years and I still didn’t know what word to use for our relationship. A few “dates,” a few kisses. But more than anything, a wary out-of-step dance. Except for the first time I’d been in Becky’s cabin. On that evening it had almost become more. I’d brought a bottle of wine and as Becky got us glasses, I’d sat on the couch and surveyed the cabin’s front room, curious to see what it might reveal about her. There was a shelf of books, most connected to nature, but also some poetry and art books, including one I’d borrowed about the cave art in Lascaux. On the fireboard was a crumbling hornet’s nest, a gold pocket watch, and a single photograph. In one corner a butter churn, in another corner a chair, a table, and a lamp. Except for the couch, that was it—no TV or CD player, no clock or radio or computer, no rug. Nothing on the walls, not even a calendar. The photograph of two old people, sun streaked and in an oval frame, seemed, like the rest of the room’s contents, remnants left in a house long abandoned.
That night, for the first time, our kisses were the kind that led to a bed. But our talk was even more intimate, as if the room’s feeling of time turned back allowed us to speak more freely of our pasts. Becky talked about her months with Richard Pelfrey, and I’d told her about my ex-wife Sarah, sharing things I’d never told anyone. Becky had also talked about her childhood, the shooting at her elementary school and what had happened in the months afterward. We spoke of promises.
But with the late hour and empty wine bottle came the feeling that we’d revealed too much, violated something within ourselves, the very thing that had attracted us to each other in the first place. So we had left it there for six months. More than once I’d imagined a listing on an Internet dating site:
Man who encouraged clinically depressed wife to kill herself seeks woman, traumatized by school shooting, who later lived with ecoterrorist bomber.
Sorry to hear about the school shooting, I typed, then remembered I needed to collect my monthly “stipend” from Jink Hampton. I may be out and about later today. Will try to come by the park. Les
Ruby once asked what sort of relationship Becky and I had. I’d answered that I didn’t know the word for it, but a word came to me now.
Accomplices. Maybe that was what we were.
Two
Somewhere in Arizona a jaguar roams. On this day of another school shooting, such news is so needed. Scat and paw prints confirm the sighting. Gone forever from the United States since the 1940s, many had believed. What more wonder might yet be: ivorybill, bachman’s warbler, even the parakeet once here in these mountains. When I see them in dreams, they are not extinct, just asleep, and I believe if I rouse them from their slumber, we will all awake in the world together.
A fisherman is in the meadow, each backcast and cast a bowstring pulled and released. I walk upstream to check his license. As always, my chest tightens, so hard just to speak, especially the day of a shooting.
“The streams are about as low as I’ve seen them in a while,” the fisherman says when I hand the license back. “I was thinking that I might play golf this morning, and I probably should have. I’ve only had one strike.”
He cradles the fly rod in the crook of his arm. I’m about to head back but he points upstream beyond the meadow and the road that leads past Locust Creek Resort to Gerald’s farmhouse.
“I bet I’d get plenty of strikes over there,” the fisherman says. “I heard they’ve stocked so many trout those fish line up like they’re getting served at a cafeteria. You can throw in a bare hook and the trout will hit it. Anyway . . .” The man pauses and I raise my eyes. He’s frowning now. “Pardon me for holding you up, Ranger. I was just trying to be sociable.”
“I . . . I’m sorry,” I stammer. “You aren’t holding me up.”
He nods and wades on upstream. It’s almost noon so I return to the park office. I eat lunch at my desk, then pedal out to the Parkway. Bright-colored car tags pass like flashcards. Land levels and I ride slow, a clock-winding pedal and pause. A pickup from Virginia sweeps past, leads me back thirty years to my grandparents’ farm. There, old license plates were a scarecrow’s loud jewelry. Wind set the tin clinking and clanking. But the straw-stuffed flour-sack face stayed silent. Those first months after my parents gave up and sent me to the farm, I’d sometimes stand beside the scarecrow, hoe handle balanced behind my neck, arms draped over. Both of us watchful and silent as the passing days raised a green curtain around us. Soon all we could see was the sky, that and tall barn planks the color of rain.
I had not spoken since the morning of the shooting. Then one day in July my grandparents’ neighbor nodded at the ridge gap and said watershed. I’d followed the creek upstream, thinking wood and tin over a spring, found instead a granite rock face shedding water. I’d touched the wet slow slide, touched the word itself, like the girl named Helen that Ms. Abernathy told us about, whose first word gushed from a well pump. I’d closed my eyes and felt the stone tears. That evening, my grandfather had filled my glass with milk and handed it to me. Thank you, I said. A shared smile between them, from my grandmother’s eyes a few tears. After that, more words each day, then whole sentences, enough to reenter school in September, though I’d stayed on the farm until Christmas.
The Parkway ascends, soon peers over landfall. No one is at the pull-off so I stop. Mountains accordion into Tennessee. Beyond the second ripple, a meadow where I’d camped in June. Just a sleeping bag, no tent. Above me that night tiny lights brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed. Photinus carolinus. Fireflies synchronized to make a single meadow-wide flash, then all dark between. Like being inside the earth’s pulsing heart. I’d slowed my blood-beat to that rhythm. So much in the world that night. The next morning as I’d hiked out, I started to step over a log but my foot jerked back. When I looked on the other side, a copperhead lay coiled. Part of me not sight knew it was there. The atavistic like flint rock sparked. Amazon tribes see Venus in daylight. My grandfather needed no watch to tell time. What more might we recover if open to it? Perhaps even God.
I leave my bike at the pull-off. As I enter the woods, the wide, clean smell of balsam firs. Deeper, the odor of shadow-steeped mold. In canopy gaps, the sky through straws of sunlight sips damp leaf meal dry. For a minute, no sound. I gather in the silence, place it inside me for the afternoon. I coast back down the Parkway, the upward buffeting what a kite must feel. I pass a wheat field, its tall gold-gleaming a hurrahing in harvest. Soon Gerald and I will sit on his porch, a tin pan tapping as snapped beans fall. You got no more family than me, Gerald said when he learned my parents were dead and that I had no siblings. He’d told me about his son and his wife and his sister, all younger than him but now gone. I’m tired of being left behind, he’d said one day, eyes misting.
But will be left never by me. Never by me. Never.
Three
C.J. Gant’s daddy had been a decent farmer but bad to drink. He’d show up in town with fifty dollars in his pocket and wake the next day without a nickel. During elementary school, C.J. and his sister wore clothes that would shame a hobo, then had to hand the cashier a ticket to get the welfare lunch. In fourth grade, though, C.J. quit eating the cafeteria’s meal, instead bringing lunches that were nothing more than a slab of fatback in a biscuit. He’d set the brown paper sack in front of him, trying to hide what he ate. Taunts about his father, shoves and trips, books knocked out of his hands, he’d had a full portion
