Black River: A Novel

By S.M. Hulse

This novel of sorrow and suspense, set in rural Montana, is “a complex and powerful story—put Black River on the must-read list” (The Seattle Times).
 
Wes Carver returns to his hometown—Black River, Montana—with two things: his wife’s ashes and a letter from the parole board. The convict who once held him hostage during a prison riot is up for release.
 
For years, Wes earned his living as a correction officer and found his joy playing the fiddle. But the uprising shook Wes’s faith and robbed him of his music; now he must decide if his attacker should walk free.
 
With “lovely rhythms, spare language, tenderness, and flashes of rage,” S. M. Hulse shows us the heart and darkness of an American town, and one man’s struggle to find forgiveness in the wake of evil (Los Angeles Review of Books).   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780544309296

S.M. Hulse

S. M. Hulse’s first novel, Black River, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, an ABA Indies Introduce title, an Indie Next pick, and the winner of the Reading the West Book Award. Hulse received her MFA from the University of Oregon and was a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. An avid horsewoman, she has lived throughout the American West.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2016

Copyright © 2015 by Sarah M. Hulse

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hulse, S. M.

Black River / S. M. Hulse.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-544-30987-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-544-57023-8 (pbk.)

1. Widowers—Fiction. 2. Correctional personnel—Fiction. 3. Stepfamilies—Fiction. 4. Prisoners—Fiction. 5. Parole—Fiction. 6. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 7. Montana—Fiction. 8. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.U436B53 2015

813'.6—dc23

2014027025

Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

Cover photograph © Robin Carleton / Aurora Open / Corbis

Author photograph © Rick Singer Photography

eISBN 978-0-544-30929-6

v2.1215

For my mother and father

PART I

White Light

The music, she thinks, is supposed to comfort. It’s meant as a kindness; they are relentlessly kind here. It comes from a small plastic stereo the nurse switches on after helping Claire onto the bed. Claire thinks she recognizes the melody, and feels mildly ashamed for not being able to put a name to it. Wesley would know.

He’s outside, in the waiting room. Not reading. Not watching the endlessly looping cable news. Certainly not placing pieces in the unchanging, half-completed jigsaw puzzle near the registration desk. No, Wesley goes still at hard moments. Sets his jaw, lets his features stiffen into an impassive mask, quiets his hands. If some well-meaning person who isn’t wearing scrubs or a white coat tries to say hello or offer a commiserating smile, he either won’t notice or will pretend he hasn’t. But he’ll be watching the comings and goings of every nurse, every doctor. Every opening of the door leading to where she is.

The music isn’t comforting. Too many violins and horns and drums going all at once. Cacophony.

Years ago they didn’t offer sedation for bone marrow biopsies, only lidocaine. Her first time, while Claire lay face-down on the bed waiting for numbness to replace the stinging in her skin, a nurse who looked like a child placed the four-inch trephine needle on a tray in Claire’s line of sight.

Maria, Claire’s doctor had said, we try not to let the patients see those.

Like a meat skewer, Claire decided. Or a knitting needle.

Afterward Wesley asked her if the pain had been bad, and she lied and said not really. He has never liked to be told even gentle untruths, so he doesn’t ask anymore.

She likes simple melodies. A series of single notes that leave a trail she can follow.

Afterward they help her to one of the reclining chairs in the infusion suite and get Wesley. Without asking, he takes a chair from the nurses’ station and rolls it to her side. His hair is backlit by the blue light of a fish tank behind him. He asks how long they have to wait before the nurses will let them leave—it’s a question he asks just for the sake of speech; he knows this routine as well as she does—and she says twenty minutes. She is about to tell him she’s cold, but he’s already standing, moving across the room to the heated cupboard with the warmed blankets folded inside.

