Catch Rider (9780544034303) (3 page)

Now we drove by Natural Well, too small to be a town, really just a dark, cold crevice in the rock that forms the well under the trees across from an old white farmhouse. When I was about six, Jimmy and I packed a lunch and went there for a picnic. I remember dropping a pebble down the well and feeling the rush of cold air on my face.

This area by the Jackson River, below the Kincaid Gorge and running all the way up to the Richardson Gorge, was magical. There was a huge waterfall—two hundred feet tall—down the mountain to the west. It was quiet, green, and cool. When a storm was coming, you could see the dark clouds over the waterfall and feel the cold air come over the Alleghenies. Hardwood forests ran up the hill on both sides of the river, around old Indian caves in the side of the mountain. The deer and turkeys climbed up the banks of the river when it flooded and ate the vegetation that grew in the loose soil on the banks.

The springs that fed the river up in Bath County were clear and clean, full of life, trickling over the rocks. The paper mill had a dam built upriver in the seventies, flooding the old Indian caves. The water that flowed into Covington was clean and full of oxygen, but as soon as it hit the mill and the pollutants gushed in, it turned dark and foamy. From the paper mill downriver about ten miles, it was a dead zone. Then it fed into the Cowpasture River, and into the James River, and out into the Atlantic Ocean.

I'd heard a hundred times that the town would die without the mill. But the animals and fish were dying with it. An old man told me once that when they built the mill, the birds in Covington stopped singing. There weren't any left.

I looked deep into the woods and thought about Me­linda's father, Buddy, who I barely remembered. My grandfather. Jimmy had told me that when Buddy was a young man, he left his small farm on the mountain every day before dawn with his dinner pail and his lantern and walked two miles down the mountain to a big farm in the valley near the river, where he worked the cornfields. Then those fields were flooded because of the dam.

I saw the herd of white cows that always stands in a grove of oaks on the hillside. The water had run down their bodies as the mist rose up from the heat—a ghostly, beautiful sight. The cows didn't mind the rain at all. They knew when it was coming, and they just let it come. Horses did this too, just hung their heads and let it pour. I wished I could be like that.

Then, as we came off the mountain, the lush farmland and forests turned into stores and parking lots and then the giant paper mill, leaking gray smoke out of more smokestacks than I could count. It looked like a plane had crashed into the valley, smoke curling up from all over the place into the sky. The rotten-egg stench was so powerful that it drifted for miles, up the Jackson River, through the hollows, to the most remote parts of the National Forest. It was an ungodly smell. Once in a while I saw tourists lost off the interstate driving through Covington with their shirts over their faces, like they were being suffocated. The smell was foul, sweet, irritating, and downright embarrassing.

The paper mill sat right in the middle of town. I knew if it wasn't for the mill, lots of people would have no place to work. But it sure was disgusting. Maybe they should leave and work somewhere else anyway, I thought. The mill took the best men we had and turned them into tired shift workers who never left Covington.

“When are you fixing my car?” I asked Wayne. I didn't even have my learner's permit yet, and my car had broken down twice. Wayne had gotten it for me from one of his horse-trader friends who I didn't trust one bit. Selling it to Wayne was probably cheaper than junking it.

“It's at your house.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

I was driving my father's pickup in the field when I was ten. Jimmy and Wayne would throw hay bales up on the back while I cruised down the rows. The sheriff was a friend of Wayne's, and he let me drive to the barn and back but nowhere else, which was stupid, but I guess that's what they have to do. I'm tall enough that I don't look too young behind the wheel, so sometimes I drive when I'm not supposed to and get away with it.

Wayne slowed down, and I felt a knot in my throat. He pulled into a church parking lot, swung the truck around back, and parked below a cemetery that stretched over a hill.

“I need to get home,” I said.

“It's your daddy's birthday, and you know it.”

He turned off the truck engine.

“Give him my respects,” I said. I didn't feel like being there, and that was that.

