I wished just once I could use a different bit, a twisted-wire or a copper-mouthed snaffle, even a double-reined pelham like the ladies used when they rode sidesaddle in the old days. I imagined myself riding a jumper in a Grand Prix class at a horse show, holding his twelve hundred pounds of fury back in a fancy three-ring elevator bit.
Wayne had a strong opinion that any good rider could ride a horse in a simple bit, no tricks or shortcuts. “Fancy bits are for bad riders,” he always said.
I got impatient. “So how much?”
He sucked on his dentures, pulling his cheeks down from his eye sockets until he looked like a crazy man. He snapped the teeth back in place. “A few thousand.”
“That’s it?”
“Been on the track so long, he can’t go clockwise,” he said.
I felt frustration tighten my throat. “We could fix that in the ring.”
“Then fix it. I’ll give you twenty percent,” he said.
I knew that Uncle Wayne and his half-crooked horse-trader friends made all kinds of deals in the run-in shed with rain leaking down on them, and I wanted to make those deals too. He must have bought and sold thousands of horses—pleasure horses, carriage teams, mules, trick horses, you name it—to and from men with names like Boojie Dowdie, Apple Woodzell, or just “the Liptrap boy with the red truck.” They didn’t trust each other, none of them. If you were buying a horse, you had to look out for yourself—feel the horse’s legs, trot him out, and ride him. If you were dumb enough to buy a lame horse or an old horse, you deserved what you got. Except sometimes Wayne would take a horse back from a good customer for credit. No money back, but he’d find him something else. Even so, I was the only person alive who really trusted him, and he was the only person I could trust.
I had read about the fancy show-horse world. It worked differently there. When a horse was for sale, the buyer’s vet took x-rays and provided a report. Wayne and his fellow horse traders laughed at that. X-rays! You could tell a horse had incurable navicular disease—which Wayne called “vehicular disease”—if he tiptoed. What kind of real horseman needed a damn x-ray of a horse’s legs?
I scratched the red horse’s neck and he closed his eyes. My nails left a mark as they pulled up the grit.
“You wash your horses or what?” I teased Uncle Wayne.
He flicked his toothpick into the mud.
THREE
IT STOPPED RAINING, and the wind began to blow. Uncle Wayne and I walked through the sloppy paddock up to his old saltbox farmhouse. The roof was rusting at the seams and the porch hung off. We went up to Wayne’s kitchen door, where Grittlebones, an old yellow cat, was sitting on the top step. He was missing teeth and his ears looked like he’d been chewed on by a pack of hyenas. He saw Wayne coming and ran under the porch.
“He looks skinny,” I said.
“Then I reckon he better get to work,” Wayne said.
Bouncing my left foot off the cinder block he used as a bottom step, I opened the door and went inside.
I smelled the smoke from the pine logs and the salty deer stew that had been sitting on the wood stove all day. Wayne was the only person I knew who cooked on a stove all summer. I hung my chaps over a chair by the fire to dry and got two bowls from the cupboard. As I put the stew into the bowls, Wayne opened the tin oven on top of the wood stove, pulled out a couple of biscuits wrapped in tinfoil, and handed one to me.
We sat in chairs facing each other and ate quietly. Wayne rested his heels on the wood stove, careful not to burn the rubber soles. It was only four thirty, but Wayne was usually in bed before dark.
In the old days, my mother had told me, Wayne had run around until all hours of the night. When I was growing up, he seemed to have a lady friend now and then, but it never lasted. Either she couldn’t ride, she was too stupid, or she had a husband. Sometimes all three. I never liked any of them except old Beezie Winants, who was a legendary horse trader in her own right. She was the only one worth a damn. I think Beezie caught him with someone else, which was too bad, because she was a load of fun. She took me riding all the time at her place and gave me a bunch of free lessons.
The others were too flirty and pretended like he was some kind of cowboy. When I would show up to ride and see some lady hanging on the fence rail talking to him, I would find something else to do until she was gone.