Wesley hates coming here, but he now occupies this place as though it is their home, with none of the deference he showed the staff in those first days and weeks. They have become used to the hospital in different ways, she and her husband. Claire feels less like herself here. Meeker. She lets people usher her from room to room, guide her through the stages of her illness. Wesley treats the hospital as territory to be conquered. He is impatient, uninterested—for the first time in his life—in policies or procedures. Wesley is one of those Montana men whose mouths hardly move when they speak, for whom words are precious things they are loath to give up. Here, though, she has heard him raise his voice at the nurses’ station loud enough that she can hear him in her room down the hall. Here he has interrogated and threatened and—once—even begged. Sometimes, when he thinks she is asleep, he prays aloud. He is confrontational with God.

One of the nurses breezes by, depositing two cans of orange juice on the table. More of that maddening courtesy: snacks for the spouse as well as the patient, unasked. For a moment neither Claire nor Wesley moves, and then she begins to unwrap herself from the blanket.

Don’t, he says. I’ll get them.

Wesley, she says. The cans have pull rings on top. He can’t manage pull rings. He fumbles with one anyway, his skewed fingers unable to get enough purchase on the ring to lift it. His face doesn’t betray him—sometimes Claire thinks he trained all the expressions out of his face when he was working at the prison—but she watches the skin over his swollen knuckles blanch and knows it hurts him.

Wesley, please.

The can slips from between his fingers and clatters against the tile, rolls under her chair. He leans forward to pick it up, but stops halfway, bent, eyes in shadow. Claire reaches from beneath the blanket and puts her hand on his bowed head, brushes his hair back from his forehead. It’s reddish blond, a color more suited to a little boy than a grown man.

Leave it, she tells him. It tastes tinny anyway.

Claire hopes that when Wesley dies, it will be quick. Heart attack. Stroke. Aneurysm. She cannot imagine him with a lingering illness like this one, cannot imagine him subjecting himself to the doctors and nurses, bearing whatever necessary pain they might inflict. Not after the riot.

It is always the two of them waiting. Waiting for the lab results to come back, for Claire’s name to be called, for the drugs to drip into her veins. Waiting for remission. Waiting for news, good or bad. Now they are waiting in one of the exam rooms in her oncologist’s office, on the bench beside the empty countertop where he will plunk down his laptop, open the lid, tilt the screen toward them. Wesley is sitting nearest the counter, so his body will be between hers and the doctor’s numbers. The verdict.

She aims her eyes out the window. The September light has just begun its slow fade from summer-bright, and its gentle cast gilds the edges of the buildings downtown. Claire has never grown to love Spokane, has never come to think of it as her home. It is too obviously fallen from grace, a city with grand but dilapidated architecture and residents who speak fondly of a golden age none of them remember. And the mountains in the distance are so small. Claire misses the mountains in Black River, their immediacy and immensity. These hills are shades of what she left behind.

I hate this fucking clock, Wesley says quietly. The first time she’s heard him swear in thirty years of marriage. Claire looks. An ugly red plastic rim, a pharmaceutical logo emblazoned across the face.

I suppose it was free, she says, but she knows what he means. It’s a loud clock. The hand moves audibly, every second sounded. Gone.

She doesn’t worry about him. He knows how to endure.

They could be wrong, Wesley says in the truck on the way home. They’re at a red light, and the engine idles so loudly she has to strain to hear him. He says, There are other doctors. Better, maybe.

We’ve seen them, Claire says. Seattle. A bigger hospital, more doctors with more letters after their names. More treatments that weren’t quite effective enough. We knew this was coming, Wesley.

We might find someone still willing to try a second transplant.

I’m not, she says. Willing.

Her doctor was kind but honest. He used words like terminal, palliative, hospice. Claire can almost see Wesley turning the conversation over in his mind, looking for the loophole. The sun is on his side of the car, and it slices through the window, bright on his skin. Sweat beads above his upper lip, darkens the hair above his ears. She is cold all the time now, but she says, It’s getting a little warm in here, and he cracks the window.

The light turns green, but there is still a man in the road, crossing the street with a slow, swaggering gait. Wesley sinks his foot against the accelerator, cuts close behind the man, who turns just before the curb and gestures with one hand, his mouth opening, the syllables obliterated by the rush of air past the window.

No. She does worry. His father was a suicide.

