“We’ve got guests who fish above the waterfall,” C.J. said. “They appreciate how rare native brook trout are, and rarer still every time Gerald makes some his dinner.”
“Brook” trout instead of “speckled,” which was what C.J. had called them growing up. Something shed, same as his accent. I leaned back in my chair. C.J. and I had gotten crosswise before when he or Harold Tucker tried to tell me how to do my job.
“Why don’t you just put it in your fancy brochures that Gerald’s there to add to the rustic experience, an authentic mountain man fishing the old-timey way.”
C.J. had always been good at keeping his feelings to himself, but now I could almost hear his molars grinding. But it wasn’t just anger. He looked desperate.
“This isn’t a joke, Les. I told Gerald in June not to go near that waterfall again. I put my ass on the line, instead of doing what Mr. Tucker wanted, which was to come to you. Gerald swore to my face he wouldn’t go fishing up there anymore.” C.J. grimaced and tapped the chair’s arm with a closed hand. “If I’d thought it out, I’d have turned right to come see you instead of left to Gerald’s house,” he said, as much to himself as to me. Then C.J. leaned forward, his voice soft, “Les, if this isn’t done right, I could lose my job.”
He glanced down at his tie, then smoothed it with his hand, like the tie needed calming, not him.
“Come on, C.J.,” I said, seriously, not joshing. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?”
“Have you seen our parking lot? If things don’t pick up soon, Tucker will have to lay some people off.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go this afternoon but I’m not charging Gerald without a warning.”
“Damn it, aren’t you listening?” C.J. said, raising his voice again. “He’s been warned. By the signs, by me.”
“But not by me,” I said. “You can wait until after the end of the month and have Jarvis Crowe deal with this, but for now I’m still sheriff.”
C.J.’s cell phone buzzed. As he took it from his pocket, I saw the puckered scar on the back of his hand, the result of a hay baler’s metal tines on a long-ago Saturday morning. C.J.’s great-uncle had made a tourniquet from a handkerchief and we’d rushed C.J. to the hospital. If your arm had gone in there it would have been ripped off and you’d have bled to death, son, the doctor had told C.J., scolding him for his carelessness. But it hadn’t been C.J. who’d been careless.
“You don’t have to tell him anything,” C.J. said to the caller. “I’m taking care of it right now. Just let me deal with it. I’ll let Mr. Tucker know what’s going on.”
He pocketed the phone.
“I can’t lose my job over this, Les,” C.J. said. “My boys aren’t going to grow up like me.”
I’d thought to go to Jink Hampton’s place first, but I raised my hands in surrender.
“Okay. I’ll go on out there now and make it damn clear to Gerald that he will be arrested next time.”
C.J. stood, but he didn’t leave.
“You know this wouldn’t have happened if Gerald had sold that place two years ago. Even his nephew had the sense to know there’d never be a better offer. And now, with this recession, he’ll be lucky to get half that.”
“I’m sure you and Tucker had only Gerald’s interests in mind.”
“Think what you want,” C.J. said, “but I knew that a man Gerald’s age, especially one with a bad heart, would be better off with a hospital near.”
“As far as I’m concerned, Darby inheriting less is all to the good. The only smart thing Gerald did was not to give that little prick of a nephew power of attorney. As for Gerald living longer, look what selling his farm did to your great-uncle. How long did he last in town, a month? You know what leaving a home place does to men like them. No hospital can cure that.”
C.J. didn’t have a response, because he knew it was true.
“Get over there, Les,” he said, and left.
You’re smart, though you try to hide it. You can get away from this place too, be an art teacher in Charlotte or anywhere clear to Alaska.
That’s what C.J. had told me at the start of our senior year. Since he’d come back to live here, he’d never directly said anything about me staying put, though the first time he’d been in my office he’d nodded at the Hopper painting. “With the rusty wheels and those weeds, someone might see that painting as rather symbolic, Les. Is that why you bought it?” “I didn’t buy it,” I’d answered. “Mr. Neil gave it to me when he retired, frame and all. He just remembered that in class I’d liked Hopper’s paintings.”
I’d settled for too little in my life, C.J. believed. And maybe I had.
Four
The school bus pulls into the lot and children stream from it into the world. They gather around the cedar announcement board, on it the brass plaque I placed there my first day.
HOW NEAR AT HAND IT WAS
IF THEY HAD EYES TO SEE IT.
—G. M. Hopkins
I go through my usual protocol. No cameras or cell phones, not even for the teacher. Then we cross the bridge, go upstream where I show them cardinal flowers and bee balm, a mantis greenblended on a blackberry bush.
“It can change shades of color,” I tell them and set the mantis on a dogwood limb. “If it stays, you will see.”
I lead them to where joe-pye stems anchor low clouds of lavender.
“Did you know flowers grew so high?” I ask.
Solemn head shakes.
“I bet there is something else you don’t know, that jaguars and parakeets once lived in these mountains. Most people think the parakeets have been gone for over a hundred years, but I know a man who says he saw some in 1944. I want to believe a few might still be around, don’t you?”
The children nod.
I show them an empty hummingbird’s nest, let them touch a box turtle’s shell, other things. Last, we walk up above the bridge and sit on the stream bank. I point to a trout holding its place in the current.
“Let’s try something,” I say. “If you had a friend who’d never seen a fish swimming in a stream, what would you tell that friend the fish looks like? Think about that for a few minutes, without talking.”
I watch and I too see something new, how the trout appears to weave the very water it is in. As if the world’s first fish lay in dust, but with each fin and flesh thrum brought forth more water, soon whole rivers, then oceans. Taliesin in the coracle, the salmon of knowledge: all the world’s wisdom waterborne, water born. Welsh notions Hopkins would have known.
“So what would you say to your friend?” I ask.
Several say a flag and the other children chime in.
“On a windy day.”
“Not too windy.”
“With lots and lots of rain.”
“A brown flag with red spots.”
“What if your friend asked how the fish was different from a flag?” I ask.
“No pole.”
“It