Above the Waterfall

by Ron Rash

  “What’d he do?”

  “He didn’t have to do anything. Damn it, Les, he looks like he just walked off the set of Deliverance. Besides that, he’s up there catching trout, and keeping them. How do you think our guests like that? They pay to fish and have to release their catch.”

  “I’m sure he just gets a few speckleds, not your pet rainbows and browns downstream.”

  “We’ve got guests who fish above the waterfall,” C.J. said. “They appreciate how rare native brook trout are, and rarer still every time Gerald makes some his dinner.”

  “Brook” trout instead of “speckled,” which was what C.J. had called them growing up. Something shed, same as his accent. I leaned back in my chair. C.J. and I had gotten crosswise before when he or Harold Tucker tried to tell me how to do my job.

  “Why don’t you just put it in your fancy brochures that Gerald’s there to add to the rustic experience, an authentic mountain man fishing the old-timey way.”

  C.J. had always been good at keeping his feelings to himself, but now I could almost hear his molars grinding. But it wasn’t just anger. He looked desperate.

  “This isn’t a joke, Les. I told Gerald in June not to go near that waterfall again. I put my ass on the line, instead of doing what Mr. Tucker wanted, which was to come to you. Gerald swore to my face he wouldn’t go fishing up there anymore.” C.J. grimaced and tapped the chair’s arm with a closed hand. “If I’d thought it out, I’d have turned right to come see you instead of left to Gerald’s house,” he said, as much to himself as to me. Then C.J. leaned forward, his voice soft, “Les, if this isn’t done right, I could lose my job.”

  He glanced down at his tie, then smoothed it with his hand, like the tie needed calming, not him.

  “Come on, C.J.,” I said, seriously, not joshing. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?”

  “Have you seen our parking lot? If things don’t pick up soon, Tucker will have to lay some people off.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go this afternoon but I’m not charging Gerald without a warning.”

  “Damn it, aren’t you listening?” C.J. said, raising his voice again. “He’s been warned. By the signs, by me.”

  “But not by me,” I said. “You can wait until after the end of the month and have Jarvis Crowe deal with this, but for now I’m still sheriff.”

  C.J.’s cell phone buzzed. As he took it from his pocket, I saw the puckered scar on the back of his hand, the result of a hay baler’s metal tines on a long-ago Saturday morning. C.J.’s great-uncle had made a tourniquet from a handkerchief and we’d rushed C.J. to the hospital. If your arm had gone in there it would have been ripped off and you’d have bled to death, son, the doctor had told C.J., scolding him for his carelessness. But it hadn’t been C.J. who’d been careless.

  “You don’t have to tell him anything,” C.J. said to the caller. “I’m taking care of it right now. Just let me deal with it. I’ll let Mr. Tucker know what’s going on.”

  He pocketed the phone.

  “I can’t lose my job over this, Les,” C.J. said. “My boys aren’t going to grow up like me.”

  I’d thought to go to Jink Hampton’s place first, but I raised my hands in surrender.

  “Okay. I’ll go on out there now and make it damn clear to Gerald that he will be arrested next time.”

  C.J. stood, but he didn’t leave.

  “You know this wouldn’t have happened if Gerald had sold that place two years ago. Even his nephew had the sense to know there’d never be a better offer. And now, with this recession, he’ll be lucky to get half that.”

  “I’m sure you and Tucker had only Gerald’s interests in mind.”

  “Think what you want,” C.J. said, “but I knew that a man Gerald’s age, especially one with a bad heart, would be better off with a hospital near.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, Darby inheriting less is all to the good. The only smart thing Gerald did was not to give that little prick of a nephew power of attorney. As for Gerald living longer, look what selling his farm did to your great-uncle. How long did he last in town, a month? You know what leaving a home place does to men like them. No hospital can cure that.”

  C.J. didn’t have a response, because he knew it was true.

  “Get over there, Les,” he said, and left.

  You’re smart, though you try to hide it. You can get away from this place too, be an art teacher in Charlotte or anywhere clear to Alaska.

