My Father Like a River by Ron Rash Page A

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 that 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