by Ron Rash
He loved his son too, but that didn’t stop Gerald from burning his son’s house down, with kerosene. That’s what I could have said, but instead I withdrew my arm and motioned toward Jarvis and Harold Tucker, who were coming to join us. Tucker had taken off the coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He looked ready to dig a ditch or enter a brawl. Whatever it took to straighten out the mess in the creek before him.
“So what did your tests tell you?” Tucker asked Becky.
“Kerosene’s a transient phenomenon,” Becky answered.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Kerosene’s not very water soluble so most of the damage has been done. DENR will probably issue a drinking water advisory but that may be just a precaution.”
“And until they decide to show up?” Tucker asked.
“We’re already putting warning flyers streamside at the park,” Becky said. “You should do the same.”
“For the first time all summer, I’ve got full capacity this weekend,” Tucker fumed. “These people will want to fish, not worry that the water will poison them.”
“It could have been a lot worse,” I said.
“So it’s just kerosene?” Jarvis asked.
“It’s kerosene,” Becky said, “but there could still be something else introduced with it.”
“Kerosene dumped at the waterfall,” Tucker said.
“Above the waterfall,” Becky said, “at least fifty yards.”
A droning came from above, quickly became a metallic clamor.
“Shit,” Tucker shouted as a white helicopter, NEWS 5 on the side, hovered above the lodge. A cameraman leaned out to film, and then the helicopter flew away. “I’ve called DENR three times and they still aren’t here but everyone else except goddamn Sixty Minutes is.”
Tucker’s eyes remained on the sky, where buzzards resumed their slow circling. Like a nightmare merry-go-round, I thought, and it was clear from Tucker’s face he didn’t find it an appealing sight either.
“That’s another nice welcome,” Tucker seethed. “Turn left when you see the buzzards. Go do your job, Sheriff. If you had on Monday when Gerald came up here raising hell—”
“He just wanted to talk to you,” Becky said angrily. “Gerald didn’t threaten anyone until your thugs came after him. And he didn’t kill your fish, Mr. Tucker. I know Gerald and I know he wouldn’t do this.”
Tucker placed a hand on his cheek, rubbed upward, touching the hearing aid before adjusting his glasses. Doing it unconsciously, but it seemed a wish that all he’d heard and seen was not real but an equipment failure.
“I’ve known Gerald Blackwelder a lot longer than you, ma’am,” Tucker said, “and I’ve seen a side of him maybe you haven’t and I’m not even talking about his burning a house down. Long before he did that, I watched him nearly kill a man in a bar fight. Gerald knocked him to the floor and the guy didn’t get up, couldn’t get up, but Gerald kept punching him in the face, even after the guy was out cold. I was across the room and I could hear the teeth breaking. It took three fellows to get Gerald off him. That man he beat up was in the hospital a week. He lost half his teeth and the vision in his right eye. He would have been in a coffin if Gerald hadn’t been stopped. So don’t tell me I don’t know the man, or what he can or can’t do.”
“Okay,” I said, stepping in front of Tucker. “You can go back to the lodge. I’m going to go get Gerald now.”
“Good,” Tucker said, “and about damn time.”
“Do you want me as backup?” Jarvis asked as Tucker stalked off.
“No, it’s better if I go alone.”
“You’re going to arrest Gerald?” Becky asked, following me as I walked to the parking lot.
“Detain’s a better word.”
“It means the same thing.”
“Maybe it does,” I said, getting tired real fast of people telling me what to do, “but it’s what has to be done.”
“It’s wrong to do this to him, Les,” Becky said.
Nowhere near as wrong as C.J. getting fired, I thought, seeing C.J.’s SUV in the lot.
I was about to get in the car when Becky grabbed my sleeve.
“His heart,” Becky said. “I need to be there. You know I do.”
“Drive your own vehicle then.”
Becky didn’t let go of my sleeve.
“Don’t you understand that Gerald didn’t do this, Les? I don’t care what Tucker says. Gerald couldn’t do this.”
