Above the Waterfall

by Ron Rash

  petrichor: the smell of first raindrops on long-dry land.

  Then

  petrichord: the sound of water sliding over smooth stone.

  I close the notebook and follow the stream to the bridge. In the pool’s tailrace, a misplaced glinting. I peel off boots and socks, roll my pants. The stream’s cold rises, each step a grainy give of sand. I lift a drink can, pour out the water. The sun at my back casts my shadow upstream. It touches the before of what I feel passing, like a memory of something that hasn’t yet happened.

  Fourteen

  At the courthouse, Jarvis handed the baby over to social services. He took Greer and Robin Lindsey downstairs to the jail, all the while Greer whining about a lawyer. I put the suits in the biohazard container and the respirators in the storage room, told Ruby to call Carly and check on Barry, then left for Greene’s Café to get a sandwich and drink to go. As I came down the courthouse steps, Ben Lindsey pulled into the side lot. He got out of his pickup slowly, more like a man in his eighties than early fifties. Ben shut the driver’s door the same way, the door not cleanly locking. He didn’t bother to reclose it.

  “Martha wouldn’t come with me,” Ben said. “That girl’s own mother has given up on her, says the Robin we knew is dead and gone and ain’t coming back. Her own mother thinking that way, Les, and I wish to God that I could too but I can’t.”

  What was a man to say to that, especially one like me who’d never had a child? I told Ben that Robin was inside. He nodded and went on, taking each courthouse step slow as a man walking toward a noose.

  In a county this rural, everyone’s connected, if not by blood, then in some other way. In the worst times, the county was like a huge web. The spider stirred and many linked strands vibrated. When I entered the café the room got real quiet, which meant people already knew. A few conversations started back up, but they were soft, words exchanged about the weather or fishing, the sorts of things people spoke of when other things couldn’t be.

  But there are some who love nothing more than other people’s misery. Bobbi Moffitt left her table, came over to where I waited by the cash register.

  “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it,” she said. “Not for that girl but for Ben and Martha. They are such fine folks, Sheriff. I just don’t know how they’re able to go on after what that child has put them through. Of course, I’ve always been of a mind they didn’t discipline her enough.”

  “Can you hurry up with that sandwich,” I asked Lloyd, who nodded and went into the kitchen.

  “Honestly, that girl was allowed to run wild. As much as I hate to say it, I knew something like this was bound to happen. I’m sure you did too.”

  No one else in the room spoke now, no sound but the click of the ceiling fan’s chain.

  “I’m just concerned for them is all,” Bobbi Moffitt said, and returned to her table.

  I’d planned to eat in the office, but instead I walked to the park and sat at a picnic table, one no one else was near.

  Spend a long period of time alone, especially if you’re someone who’s never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude. After my divorce, I quit going by Burrell’s Taproom after work and ate almost all of my meals at home or behind a closed office door. People in town accepted the change, maybe because they knew what had happened, not just the divorce but Sarah’s overdose, or maybe because, after a while, folks in small towns quit noticing or caring about a person’s eccentricities. You could walk around town with black scuba fins on your feet and a tiara on your head and people would soon quit caring or noticing. Like my painting watercolors, the inwardness was seen as a bit peculiar, but I was still a good sheriff.

  It was my sisters who’d tried to draw me out after the divorce. They both lived in Alabama and offered to pay for my flights if I’d come visit, but I’d been curt enough that they’d quit offering, or calling. After a year, I went out on a few dates, but most times I couldn’t wait to get back home and be alone. There had been, and sometimes still were, days I turned my head or crossed the street to avoid talking to someone. Even to acknowledge them with a nod drained me.

  Accomplices.

  When I returned to the office, my phone was blinking. I recognized the number as Jink Hampton’s. He’d left no message but he didn’t need to. The call itself was the message—he had his monthly “tithe,” as he called it, and was ready for me to pick it up.

  But before driving out to Jink’s place, I called Becky. It was good to hear her voice, so good in fact that I told her so. She asked about the raid, and I told her it went no worse than we’d expected. I left it at that and asked how Gerald was.

  “I’m doing what Dr. Washburn told me, making sure the scrapes stay disinfected. What that guard did,” Becky said, her voice beginning to tremble. “What could have happened . . .”

  “It was wrong,” I said, “but Gerald shouldn’t have been at the waterfall or the resort. I know he’s used to things being different, but it is Tucker’s property. You’ve got to make Gerald understand that. You’re the only person he’s going to listen to.”

  “I know,” Becky said.

  “Listen,” I said, “if you have a free minute, can you see if C.J. Gant’s SUV is in the resort’s lot? It’s the light blue one. Tucker was really ticked off at him yesterday. I don’t think he’d do anything like fire C.J., but I want to be sure.”

  “It will be fifteen minutes before I can,” Becky said. “I’ll call you back when I know.”

  “I’ll be driving so call me on my cell phone,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Becky said softly. “I worried about you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  I told Ruby I’d be out of the office for the rest of the day.

  “What about Barry?” she asked. “I can’t get an answer at his house or on his cell.”

