My Father Like a River Read online

  My Father Like a River

  Ron Rash

  Contents

  My Father Like a River

  “The Trusty,” excerpt from Nothing Gold Can Stay

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Ron Rash

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  My Father Like a River

  Fifty years, half a century, have passed since the November afternoon my father watched from a sandbar as my brother surfaced and then disappeared in a river that, like my father’s life, was moving in the wrong direction. This was the autumn of 1962. He was thirty-five years old, a man with a wife, four children, and, suddenly, no job.

  “I can’t believe he fired me,” my father had said a month earlier when he sat down at the dinner table. He sounded puzzled—no bitterness or fear in his voice, not yet. My mother and I, even my nine-year-old younger brother, let our roast beef and mashed potatoes lay untouched. Only the twins in their high chairs continued to eat.

  “Maybe he will reconsider, realize the mistake he’s making,” my mother said.

  “No,” my father answered. “He’s been setting this up for weeks. I just refused to see it coming. He wants to show he’s in charge, not his daddy-in-law’s ghost, and he’s using me to make that clear. He didn’t even offer me my old job back.”

  My father shoved his chair back from the table, his plate untouched.

  “I wish Mr. Hamrick had left me in the weave room,” he said and walked out the front door.

  Through the dining room window we could see him in the yard, the flare of his lighter as he lit a cigarette. He stood at the edge of the cul-de-sac, looking across the street at houses as new as our own, as heavily mortgaged. Brick houses, unlike the wooden house we’d lived in before, a house on the same mill village street where my father had grown up. There’s nothing more solid than brick, my father had said the day we moved.

  “You all need to eat,” my mother told my brother and me.

  “It’s cold,” my brother said.

  “Eat it anyway,” my mother said sharply.

  “A man doesn’t have to have a college degree to wear a tie,” Mr. Hamrick had said at the mill’s Christmas party, then announced the third and final promotion that had taken my father from weaver to shift supervisor to management. “Hard work and experience are more important than some rolled-up piece of paper.”

  Mr. Hamrick had waved us up to the podium to join our father. He had kissed my mother on the cheek and shaken hands with my brother and me.

  “You boys should be proud of your daddy,” Mr. Hamrick had said.

  But Mr. Hamrick’s philosophy was not shared by his son-in-law, and two years later when Mr. Hamrick died of a heart attack, my father’s rise became a free fall.

  He started looking for work the morning after he was fired. By afternoon he’d found a job. Clyde Harmon, a contractor my father had known since they’d been in first grade together, added him to a crew repainting the junior high. The job would last a month at most Clyde told him. After that my father would need to find something else.

  And so my father returned to a school he had attended two decades earlier. Instead of a white shirt and tie, he worked in white coveralls crusty with dried paint. His coworkers were two brothers, one twenty and one eighteen. Each Friday when Clyde Harmon took his thick roll of ten-dollar bills from his pocket, my father placed two fewer in his wallet than his coworkers. He had never painted before, so he learned from men half his age the art of staring at walls day after day.

  For that month my father was a looming presence in my life—in hallways when I changed classes, up on his ladder as adolescents moiled under him, or peering into my classrooms as he painted window frames. That I pretended to ignore him was only natural for a fourteen-year-old, for at that age a parent’s mere presence is a source of embarrassment, but I’m sure my father believed my downcast eyes were caused as much by shame. He was as uncomfortable as I when we saw each other during the school day, our acknowledgment a quick turning away of eyes.

  In the middle of my father’s monthlong career as a painter, Turner Realty raised a FOR SALE sign on our lawn. Almost every evening strangers snooped and poked around, sometimes under our house, while my father searched via phone or car for a permanent job, a less expensive house for when we sold ours. We ate on paper plates and quickly, our suppers a tense silence. Someone was always coming or my father always leaving, sometimes my mother with him if house hunting. They would strap the twins in the backseat and leave my brother and me to let in the Realtor and her latest entourage.

  By November the FOR SALE sign was no longer needed and we moved into a small wooden house in the mill village where my father had grown up. Unlike his parents, my father would, if he kept up the mortgage payments, own his house, but how could he not sense that he was back where he had started eighteen years ago?

  My father still had not found a permanent job, and the inside painting at the junior high was done. Now it was odds and ends, poles and doors. On the Friday afternoon of my father’s last day, I came out for recess and saw him in the distance climbing the water tower ladder, a paint bucket and brush grasped in one hand, gripping the metal rungs with the other. Except for the faded black letters that proclaimed our school’s name, the water tower was white as the clouds that filled the sky that afternoon. As my father rose, it seemed he might ascend into the clouds themselves, but then he stopped, halfway between the ground and the sky, and dipped his brush in the paint. I watched him raise the brush, follow the faded letters, his arm moving above and then out to his side as if semaphoring. The letters slowly brightened into blackness, my father filling in each letter’s outline like a first grader learning the alphabet.