Wayne walked around the truck and opened my door, but I stared straight ahead. Every time I looked up at that cemetery, I remembered Jimmy's funeral. I'd worn sneakers, but my mother didn't notice. Then I wore the same outfit to school three days in a row, and she still didn't say anything. I waited for her to start noticing me again.

I sat in the car for a minute or so, then gave up and got out, stiff and sore from my fall. I followed Wayne up the hill, watching his Red Wing boots sink into the mud up to the bottom of his coveralls.

As Wayne walked between the headstones, closer and closer to the grave, I thought about running the other way.

“You coming or what?” he said.

Jimmy had worked at one of the state fish hatcheries up in Montebello where they raised rainbow trout. When the fish were big enough, they loaded them up in a truck and stocked lakes and ponds all over the state of Virginia. I used to go with Melinda to visit him at his job. It was so quiet, no one around, just the vultures sitting in the trees over our heads waiting to scoop up a dead fish. I'd buy ten cents' worth of fish food from the machine—looked just like a gum dispenser—and toss the pellets into the dark water. The fish would grab the brown pellets gently. The young fingerlings would fight at the surface, not knowing there was more. The older fish knew there was always more. The job Jimmy had was a good one—didn't pay a whole lot, but he liked it.

Every year the town had a “Trout Derby,” and Jimmy helped the kids stock the creek with fish. They'd jump into trucks and drive from one part of the creek to another, the boys and girls getting one fish each in a bucket. I rode with my father in the front of the state truck.

Once, Melinda and I went to visit Jimmy and he was taking a nap in that truck—up in the woods, sound asleep. I told Uncle Wayne about that, and he must have teased Jimmy a dozen times.

But my best memories of him were the trail rides. Every fall we'd load up a stock trailer with three horses and drive to West Virginia. Dozens of people came with their horses and camped out for three nights, sleeping in the cleaned-out stock trailers while their horses slept tied to trees. In the daytime we'd ride for hours through the woods, around peanut fields and cornfields, past cinder-block shacks and white clapboard churches. It was always hot and humid. Jimmy taught me how to tie a sponge to the saddle with a thin piece of rope. Whenever we crossed a stream, we'd drop the dry sponges down, hoist them up, and squeeze the cold water over the horses' withers. We'd walk the horses out of the woods at dusk, when the bobwhites would call from the edge of the swamp and the fireflies lit up the hay fields.

The deer flies would have stopped biting so much and the cicadas would be screaming from the woods as it got dark, and at night there'd be a dance with a real wooden dance floor and a country band, kegs of beer, and a big cookout. I'd watch my mother and father pass a flask of whiskey, and when they'd finally get up and start to slow dance, I'd walk back through the trailers, check the horses, crawl into my sleeping bag, and sleep so hard that when I woke up, I didn't know where I was.

Wayne and I stopped at a flat stone in the ground and looked.

 

JAMES CLORENT CRISER
1965–2009

 

For some stupid reason, it said “Daddy” under his name. I had been calling him Jimmy and my mama Melinda since I was two years old. He said I'd figured out that if I called them by their first names, they paid attention. Some lady at the tombstone company had talked Melinda into putting “Daddy” on it—Melinda was taking so many pills around then that she would have damn near run down the street naked if you said to. The stone was dirty now, and that made me angry at my mother. Jimmy Criser was neat and orderly, and everything he did, he did with care. All the time he'd spent making things right, and no one was keeping them up anymore. Was I supposed to do that too? Was I supposed to tell her what to put on the tombstone and how to keep it clean?

She'd given up on the tomato plants right away. Jimmy used to start thumbing through seed catalogs in February. Somebody had told him about a tomato called Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, after a mechanic who got out of debt by creating his own hybrid and selling the seedlings for a dollar apiece. Jimmy accidentally made his own hybrid after the wind mixed up the seeds he was storing by the shed. He'd crossed a green apple seed with some seeds of a fat orange tomato he'd gotten from grandma Elsie Cash, and he called the new tomato the Green Granny Cash. Once he was gone, Melinda didn't even tie up the tomato plants. They just tangled with the lamb's quarter in the yard.