  “I’ll try him tonight,” I said.

  As I drove out to Jink Hampton’s place, I told myself again that Harold Tucker wouldn’t fire C.J., even if the resort did need to lay off some people. It came down to loyalty, many years of it. My cell phone buzzed.

  “His SUV is in the parking lot,” Becky said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’re still on for lunch Friday, right?”

  “As long as Gerald is okay,” Becky said.

  It had been in ninth grade when Mr. Ketner, the principal, announced during homeroom that my watercolor had been chosen to represent our school in a statewide competition. Eric Dalton, who’d failed ninth grade twice, turned to his buddies on the back row. That’s almost as faggy as writing poetry, he’d said. His buddies laughed loudly, in part because Eric was not just the biggest ninth-grader but the meanest. When the rest of the class turned to look at him, Eric stared back. What I said was funny, wasn’t it? he challenged. C.J. was on the front row. Not even a laugh was necessary, just a smile and he’d be, maybe for the first time in his life, on the other side of the taunts, invited into the safety of the herd. When the laughs rippled to the front row, C.J. didn’t even smile, and he didn’t look at me. He turned to the front of the room and waited for the teacher to restore order.

  Four months later he would save my life.

  Jink Hampton raised dope but he also bred Plott hounds. When I got to his house, he led me inside the pen, picked up a pup from a new litter. It had the right brindled coloring and the rambunctiousness that usually predicted an adult that would be tireless on the trail.

  “You in the market for a good bear dog?” Jink asked. “Since you’re retiring you’ll be needing a hobby, won’t you?”

  “I’m thinking more along the lines of a garden.”

  Jink smiled.

  “I’ve got some good Early Misty seeds if you want them.”

  “I think I’ll stick to corn and tomatoes, maybe some squash,” I said. “Any helicopters flown around here this week?”

  “Nah,” Jink answered. “I heard they been flying over government land though.”

/>   “You know they’ll spread out since it’s harvest time.”

  “I know,” Jink said, and grimaced as he took a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet. “I reckon this will help buy you another window.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, and stuffed the bill in my pocket.

  Jink set the pup down and came out of the pen.

  “How is your cabin coming along?” Jink asked. “I reckon I ought to know since I’m financing it.”

  “The well is in and the road graded and graveled. They started the foundation. After I leave here I’m going by to check.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty piece of land.”

  “It is,” I said.

  For a few moments we watched the pups play tug-of-war with a strip of cowhide.

  “I don’t guess you have an idea who Darby Ramsey might buy meth from?” I asked.

  “You know I don’t have any truck with meth, or Oxy either.”

  “I do know that,” I said, “just thought you might have heard something.”

  “No, but I heard about Gerald’s tussle yesterday. You didn’t law him, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Good, I wouldn’t want trouble for that old man. Me and his boy William was tight as tree bark growing up. I never had a better friend then nor now. Hard to believe Darby comes from the same stock, ain’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “I know you’re not supposed to go back on your word,” Jink said, “especially when you give it to your sister on her deathbed, but damned if I’d let Darby inherit anything I left behind. You know he’ll spend every dime of it on drugs.”

  “I do,” I said, and took the car keys from my pocket. “Anyway, you got a fine litter there.”

  “They should be, but dogs are like people. No matter how good the bloodline, they can still turn out sorry.”

  We walked over to my car.

  “So this is the last time between me and you,” Jink said.

  “This is it.”

  “What about Jarvis Crowe? Do I have the same arrangement with him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s between you and Jarvis.”

  “You ever talked to him about it?”

  “I haven’t, but you and I both know he’s wise to what’s going on. If he wants it to continue he’ll drop by.”

  “Hell, Les, what if he ‘drops by’ just to arrest my ass?”

  “Like I said, you boys will have to work it out.”

  “All right,” Jink said, extending his hand. “Have a good retirement.”

  Fifteen

  At ten tonight come to the I-81 rest stop, the one between the two Emory exits. R.

  The note had been placed under the park truck’s wiper blade. This was six months after I’d moved out, two weeks before Richard died. By then he was being sought for setting fire to a mine owner’s house. A homegrown terrorist, newspapers said, another Ted Kaczynski. Don’t go, a part of me said, but I went.

  The first interstate sign with the word EMORY was like a knife tip touching my stomach. A dull knife, but each time EMORY appeared, eighteen miles, ten miles, four, the blade pressed deeper. I turned off the highway and parked. Where my parents’ house had been, where the elementary school still was—all were within a mile. No other vehicle was at the rest stop, but minutes later a jeep pulled in beside me. A man I didn’t know got out.

  “Hand me your cell phone,” he said, and took out the battery and threw it into the woods.

  “Wait here,” he said, then got in the jeep and drove off.

  “They don’t even notice it anymore, do they?”

  I turned around and Richard was coming out of the woods.

  “I mean the exhaust,” he said. “They think air is supposed to smell like poison.”

  Richard came closer, about to draw me to him, but I stepped back.