Wesley turns onto their street. His fingers hang over the edge of the steering wheel, neither curved nor straight, but caught in their permanent seize. He slows the truck, eases the tires over the wide, weed-split cracks in the asphalt. Each time the truck hits one of the cracks, Claire feels it. She feels it everywhere her blood goes. When the doctors first told her there was something wrong, she lay very still at night and tried to feel the disease, the cells building up in her marrow, thickening her blood, coursing through her veins. Now there’s nothing but the pain of the illness and its treatments, always there, under and above everything else.

The house, a postwar bungalow of yellow brick, is small, though it had seemed large when they signed the papers. They put a new roof on it after the first winter, two fresh coats of paint on the trim since. A cherry tree in the yard blossoms once a year and drops sour fruit on the lawn months later. The cherries are past ripe now, black and full but still clinging to the branches.

Wesley kills the ignition, and the engine ticks. He brings his hands together, rubs one over the other. He must have clenched his fists while her doctor was talking; she should have noticed and stopped him. Claire reaches across the seat, takes his right hand in both of hers. She moves her fingertips over his knuckles, down the healed bones of his fingers, around each outsized joint. Coaxes his pain away.

I want to go to Black River, she says. She looks at him, and he stares through the windshield at the fence. The muscle in front of his ear jumps once, twice.

All right.

She lets go of his right hand, holds her palms out for his left. I don’t mean for a trip, she says.

The bench seat’s springs creak as he twists to give her his other hand.

I know.

She will miss the cherry tree.

Wesley doesn’t look at her the way he used to. Now it’s all half glances, stolen looks when her own eyes are directed elsewhere. When he does look at her directly, he maintains absolute eye contact. Looks for her soul, avoids her body. Claire understands. When she goes into the bathroom now, she leaves the light off. In the truck, she doesn’t pull the sunshade down even if the sun burns right in her eyes, because the mirror set into it finds the worst of her: the white glare of her scalp through tufted hair, the taut patch of scar tissue below her collarbone, where her port sits beneath the skin. When her older sister, Madeline, was feeling cruel when they were girls, she would tell Claire that she looked like a German milkmaid, all rounded curves and thick blond hair. Claire, eleven or twelve and oblivious to the sensuous potential of such an image, would suck in her cheeks and make a futile effort to comb her hair straight and sleek. Now she must work to find the milkmaid in her reflection, and even then it’s mostly imagination.

Claire leaves most of the chores to Wesley, but she calls her son herself.

Of course you can come, Dennis says. For as long as you want.

She can hear the boy in him then, the wishful thinking. As if what she wants has anything to do with it. Wesley’s coming, too, she tells him.

He hardly pauses, but she hears the edge come into his voice. That’s fine, he says.

He’s my husband, Denny. I love him.

I know, Mom. I said it’s fine. He’s angry now, talking through his teeth.

I want to be with you, she says. You and Wesley both. When it’s time.

She wishes she had said, When I die. When my heart stops beating. When this disease takes the little I have left and kills me. He needs to hear it. He needs to understand. But even Wesley still says if something happens. If. Never when.

Something she has never told Wesley: when they left Black River eighteen years ago, without Dennis—when Wesley made her choose—Claire didn’t go because she needed him. She didn’t go because she thought he was right. She went because she knew her son, even at sixteen, would be all right without her. She couldn’t say the same about her husband.

Wesley is glad to have tasks. Over the next days, he approaches each with single-minded purpose: calling her doctors here, calling the hospice there, arranging time off work (Claire suspects this is harder than he reports; he has already taken so much). He counts out her medications, checks labels, calls in refills. Lays out more clothes than she’ll ever wear. Sorts through photographs and mementos, wraps everything she could possibly want in layers of newsprint and bubble wrap. He stacks the things he packs in their bedroom, against the far wall. Two suitcases, one duffel, three boxes. He is packing for the time he hopes she will have. For more time than the doctors have suggested she will have. Is this delusion, she wonders, or denial?

He sits on the edge of the bed. We can go tomorrow, he says.

I’m glad.

They’re predicting sun the whole way. Ought to be a pretty drive.

Where’s your fiddle?

