The Roar of Rushing Waters

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An excerpt:

He lifted his eyes up from the path, turning his body so that the roar of the rushing waters was to his right, far below him, now louder than the applauding trees. Up he meant to climb, but he was looking for the lightning-struck stump. A generation ago it had been struck, his daddy once told him, and once it was struck by lightning, light could no longer escape, so it stood against the shadowed green of the summer woods as an obelisk, marking the way to the Indian corn grinder. He closed his eyes, remembering how his daddy held his hand and pointed. Was the obelisk up a little? Or was it straight in front of him, resting upon the top of the bluffs as he was? He remembered. He opened his eyes and peered: there it was, up a little. The top of the bluffs served as a path, but not without treachery, for the river in places suddenly snaked toward the bluffs, reaching to pull out foundational stones with a great crack of victory, leaving only the deception of safety.

To the great obelisk, now showing green, spring green in August, moss flourishing on the north side at the end of this wet summer, he climbed. Straight up the hill from the stump was the Indian corn grinder, a cup hewn into the top of a projection of bedrock, waist high on an Indian maiden, chest high on an unnipped boy named Bud. Around the corn grinder had been a village, strung out along a flat spot on this steep hill, protected below by the bluffs of the river, protected from above by sheer inclination, accessible from either side, but only in single file. Bud fingered the marks where his older uncles, who stood in his mind like a towering jury of the unjust, had tried to cut the corn grinder out of the hill in order to sell it, but had been disappointed to find that it was, indeed, a part of the foundations of the earth itself. Bud heard whispering, but he was not afraid: it was the forest, whispering to him beneath the roar of the rushing waters.

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