mouths.”
“Flags don’t eat bugs.”
The teacher nods at her watch, says it’s time to leave. As the orange bus drives away, a child peers through the back window. Behind the glass she mouths words as she waves at me. Memory scalds. Not the orange-bright of buses we ran toward that morning but minutes before, in the classroom as Ms. Abernathy lined us up. You must be as quiet as you can, children, she had told us. Promise me that you won’t say a single word. More memories come of the days and months after that morning: the room with big chairs and magazine-filled tables, a smaller room full of soft questions, a pair of black-framed glasses behind which huge eyes urged spoken answers, not head shakes. One night, my father thinking me asleep: The other children are getting over it fine, why can’t she? We’ve tried everything and it’s cost us a fortune. What your parents offered, well, let them have her. At least we’ll have a break from all this.
I close my eyes. Wash away, I whisper. Wash away, wash away. I walk down the loop trail, pass foxglove past bloom. Midsummer their flowers dangled like soft yellow bells. I’d wished them a breeze so they might silently ring. The same yellow as Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Vincent’s thick paint, like Hopkins’ thick sounds. Such grace-giving from supposed failed priests. I think of reading Hopkins in those days after Richard was killed. A failed priest saved my soul.
What would he see if here? I ask. I pick up a Fraser fir cone. A hollowed lightness like a thimble, spring’s green weight gone. The edges are strong-keeled as viper scales, wing seeds wedged in the slits. High in a white oak, a flicker searches for grubs. The bird’s too blended to see at first but then the red nape reveals and tree bark softens into feathers. The flicker’s tap-bursts and pauses: a thoughtful message typed. Where the trail skirts the creek, a stand of silver birch, then a gap where sun and water pool. On a granite outcrop, a five-lined skink. Plestiodon fasciatus. Its throat fills and sags but no other movement, a chameleon of stillness. Indigo body coppered with stripes that chevron on the head. The back feet frog cocked, the tail a bright blue fuse. I too feel the heatsoak of sun and stone, the human in me unshackling.
Five
One night the Discovery Channel showed a documentary about sheep in Wales. If the owner sold his flock, he had to sell the pasture as well, because, after so many generations, the sheep would be too rooted in that place to survive elsewhere. Little different for men like Gerald, I thought as I turned off the main road and onto the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’d seen others besides C.J.’s great-uncle leave houses where they and their families had lived for generations. They’d enter nursing homes or move in with sons or daughters. Like I’d told C.J., you’d be going to their funerals within six months.
I turned off the Parkway and passed the sign that said ENTRANCE LOCUST CREEK STATE PARK. I slowed and saw Becky’s green state truck in the parking lot. I didn’t turn in but followed the main road, soon passing another sign, LOCUST CREEK RESORT. On the left, the woods fell away, replaced by grass as manicured as a golf green, farther back the stone lodge itself. With its sixty rooms and three stories, the building parted the woods like a battleship, the same gray color and every bit as solid. A crazy idea, people had thought, turning the Tucker family’s best bottomland into a tourist destination, but Harold Tucker had known what he was doing. He was a rich man now, with a second resort in Myrtle Beach. After college, C.J. had worked twelve years with an ad agency in Wilmington, but when a public relations position opened at Tucker’s Myrtle Beach resort, he applied and got hired. Even after almost two decades, Harold Tucker had remembered him, and how hard C.J. worked for him as a teenager. The man believed in loyalty, and C.J. had been loyal to Tucker as well, which was why I figured he’d stick by C.J., even in a bad economy.
Where Locust Creek ran closest to the resort, a fly-fishing instructor stood beside a client dressed as if posing for an Orvis catalog, wicker creel and all. Not that he’d need much instruction. Tucker had the stream so well-stocked that all the guy had to do was hit water. Along the road’s edge, spaced just yards apart, bright yellow signs:
NO TRESPASSING ALL VIOLATORS PROSECUTED
I bumped over the culvert where Locust Creek entered a meadow on the state park side. Blacktop ended and gravel clattered as I crossed onto Gerald’s property. He owned no cattle now, but the pasture’s barbed wire fences didn’t sag or the locust posts lean. A tin shed protected a Ford Red Belly tractor that a collector would pay good money for. I knew if I checked the oil stick, it would mark the right level and the fuel filter would be clean as a new sponge. Men of Gerald’s generation took pride in such things, which made the patch of land beyond the woodshed appear so out of place. Charred wood and rusty tin poked out of kudzu and honeysuckle. It was all that remained of the house Gerald had built for his son, William.
Gerald was worming his tomatoes. He wiped his hands on his overalls and came to meet me. Even at seventy-six, he was a man not to be trifled with. Six feet tall and easily two-thirty, with little of that weight hanging over his belt. Gerald sheared his white hair and beard with scissors, keeping both short but ragged. Years back, a snapped logging chain had ripped open the right side of his face. The purple scar that stretched from eye to chin looked like a centipede had burrowed under his skin.
The scar and the size of the man, even the desert camo cap William had worn in Kuwait, all these things would have unsettled Tucker’s guest. The story of your life is in your face, an old country song claimed, a hard life in Gerald’s case. How could it not be for a man whose only child died at nineteen. Now his wife, Agnes, was gone too. Over the years, he and I had gotten along well enough, but his anger could flare up like a struck match. When it did, people gave Gerald a wide berth. Yet you never saw that part of him when he was around Becky. Watching him dote on her, and her him, you’d think him the mildest of men. He looked that way now, smiling as we shook hands.
“Nice tomatoes,” I said.
“They ought to be. Becky’s got me fussing over them enough. But she’s near convinced me she’s right. I didn’t dust a bit of Sevin on them. And feature how dark that corn is. I done it without pesticides too.”
I looked at the field. The shucks had the right coloration, the tassels blond and silky.
Gerald tapped his chest.
“What with this bad ticker, I can’t handle but an acre. Doc Washburn got on me for doing that much. Anyway, those tomatoes are riped up good so carry a few home with you.”
“Thanks, but not today.”
“So what brings you out this way, Sheriff?”
“Becky said that Darby’s had your lawn mower for two weeks.”
Gerald’s smile disappeared.
“What of it?”
“I’m of a mind it’s past time for him to bring it back.”
Gerald looked down and scuffed up a bit of dirt with his boot toe.
“If that’s why you come out here, I got nothing to say to you.”
“Actually, it’s not, Gerald. You scared a woman at the resort yesterday, bad enough that she packed up and left.”
“I didn’t mean to spook that woman,” Gerald said. “The trail took a curve and of a sudden she was there. Hell, she give me a jolt too.”
“C.J. Gant warned you not to go up there. Tucker’s signs told you the same thing.”
Gerald’s chin lifted and his gray eyes narrowed.
“What about all the times Harold Tucker’s bird watchers and flower sniffers come onto my land? I never rough-talked a one of them.”
“That may be, but I’m here to tell you the next time you trespass I’ll charge you.”
“So you’re taking their side?”
“The