Go as a River: A Novel

Wilson Moon is an Indigenous American teenager who escapes to Iola by train after working in a coal mine in Dolores. The mysteries of his family and the community connections of his tribe are never revealed in the novel, though the sheriff discovers that he ran away from a boarding school for Indigenous children in Albuquerque. Wil has dark, gentle eyes as “shiny as a raven’s wing” (6), tan skin, and straight black hair, and he is muscular from manual labor. Wil is characterized as being sweet and kind but is also physically and mentally tough from his years of living nomadically and dealing with violence that is motivated by racism. He doesn’t pick a fight with Victoria’s brother, Seth, but when Seth attacks him directly, he succeeds in defending himself. When the reward is later posted for his arrest, he chooses to pursue his love of Victoria rather than leaving town for his own safety. As a result, a local boy named Forrest Davis brutally murders him in a hate crime while Seth watches after having tipped him off to Wil’s location. Wil’s character arc in the story represents the greater history of forced Indigenous migration that the events of the novel often reference, either directly or indirectly, thus exemplifying yet another aspect of The Damaging Legacy of  Racism.

Much of Wil’s character is revealed through flashbacks to his and Victoria’s brief romance. Victoria remembers him as being sensitive and in possession of almost magical powers, such as his ability to massage her sprained ankle to health and his ability to seemingly bring Ruth-Alice's stillborn puppy back to life. This latter feat provides Victoria with crucial information that she later uses to save Lukas’s life at the moment of his birth. In this way and others, Victoria uses Wil’s wisdom to guide her after his death, for she draws upon his knowledge to navigate the wilderness and uses his old hut as shelter when she runs away from home. However, it is his approach to life that affects Victoria the most, pushing her to move forward through her grief and loss. This dynamic is most fully expressed in the moment when she holds dirt in both hands, echoing her memory of Wil, who “rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars” (12). Victoria therefore carries Wil’s legacy and memory on after his tragic death in the first part of the novel. 

Seth is Victoria’s younger brother and the main antagonist in the novel. He is volatile and menacing and is “built like a boxer in body and temper” (16). His instability and violent nature are apparent from a young age. The two people who once had a calming influence on Seth, his mother and his cousin Cal, are both killed in an accident while he is still a child. Victoria, still a child herself, attempts to step into their place and “save Seth from his own mischief” (18), but she fails to hold him in check. Despite feeling that she and Seth are “eternally and mysteriously linked” (47) through their shared family trauma, Victoria despises Seth’s hateful attitude and destructive behavior. As a teenager, he and his friends threaten her, rattling her door handle at night when they are drunk, and Victoria’s fear of Seth and anger at his behavior increase as she grows into adolescence. As the narrative states, her “abhorrence for Seth was raw and ragged as a thistle, having grown a little sharper each day” (17). When Seth betrays Wil’s location to Forrest Davis, leading to Wil’s murder, both Victoria and their father believe that he is guilty of murder himself. Years later, Seth explains that he was a witness to the crime but did not carry it out himself, but Victoria still cannot forgive him for his part in it. When Victoria leaves Iola for her new home in Paonia, she severs her connection to Seth, deciding that “he was part of my before. He simply did not exist to me anymore” (282).

Victoria and Seth have different reactions to loss and journeys of grief that create their adult identities, acting as foils to each other. Seth’s anger sets him on a path of violence, and after his mother’s death, he loses his capacity for empathy. Seth’s split identity is symbolized through his mother’s two ornamental crosses. One is made of broken glass, which Seth destroyed in rage as a boy, and the other is made of sticks, which Seth created as an apology to his mother. Victoria laments the lost part of Seth that she once knew as a child. When Seth returns to Iola as an adult, he has been beaten down by a life of crime and violence and appears weathered, with shaking hands and "a long white scar puckering the skin of one cheek” (183). He is desperate for a connection to Victoria and the landscape of his youth, but Victoria is unable to forgive him for his crime. Through the siblings’ opposing characters, the novel examines the healing power of love and connection as a way through grief. While Victoria’s love of Wil moves her forward with less fear, and motherhood strengthens her, Seth lives his life isolated and becomes stuck in his boyhood malignance, broken with grief.