by Ron Rash
“He’s better,” a voice said.
Becky rose from a chair in the corner. She went to the bed and placed her palm on Gerald’s forehead, then gently smoothed back a few gray hairs.
“We should go to the lobby,” she said softly.
There was a coffee urn on a table and Becky poured herself a cup. I thought about getting some as well, but just being here had stirred up enough already for sleep not to come easily. We sat down on the couch. On the wall opposite us, a muted television showed blue water and bright-colored fish. I watched them a few moments.
“I know why Gerald was up there this morning,” Becky said.
“I think we all do.”
“Gerald told me and it’s not what you think,” Becky said. “Tucker’s secretary called him Tuesday night. She told Gerald that Tucker wanted to meet with him Wednesday morning, just the two of them.”
“At the waterfall?”
“Yes. Tucker wanted to straighten out things between them.”
“No security up there or anything?” I asked. “Just the two of them?”
“Yes.”
“That makes no sense. Gerald’s so drugged he could say anything.”
“He was clear about that,” Becky said. “He told me twice. You can trace the phone call, right?”
“Yes, if there was such a phone call. Even if it isn’t the drugs, Gerald could still be confused. I told Dr. Washburn to do some cognitive tests before he’s released.”
“Gerald doesn’t have dementia,” Becky said, emphatic enough that a nurse looked our way. “I’ve been around him more than anyone else, and I haven’t seen a single sign of it.”
“Jarvis found an old Dephas kerosene can next to Gerald’s pasture, right where a path leads up to the waterfall. It’s Gerald’s, isn’t it?”
“Even if it is, that doesn’t mean it was used up there.”
“The can was empty, Becky.”
“He didn’t kill those trout, Les,” Becky said. “At his house this morning, you saw how he reacted. He didn’t know what we were talking about. He was telling the truth and it wasn’t dementia.”
“Let’s hear what Dr. Washburn says. If Gerald is okay mentally, then we can start checking other things. We’ll know more about that in the morning.”
For a few moments the only sound was a nurse’s soft-soled steps. I reached for Becky’s hand, unsure if she would let me hold it. She did.
“That comment about you being wrong about people,” I said softly. “That was a shitty thing to say. I apologize.”
“It’s true though,” Becky said, “the part about Richard, at least.”
For a couple of minutes we didn’t speak. On the TV screen a mountain lion had replaced the ocean fish. The locale was out West, maybe the Rockies.
“Tucker could have done this to keep Gerald from going up there,” Becky said.
“Go to that much trouble and expense?” I asked. “Think of the risk for Tucker. All that to keep one old man off his property?”
“You think it’s not possible?” Becky said stubbornly.
“Look,” I answered, trying to keep my voice calm. “It’s been a long day for both of us. We need to get some rest. This thing will sort itself out soon enough.” I gave Becky’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Becky said, “but if Gerald gets to go home in the morning, I want to take him. I’ll pay the bail money if I need to.”
“I’ll let Gerald go home if Dr. Washburn says he is all right, and there won’t be any bail. But after his high jinks on Monday, he will wear an ankle monitor, and if he so much as takes a step off his own property, he’s headed to jail.”
I got up but Becky didn’t.
“Come on, I’ll walk out with you.”
“I’m going to stay,” Becky said.
I freed my hand from hers but resettled it on her shoulder once I stood.
“Tomorrow could be harder than today. You need to get some rest.”
“The nurse told me I can sleep on a couch. She said they have a blanket and pillow I can use.”
“I’m trying to care for you,” I said gently, and realized as soon as I’d spoken that trying could be taken two ways. I suddenly realized something else—that day at her mother’s house, when Sarah answered I know you didn’t when I’d told her I didn’t mean it, she and I may have been speaking of two different things.
“I care about you,” I began again. “I’m trying to help you.”
Becky raised her hand and set it on mine.
“What Tucker said about the fight, I wish I’d never heard that. Richard changed, and it was for the worse. But I’ve got to believe people can change for the better. I have to, Les.”
“I hope they can too,” I said.
“You will check about the phone call?”
“If Dr. Washburn says Gerald’s okay, I will check it.”
When I got back home, I wanted to sleep but too much jangled inside my head. What Becky had said about Gerald loving the trout too much to kill them gave me pause, but I’d known more than one suicide to kill their pets first, as if, like the old Egyptians, they believed the animals would accompany them to the other side.
Then I realized something I should have thought of sooner. A full five-gallon can of kerosene would weigh forty or fifty pounds, and then to haul it up a ridge . . . Gerald was country strong, as people say, but could his heart take the strain?
A horse, not a zebra, I reminded myself. Things almost always are what they seem.
But still.
Twenty-three
I sleep a few hours and awake just after midnight. A second blanket is over me, some nurse’s kindness. But no sound or smell soothes, all light skystarved. I check on Gerald. Despite the flashing lights, he sleeps soundly, so I take the elevator to the first floor, walk past the parking lot to sit on a concrete bench. Above, night’s high tide washup of stars. A car passes near but then there is silence.
Lord, send my roots rain.
Hopkins in a moment of wavering faith.
