Above the Waterfall Read Online Free

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 turnin 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 inGerald’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