Then Donald came. He ripped out the tomato plants and put grass seed down. He threw out all of Jimmy's stuff when I was at school. When I asked Melinda why, she said he felt like he wanted to make the family his own and that was a good thing. But I was sick over it. Everything was gone—pictures, clothes, records, magazines. I couldn't find anything of Jimmy's in the whole house. The only remnants were things at the barn. I figured that was all Jimmy had cared about in life anyway—his horse stuff—so I wouldn't let Wayne give any of that away. Not even a hoof pick.

After we'd stood by the grave a few moments, Wayne walked away. I started cleaning the stone with my finger, and Wayne came up behind me with a clean handkerchief. I dipped it into a puddle and wiped around the letters, and then I scraped some dirt back and saw the horseshoe underneath Jimmy's name. I ran my thumb around the horseshoe.

As we walked back to the truck, the sun was setting.

“Your mama coming?” Wayne asked.

I didn't know what to say.

As if life wasn't hard enough, I had to drive by this damn cemetery every day. It would always be there, and he would always be in it. It made me sadder than anyone could imagine—that people wind up in the ground, and that's it. But sometimes I felt Jimmy watching, especially when Wayne and I were at the barn. I knew he'd like that red horse, the way that horse wasn't afraid of anything. I knew he'd argue with Wayne, tell him the horse could get some real money with a little work.

I tried not to cry as Wayne swung out into traffic, down the turnpike and past the farmer's co-op. The Blue Ridge Mountains rose up behind the paper mill like a big ocean wave about to overtake a rusty tanker. I wished the wave would sink the whole town and bury it on the ocean floor. I turned the radio on loud, but Wayne shut it off.

It was growing dark when Wayne pulled up in front of the house. The place looked terrible—the storm door was broken and swinging in the wind, bags of garbage were piled on the porch. My beat-up old car was parked in front.

“Thanks for my car,” I said again. I pulled down the visor and looked in the mirror. I had a fat lip and the beginning of a black eye.

“It'll do for now. Put some ice on your face,” he said. “We'll get to work on that red horse tomorrow after school.” He winked.

I got out and stopped at the metal gate. “You coming in?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“I'll strangle that bastard if I lay eyes on him.”

I let the gate slam.

“Listen, you pay him no mind, you hear?” Wayne said. He seemed worried. I walked up on the porch, and he called after me. “He ain't worth your temper!”

He drove away.

I
STOOD ON THE
porch for a little while, listening to Donald's voice. They didn't know I was there. I was waiting to see what kind of mood he was in. It was my father's birthday, and if Donald blew up at me, I wasn't sure what I would do.

I took a deep breath and walked into the house.

Melinda came out of the kitchen looking pale and tired. Her hair was dirty and she had on a stained sweatshirt. I could smell Windex—she cleaned when she got nervous. Donald was sitting on the couch polishing his new knife with his red bandana. He was one of those losers who felt like a man only when he was talking about his knives, polishing them, or reading about them in
Blade
magazine. I love a good knife, but it's a tool, for cutting open hay bales and whittling a stick. Not for pretending you're some kind of warrior.

Donald was skinny with a long face. He had heavy-lidded eyes, like a lizard. Some animal part of me saw him as a predator.

When I walked in, his little black eyes followed me. He had his dirty sock feet on my mother's maple coffee table. He'd never done that before.

I walked right past both of them.

Melinda saw my face and gasped. “What did you do?”

I kept walking.

“You don't answer your mama?” Donald said.

I stopped in my tracks. I could feel my face getting hot.

“Take those boots off and leave them outside,” he ordered.

I looked down at my paddock boots. “They're not muddy,” I said.

“You heard me!”

“How about you get your dirty feet off my mother's coffee table?”

My mother's face was frozen in fear. I headed for my room, and I was almost there before I felt his grip on my upper arm, pinching my skin.

“Let go,” I said through my teeth, without turning around.

He tightened his grip. I yelped, and he released my arm. I knew he could snap my arm in two, and it scared me. I took my boots off and put them on the porch.

That was the first time he had ever laid a hand on me, and I don't think my mother breathed the entire time.