Catch Rider (9780544034303) Read Free Page B

saw the fresh marks in the tree, but I never said anything. We’d drive right by and not say a word.
    I was so scared they were going to die too and leave me that Wayne started taking me everywhere: horse auctions, farmers’ co-ops, truck-stop breakfast meetings. At first, he wasn’t sure what to do with me, but I didn’t care. At gas stations, he’d lock the truck doors and go inside the diner to get me a hot chocolate, but I’d climb out and follow him. I tried to work up the courage to ask him if I could come live with him, but I couldn’t do it. Then one day, I blurted it out while we were waiting for a train to pass at the crossing. He paused for a second, and then he said I had to live with my mother. I was embarrassed for asking and angry at him for saying no, and my face got hot. I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, and for the first and last time, he got me a candy bar before he dropped me off.
    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