The road Read Online Free PDF Page A

and watched the
boy. Wow, the boy said. He couldnt take his eyes off it.
     
    He squatted and scooped up a handful of stones and
smelled them and let them fall clattering. Polished round and smooth as marbles
or lozenges of stone veined and striped. Black disclets and bits of polished
quartz all bright from the mist off the river. The boy walked out and squatted
and laved up the dark water.
     
    The waterfall fell into the pool almost at its
center. A gray curd circled. They stood side by side calling to each other over
the din. Is it cold? Yes. It's freezing. Do you want to go in? I dont know.
Sure you do. Is it okay? Come on. He unzipped his parka and let it fall to the
gravel and the boy stood up and they undressed and walked out into the water.
Ghostly pale and shivering. The boy so thin it stopped his heart. He dove
headlong and came up gasping and turned and stood, beating his arms. Is it over
my head? the boy called. No. Come on. He turned and swam out to the falls and
let the water beat upon him. The boy was standing in the pool to his waist,
holding his shoulders and hopping up and down. The man went back and got him.
He held him and floated him about, the boy gasping and chopping at the water.
You're doing good, the man said. You're doing good.
     
    They dressed shivering and then climbed the trail
to the upper river. They walked out along the rocks to where the river seemed
to end in space and he held the boy while he ventured out to the last ledge of
rock. The river went sucking over the rim and fell straight down into the pool
below. The entire river. He clung to the man's arm. It's really far, he said.
It's pretty far. Would you die if you fell? You'd get hurt. It's a long way.
It's really scary.
     
    They walked out through the woods. The light was
failing. They followed the flats along the upper river among huge dead trees. A
rich southern wood that once held may-apple and pipsissewa. Ginseng. The raw
dead limbs of the rhododendron twisted and knotted and black. He stopped. Something
in the mulch and ash. He stooped and cleared it away. A small colony of them,
shrunken, dried and wrinkled. He picked one and held it up and sniffed it. He
bit a piece from the edge and chewed. What is it, Papa? Morels. It's morels.
What's morels? They're a kind of mushroom. Can you eat them? Yes. Take a bite.
Are they good? Take a bite. The boy smelled the mushroom and bit into it and
stood chewing. He looked at his father. These are pretty good, he said.
     
    They pulled the morels from the ground, small
alien-looking things that he piled in the hood of the boy's parka. They hiked
back out to the road and down to where they'd left the cart and they made camp
by the river pool at the falls and washed the earth and ash from the morels and
put them to soak in a pan of water. By the time he had the fire going it was
dark and he sliced a handful of the mushrooms on a log for their dinner and
scooped them into the frying pan along with the fat pork from a can of beans
and set them in the coals to simmer. The boy watched him. This is a good place
Papa, he said.
     
    They ate the little mushrooms together with the
beans and drank tea and had tinned pears for their desert. He banked the fire
against the seam of rock where he'd built it and he strung the tarp behind them
to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their refuge while he told the boy
stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy
was asleep in his blankets and then he stoked the fire and lay down warm and
full and listened to the low thunder of the falls beyond them in that dark and
threadbare wood.
     
    He walked out in the morning and took the river
path downstream. The boy was right that it was a good place and he wanted to
check for any sign of other visitors. He found nothing. He stood watching the
river where it swung loping into a pool and curled and eddied. He dropped a
white stone into