“Maybe you’re wrong about what he’s capable of,” I said. Then more words blurted out before I could stop them. “You’ve been wrong before about what a person could do.”
Becky flinched and let go of my sleeve. For the first time since we’d known each other, I’d hurt her. Yes, I thought. Maybe it’s not just Pelfrey and Gerald you are wrong about.
When we drove up, Gerald was sitting on the porch, coffee mug in hand, and wearing the same shirt he had on in the video. He smiled and stood.
“Well, I’d not have reckoned a visit from you all this morning.”
I stopped at the front step but Becky went up to stand beside him. She trembled but Gerald didn’t seem to notice. He nodded at the helicopter droning above the ridge.
“Looking for dope, I reckon,” he said. “Come up and warm a chair, Sheriff. I’ve got coffee enough for the three of us.”
“You go ahead and finish that coffee,” I said. “You and me need to go to the courthouse.”
“What for?” Gerald asked, his head tilting slightly, brow furrowed.
“It’s just a misunderstanding,” Becky said, taking Gerald’s free hand. “Someone poured kerosene into Locust Creek and killed a lot of trout.”
“At the park?” Gerald asked.
“No,” Becky said. “On Tucker’s property, above the waterfall.”
“And they think I done it?” Gerald asked after a few moments.
“They’ve got you on video, Gerald,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“I never dumped anything in that creek,” Gerald stammered.
“I know that,” Becky told him, her other hand on his forearm now. “It’ll get cleared up soon, it will.”
The porcelain cup slipped from Gerald’s hand. Coffee splashed on the porch but the cup didn’t shatter.
“Becky,” Gerald said, shaking his head as he spoke. “I’d not hurt them trout. You know that.”
The helicopter must have seen my patrol car, because as I stepped onto the porch it skimmed over the last trees, raising dust and buffeting our clothes.
“We’ve got to go,” I shouted.
I went and took Gerald’s free arm. Becky and I got him down the steps as grit lifted, stinging our eyes. The brown cloud thickened, gained twigs and pebbles. A plastic bag flapped against my leg, then gusted away. Coughing, Becky and I guided Gerald with one hand while shielding our eyes with the other. Gerald stumbled and almost caused us all to fall. The helicopter kept descending as if trying to drag the sky itself down upon us.
I got the back passenger door open and helped Gerald inside. As I did, Gerald slapped at his shirt pocket and Becky scrambled into the backseat. She cradled his head and took the pill bottle from his overalls pocket. She opened it, pressed a tablet into Gerald’s mouth, then one more. Dust had powdered Becky’s face and now tears streaked pale rivulets down her cheeks. I got in, turned on the blue light, and sped toward the hospital.
“Please, Gerald,” Becky shouted, “please.”
He’s going to die right in front of her, I thought, glancing in the rearview mirror as we passed the resort.
“Tell me you’re okay,” Becky kept pleading, “at least open your eyes.”
As we turned off the Parkway and headed toward town, Gerald responded, and the next time I glanced in the mirror much of the ashy grayness had left his face.
“You’re going to be okay, Gerald,” Becky kept saying, again and again.
Yes, he will, I thought when the hospital came in sight, and I wondered if in the c
oming days Gerald, and maybe all of us, would wish Becky hadn’t given him the nitro tablets, and that he’d died in the arms of the one person left on earth who loved him.
Twenty
The day of Grandmother’s funeral, I’d entered the farmhouse alone. Sepia and mote drift, her absence all luster now gone. The sadness of a bowl left on a counter, a pair of reading glasses beside a chair. Something of that as I enter Gerald’s house. But Gerald will return. The EKG fine, the overnight stay just precaution. I didn’t lock up the house, Gerald mumbled as the IV drip eased him asleep. Everything inside looks okay, so I close the door and twist the key until the lock clicks.