  “No?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You always were a different kind of person that way,” Richard said. “Noli me tangere one day, not even a kiss, then another day not so. That’s okay. These last few months, I understand more and more why you’re that way. People take too much from you, don’t they? You have to pull away awhile, keep the contagion at a minimum and only then with a few kindred spirits.”

  “Why did you want me to come here?” I asked.

  Richard didn’t answer, just motioned for me to follow him away from the lights to sit at a concrete picnic table.

  For a few moments the only sound was the whoosh of passing cars.

  “This was risky for me,” Richard said, “but I had to see you.”

  He raised his hand, traced the fall of my hair down my shoulders. Memories of sleeping bags and beds and meadows rushed back. My body wanted to lean into that touch. The ache of so long not having.

  “I’m glad you haven’t cut it,” Richard said. He let his fingertips brush slowly down my spine, touching my jeans before he removed his hand. “I want you to come with me. Six months since the verdict and not a word about a retrial. The bastards can even kill kids and get away with it, Becky. Change comes only from my way. It always does in the end.”

  “That house you burned down, children could have been inside,” I said. “That late at night you couldn’t have been certain no one was there.”

  “If that bastard’s kids had been there, their blood would be on his hands, not mine. The Bible’s got that right if nothing else. The sins of the father . . .”

  The jeep came up the exit ramp and parked. The engine stayed on, but the driver got out and waited.

  “Why meet, why here?”

  “You mean Emory?”

  “Yes.”

  “To free you from this place forever and start again, Becky,” Richard said. “You can leave here with me, no longer a victim of anything or anyone in your past. Come with me, tonight. Even if the worst happens, at least you won’t be a victim. I’m giving you a choice of which to be, Becky, maybe for the only time in your life. You’re not stupid. You’ve seen enough to know my way is the only one that will work.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I answered.

  “Yes, you can, but it has to be now. Soon we won’t have any chance. They’ve got the technology in place. In five years people won’t even know they’re in the world, much less care about what happens to it. They will believe that when everything else on this planet dies, they’ll be able to disappear into a computer screen. They believe it now, most of them.”

  For a few moments there was only silence.

  “What you’re saying,” I answered. “If I let myself believe that, I couldn’t endure living.”

  Richard reached for my hand but I clasped both of mine tight and stood.

  “I need to go,” I said and walked back to the lot, Richard following.

  “You want me to cut the cord on her CB?” the jeep driver asked.

  “No,” Richard answered.

  “You certain?”

  “Unless Becky tells me otherwise.”

  Richard met my eyes.

  “If a child had been in the house I burned down, you’d have turned me in, or tried to, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Richard nodded and got in the jeep. As it was pulling out, he smiled and said something but the jeep’s engine drowned it out. Probably just a good-bye.

  After he died, I’d packed provisions for two weeks and gone deep into Shenandoah National Park, followed the trails leading to what was farthest away. Where the trails ended, I went beyond, pushed through a gorge of laurel slicks and over a ridge where I set up camp. One afternoon I’d wandered the woods, found an old homestead with its cairn of chimney rocks. There the fox grape’s musky odor thickened the air. Yellow bells and periwinkle spread untended. How many decades such silence, I had wondered, what last words were spoken before the people left. I’d walked back to my camp and opened the only book I’d brought. I settled the poems inside of me one at a time. First “The Windhover,” and then “Pied Beauty,” by the end
of the next week a dozen more. Letting Hopkins’ words fill the inner silence. Inscape of words. A new language to replace the old one I no longer could interpret.

  I close the park gate and leave, try to lock away memory as well. I need to check on Gerald but pedal toward the Parkway first, feel the release of being in a body all-aware. A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what’s under itself, then resettle. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves and shifts, gathers and twists. Murmuration: ornithology’s word-poem for what I see. Two hundred starlings at most, but in Europe sometimes ten thousand, enough to punctuate a sky. What might a child see? A magic carpet made suddenly real? Ocean fish-schools swimming air? The flock turns west and disappears.

  Sixteen

  As I drove back toward town, I thought of what Jink had said about Darby and his bloodline, but it could go the other way too. My dad had been as kind and gentle a man as I’ve ever known. He’d never laid a hand on me, even when my mother argued that he should. But my father’s father had been a monster. He’d come home drunk and slap my grandmother around, then jerk his belt off and flail the backs of my father and his younger brother. Until one night when Dad was fourteen. The old man had staggered through the front door and my father swung a ball bat as hard as he could into my grandfather’s kneecap. He’d fallen and Dad and his brother beat him senseless and then dragged him out of the house and all the way to the road. They told their father if he ever came back they’d kill him. He’d hobbled away and no one ever saw him again.

  A lot of men couldn’t get past such childhoods though. They’d stay trapped in the same cycle. I’d seen it too often. The boys with welts and bruises from their fathers’ belts and fists would do the same to their own wives and children, becoming the very thing they’d feared and hated most growing up. After my parents’ deaths, I’d found a single photograph with my grandfather in it. His eyes didn’t look at the camera or at his family standing beside him. Instead, they’d gazed toward something to his right, as if denying any connection. I’d studied his features, found more of me in them than I had wished.