Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash

I’d packed provisions for two weeks and gone deep into Shenandoah National Park, followed the trails leading to what was farthest away. Where the trails ended, I went beyond, pushed through a gorge of laurel slicks and over a ridge where I set up camp. One afternoon I’d wandered the woods, found an old homestead with its cairn of chimney rocks. There the fox grape’s musky odor thickened the air. Yellow bells and periwinkle spread untended. How many decades such silence, I had wondered, what last words were spoken before the people left. I’d walked back to my camp and opened the only book I’d brought. I settled the poems inside of me one at a time. First “The Windhover,” and then “Pied Beauty,” by the end of the next week a dozen more. Letting Hopkins’ words fill the inner silence. Inscape of words. A new language to replace the old one I no longer could interpret.
    I close the park gate and leave, try to lock away memory as well. I need to check on Gerald but pedal toward the Parkway first, feel the release of being in a body all-aware.A mown hay field appears, its blond stubble blackened by a flock of starlings. As I pass, the field seems to lift, peek to see what’s under itself, then resettle. A pickup passes from the other direction. The flock lifts again and this time keeps rising, a narrowing swirl as if sucked through a pipe and then an unfurl of rhythm sudden sprung, becoming one entity as it wrinkles, smooths out, drifts down like a snapped bedsheet. Then swerves and shifts, gathers and twists. Murmuration : ornithology’s word-poem for what I see. Two hundred starlings at most, but in Europe sometimes ten thousand, enough to punctuate a sky. What might a child see? A magic carpet made suddenly real? Ocean fish-schools swimming air? The flock turns west and disappears.

Sixteen
    As I drove back toward town, I thought of what Jink had said about Darby and his bloodline, but it could go the other way too. My dad had been as kind and gentle a man as I’ve ever known. He’d never laid a hand on me, even when my mother argued that he should. But my father’s father had been a monster. He’d come home drunk and slap my grandmother around, then jerk his belt off and flail the backs of my father and his younger brother . Until one night when Dad was fourteen. The old man had staggered through the front door and my father swung a ball bat as hard as he could into my grandfather’s kneecap. He’d fallen and Dad and his brother beat him senseless and then dragged him out of the house and all the wayto the road. They told their father if he ever came back they’d kill him. He’d hobbled away and no one ever saw him again.
    A lot of men couldn’t get past such childhoods though. They’d stay trapped in the same cycle. I’d seen it too often. The boys with welts and bruises from their fathers’ belts and fists would do the same to their own wives and children, becoming the very thing they’d feared and hated most growing up. After my parents’ deaths, I’d found a single photograph with my grandfather in it. His eyes didn’t look at the camera or at his family standing beside him. Instead, they’d gazed toward something to his right, as if denying any connection. I’d studied his features, found more of me in them than I had wished.
    I hadn’t thought anyone to be around this late, but as I came up the freshly graveled road Billy Orr’s truck was parked in front of the cabin’s foundation. He sat in the cab, the driver’s window down. I pulled up beside him.
    â€œJust come by to see how far they got today,” Billy said. “It’s coming along good, don’t you think?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œMatter of fact, I’m ready to order the porch materials. You’re still sure you want that wrap around, the one I showed you?”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œIt’ll