A memory of the Christmas morning two weeks after leaving my grandparents’ farm. The tree by the front window tinseled, coiled around it green cords blinking white, a spiked star on the tree’s leader, presents underneath. The breakfast of hot cider, ambrosia, and fruit cake. Everything is exactly the same as last Christmas, my mother told me. You are even wearing the same sweater as last year, she said. Not a bit of difference, my father agreed as he handed me my first present. Can’t you at least pretend to act grateful, to at least say thank you, my father had said.
So I said it.
The trade-off with school and parents from seventh grade on—make good grades, speak if spoken to, and no more counselors and doctors. You can sit in the classroom’s back corner, in empty rooms at lunch and at breaks, in your bedroom behind a closed door. But from then until I left home, I’d never been allowed to stay on the farm, for the summer or even a weekend. If you punish us, we punish you, my parents had said. The détente of college and after: those visits to that place I could not call home. Then the February night of my last year in grad school, my father dead, my mother in a hospital dying.
You can’t know how it felt to watch other parents with their children, to know that we were viewed as failures, parents who had to send you away so others could get you to speak again. You think of us as bad parents, bad people, but can’t you understand that after a while, after we did all that we knew to do, that you simply wore us out?
Vorago of memory threatens. I close my eyes and will myself to a different past day. How many years ago: thirty-one. Thirty-one years ago and a little after midnight. I would be at the farm, asleep between my grandparents. And when I awoke the next morning, I’d get dressed and eat, then quickly out to the barn. As the morning sun gilds the barn’s tin, the warmth softly enfolds me. I am here and I have never left. I am safe inside the silence of bright wings.
PART FOUR
Twenty-four
My
alarm clock was set for seven but when I woke it glowed 5:50. I lay in bed a long while but couldn’t go back to sleep, so I made some coffee and sat on the back step. The sky was dark but not silent. East of town geese honked as they followed the river south. It was a far-off, lonely sound, all the more so because it was somewhere in the darkness, like a late-night train whistle or a coyote’s howl. I was thinking about the kerosene can, how it surely was the same one Gerald emptied to destroy William’s house. Had Gerald thought of that? Maybe, but maybe not. My first year as sheriff I’d asked a woman what she was thinking when she stole a neighbor’s Christmas wreath. I wasn’t thinking. I just done it, she’d answered.
I ate breakfast and lingered over a second cup of coffee. Dr. Washburn would examine Gerald at nine and I planned to be present, especially since I knew Becky would be there. But at eight o’clock my home phone rang and it was Ben Lindsey.
I didn’t use the siren but kept the blue light on most of the way, though that was more about driving fast to get to the hospital by nine. I’d made this same trip a year ago to arrest Robin after she’d forged a prescription. She hadn’t done prison time but it had cost her parents plenty in lawyers’ fees. Now it looked like they might lose the bail money Ben had put up on Tuesday.
He met me at the door, stepped back so I could come in. Martha stood in the doorway that separated the front room and kitchen. She’d been a looker when we were younger, and bearing three children hadn’t changed that. Even two years ago, Martha had a face and figure most women in their thirties would envy. No longer. Now she seemed melted into a pale shapelessness, though a darker swelling lay under her eyes, as if the grief had pooled there. I sat down on the couch, though no one had invited me to.
“I told him not to bail her out,” Martha said, then turned to Ben. “I told you and you done it anyway.”
“What did she take?” I asked.
“My wedding ring,” Martha answered, “that and what money Ben had in his billfold and me in my purse. And a gold pocket watch Ben’s daddy gave him.”
“Anything else?”
“What else is there?” Martha hissed through clenched teeth. “She’s done used up all our savings on lawyers and bondsmen and the rehab center. She’s took everything but that baby sleeping in the back room, leaving her for us to raise.”
“Martha,” Ben said quietly.
“I’ll not raise it,” Martha said, her voice louder, more bitter. “There’s no telling what’s wrong with it after breathing that meth. Social services can give that baby to any that’s willing to take it.”
“You know where Robin might have gone?” I asked.
“Charlotte maybe,” Ben said. “That’s where she went the other time.”
“Then she come back here when even the trash she lived with down there wouldn’t have her,” Martha said, glaring at me now. “I know what busybodies like Bobbi Moffitt are saying about us in town and it’s a lie. We raised two children that don’t do drugs or drink. They both hold down jobs and never had the least trouble with the law. If we were such bad parents, how was it that they turned out good?”
Martha began crying, but when Ben went to hold her she slapped his arm away.
“Leave me be,” she shouted, and as she did a baby’s cry came from a back room. “I ain’t deserved this, and I’d say it to God himself. I’d say it to His face and I’d dare him to claim otherwise.”
“I’m going to see about the baby,” Ben said.
Martha wiped her eyes, then followed.
I heard a door open, then close. The baby quit crying. I looked around the room. When I’d been here last year, the fireplace mantel was crowded with family photographs, but now there were pictures of only the two older children, or of the family before Robin had been born. When I stepped closer to the mantel, I smelled smoke.
Ben came back into the room, alone. My cell phone buzzed but I left it in my pocket.