  That’s what C.J. had told me at the start of our senior year. Since he’d come back to live here, he’d never directly said anything about me staying put, though the first time he’d been in my office he’d nodded at the Hopper painting. “With the rusty wheels and those weeds, someone might see that painting as rather symbolic, Les. Is that why you bought it?” “I didn’t buy it,” I’d answered. “Mr. Neil gave it to me when he retired, frame and all. He just remembered that in class I’d liked Hopper’s paintings.”

  I’d settled for too little in my life, C.J. believed. And maybe I had.

  Four

  The school bus pulls into the lot and children stream from it into the world. They gather around the cedar announcement board, on it the brass plaque I placed there my first day.

  HOW NEAR AT HAND IT WAS

  IF THEY HAD EYES TO SEE IT.

  —G. M. Hopkins

  I go through my usual protocol. No cameras or cell phones, not even for the teacher. Then we cross the bridge, go upstream where I show them cardinal flowers and bee balm, a mantis greenblended on a blackberry bush.

  “It can change shades of color,” I tell them and set the mantis on a dogwood limb. “If it stays, you will see.”

  I lead them to where joe-pye stems anchor low clouds of lavender.

  “Did you know flowers grew so high?” I ask.

  Solemn head shakes.

  “I bet there is something else you don’t know, that jaguars and parakeets once lived in these mountains. Most people think the parakeets have been gone for over a hundred years, but I know a man who says he saw some in 1944. I want to believe a few might still be around, don’t you?”

  The children nod.

  I show them an empty hummingbird’s nest, let them touch a box turtle’s shell, other things. Last, we walk up above the bridge and sit on the stream bank. I point to a trout holding its place in the current.

  “Let’s try something,” I say. “If you had a friend who’d never seen a fish swimming in a stream, what would you tell that friend the fish looks like? Think about that for a few minutes, without talking.”

  I watch and I too see something new, how the trout appears to weave the very water it is in. As if the world’s first fish lay in dust, but with each fin and flesh thrum brought forth more water, soon whole rivers, then oceans. Taliesin in the coracle, the salmon of knowledge: all the world’s wisdom waterborne, water born. Welsh notions Hopkins would have known.

  “So what would you say to your friend?” I ask.

  Several say a flag and the other children chime in.

  “On a windy day.”

  “Not too windy.”

  “With lots and lots of rain.”

  “A brown flag with red spots.”

  “What if your friend asked how the fish was different from a flag?” I ask.

  “No pole.”

  “It can’t get dirty.”

  “Or be folded.”

  “Flags don’t have eyes.”

  “Or mouths.”

  “Flags don’t eat bugs.”

  The teacher nods at her watch, says it’s time to leave. As the orange bus drives away, a child peers through the back window. Behind the glass she mouths words as she waves at me. Memory scalds. Not the orange-bright of buses we ran toward that morning but minutes before, in the classroom as Ms. Abernathy lined us up. You must be as quiet as you can, children, she had told us. Promise me that you won’t say a single word. More memories come of the days and months after that morning: the
room with big chairs and magazine-filled tables, a smaller room full of soft questions, a pair of black-framed glasses behind which huge eyes urged spoken answers, not head shakes. One night, my father thinking me asleep: The other children are getting over it fine, why can’t she? We’ve tried everything and it’s cost us a fortune. What your parents offered, well, let them have her. At least we’ll have a break from all this.

  I close my eyes. Wash away, I whisper. Wash away, wash away. I walk down the loop trail, pass foxglove past bloom. Midsummer their flowers dangled like soft yellow bells. I’d wished them a breeze so they might silently ring. The same yellow as Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Vincent’s thick paint, like Hopkins’ thick sounds. Such grace-giving from supposed failed priests. I think of reading Hopkins in those days after Richard was killed. A failed priest saved my soul.