A sharp look. What?

You haven’t put your fiddle with the other things. You have to take your fiddle.

Claire.

Get it.

He stands, slowly. Goes to the closet and reaches to the top shelf, pulls the worn chipboard case down and sets it on the foot of the bed. His fingers leave clean black streaks in the dust on the lid, linger over the tarnished brass clasps at either end of the case. He speaks without looking at her. Ain’t no reason to bring this.

Don’t leave it behind, she says. He won’t come back after.

Something else she has never told him: she still wonders if she made the right choice.

Sometimes she can’t put it out of her mind. She’s dying. Not Hey, we’re all dying from the day we’re born, but really dying. Here. Now. When she can’t stop the panic in time, when it threatens to take hold and overwhelm her, there’s one way to hold it at bay: she thinks about her last moments. About what will happen when death arrives. People see things. Loved ones. A tunnel. White light. Science thinks it’s explained all this. Electrical impulses. Firing synapses. Chemical reactions.

Claire doesn’t care. She’s never been a believer, and if it is only science, isn’t that wonderful, too? A built-in safety net, an evolutionary shield to protect a person at her most desperate moment. It doesn’t matter if what she experiences as she dies is real or not; what matters is that she experiences something. Claire already knows what it will be. Sound. Song. Wesley’s song. Black River. He first played it the day they met, at Harvest. It came to be his most well-known tune, though it wasn’t fast, didn’t end with impossible cascades of notes and broken strands of horsehair dangling from his bow. It was slower, wistful. Bittersweet.

Everyone loved it. Claire loved it. Wesley, though, was never quite satisfied. Every day it was the last tune he played before his fiddle went back in its case, and every day it changed. Just a bit. The changes became smaller and subtler over the years: adding a grace note, dropping a double-stop, digging his bow more deeply into a string. Each time he played it, Claire knew she was one day closer to hearing a masterpiece. And then the riot. Bobby Williams. Dust on a chipboard case.

Claire got the musical terms mixed up, always called it a lament. Wesley would shake his head. It’s an air, he’d tell her. Laments are for the dead.

Claire is the first to know that they won’t be going to Black River. She wakes in the dark with a pressure building in her chest, a hand closing on her throat. Wesley is asleep beside her, his teeth clenched tightly, the line of muscle along his jaw taut. He is never peaceful when he sleeps, and this lets her wake him without guilt.

Sit up with me, she says. The words come out more quietly than she intends, but he is awake.

You’re burning, he says, and goes to stand.

Stay, Claire says. With me. She wonders if he will. If he’ll be able to let this be.

He stays at her side all day, sits with her in bed so she can lean her body against his. He is very still. A nurse comes, one Claire doesn’t know. She is kind, and does less to Claire than she is accustomed to nurses doing. Wesley goes to the hall to talk with her. Claire cannot hear them, though they are near enough she should be able to. Wesley keeps his hand on the doorframe, and she watches it until he comes back to her. Something is wrong with his fingers.

Time becomes untrustworthy. It is day, the only one Claire remembers since waking Wesley. But her fastidious husband has more than a few hours’ worth of stubble on his face. (It is gray, not blond, and this makes her feel peculiarly sad.) And this is not the gown she wore to bed. Is it? She’s angry; if time has ever mattered, it matters now.

Breathing becomes a conscious, messy act; she is choking on her own saliva, on the mucus in her nose and mouth and lungs. There’s a strange sound in the room, a wet rattle, and at some point she realizes it is her. She’s afraid Wesley will be disgusted by these things her body is doing, but he wipes her face and strokes her hair and rests her head on his chest.

I can hear your heart, she tells him.

That’s good, he says.

For a long time the light in the room is a slow, sweet gold. And then it is dark, and Claire cannot understand how a day has gone by. (One day? More?) She wishes the window were nearer, so she could look out and see the mountains, black against black. She has always loved the mountains here.

Play for me, she says.

Wesley’s body stiffens beneath her cheek. What?

Play, she says again. Play your fiddle for me.

He sighs. A long breath like she will never have again.

Not for long, she tells him. One tune is all.

