Empire Falls

no more foolish than most men, I suppose, and yet you’ll never guess what he was up to when I met him. He was actually engaged in altering the flow of this very river. Spent a small fortune dynamiting channels and building guide walls and levees upstream, not to mention bribing state officials to allow all of this, simply so trash wouldn’t collect along our bank. He died imagining he’d succeeded, too, so how’s that for folly?”
    Miles shrugged, far too miffed with the old woman to pretend much interest in the arrogance of the rich.
    “But now the river’s gone back to doing what it wants, and what it wants is to wash up dead animals and all manner of trash on my nice lawn. That’s the lovely odor you noticed when you sat down. Which is my point. Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice. People speak of selfishness, but that’s another folly, because of course there’s no such thing. It’s a point I could never make your dear mother comprehend. In her own way she was like my late husband, except it was always human rivers she was trying to redirect.”
    Miles pretended to examine the scratch Timmy had given him on the back of his hand, a ragged tear that had already puffed up along its length, stinging and itching at the same time. It was probably true that Grace Roby had been foolish enough to believe she could change lives. No doubt she’d married Max with this very idea in mind. There was a difference, though. Her purpose was never to change the course of rivers so the garbage wouldn’t wash up on her shores. He considered making this distinction to Mrs. Whiting and immediately thought better of it. “You might’ve mentioned that Cindy was home,” he said.
    “She wanted to surprise you,” the old woman said, bending down to pick up something underneath the round table. To Miles’s astonishment, it was Timmy the Cat. There were times when he suspected there must be two of the little beast, since she never seemed to pass from one place to another but simply materialized in the middle of things. The screen door, Miles noted, was still shut. How had she gotten out, then crossed the wide expanse of manicured lawn without his noticing?
    Miles wiped away the blood with his handkerchief, eyeing Timmy warily and wondering, as he always did, why anyone would keep such a homicidal animal when there was a perfectly good river right out their back door. Timmy’s previous owner had had the right idea. At the moment, however, Timmy looked anything but homicidal. She burrowed under her mistress’s bosom and began to purr loudly, studying Miles with feline indifference, her eyelids closing slowly, as if heavy with sleep, then opening again to reveal urine-yellow orbs. “Which of them scratched you, my daughter or this one?”
    “I wish to God you’d put her down,” he said, having offered on numerous occasions to attend to the task himself. “And I don’t mean on the ground, either.”
    “Dear boy”—the old woman smiled—“when you’re upset, you’re careless with your pronouns. I assume you’re referring to the cat. Do correct me if I’m mistaken.”
    Miles sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve upset her. I didn’t mean to—”
    “Poor Miles,” Mrs. Whiting said. “You have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. Surely you know you’re not responsible for my daughter’s sad life. You were just a little boy when she had her accident.”
    In fact, that terrible event was one of his earliest and most vivid memories. Miles hadn’t seen the child run over, but people had talked about the accident for weeks, and the images lingered much longer in his horrified mind. The car had struck and then dragged the little girl, crushing both of her legs and fracturing her pelvis. She’d sustained serious head trauma as well, slipping into a coma shortly after she was hospitalized, and for several weeks it had appeared that she would surely die.
    The authorities conducted a frantic and prolonged search for the bright green Pontiac that had been reported speeding away from the scene. Miles still remembered how everyone in Empire Falls who owned a Pontiac had fallen under suspicion. At first it was assumed that the driver was probably local, because the accident took place on the Whitings’ side of the Iron Bridge. Back then there hadn’t been much on that side of the