  It was my mother’s idea for us to go fishing the following day. Perhaps she thought it might take my father’s mind off our uncertain future, give him a chance to spend time with his sons, something he had not done much in the last month. He grumbled about paying eight dollars for a license, but my mother told him a stringer of trout would give us a nice supper. She filled a picnic basket with sandwiches and Cokes and an old quilt. My father gathered the rods and reels and rusty tackle box from the cellar while my brother and I shoveled up earthworms in the backyard. We stopped at Lenior Sporting Goods where my father took a hard-earned ten-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to the clerk. As the clerk filled out the license form, my father studied the fishing lures in the glass case. He signed the license and was about to stuff the two dollars back into his wallet when he changed his mind, set the bills back on the case, and pointed at the Rapala.

  It took an hour of driving curvy two-lane roads to get to the upper corner of Watauga County where the New River flowed into Virginia. One of the oldest rivers in the world, my North Carolina History teacher had claimed and showed us how, unlike other rivers, the New flowed north instead of south, all the way to the Ohio before that wider water bent its current south toward the Gulf of Mexico.

  Once we entered the gorge, the road was no longer paved. We bumped and jolted down to the river, meeting no other cars. People had lived in this gorge before the government bought the land, but all tha
t remained of their having done so was an occasional chimney crumbling amid rotting wood and rusty tin.

  The state of North Carolina stocked rainbow trout under the bridge where we parked, and these fish along with an occasional knottyhead were what my brother and I had caught on previous trips. My father usually fished with worms as well, but this day he tied the four-inch Rapala to his line instead of a size ten hook. There were smallmouth bass in the New, some reaching four to five pounds, and a few brown trout even bigger. Perhaps my father believed a trophy smallmouth or brown would signal a change of luck in his life.

  As with most fishing trips we took, he had little opportunity to find out. Every time he moved up or downstream, my brother and I brought him back with a bird’s nest in our reel, a hook hung on a rock or drowned log. My father was usually a patient man in such situations, but on this afternoon his face darkened each time he laid down his rod and traversed the rocky bank to untangle a line or wade into the water to free a hook. The casts he did make brought no strikes, not even a swirl or follow. The day was warm for November, but we were deep in the gorge. By three o’clock the sun was falling behind mountains, the air chilly.

  My brother complained he was cold and wanted to go home, and though I said nothing I was ready as well. The fishing had been slow, three small rainbows in four hours. We were bored, the bait unchecked on the stream’s bottom. My father ignored my brother and waded out onto a sandbar fifty feet downstream. He fished with a concentration I had never seen before, making long, looping casts toward the far bank, changing the speed of the retrieve, even adding a sinker to the line in hopes the different depth might bring forth the miracle a big fish always is.

  “I’m going to the car,” my brother whined. He picked his rod up off the rocks and reeled for a few moments before the line tightened and the rod bowed. “I’m hung up, Dad,” he yelled.

  “Unsnag it yourself, dammit,” my father yelled back.

  My brother hesitated, waited for my father to say or do something else, because we’d been told to never enter the water without him close by. But the river had our father’s full attention. My brother placed his hand on the taut line, followed it into the swift current. He was up to his knees when he lost his footing and floundered into deeper water.

  When I yelled, my father looked around to see his youngest son appearing and disappearing in a current that shoved him toward and then past the sandbar. I stumbled into the shallows, shouting at my father to do something. I was close enough to see his eyes, and, in that moment, I believed he was about to let my brother drown. Then he entered the river, tripping and bloodying his knee in the rocky shallows before flailing into the deeper current, tumbled and spun downstream himself as he closed the gap between my brother and himself. He caught my brother, then lost him as a drop-off pulled the riverbed out from under their feet.

  Twenty yards farther downstream he collared my brother again. They had been pushed closer to shore, the water shallow now. My father lifted my brother to his feet, held him there as they both gasped and sputtered for breath. I watched my father’s hand as it slowly reached back and touched an empty pocket. I was with them now, and I held on to my brother’s arm as well, as the three of us stumbled toward shore.

  We looked like shipwreck survivors, each of us dripping and shivering. My father carried my brother to the car, stripped off his clothes and then mine, and wrapped us in the quilt. He placed us in the front seat, cranked up the engine, and turned the heater on high. “When you and your brother get warm, cut off the engine,” he told me.

  He walked the shoreline for an hour, his eyes searching the shallows, occasionally wading into the river to get a better look. The day’s last light had faded completely when he gave up. My brother had fallen asleep, his head on my shoulder. We drove back in silence. We pulled into the driveway, my brother between us, still asleep. My hand was on the door handle, but then I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder. The porch light came on and I could see his face. He nodded at my brother.

