Wanting Radiance: A Novel by Karen Salyer McElmurray

Author:Karen Salyer McElmurray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Russell Wallen

Wellsprings

1957

15

Flights above the Earth

The first time he saw her he was in the diner and hungry. He’d been hungry ever since he set foot in that little town, the one called Radiance. It was summer, and hot, and the blue of the sky never changed, not a cloud to cover them as they took down trees and drug logs and piled them neat. They were land clearers, and that was that, but he wanted more and he knew it. He’d get his own rig, one of the boys said, but Russell wanted more than that. Wanted his own men to boss, his own company at the very least. He’d been looking at maps of out West, the possibilities for copper and the richest veins of uranium they’d ever seen. He’d looked at photos of the factories in Willette, New Mexico. Foreman, at least. That was part of what left him hungry, the next and next and next of all his plans. And a man shall have dominion over the earth. He woke hearing those words and he knew it was his daddy talking, after all this time. Memories made him hungry for all he still didn’t want to be, all that he’d left.

When he saw her at the counter lunch place in Radiance he was not surprised, and yet he was. Her blue-black hair hung on either side of her face as she leaned in to cards spread on the table in the corner, her studying them so hard that when she did look up and meet his eyes, he almost jumped out of his skin.

When he made his way toward the booth where she was, he left his body, looking at her as she pushed her hair aside so that he saw the full of her beautiful face. No other word for it than beautiful, but it was her hands that he remembered later. Slender hands shuffling the odd cards spread in front of her, the pictures of fire and towers. Hands like wind and all things thin and fast. He just stood, wondering where he was for a little, lost somewhere between the door open onto the hot sun of the street outside and the red-and-steel of the counter. He tipped his hat to her. He didn’t know what else to do, because he was lost already. Picked up and set back down inside a dream he’d long wanted to unremember.

He’d had that dream most of his life—details of it rearranged, gone—but he would never forget the first time he dreamed it. He’d grown up in a little Georgia town called Oceanus where he’d loved fighting, pocketknives, and playing in the swampy alley behind their house. A factory dumped old tires and chemicals there, and they settled on the water like green light so that at ten years old he told himself he’d seen the power of heaven. But in the dream he had later on, he wasn’t in some factory-made Georgia swamp. He was in a place where the land was hard, dry.

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