My Father Like a River (4 page)

Authors: Ron Rash

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BOOK: My Father Like a River

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Near another ridge, they crossed a creek that was
little more than a spring seep. They followed the ridge awhile and then the
trail widened and they moved back downhill and up again. Each rise and fall of
the land looked like what had come before. The mountain air was thin and if
Sinkler hadn't been hauling water such distances he wouldn't have had the spunk
to keep going. They went on, the trees shading them from the sun, but even so he
grew thirsty and kept hoping they'd come to a stream he could drink from.
Finally, they came to another spring seep.

“I've got to have some water,” he said.

Sinkler kneeled beside the creek. The water was so
shallow that he had to lean over and steady himself with one hand, cupping the
other to get a dozen leaky palmfuls in his mouth. He stood and brushed the damp
sand off his hand and his knees. The woods were completely silent, no murmur of
wind, not a bird singing.

“You want any?” he asked, but Lucy shook her
head.

The trees shut out much of the sky, but he could
tell that the sun was starting to slip behind the mountains. Fewer dapples of
light were on the forest floor, more shadows. Soon the prisoners would be
heading back, one man fewer. Come suppertime, the ginks would be spooning beans
off a tin plate while Sinkler sat in a dining car eating steak with silverware.
By then, the warden would have chewed out Vickery's skinny ass but good, maybe
even fired him. The other guards, the ones he'd duped even more, would be
explaining why they'd recommended making Sinkler a trusty in the first
place.

When the trail narrowed again, a branch snagged
Lucy's sleeve and ripped the frayed muslin. She surprised him with her profanity
as she examined the torn cloth.

“I'd not think a sweet little gal like you to know
words like that.”

She glared at him and Sinkler raised his hands,
palms out.

“Just teasing you a bit, darling. You should have
brought another dress. I know I told you to pack light, but light didn't mean
bring nothing.”

“Maybe I ain't got another dress,” Lucy said.

“But you will, and soon, and like I said it'll be a
spiffy one.”

“If I do,” Lucy said, “I'll use this piece of shit
for nothing but scrub rags.”

She let go of the cloth. The branch had scratched
her neck and she touched it with her finger, confirmed that it wasn't bleeding.
Had the locket been around her neck, the chain might have snapped, but it was in
her pocket. Or so he assumed. If she'd forgotten it in the haste of packing, now
didn't seem the time to bring it up.

As they continued their descent, Sinkler thought
again about what would happen once they were safely free. He was starting to see
a roughness about Lucy that her youth and country ways had masked. Perhaps he
could take her with him beyond their first stop. He'd worked with a whore in
Knoxville once, let her go in and distract a clerk while he took whatever they
could fence. The whore hadn't been as young and innocent-seeming as Lucy. Even
Lucy's plainness would be an advantageâharder to describe her to the law. Maybe
tonight in the hotel room she'd show him more reason to let her tag along
awhile.

The trail curved and then went uphill. Surely for
the last time, he figured, and told himself he'd be damn glad to be back in a
place where a man didn't have to be half goat to get somewhere. Sinkler searched
through the branches and leaves for a brick smokestack, the glint of a train
rail. They were both breathing harder now, and even Lucy looked tuckered.

Up ahead, another seep crossed the path and Sinkler
paused.

“I'm going to sip me some more water.”

“Ain't no need,” Lucy said. “We're almost
there.”

He heard it then, the rasping plunge of metal into
dirt. The rhododendron was too thick to see through. Whatever it was, it meant
they were indeed near civilization.

“I guess we are,” he said, but Lucy had already
gone ahead.

As Sinkler hitched the sagging pants up yet again,
he decided that the first thing he'd do after buying the tickets was find a
clothing store or gooseberry a clothesline. He didn't want to look like a damn
hobo. Even in town, they might have to walk a ways for water, so Sinkler
kneeled. Someone whistled near the ridge and the rasping stopped. As he pressed
his palm into the sand, he saw that a handprint was already there beside it, his
handprint. Sinkler studied it awhile, then slowly rocked back until his buttocks
touched his shoe heels. He stared at the two star-shaped indentations, water
slowly filling the new one.

No one would hear the shot, he knew. And, in a few
weeks, when autumn came and the trees started to shed, the upturned earth would
be completely obscured. Leaves rustled as someone approached. The footsteps
paused, and Sinkler heard the soft click of a rifle's safety being released. The
leaves rustled again but he was too worn out to run. They would want the clothes
as well as the money, he told himself, and there was no reason to prolong any of
it. His trembling fingers clasped the shirt's top button, pushed it through the
slit in the chambray.

Acknowledgments

G
rateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the following stories first appeared: “The Trusty” was originally published in
The New Yorker
.

About
the Author

Author photograph by Mark Haskett

RON RASH is the author of
The Cove
and of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist and
New York Times
bestselling novel
Serena,
in addition to three other prizewinning
novels,
One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River,
and
The World Made Straight
; four collections of
poems; and four collections of stories, among them
Burning
Bright,
which won the 2010 Frank O'Connor International Short Story
Award, and
Chemistry and Other Stories,
which was a
finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O. Henry
Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
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Also by Ron Rash

Fiction

Nothing Gold Can Stay

The Cove

Burning Bright

Serena

The World Made Straight

Saints at the River

One Foot in Eden

Chemistry and Other Stories

Casualties

The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth

Poetry

Waking

Raising the Dead

Among the Believers

Eureka Mill

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

MY FATHER LIKE A RIVER
. Copyright Â© 2013 by Ron Rash. Excerpt from
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
. Copyright Â© 2013 by Ron Rash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST ECCO SOLO EDITION

Epub Edition February 2013 ISBN: 9780062261960

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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