  “He’s okay,” my father said, his voice husky. “That’s what matters.”

  We lived close to the bone that winter, and the money the river snatched from us must have been a festering memory to my parents each time they sat down at the kitchen table to decide which bills to pay, which not to. It was January before my father got a full-time job at Shuford Mill in Hickory. We moved for the second time in five months. Though he would work at Shuford Mill for thirty years, he’d never wear a tie or make the salary he’d brought home those two years he was a manager. No one ever told him again that hard work and experience meant more than a rolled-up piece of paper.

  We make our own choices on how we remember our parents. I remember my father on a November afternoon as he stood midstream on a sandbar as if marooned. I remember how he watched his son sweep past him. What he felt at that moment, what he didn’t feel, I will not, as I did at fourteen, presume to know. Instead, I will remember how he found something worth holding on to in that wrong-flowing current that carried all our lives.

  Please enjoy this excerpt from Ron Rash’s short story collection Nothing Gold Can Stay, available February 19, 2013, from Ecco.

  In the title story, two drug-addicted friends return to the farm where they worked as boys to steal their boss’s unusual but valuable war trophies. In “The Trusty,” Ron Rash’s first story to appear in The New Yorker, a prisoner sent to fetch water for the chain gang tries to sweet-talk a farmer’s young wife into helping him escape, only to find she is as trapped as he is. In “Something Rich and Strange,” a diver is called upon to pull a drowned girl’s body free from under a falls, but finds her eerily at peace below the surface. The violence of Rash’s characters and their raw settings are matched only by their unexpected tenderness and stark beauty, a masterful combination that has earned Rash an avalanche of praise.

  The Trusty

  They had been moving up the road a week without seeing another farmhouse, and the nearest well, at least the nearest the owner would let Sinkler use, was half a mile back. What had been a trusty sluff job was now as onerous as swinging a Kaiser blade or shoveling out ditches. As soon as he’d hauled the buckets back to the cage truck it was time to go again. He asked Vickery if someone could spell him and the bull guard smiled and said that Sinkler could always strap on a pair of leg irons and grab a handle. “Bolick just killed a rattlesnake in them weeds yonder,” the bull guard said. “I bet he’d square a trade with you.” When Sinkler asked if come morning he could walk ahead to search for another well, Vickery’s lips tightened, but he nodded.

  The next day, Sinkler took the metal buckets and walked until he found a farmhouse. It was no closer than the other, even a bit farther, but worth padding the hoof a few extra steps. The well he’d been using belonged to a hunchbacked widow. The woman who appeared in this doorway wore her hair in a similar tight bun and draped herself in the same sort of flour-cloth dress, but she looked to be in her midtwenties, like Sinkler. Two weeks would pass before they got beyond this farmhouse, perhaps another two weeks before the next well. Plenty of time to quench a different kind of thirst. As he entered the yard, the woman looked past the barn to a field where a man and his draft horse were plowing. The woman gave a brisk whistle and the farmer paused and looked their way. Sinkler stopped beside the well but did not set the buckets down.

  “What you want,” the woman said, not so much a question as a demand.

  “Water,” Sinkler answered. “We�
��ve got a chain gang working on the road.”

  “I’d have reckoned you to bring water with you.”

  “Not enough for ten men all day.”

  The woman looked out at the field again. Her husband watched but did not unloop the rein from around his neck. The woman stepped onto the six nailed-together planks that looked more like a raft than a porch. Firewood was stacked on one side, and closer to the door an axe leaned between a shovel and a hoe. She let her eyes settle on the axe long enough to make sure he noticed it. Sinkler saw now that she was younger than he’d thought, maybe eighteen, at most twenty, more girl than woman.

  “How come you not to have chains on you?”

  “I’m a trusty,” Sinkler said, smiling. “A prisoner, but one that can be trusted.”

  “And all you want is water?”

  Sinkler thought of several possible answers.

  “That’s what they sent me for.”

  “I don’t reckon there to be any money in it for us?” the girl asked.

  “No, just gratitude from a bunch of thirsty men, and especially me for not having to haul it so far.”

  “I’ll have to ask my man,” she said. “Stay here in the yard.”

  For a moment he thought she might take the axe with her. As she walked into the field, Sinkler studied the house, which was no bigger than a fishing shack. The dwelling appeared to have been built in the previous century. The door opened with a latch, not a knob, and no glass filled the window frames. Sinkler stepped closer to the entrance and saw two ladder-back chairs and a small table set on a puncheon floor. Sinkler wondered if these apple-knockers had heard they were supposed to be getting a new deal.