Jarvis Crowe’s patrol car is parked in Gerald’s driveway. He searches where Gerald’s pasture borders resort property. He’ll check the barn, if he already hasn’t, and find the kerosene can. But it will not be empty, I assure myself. If you go to the barn and check, you doubt Gerald too. Instead, I take the canning jar I brought with me to the springhouse. The dipper dangles from a cherry tree limb. The best water in this county, Gerald swears. Mineral rich, but Gerald claims the cherry tree’s roots sweeten it too. I lift the tin spring guard and fill the jar, twist the lid tight and set it on the ground. I scoop up a dipperful for myself, savor the chill passing into my chest as my nose inhales the after-rain smell of moss. When I place the tin back, I see a mud puppy, thready red gills fanning.
As I walk back, MASON brailles my palm and all is brought back: clay floor cool under my feet, dusky potato smell, the pint and quart jars floating above me, grandmother’s tall hand lifting one down. You carry this one, she said. Even in the dim light the honey glowed, sunshine steeped in earthy blackness.
To be there with her in that dark place and know I was safe.
There are limits to what you owe your grandparents, Becky, Les had said, but he was wrong. How could there be, when what they gave me was not only their acceptance of my silence but so much more, the minnow in the springhouse guarding the water’s purity, spiders spinning webbed words, whip-poor-wills and white owls, woolly worms and snake skins, the sink of a star. All had resonance, meaning. Folklore, yes, but always in one way true, the seamless connection that Hopkins saw: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. What limits: that after the morning in the school basement, word and wonder and world could be one.
At the park Carlos has the warning signs posted. I check in with him and then walk downstream to make sure no dead fish are there. As I cross the bridge, Les’s thorned words.
You’ve been wrong before.
Don’t think of anything but here and now, only here, only now. On a maypop vine a saddleback caterpillar clings. Acharia stimulea. Oarlike legs, green and brown whitebristled body. Soon it will sleep in its self-spun shroud, winter dreaming as spring’s moth-wings slowly sprout. At my feet are snakeroot and sumac, farther on knotweed and skullcap. I whisper each name. Above me birch and beech, red oak and shagbark hickory. In the thicker canopy, stilts of sunlight stalk the ground.
The trail sways closer to the stream. A mane of whitewater falls off a stone shelf, lands loudly. Then the creek curves into shadow. Ferns sleeve both banks green. Water softly licks stone. On a sandbar an otter’s tracks. The world’s first words ever printed: I was here. In Lascaux too: amid that floating menagerie, reed-blown red pigment holds the human hand aloft, oncepresence indelible. Where the otter left the stream, the tail’s drag makes an exclamation point. The woods pull back and sunlight surprises the water. Glitters of pyrite. I lift a piece of rock crystal. Time smoothed. What patience to have all edges worn away. As I roll it over my palm, colors gather and spill. I set the stone back and take the loop trail to the meadow, then follow the stream to the park boundary. Across the road I see a DENR van. A resort worker with a black plastic bag gathers dead fish. As he moves upstream, the turkey buzzards flap from branch to branch. Like all Cathartidae, voiceless.
I stand in a patch of clover, only then realize I haven’t seen a single honeybee. I turn to go back and as I do the meadow withers into dust. Trees melt like candles and the mountains blacken. I lean forward, palms on knees, and take deep steady breaths. I slowly raise my head. The meadow and trees have returned. It is here, and I am here.
But I have seen this world
a world become
where wind and water
pass
past
unheard
Twenty-one
It was midafternoon when Jarvis set the kerosene can on my desk.
“It was empty, I assume.”
“Empty as a church on Saturday night,” Jarvis said as he took off his gloves and sat down. “Think it’s the same one he used when he burned his son’s house down?”
I lifted the can and looked it over. There was little rust but plenty of dents. Only the red D and E hadn’t worn off.
“I don’t remember, but it could be.”
“It’s got to be old enough,” Jarvis said.
“My grandfather had one like it, same kind of spout and wood handle.” I set the can down. “And it was on Gerald’s land, not the resort’s?”
“Just barely inside the fence. I nearly tripped over it,” Jarvis said. “I guess Gerald wanted to make damn sure Tucker knew who did it. I’d say we can put this one in the case-closed file, Sheriff.”
“What is it?” Jarvis asked when I didn’t respond.
