Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash

Author:Ron Rash
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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