  What would he see if here? I ask. I pick up a Fraser fir cone. A hollowed lightness like a thimble, spring’s green weight gone. The edges are strong-keeled as viper scales, wing seeds wedged in the slits. High in a white oak, a flicker searches for grubs. The bird’s too blended to see at first but then the red nape reveals and tree bark softens into feathers. The flicker’s tap-bursts and pauses: a thoughtful message typed. Where the trail skirts the creek, a stand of silver birch, then a gap where sun and water pool. On a granite outcrop, a five-lined skink. Plestiodon fasciatus. Its throat fills and sags but no other movement, a chameleon of stillness. Indigo body coppered with stripes that chevron on the head. The back feet frog cocked, the tail a bright blue fuse. I too feel the heatsoak of sun and stone, the human in me unshackling.

  Five

  One night the Discovery Channel showed a documentary about sheep in Wales. If the owner sold his flock, he had to sell the pasture as well, because, after so many generations, the sheep would be too rooted in that place to survive elsewhere. Little different for men like Gerald, I thought as I turned off the main road and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’d seen others besides C.J.’s great-uncle leave houses where they and their families had lived for generations. They’d enter nursing homes or move in with sons or daughters. Like I’d told C.J., you’d be going to their funerals within six months.

  I turned off the Parkway and passed the sign that said ENTRANCE LOCUST CREEK STATE PARK. I slowed and saw Becky’s green state truck in the parking lot. I didn’t turn in but followed the main road, soon passing another sign, LOCUST CREEK RESORT. On the left, the woods fell away, replaced by grass as manicured as a golf green, farther back the stone lodge itself. With its sixty rooms and three stories, the building parted the woods like a battleship, the same gray color and every bit as solid. A crazy idea, people had thought, turning the Tucker family’s best bottomland into a tourist destination, but Harold Tucker had known what he was doing. He was a rich man now, with a second resort in Myrtle Beach. After college, C.J. had worked twelve years with an ad agency in Wilmington, but when a public relations position opened at Tucker’s Myrtle Beach resort, he applied and got hired. Even after almost two decades, Harold Tucker had remembered him, and how hard C.J. worked for him as a teenager. The man believed in loyalty, and C.J. had been loyal to Tucker as well, which was why I figured he’d stick by C.J., even in a bad economy.

  Where Locust Creek ran closest to the resort, a fly-fishing instructor stood beside a client dressed as if posing for an Orvis catalog, wicker creel and all. Not that he’d need much instruction. Tucker had the stream so well-stocked that all the guy had to do was hit water. Along the road’s edge, spaced just yards apart, bright yellow signs:

  NO TRESPASSING

  ALL VIOLATORS PROSECUTED

  I bumped over the culvert where Locust Creek entered a meadow on the state park side. Blacktop ended and gravel clattered as I crossed onto Gerald’s property. He owned no cattle now, but the pasture’s barbed wire fences didn’t sag or the locust posts lean. A tin shed protected a Ford Red Belly tractor that a collector would pay good money for. I knew if I checked the oil stick, it would mark the right level and the fuel filter would be clean as a new sponge. Men of Gerald’s generation took pride in such things, which made the patch of land beyond the woodshed appear so out of place. Charred wood and rusty tin poked out of kudzu and honeysuckle. It was all that remained of the house Gerald had built for his son, William.

  Gerald was worming his tomatoes. He wiped his hands on his overalls and came to meet me. Even at seventy-six, he was a man not to be trifled with. Six feet tall and easily two-thirty, with little of that weight hanging over his belt. Gerald sheared his white hair and beard with scissors, keeping both short but ragged. Years back, a snapped logging chain had ripped open the right side of his face. The purple scar that stretched from eye to chin looked like a centipede had burrowed under his skin.

  The scar and the size of the man, even the desert camo cap William had worn in Kuwait, all these things would have unsettled Tucker’s guest. The story of your life is in your face, an old country song claimed, a hard life in Gerald’s case. How could it not be for a man whose only child died at nineteen. Now his wife, Agnes, was gone too. Over the years, he and I had gotten along well enough, but his anger could flare up like a struck match. When it did, people gave Gerald a wide berth. Yet you never saw that part of him when he was around Becky. Watching him dote on her, and her him, you’d think him the mildest of men. He looked that way now, smiling as we shook hands.