Claire . . .

Please?

A lament.

He sits on the edge of the bed and rests his fiddle on his knee, cradling the neck in his left hand. Golden varnish, unblemished ebony, the bright lines of the strings. He holds the bow loosely in his right hand, the stick lying across the bed. The horsehair leaves a fine white line of rosin on the blanket. Wesley passes his thumb lightly over the fiddle’s strings, and even Claire can hear the discordant notes, knows it isn’t in tune.

Wesley looks over his shoulder at her. What do you want to hear? he asks.

You know, she says.

Black River.

Yes.

He watches her for a long time, and it’s been thirty years—thirty years—but she cannot read his expression. She wants to tell him that the color of his fiddle is like the color of his hair, which is like the color of summer evening sun, but the thought of forming the words overwhelms her, so she closes her eyes and waits. The bed moves as Wesley shifts his weight, and Claire wants to look at him again so she can see the fiddle under his chin—he looks almost haughty when he plays, and she has always loved this about him—but she is so tired. She hears the brush of his skin against wood, the light touch of the bow as horsehair comes to rest on wound steel. The breath before the note.

She listens.

Wes Carver was sixty years old and had been a widower five days. He was in his truck, struggling up the Idaho side of Lookout Pass, not quite two hours into a four-hour trip. His fiddle was in its case on the floor, the DOC letter and his revolver in the glove compartment. And Claire’s ashes there beside him on the bench seat, in a small box wrapped with brown parcel paper and labeled with a bar code sticker. They’d warned him the package would be small, but he’d still been surprised when he signed the papers and they handed it to him.

Tractor-trailers eased into the left lane and passed him, their hazards flashing. Years ago, when Wes was still living in Black River, he’d come through here in January. Couldn’t say why anymore. The storm had been bad enough he shouldn’t have been driving—the left lane impassable, the right invisible against a snow-filled sky—but by the time he realized, it was too dangerous to pull off. At the top of the pass, at the Montana state line, he’d come upon an accident in which a little sedan had thrust itself beneath the trailer of a semi. Never saw it, most likely. Wes must’ve arrived just after the state patrol, no ambulance yet. The patrolmen were standing on the side of the road with the driver of the truck, collars turned up against the blowing snow. The way the car had folded under the trailer, there was no doubt. When he drove by at five miles an hour, Wes saw blood melting the snow beneath the union of twisted metal, illuminated by the chemical glare of the nearest flare.

Now the truck badly needed the long coasting down the Montana side of the pass. Wes took the curves a little too fast, riding close to the white line. The sun was low, streaming through the passenger window, burning at the corner of his eye. The mountains crumpled up around him, ravines and canyons everywhere, all a uniform green. A few brief moments here near the summit to see it all before descending back into the deep valleys that blinded a man to all but the path ahead or behind. (The day before she died, Claire opened her eyes just as the sun went down. A softness to her gaze. Maybe the morphine. Maybe the first haze of death. Are we still going to Black River? she’d asked. He’d put his hand over hers. Yes, he said. Of course we are.)

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn’t. All that space, waiting. Wes never could’ve planned a suicide, couldn’t have swallowed the pills or loaded the gun or climbed the trestle. But this would take only a single moment of conviction, an instant of courage that could be abandoned almost as soon as it had been summoned. The briefest contraction of the muscles in the arms, a short jerk of the wheel to the right—a few inches would do it—and then: through the low guardrail and into the air. The truck, the fiddle, the ashes, the letter. Him. Falling like flying.

He’d waited there a long time, fiddle on his collarbone, bow touched to string. Poised beside his dying and then dead wife in a mockery of something he could no longer do. His arms must have begun to ache, but he didn’t notice. In the dark it had seemed possible to stay there like that: Claire just a moment from breath; he just a moment from music.