Uncle Wayne worked as a farm caretaker, but he used to get a new job with a new truck every couple of years. If I asked him, he just said the old job didn’t suit him, but it was really because he’d go on a crazy drunk and disappear for weeks. Then he’d sober up for another six months, or a year, or two years. My mother, Melinda, said there was no rhyme or reason to when it happened. He’d do it if things were good, and he’d do it when things were bad. Jimmy said one time that Wayne did it when he needed to get something bad out of his system, like a wave tossing a piece of garbage up on the beach. I’ve never been to the beach, but that’s what I imagine. What it actually was—well, that was Wayne’s secret.
I figured he must have stayed at this caretaker job just because the farmer there left him alone. Wayne watched the cattle and patrolled for coyotes with a rifle twice a week, and in return, he could buy and sell as many horses as he liked and keep them there.
When we finished eating, Wayne drove me home in his blue pickup. I loved that big old truck. We sat on Navajo sad- dle blankets. They were half polyester, not wool or anything, but they were soft. That old Ford truck had the biggest cab—felt like a tractor-trailer in there. The window handle was so big, sometimes I’d pretend I was cranking the winch on a big ship out in the ocean, raising the mainsail or whatever it’s called, when I put my window up.
The mist hung over the hay fields and the water splashed into the wheel wells when we went through puddles. We passed a pond on a cattle farm, and I saw the snapping turtles poking their heads out of the warm layer of rainwater.
Whenever we passed that stretch of Route 687, I’d look out to the west and remember the time Jimmy said that the Appalachian Mountains were the oldest in the world. Five hundred million years ago, they were the tallest mountains on earth, like the Himalayas are now. Another time he told me he’d heard that the mountains in southern China are similar, with the same trees, same climate. I figured one day I might just go there and see if this was true. Maybe I would ride one of those tough Mongolian horses on the Great Wall itself.
I looked at the creases in Wayne’s face. His thick hands rested on the steering wheel, yellow stains on his fingers from smoking. Jimmy and Wayne used to stay out late and come home laughing loudly, and when I’d wake up, Wayne would be snoring on the couch. I loved those mornings. Melinda didn’t like the drinking, but she and I loved all of us waking up together. We’d eat sausage and gravy, and waffles with syrup, and we’d watch cartoons. Jimmy used to laugh so hard at Daffy Duck that he could barely breathe, at how Daffy was always mad at everyone about everything. Strange how people laugh at different things. Jimmy didn’t get mad about nothing.
When Jimmy died, four years ago, Melinda and Wayne pretty much stopped talking about him. They certainly didn’t talk about how he died. I didn’t want it this way. I guess it was the only way they could handle it. But after that I was so scared something would happen to one of them, I barely let them out of my sight without having a nervous fit. The one thing they told me about the accident was that he hit a tree on Route 220, like lots of other people had. They said it was foggy. I knew where it was, because I saw the fresh marks in the tree, but I never said anything. We’d drive right by and not say a word.
I was so scared they were going to die too and leave me that Wayne started taking me everywhere: horse auctions, farmers’ co-ops, truck-stop breakfast meetings. At first, he wasn’t sure what to do with me, but I didn’t care. At gas stations, he’d lock the truck doors and go inside the diner to get me a hot chocolate, but I’d climb out and follow him. I tried to work up the courage to ask him if I could come live with him, but I cou
ldn’t do it. Then one day, I blurted it out while we were waiting for a train to pass at the crossing. He paused for a second, and then he said I had to live with my mother. I was embarrassed for asking and angry at him for saying no, and my face got hot. I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, and for the first and last time, he got me a candy bar before he dropped me off.
Now we drove by Natural Well, too small to be a town, really just a dark, cold crevice in the rock that forms the well under the trees across from an old white farmhouse. When I was about six, Jimmy and I packed a lunch and went there for a picnic. I remember dropping a pebble down the well and feeling the rush of cold air on my face.
This area by the Jackson River, below the Kincaid Gorge and running all the way up to the Richardson Gorge, was magical. There was a huge waterfall—two hundred feet tall—down the mountain to the west. It was quiet, green, and cool. When a storm was coming, you could see the dark clouds over the waterfall and feel the cold air come over the Alleghenies. Hardwood forests ran up the hill on both sides of the river, around old Indian caves in the side of the mountain. The deer and turkeys climbed up the banks of the river when it flooded and ate the vegetation that grew in the loose soil on the banks.
