Above the Waterfall (7 page)

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.

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.

I hadn't thought anyone to be around this late, but as I came up the freshly graveled road Billy Orr's truck was parked in front of the cabin's foundation. He sat in the cab, the driver's window down. I pulled up beside him.

“Just come by to see how far they got today,” Billy said. “It's coming along good, don't you think?”

“I do.”

“Matter of fact, I'm ready to order the porch materials. You're still sure you want that wrap around, the one I showed you?”

“I am.”

“It'll give you a pretty view in four directions,” Billy
said, his gaze sweeping the mountains now, “but like I said, counting labor, it'll be around twenty-five thousand.”

“That's fine,” I answered. “I need to go ahead and pay you, for everything. A hundred and twenty-five thousand total, right?”

“That's right, but pay half now and half when it's finished. I want you to be certain you're satisfied.”

“All right. I'll get half to you by Monday. It'll be cash.”

“I'm not averse to real money,” Billy said, smiling as he cranked the engine. “If something's not the way you want it, let me know.”

After Billy left, I checked out the foundation. Everything looked plumb, no cracks or bulges, the end and bed joints precisely measured. No drink bottles or food wrappers left behind either, another sign that Billy's crew took pride in their work. I turned and looked at the view I'd have from the front porch. In winter, I'd see a couple of second homes on the ridge, but for now it was green trees and blue mountains and silence.

It was a scene I'd once enjoyed viewing with a brush in my hand and a blank canvas. After a day dealing with the usual messes, it was nice to set an easel outdoors and look at the mountains, then try to re-create them, mixing colors to get the right shade of a leaf or boulder, or capture the way a tree limb reached crookedly toward the sky. The pleasure of that quietness, because even if people saw me in
a yard or field they'd leave me be. Plus the pride anybody gets from doing something well, as the county art show ribbons attested, though sometimes, less proudly, an excuse to get away from Sarah. Which was ironic, because, like a lot of things, I'd not enjoyed painting much after she was gone, and so quit.

I walked back to the car but didn't get in. I leaned against the hood and looked at the mountains. A breeze stirred as the sun began to sink below them. Soon the leaves on the hardwoods would turn.
Like the mountains are huddled under a big crazy quilt
. That was what my grandmother used to say when it happened.
Crazy quilt.
It was an expression you rarely heard these days, same as “Proud to know you,” or “It's a gracious plenty.” I thought about Gerald, who understood those words but, in a deeper way, couldn't understand a
NO TRESPASSING
sign, because it belonged to a world he didn't know.

I had been bad to sleepwalk as a kid. There were times, for some reason always in the summer, I'd make my way out of the house and end up in the yard. Folks back then, or at least country folks, didn't see the need for a porch bulb burning all night. I'd open my eyes and there'd be nothing but darkness, like the world had slipped its leash and run away, taking everything with it except me. Then I'd hear a whip-poor-will or a jar fly, or feel the dew dampening my feet, or I'd look up and find the stars
tacked to the sky where they always were, only the moon roaming.

I turned onto the main road and drove back toward town, all the while remembering what it had felt like when the world you knew had up and vanished, and you needed to find something to bring that world back, and you weren't sure that you could.

We were at Laurel Fork, not just Sarah and me but with three children, who soon left the water to get warm. Sarah joined them. They lay sprawled on the big boulder while I stood above the waterfall. Can you touch the bottom? Sarah asked me. I dove and when I surfaced Sarah and the children were gone. Only damp shadows remained.

Then the phone was ringing. I looked over at the clock and saw it was 8:20.

“Harold Tucker just called,” Ruby said. “He said you need to get out to the resort right now. You, not a deputy. I sent Jarvis but Mr. Tucker was adamant that you come too.”

I got dressed and drove to the resort, already thinking that whatever had happened, Gerald was involved. Becky's truck was parked next to C.J.'s SUV, another bad sign.
She and Jarvis were down by the creek and I joined them. Becky kneeled beside the stream, filling a plastic bottle with water. A few yards farther, where the culvert was, a brown trout, easily five pounds, drifted against the mesh wire. More dead trout were around it.

“What in the hell happened?” I asked.

“A fish kill,” Jarvis answered. “They say it is worse upstream where there's a big waterfall. DENR's on the way. They've already contacted the water treatment plant and they've shut down the intake valves.”

“It's that bad?”

“They're just being safe, same as us,” Becky said. “There are no dead fish in the park, but Carlos is posting warning signs.”

“It smells like diesel fuel,” I said.

“It's kerosene,” Jarvis said.

He pointed at the reddish sheen on a pool's edge. But it wasn't just there. Red tinged a sandbar upstream, as if the creek was bleeding.

“Why do you say that?” Becky asked, turning from the water she now tested.

“They put red dye in kerosene,” I said, “to differentiate it from on-road diesel.”

Becky didn't look pleased to hear that. She already knew where this was leading.

“What do your tests say?” I asked.

“The ammonia levels aren't elevated, right here at least.”

“Which means?”

“It's probably not organic or animal waste and I don't smell a herbicide,” Becky said. “Sewage or a pesticide either. But we won't have the results for at least a week.”

“But isn't it obvious what killed them?” Jarvis said. “I mean, you can smell it, and the red.”

“There could be something else mixed with it,” Becky said. “Or some chemical that was added in diesel fuel.”

“I'm just saying,” Jarvis added.

But Becky ignored him. She set the last sample bottle in the tackle box and snapped it shut.

“Where's Tucker?” I asked Jarvis.

“Inside making phone calls.”

“You talk to him?”

“Just for a few moments. He was waiting for you to come. Mr. Tucker said this was done on purpose. He says he damn well knows who did it.”

“I'm going upstream,” Becky said, getting up, “to try and find where it was introduced.”

I watched her walk up the trail and disappear into the woods.

She already knows
, I thought,
but she doesn't want to hear it.

“So Tucker thinks Gerald did this?”

“He didn't say Gerald's name but you know that's
what he's thinking.” Jarvis shook his head and frowned. “It's not much of a stretch to think so.”

“No,” I said, as Harold Tucker came out on the lodge's porch and motioned me toward him. “It isn't.”

“I've got something to show you, Sheriff,” Tucker said.