Hearing was the last sense to go. The last filament connection to life. Dr. Harmon had told him that, and it was knowledge Wes didn’t want, knowledge

Reviews for Black River

[tstan-5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This has been getting a little Pulitzer buzz, and I can see why. Wes goes home to Black River to bury his wife and to grieve for her. He is a prickly man, not good at showing his emotions. This has made a relationship with his equally difficult stepson nearly impossible.
Wes was a prison guard at the State Penitentiary when a riot broke out in 1992, and he was tortured by a man who broke all his fingers, taking away his one true peace: playing his fiddle. Now this man is up for parole.
Add in a troubled teen with a shining musical talent and this could end up as a smarmy Lifetime movie. But this was nothing like that.
Quiet writing, like Kent Haruf, but not quite- it captured the beauty and danger of Montana's mountains, and of the people who live there. Wes is far from perfect, and often unlikable. Actually, every person in this book has flaws. But they all try, and each has at least one thing that makes him/her a better person.
Ultimately, this is about grief. Wes lost his faith when he lost his fiddle, he never really understood his father's death, his wife has passed, and his relationship with his stepson is in shambles. But, one at a time, he tries to come to terms and make what he can better. In his own, gritty, gruff Montana way. Kudos to Ms. Hulse for writing a gritty and gruff, yet tender, book that's no where near the Lifetime or Hallmark channels.
4.5 stars.

[gincam · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Black River", with its immediate sense of place, compelling storyline, and memorable characters, is a remarkable debut work from author S.M. Hulse. Like the men before him in his family, Wes Carver was a correctional officer for the Montana State Prison, which was located not far from his small home town of Black River. During a prison riot, Wes was tortured and maimed, losing his ability to play his beloved fiddle. Wes and his wife Claire eventually moved from Black River, leaving behind not only the prison, but also Claire's troubled teenaged son, Dennis. Years later, just before Claire's death from leukemia, she requests to go home to Black River. Wes complies, but Claire passes away before they can make it, and Wes travels home with the silent companionship of Claire's ashes. A tense reunion with Dennis is compounded by the upcoming parole hearing for Bobby Williams, the man who had forever changed life for Wes and his family. Can Wes live with whatever the verdict may be, even if the outcome is the unthinkable? Will he find a way to begin healing himself and finding some sense of peace, or will the cycle of violence remain unbroken? "Black River" is a quick, involving read that will leave a lasting impression.Review Copy Gratis Amazon Vine

[shazjhb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing book written by a youngish woman. Hard to believe she understood and was able to write about the pain with so much empathy. Maybe the ending needed a little "fixing".

[billiebook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I can understand why other readers loved it--it's well-written and full of dramatic moments (And death. So. Much. Death.)--but it just wasn't the right book for me.

[nyiper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was amazed at how good this was, especially when I saw the picture of the author inside the back cover, a young woman! The steady pace toward an unknown---it just builds step by step with some remarkable twists and turns as you learn what has come before.

[ffortsa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A story of loss, in so many senses of the word, and the possibility of connection. Wesley, a former corrections officer and former fiddle player, watches his wife die of leukemia, and tries to connect with his stepson, all the while dealing with the trauma of a prison riot and the prospect of parole for the man responsible. Not a spoiler - you can learn this in the first chapter or two. But oh, how it plays out, how Hulse builds each character and the rhythm of small town Montana, gives us such close access to Wesley and others. A stellar, intimate story. Not to be missed.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

fiction (modern western / human drama). I've summed this up as "men who don't talk about stuff trying to cope with modern problems" but it doesn't really do justice to the depth and richness of the writing and characters.

I think I maybe heard S.M. Hulse was about to come out with a new book (and I'd checked this one out because the reviewer had pointed out how good her first book was), but I don't see anything forthcoming right now, so perhaps I am misremembering. In any case, she is an author to look out for.