The springs that fed the river up in Bath County were clear and clean, full of life, trickling over the rocks. The paper mill had a dam built upriver in the seventies, flooding the old Indian caves. The water that flowed into Covington was clean and full of oxygen, but as soon as it hit the mill and the pollutants gushed in, it turned dark and foamy. From the paper mill downriver about ten miles, it was a dead zone. Then it fed into the Cowpasture River, and into the James River, and out into the Atlantic Ocean.
I’d heard a hundred times that the town would die without the mill. But the animals and fish were dying with it. An old man told me once that when they built the mill, the birds in Covington stopped singing. There weren’t any left.
I looked deep into the woods and thought about Melinda’s father, Buddy, who I barely remembered. My grandfather. Jimmy had told me that when Buddy was a young man, he left his small farm on the mountain every day before dawn with his dinner pail and his lantern and walked two miles down the mountain to a big farm in the valley near the river, where he worked the cornfields. Then those fields were flooded because of the dam.
I saw the herd of white cows that always stands in a grove of oaks on the hillside. The water had run down their bodies as the mist rose up from the heat—a ghostly, beautiful sight. The cows didn’t mind the rain at all. They knew when it was coming, and they just let it come. Horses did this too, just hung their heads and let it pour. I wished I could be like that.
Then, as we came off the mountain, the lush farmland and forests turned into stores and parking lots and then the giant paper mill, leaking gray smoke out of more smokestacks than I could count. It looked like a plane had crashed into the valley, smoke curling up from all over the place into the sky. The rotten-egg stench was so powerful that it drifted for miles, up the Jackson River, through the hollows, to the most remote parts of the National Forest. It was an ungodly smell. Once in a while I saw tourists lost off the interstate driving through Covington with their shirts over their faces, like they were being suffocated. The smell was foul, sweet, irritating, and downright embarrassing.
The paper mill sat right in the middle of town. I knew if it wasn’t for the mill, lots of people would have no place to work. But it sure was disgusting. Maybe they should leave and work somewhere else anyway, I thought. The mill took the best men we had and turned them into tired shift workers who never left Covington.
“When are you fixing my car?” I asked Wayne. I didn’t even have my learner’s permit yet, and my car had broken down twice. Wayne had gotten it for me from one of his horse-trader friends who I didn’t trust one bit. Selling it to Wayne was probably cheaper than junking it.
“It’s at your house.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
I was driving my father’s pickup in the field when I was ten. Jimmy and Wayne would throw hay bales up on the back while I cruised down the rows. The sheriff was a friend of Wayne’s, and he let me drive to the barn and back but nowhere else, which was stupid, but I guess that’s what they have to do. I’m tall enough that I don’t look too young behind the wheel, so sometimes I drive when I’m not supposed to and get away with it.
Wayne slowed down, and I felt a knot in my throat. He pulled into a church parking lot, swung the truck around back, and parked below a cemetery that stretched over a hill.
“I need to get home,” I said.
“It’s your daddy’s birthday, and you know it.”
He turned off the truck engine.
“Give him my respects,” I said. I didn’t feel like being there, and that was that.
Wayne walked around the truck and opened my door, but I stared straight ahead. Every time I looked up at that cemetery, I remembered Jimmy’s funeral. I’d worn sneakers, but my mother didn’t notice. Then I wore the same outfit to school three days in a row, and she still didn’t say anything. I waited for her to start noticing me again.
I sat in the car for a minute or so, then gave up and got out, stiff and sore from my fall. I followed Wayne up the hill, watching his Red Wing boots sink into the mud up to the bottom of his coveralls.
As Wayne walked between the headstones, closer and closer to the grave, I thought about running the other way.
“You coming or what?” he said.
