A breeze lifts off the river. I raise the jacket’s collar and tuck the denim lapels under my chin. In another month all the leaves will be shed. Things hidden will emerge: knotholes and barked stretches of root, mistletoe and squirrel nests in the trees’ higher junctions. From this bridge I will be able to follow several of the river’s bends and curves as it makes a boundary between two states. Outcrops and rivulets will become more visible. Wildlife as well, mainly deer and wild turkeys but also an occasional wild boar or bobcat, even a black bear foraging for mast. Possibly a bigger cat, allowing a glimpse of yellow eyes, a long black-tipped tail, before vanishing back into the realm of faith.

From this bridge I cannot see the pool below Wolf Cliff, but I know the water is low and clear, the shallows thickened by red and yellow and purple leaves. Perhaps trout spawn in those shallows, their fins stirring the leaves as they follow old urgings.

In the boulder-domed dark below the falls, no current slows or curves in acknowledgment of Ruth Kowalsky and Randy Moseley’s once-presence, for they are now and forever lost in the river’s vast and generous unremembering.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank John Lane, Marlin Barton, Tom Rash, and Butch Clay for their help with this novel. Special thanks also to Lee Smith, Robert Morgan, Janette Turner Hospital, Silas House, George Singleton, Frye Gaillard, Amy Rogers, Linda Elliott, and Don Garrison. Good people all. I am especially indebted to three angels of the literary realm: Nancy Olson, bookseller extraordinare; Jennifer Barth, as gifted an editor as any writer could hope for; and, most of all, Marly Rusoff, who is not only an exceptional agent but also an exceptional human being. Thank you all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Winner of an NEA poetry fellowship, RON RASH has published three collections of poetry and two of short stories. The paperback edition of his first novel, One Foot in Eden, was published by Picador in February 2004. He is the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University.