[samsattler · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Black River, S.M. Hulse’s debut novel, is one of those books that come around every so often to remind me of why I so much enjoy reading and why I am always willing to take a look at debut novels and books by new-to-me authors. It is that good. The novel tells the story of Wes and Claire Carver, man and wife, who left Black River eighteen years earlier because of what happened to them in that little Montana town. Now, Wes is back. And he really doesn’t want to be there.For generations, the best paying jobs in Black River have been inside the walls of the local prison. Many of the prison’s correction officers, in fact, have fathers who themselves once held the same jobs they are working today. Wes Carver is no exception, but for Wes it all went terribly wrong during a prison riot during which he was taken hostage by a psychopath – and tortured for 39 hours. Wes, even though he worked at the prison another two years, emerged from that experience a broken man, both physically and mentally. Then, after a near violent confrontation at the dinner table between Wes and his stepson, he and Claire leave Black River to start a new life for themselves in Spokane, Washington. Now Wes has returned to Black River for two very different reasons: to bring Claire’s ashes back to her son and to testify at the parole hearing of the man who almost tortured him to death twenty years earlier. Finally forced to confront all his old demons (including his relationship with the step-son he has barely spoken to for the past eighteen years), Wes is not having an easy time of it. Now his friends are starting to wonder which of the two tasks will destroy him first.Black River, largely told through flashbacks, is filled with interesting characters and plot twists, and its setting is so vividly rendered by Hulse that the reader gets a clear feeling of what life in such a geographically isolated and self-contained location must be like. This is a place with few secrets, a place where newcomers are not particularly welcome, a place where families have known each other for generations. And they like it that way. No, this is not a perfect novel. But it is one that I highly recommend, and one that has turned me into an S.M. Hulse fan. I can’t wait to see what she does next.

[julie10reads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was impossible to be lost in western Montana. The mountains were always there against the sky, their unchanging silhouettes as sure as any map.Driving to his hometown deep in the canyon made by mountains, retired Corrections Officer, Wes Carver feels lost. Sixty years old and widowed five days earlier, Wes is returning to appear at the parole board hearing of the convict who tortured him twenty years ago during a prison riot. Bobby Williams, claiming to have “found Jesus”, is now a Bible-reading, church-leading model inmate. Even knowing he will have to relive the trauma of his thirty-nine hours at the hands of a sadist, Wes forces himself to attend the hearing for fear Williams will be granted parole. At the same time Wes hopes to repair the rift between himself and his stepson, Dennis, who still resides in Black River. Black River puts faces on the big questions of faith and justice and reparation. What does it say about faith that a criminal can “find” it and a church-going man “lose” it? Is justice served if Billy goes free while Wes remains disabled by the physical and emotional wounds he inflicted? In her first novel S. M. Hulse draws on a harsh landscape of intimidating mountains and descending valley roads to portray the devastation of loss, softening it with the soul-saving music of Wes Carver’s fiddle. Hulse deftly inhabits the male world of stoicism, violence and punishment, wrangling out of it a searing drama certain to impress a large audience.

[tututhefirst_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The publisher whets our appetite for the story: When Wes Carver returns to Black River, he carries two things in the cab of his truck: his wife’s ashes and a letter from the prison parole board. The convict who held him hostage during a riot, twenty years ago, is being considered for release. Wes has been away from Black River ever since the riot. He grew up in this small Montana town, encircled by mountains, and, like his father before him and most of the men there, he made his living as a Corrections Officer. A talented, natural fiddler, he found solace and joy in his music. But during that riot Bobby Williams changed everything for Wes — undermining his faith and taking away his ability to play. Tutu says: If ever a book were written to bring me out of a reading funk, this one is it. S. M. Hulse, in her debut novel, has given us an anguished and compelling tale of love and regret, condemnation and forgiveness, life and death, acceptance and rejection. She sets the story in the starkness of Montana mountains, leading several reviewers to declare the book to be a "western". The theme however, is much more universal. This story of human tragedy could take place in any small town in any part of the country.Through an alternating series of flashbacks and current narrations, we follow the life of Wesley Carver, his wife Claire, his step-son Dennis, and assorted friends, co-workers, and relatives. The story of the prison riot and its impact on his life is the center piece. The theme of faith, forgiveness, goodness and evil provides the underpinnings. Watching Wes as he works through his grief over Claire's death, his feelings about the impending parole hearing for the prisoner who held him hostage, his relationship with his estranged step-son, and how he deals with the loss of the musical ability he took such joy in gives the reader a poignant tale of heart-breaking beauty.The writing is clean, poetic, full of imagery and emotion. The story is short (only 232 pages,) and well-paced, without an extra word, but with the ability to paint scenes that bring us to tears. Even the ending is exceptional. This is the best book I've read this year. I can't wait to see more by this author.

