house in a month, on a tree stump, where he instantly fell into a deep, restful, flatulent sleep, while C.B. showed his father in and around the frames and arches of the new house. Yes, he admitted, it was going to be some damn Mexican sort of deal. The detached structure, he explained, would be a guest house, which, in fact, he’d decided that afternoon, it