“Sorry you had to witness this, Les. It’s just been hard, on all of us.” Ben took a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. “Here’s a list of what’s missing.”
“If you hear from Robin, let me know,” I said as I took the paper. “I’ll tell Trey Yarbrough to look out for the pocket watch and ring, just in case she’s still around.”
We walked out to the porch.
“I guess you’ve still got a photo of her,” Ben said.
“We do.”
“The ones we had of her, Martha burned before you came. Every one of them. I didn’t stop her. I wanted to,” he said. “I wanted to,” he said again, more softly.
“I’d better be on my way,” I said.
It felt wrong to offer a handshake but Ben reached out to me, not to take my hand but to grasp my forearm.
“You’ve seen some folks that were able to get off this meth, ain’t you? I mean, there’s some.”
“Yes,” I answered as Ben released my arm. “There’s some.”
It was almost nine, so when I got back in the patrol car I called Jarvis, told him that he’d need to take an ankle monitor to the hospital in case Gerald got discharged.
“If that’s the way you want to handle this,” Jarvis said, disapproval in his tone.
Like the pot bribes, Jarvis was letting me know things would be different with him in charge. That was a good thing, but he would learn in time that a sheriff could bend the law for no other reason than what was law and what was right sometimes differed.
Ben remained on the porch as I drove off. Not wanting to go inside, or maybe waiting for Robin to show up, bring back what she’d taken and make everything all right. One story my grandfather told me about his days as a sandhog had seemed a tall tale, even to a kid, but later I’d found out it was true. In the years before electricity, what light burned inside the underwater caissons came from candles. At the greatest depths, the pressure was such that the candles wouldn’t blow out. The flame would sail off the wick, ricochet around the walls, then resettle on the wick. What my grandfather hadn’t told me was that sometimes cables broke and a man would be trapped down there. He’d know the candle was burning up oxygen, and he’d know the flame would not go out, but he’d keep blowing anyway, even with his last breaths, still hoping against hope that, somehow, it might.
Twenty-five
“They told me if I wanted to stay for lunch I could,” Gerald snorts as we leave the hospital. “Likely as not they’d have laid another slab of green Jell-O on my plate. The only thing good I swallowed the whole time was that spring water you brung me.”
“At least Dr. Washburn released you early.”
“Not before he gave me a bunch of advice I didn’t ask for,” Gerald said.
“You need to listen to what he tells you.”
“Seems like that’s all people do anymore,” Gerald grumbles, “tell me what I can or can’t do.”
“If you’re real hungry,” I say as I turn onto Main Street, “we can stop at Greene’s Café.”
“No, I want to go home and fix a real breakfast,” Gerald says. “Anyway, I’m in no mood to be around folks. I had a full portion of that yesterday. And now this thing on my ankle, like I’m a damn dog or something.”
“At least you’ll be home,” I say.
Outside town, a roadside apple stand has opened. Red delicious and Granny Smiths brim the latticed baskets. Like the half-mown hay field across the road, a harbinger of mornings when firm ground crackles and white breaths precede, trees start unblending and the leafers appear. Though a difference these last few years. Once out of their vehicles, the tourists raise cameras or cell phones, as if unable to see without them. I think of what Richard said, They won’t even know they are in the world.
When the resort comes in sight, Gerald tenses. Beside the stream is a white truck with a steel tank and an aerator, which means DENR’s declared the water safe. Two men lift sopping dip nets of rainbow trout. They hold the mesh bottoms, twist the long handles. Silvery scales catch sunlight. Bright as fresh-struck coins, trout spill and spl
ash.
“I didn’t kill them fish,” Gerald says as we pull into his driveway. “It was Tucker’s doing that I was even up there.”
“Les is going to check the phone call,” I say.
I give Gerald his key and he unlocks the door.
“I know what this is about,” Gerald says once we’re inside. “Tucker figured to get me back by blaming them dead fish on me.”
Gerald says it loud, like he’s talking to the house, not me.
“If you get too upset, you’ll be in the hospital again.”
“But that’s the what-for of him doing it,” Gerald says. “Ain’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “You need to eat. If you make the coffee, I’ll cook.”
I set the skillet on the stove, get butter and eggs from the refrigerator while Gerald fills the pot with water, places the basket inside, and scoops in the grounds. Soon the familiar soothes. We sit down and Gerald eats as I sip coffee.
My cell phone buzzes and Les’s number comes up. I step out in the yard to answer.
“Are you with Gerald?” Les asks.
“Yes, but he can’t hear me. Have you talked to Dr. Washburn?”
“I just did.”
“And he said Gerald’s mind is fine.”
“A cursory exam showed no dementia,” Les says. “To be positive he’ll have to do more tests.”
“Gerald’s mind is clear,” I say, “and he’s certain about that phone call from the resort. It was between seven and nine on Tuesday night. Have you checked?”
“No.”
“But you will?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk to Gerald about the telephone call?”
“Let’s be sure there was a call first,” Les says. “Then we’ll go from there.”
“How long will it take to know?”
“It depends. Probably a few hours.”
“But you’ll call me as soon as you know?”
“Yes, Becky, but you’ve got to be patient.”