  “Nice tomatoes,” I said.

  “They ought to be. Becky’s got me fussing over them enough. But she’s near convinced me she’s right. I didn’t dust a bit of Sevin on them. And feature how dark that corn is. I done it without pesticides too.”

  I looked at the field. The shucks had the right coloration, the tassels blond and silky.

  Gerald tapped his chest.

  “What with this bad ticker, I can’t handle but an acre. Doc Washburn got on me for doing that much. Anyway, those tomatoes are riped up good so carry a few home with you.”

  “Thanks, but not today.”

  “So what brings you out this way, Sheriff?”

  “Becky said that Darby’s had your lawn mower for two weeks.”

  Gerald’s smile disappeared.

  “What of it?”

  “I’m of a mind it’s past time for him to bring it back.”

  Gerald looked down and scuffed up a bit of dirt with his boot toe.

  “If that’s why you come out here, I got nothing to say to you.”

  “Actually, it’s not, Gerald. You scared a woman at the resort yesterday, bad enough that she packed up and left.”

  “I didn’t mean to spook that woman,” Gerald said. “The trail took a curve and of a sudden she was there. Hell, she give me a jolt too.”

  “C.J. Gant warned you not to go up there. Tucker’s signs told you the same thing.”

  Gerald’s chin lifted and his gray eyes narrowed.

  “What about all the times Harold Tucker’s bird watchers and flower sniffers come onto my land? I never rough-talked a one of them.”

  “That may be, but I’m here to tell you the next time you trespass I’ll charge you.”

  “So you’re taking their side?”

  “The only side I’m taking is the law’s. There are other places to fish. Go over to the park and catch your trout there. Becky’s always glad to see you.”

  “Who claimed me to be fishing?” Gerald bristled. “Any that says so is a liar.”

  “Then why were you up there?”

  As soon as I said it that way, I knew I’d made a mistake. Gerald’s face, his whole body, grew taut.

  “I’m not trying to pry into your business, Gerald,” I said. “I’m just wanting to smooth this out, for everyone. C.J. Gant could get in trouble over this. He tried to do you a favor by not reporting you in June.”

  For a few moments Gerald didn’t speak.

  “I like to go up above that waterfall and look at them specks,” Gerald finally said. “That water’s so clear you can see every dot on them. It ain’t about nothing bu
t setting on a rock and watching them.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said. “I’m glad you weren’t poaching, but I’m afraid that still doesn’t change anything. Tucker wants you to stay off his property and that’s his right.”

  Gerald’s fingers began rubbing his palms. He’d spent his life trying to figure out problems with his hands instead of with words, even so far as to build his son a house when William left for the Persian Gulf War. I’d always thought Gerald building the house was a sort of wordless prayer to ensure William’s future—as if his son had to have a future if a house awaited him. But William hadn’t come back. I’d been right behind the fire trucks the day Gerald had gotten the news about William. By then all that could be done was keep the fire from spreading. Gerald had been sitting on the ground, a charred door frame and empty kerosene can in front of him. Sparks had singed his shirt and arms but he didn’t move or make a sound. No one could get him to, not even Agnes.

  “This ain’t right,” Gerald said, his voice growing angrier. “I’m of a mind to go over there and tell Tucker my ownself it’s not.”

  “You don’t need to get put out about this, especially with your heart.”

  Gerald pointed at an overall pocket.

  “I got my nitro right here if I have cause to need it.”

  “I’d rather those stay tucked in your pocket, Gerald,” I said. “Look, I’ll remind C.J. about resort guests wandering onto your property and I’ll let him know you aren’t catching their trout. I can talk to Tucker as well. This economy’s got them on edge, same as a lot of folks. You can understand that. This will blow over if you’ll just wait it out a bit. But I need you to promise you’ll stay away from that creek, okay?”

  That seemed to calm Gerald some. At least his fingers no longer rubbed his palms.

  “Okay?” I asked again.

  “Yeah,” Gerald said.

  “Becky been out to see you today?”

  “She come by for a minute,” Gerald said, his voice still sullen. “Why? You told her about this?”