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “It’s just that when I drove up to Gerald’s house, he was sitting on his porch drinking coffee like nothing had happened. When I told him why I’d come, he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Why do that if two hours earlier you made sure people knew you’d done it?”
“Couldn’t it be dementia?”
“That’s one answer,” I said. “I’ll make sure Dr. Washburn checks for signs of that before he’s released.”
“Or he could be faking that he has it.”
“I can’t see him faking something like that.”
“Why not?”
“His pride,” I answered, “but I’m probably just overthinking this thing, putting in too many ifs and buts. Hell, everything points to Gerald having done it.”
“Like you’ve said before, Sheriff, when you hear hoofbeats it’s best to assume a horse is coming, not a zebra. What do you want me to do with that kerosene can?”
“Put it in the evidence room.”
“Okay,” Jarvis said, but he didn’t get up. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about.”
“All right.”
“What you’ve done with the pot dealers. I get that it’s the meth doing the serious damage in this county and that’s what I’ll focus on too, but the way you’ve done it . . .”
“You mean the payoffs?”
“I’m not judging you,” Jarvis said. “I’m just saying.”
I waited as he studied the floor a few moments, then met my eyes.
“I’m not going to do that.”
“That’s your decision, Jarvis,” I answered. “You do what’s right for you.”
“I will,” Jarvis said, sounding relieved.
“Anything else?”
“Carly brought in Barry’s uniform, so it’s clear he’s not changing his mind. Should it be me or you who starts looking for a new deputy?”
“You should. He’ll be working for you, not me.”
Jarvis picked up one glove and set it carefully atop the other, fingers to fingers, thumb over thumb.
“You know, when she pointed at that microwave, I wanted to walk out of that trailer too.”
“But you didn’t,” I said. “I think you and me both realized that Barry wouldn’t last very long on this job.”
“I guess so, but it’s made me think about some things,” Jarvis said. “Like three years ago, when the river flooded and they brought in that cadaver dog. I was out there when it found that woman’s body.”
“I remember. That’s something nobody wants to see.”
“It wasn’t so much seeing her
body,” Jarvis said. “It was what the handler told me, about how those dogs can last only a few years. She said after they’ve found enough bodies the dogs get so depressed they can’t do the job anymore. Barry’s like that, but you and me, we aren’t, are we?”
“I guess not.”
“But still,” Jarvis said. “We have to feel that way at times too, don’t we? The only difference is that, unlike those dogs and Barry, we can get past it. I mean, you’ve felt that way, right? Real sad, and you thought you couldn’t deal with it anymore?”
“Once,” I said.
Twenty-two
There are certain odors in a hospital that all the disinfectant in the world can’t hide. Sometimes it’s blood and pus on a piece of gauze, or a bedsheet stained with urine. It’s the smell of suffering. I’d come here when my parents were dying, and I’d come on sheriff business as well, sometimes to the building’s lower region where what had brought me slid out on a metal tray. But my strongest memory was the evening I came because of Sarah.
No one can understand depression unless they’ve experienced it. That’s what the pamphlet given to me had said, what Dr. Edgar himself told me that day I sat in his office with Sarah. So I was no different from anyone else who hadn’t experienced it. Those evenings I stayed at Burrell’s Taproom drinking beer, the mornings I left the house without speaking a word, the unreturned phone calls at work, even the outburst the day of the meth raid—all were justified, even inevitable, for anyone dealing with something they couldn’t understand. I’d told myself that many times.
I checked in at the nursing station and walked down a hall, the white walls and fluorescent lighting reminding me of Trey Yarbrough’s pawnshop. But the rooms all had their shadows. I stepped inside Gerald’s. The ceiling light was off, the table lamp as well.
Beside the bed, machines blinked and beeped. He’ll be okay this time, Dr. Washburn had told me in the ER, but added that Gerald should be living nearer the hospital, the same thing C.J. had said two days ago. I stepped closer. The hospital gown made Gerald look infantile. The strangest thought came to me. When a baby was born, was it possible for a parent to imagine that child being this old?