Jimmy had worked at one of the state fish hatcheries up in Montebello where they raised rainbow trout. When the fish were big enough, they loaded them up in a truck and stocked lakes and ponds all over the state of Virginia. I used to go with Melinda to visit him at his job. It was so quiet, no one around, just the vultures sitting in the trees over our heads waiting to scoop up a dead fish. I’d buy ten cents’ worth of fish food from the machine—looked just like a gum dispenser—and toss the pellets into the dark water. The fish would grab the brown pellets gently. The young fingerlings would fight at the surface, not knowing there was more. The older fish knew there was always more. The job Jimmy had was a good one—didn’t pay a whole lot, but he liked it.
Every year the town had a “Trout Derby,” and Jimmy helped the kids stock the creek with fish. They’d jump into trucks and drive from one part of the creek to another, the boys and girls getting one fish each in a bucket. I rode with my father in the front of the state truck.
Once, Melinda and I went to visit Jimmy and he was taking a nap in that truck—up in the woods, sound asleep. I told Uncle Wayne about that, and he must have teased Jimmy a dozen times.
But my best memories of him were the trail rides. Every fall we’d load up a stock trailer with three horses and drive to West Virginia. Dozens of people came with their horses and camped out for three nights, sleeping in the cleaned-out stock trailers while their horses slept tied to trees. In the daytime we’d ride for hours through the woods, around peanut fields and cornfields, past cinder-block shacks and white clapboard churches. It was always hot and humid. Jimmy taught me how to tie a sponge to the saddle with a thin piece of rope. Whenever we crossed a stream, we’d drop the dry sponges down, hoist them up, and squeeze the cold water over the horses’ withers. We’d walk the horses out of the woods at dusk, when the bobwhites would call from the edge of the swamp and the fireflies lit up the hay fields.
The deer flies would have stopped biting so much and the cicadas would be screaming from the woods as it got dark, and at night there’d be a dance with a real wooden dance floor and a country band, kegs of beer, and a big cookout. I’d watch my mother and father pass a flask of whiskey, and when they’d finally get up and start to slow dance, I’d walk back through the trailers, check the horses, crawl into my sleeping bag, and sleep so hard that when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was.
Wayne and I stopped at a flat stone in the ground and looked.
JAMES CLORENT CRISER
1965–2009
>
For some stupid reason, it said “Daddy” under his name. I had been calling him Jimmy and my mama Melinda since I was two years old. He said I’d figured out that if I called them by their first names, they paid attention. Some lady at the tombstone company had talked Melinda into putting “Daddy” on it—Melinda was taking so many pills around then that she would have damn near run down the street naked if you said to. The stone was dirty now, and that made me angry at my mother. Jimmy Criser was neat and orderly, and everything he did, he did with care. All the time he’d spent making things right, and no one was keeping them up anymore. Was I supposed to do that too? Was I supposed to tell her what to put on the tombstone and how to keep it clean?
She’d given up on the tomato plants right away. Jimmy used to start thumbing through seed catalogs in February. Somebody had told him about a tomato called Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, after a mechanic who got out of debt by creating his own hybrid and selling the seedlings for a dollar apiece. Jimmy accidentally made his own hybrid after the wind mixed up the seeds he was storing by the shed. He’d crossed a green apple seed with some seeds of a fat orange tomato he’d gotten from grandma Elsie Cash, and he called the new tomato the Green Granny Cash. Once he was gone, Melinda didn’t even tie up the tomato plants. They just tangled with the lamb’s quarter in the yard.
Then Donald came. He ripped out the tomato plants and put grass seed down. He threw out all of Jimmy’s stuff when I was at school. When I asked Melinda why, she said he felt like he wanted to make the family his own and that was a good thing. But I was sick over it. Everything was gone—pictures, clothes, records, magazines. I couldn’t find anything of Jimmy’s in the whole house. The only remnants were things at the barn. I figured that was all Jimmy had cared about in life anyway—his horse stuff—so I wouldn’t let Wayne give any of that away. Not even a hoof pick.
After we’d stood by the grave a few moments, Wayne walked away. I started cleaning the stone with my finger, and Wayne came up behind me with a clean handkerchief. I dipped it into a puddle and wiped around the letters, and then I scraped some dirt back and saw the horseshoe underneath Jimmy’s name. I ran my thumb around the horseshoe.
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