[toobusyreading · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fiddler, a prison riot, and broken relationships are the crux of this novel. I saw it classified as a “Western,” but it's a western only because it is set in Montana and there are horses and ranches in the story – not a typical western in my definition.It is a story about relationships. The characters are all flawed, some extremely so. Most are likable anyway. Even Claire, the kindest character, made a long-ago decision that had me wondering about her priorities.But the story revolves around Wes, his past and his inability to leave it behind. And although a basically good man, he has left a trail of disappointment and sorrow and anger behind him.Animals are part of the story, but it is not about animal abuse, so those who, like I, hate to read about that should be fine with this book.My only complaint is that the book sometimes seem a little too one-note, that the physical and emotional results of that prison riot, sometimes crowd out the rest of the story.Despite that nit, this is a satisfying story with terrific atmosphere and characters I cared about.I was given an advance readers copy of the book for review.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Black River by debut author S.M. Hulse was an outstanding read. An American tragedy that draws the reader in with it’s detailed rendering of a unique character. Wes Carver is a complicated, driven yet broken man. He is a hard man to understand or get close to, in fact, it appears that only one person ever has broken through the outer shell and that would be his wife, Claire, who has just passed away from cancer. Wes brings her ashes home to Black River, a small town in Montana whose claim to fame is that the state prison is located there. Wes and Claire once lived in Black River and Wes worked as a correctional officer, but 20 years ago a prison riot changed their lives. Held and tortured for 39 hours by a vicious inmate, Wes’s rage, fear and grief are still bottled up inside him. But the prison riot isn’t the only reason why Wes is scarred, he grew up in the shadow of a father who committed suicide and there was an incident with his stepson that caused great damage to the family and saw Claire and Wes move to Spokane. As Wes arrives back on the ranch that was once his home, he learns that the person responsible for his scars, burns and smashed fingers is coming up for parole. With his silent stoicism and rigid morality Wes Carver is a hard man yet we do see another side, a much gentler man who lost the ability to play his violin and express his inner soul through his music when his fingers were smashed. Black River is both harsh yet delicate in it’s portrayal of one man’s quest for grace and the author hit all the right notes. There is a great deal more to this story than I have described here, but rest assured that Black River is a wonderful story of both rage and redemption.

[katiekrug · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really want to do this book justice, but there is so much to chew on and mull over and consider, that I know I will still be thinking about it for a long time. I am not usually drawn to novels in which faith plays a central part but this portrayal of one man’s struggle and yearning for faith and the understanding of grace felt incredibly real and authentic to me. Wes Carver is a good man but one who struggles, and as such, he is an incredibly sympathetic character, even as the reader feels some frustration with him. He cares about people but can’t show it in ways that they need; he feels deep pain but his stoic exterior leads people to assume a lack of feeling; and his reticence prevents him from making the human connections that could, ultimately, be his salvation. This novel is beautifully written and somber and stark in tone but with enough hope allowed to shine through to ultimately be satisfying and worthwhile.I haven’t done the book the justice I wanted to, or that it deserves. Some books just strike the right note at the right time for a reader, and this was one such for me. I am so glad I read it and hope that more readers will give it a try. I look forward to more work by S.M. Hulse.

[brangwinn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I can’t say it better than Amazon does in its January 2015 book of the month review. How a person is shaped by the culture and landscape of his life shows so strongly in this book, as a former Montana prison guard struggles to understand his step-son and struggles with his faith as he confronts a “born-again” Christian prisoner who tortured him at the prisoner’s parole hearing.

[drmom62 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Starts slowly and then becomes pretty intense. I was disappointed with the abrupt ending.

[rdra1962 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Spare well written novel. I did not identify or really like the characters, but they were interesting and well developed. The author teases out the story very gradually, and the conversations/arguments felt very real. No happy endings, just realism and grit.