“Maybe that can be changed as well.”

“It would be nice to believe that, but human history argues otherwise.”

Luke fixed his eyes on mine, and this time I did not avoid his gaze.

“You getting sentimental on me? Or are you just a little sweet on Hemphill? I see the way you lean in to catch his words, the way you keep glancing upstream to make sure he’s still there. You can’t fool me. I know you too well.”

“Maybe I’m not the same person I was eight years ago.”

“I think you are,” Luke said. “You just conceal it better now.”

I looked across the river at Luke’s companion. At her age I would have had my eye on Luke if he were talking to another woman, but she was lying on her stomach reading a book. “To answer your question, maybe it’s just that I’m capable of some basic human emotions.”

“What basic human emotions are you talking about? Greed, hate, fear? Those tend to predominate, from what I’ve seen of the world.”

“There are others. Just because you don’t possess them doesn’t mean another person can’t.”

Luke stood up, ran his fingers through his hair. “Like love,” he said. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“Maybe so.”

“I know more about love than you do,” he said, looking not at the blond but at the Tamassee.

“A river’s not human, Luke.”

“No, it’s something better. A human being’s puny compared to a river.” He raised his eyes from the river. “And maybe that’s the purest kind of love, Maggie, because I don’t expect the river to love me back. There was a time you knew these things.” His voice softened. “Maybe you’ve forgotten I did an extended tour of duty in the lovers-of-mankind brigade. And that I did it on the front lines.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said.

At night or when a hard rain made the river too high to run, we used to stay in the cabin and read. Luke had nailed four bookshelves together, and the shelves and the books they held covered the back wall. Luke claimed he could educate me better than a university could. And maybe he did, because the books I read affected me in a way assigned texts in college never had.

My family had lived in Oconee County for over two hundred years. Seven generations of Glenn eyes had opened and closed in this place, but it took writers such as William Bartram and Horace Kephart, men from other parts of the country, to reveal what had surrounded me all my life. Luke tutored me on the river as well, explaining not just about eddy lines and hydraulics but also the watershed’s plant and wildlife. He taught me how mountain laurel leaves were glossy and rhododendron weren’t, how on mink tracks you could see the claws where on otters you saw only the pads.