Burning Bright: Stories (10 page)

H
is great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she’d always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.

Knowledge of the land was the one memory that refused to dissolve. During her last year, Jesse would step off the school bus and see his great-aunt hoeing a field behind her farmhouse, breaking ground for a crop she never sowed, but the rows were always straight, right-depthed. Her nephew, Jesse’s father, worked in an adjoining field. The first few times, he had taken the hoe from her hands and led her back to her house, but she’d soon be back in the field. After a while neighbors and kin just let her hoe. They brought meals and checked on her as often as they could. Jesse always walked rapidly past her field. His great-aunt never looked up, her gaze fixed on the hoe blade and the dark soil it churned, but he had always feared she’d raise her eyes and acknowledge him, though what she might want to convey Jesse could not say.

Then one March day she disappeared. The men in the community searched all afternoon and into evening as the temperature dropped, sleet crackled and hissed like static. The men rippled outward as they lit lanterns and moved into the gorge. Jesse watched from his family’s pasture as the held flames grew smaller, soon disappearing and reappearing like foxfire, crossing the creek and then on past the ginseng patch Jesse helped his father harvest, going deeper into land that had been in the family almost two hundred years, toward the original homestead, the place she’d been born.

They found his great-aunt at dawn, her back against a tree as if waiting for the searchers to arrive. But that was not the strangest thing. She’d taken off her shoes, her dress, and her underclothes. Years later Jesse read in a magazine that people dying of hypothermia did such a thing believing heat, not cold, was killing them. Back then, the woods had been communal,
No Trespassing
signs an affront, but after her death neighbors soon found places other than the gorge to hunt and fish, gather blackberries and galax. Her ghost was still down there, many believed, including Jesse’s own father, who never returned to harvest the ginseng he’d planted. When the park service made an offer on the homestead, Jesse’s father and aunts had sold. That was in 1959, and the government paid sixty dollars an acre. Now, five decades later, Jesse stood on his porch and looked east toward Sampson Ridge, where bulldozers razed woods and pastureland for another gated community. He wondered how much those sixty acres were worth today. Easily a million dollars.

Not that he needed that much money. His house and twenty acres were paid for, as was his truck. The tobacco allotment earned less each year but still enough for a widower with grown children. Enough as long as he didn’t have to go to the hospital or his truck throw a rod. He needed some extra money put away for that. Not a million, but some.

So two autumns ago Jesse had gone into the gorge, following the creek to the old homestead, then up the ridge’s shadowy north face where his father had seeded and harvested his ginseng patch. The crop was there, evidently untouched for half a century. Some of the plants rose above Jesse’s kneecaps, and there was more ginseng than his father could have dreamed of, a hillside spangled with bright yellow leaves, enough roots to bulge Jesse’s knapsack. Afterward, he’d carefully replanted the seeds, done it just as his father had done, then walked out of the gorge, past the iron gate that kept vehicles off the logging road. A yellow tin marker nailed to a nearby tree said U.S. Park Service.

Now another autumn had come. A wet autumn, which was good for the plants, as Jesse had verified three days ago when he’d checked them. Once again he gathered the knapsack and trowel from the woodshed. He also took the .32-20 Colt from his bedroom drawer. Late in the year for snakes, but after days of rain the afternoon was warm enough to bring a rattler or copperhead out to sun.

He followed the old logging road, the green backpack slung over his shoulder and the pistol in the outside pouch. Jesse’s arthritic knees ached as he made the descent. They would ache more that night, even after rubbing liniment on them. He wondered how many more autumns he’d be able to make this trip. Till I’m
seventy, Jesse figured, giving himself two more years. The ground was slippery from all the rain and he walked slowly. A broken ankle or leg would be a serious thing this far from help, but it was more than that. He wanted to enter the gorge respectfully.

When he got in sight of the homestead, the land leveled out, but the ground grew soggier, especially where the creek ran close to the logging road. Jesse saw boot prints from three days earlier. Then he saw another set, coming up the logging road from the other direction. Boot prints as well, but smaller. Jesse looked down the logging road but saw no hiker or fisherman. He kneeled, his joints creaking.

The prints appeared at least a day old, maybe more. They stopped on the road when they met Jesse’s, then also veered toward the homestead. Jesse got up and looked around again before walking through the withered broom sedge and joe-pye weed. He passed a cairn of stones that once had been a chimney, a dry well covered with a slab of tin so rusty it served as more warning than safeguard. The boot prints were no longer discernible but he knew where they’d end. Led the son of a bitch right to it, he told himself, and wondered how he could have been stupid enough to walk the road on a rainy morning. But when he got to the ridge, the plants were still there, the soil around them undisturbed. Probably just a hiker, or a bird watcher, Jesse figured, that or
some punk kid looking to poach someone’s marijuana, not knowing the ginseng was worth even more. Either way, he’d been damn lucky.

Jesse lifted the trowel from the backpack and got on his knees. He smelled the rich dark earth that always reminded him of coffee. The plants had more color than three days ago, the berries a deeper red, the leaves bright as polished gold. It always amazed him that such radiance could grow in soil the sun rarely touched, like finding rubies and sapphires on the gloamy walls of a cave. He worked with care but also haste. The first time he’d returned here two years earlier he’d felt a sudden coolness, a slight lessening of light as if a cloud had passed over the sun. Imagination, he’d told himself then, but it had made him work faster, with no pauses to rest.

Jesse jabbed the trowel into the loamy soil, probing inward with care so as not to cut the root, slowly bringing it to light. The root was a big one, six inches long, tendrils sprouting from the core like clay renderings of human limbs. Jesse scraped away the dirt and placed the root in the backpack, just as carefully buried the seeds to ensure another harvest. As he crawled a few feet left to unearth another plant, he felt the moist dirt seeping its way through the knees of his blue jeans. He liked being this close to the earth, smelling it, feeling it on his hands and under his nails, the same as when he planted tobacco sprigs in the spring. A song he’d heard on the
radio drifted into his head, a woman wanting to burn down a whole town. He let the tune play in his head and tried to fill in the refrain as he pressed the trowel into the earth.

“You can lay that trowel down,” a voice behind Jesse said. “Then raise your hands.”

Jesse turned and saw a man in a gray shirt and green khakis, a gold badge on his chest and U.S. Park Service patch on the shoulder. Short blond hair, dark eyes. A young man, probably not even thirty. A pistol was holstered on his right hip, the safety strap off.

“Don’t get up,” the younger man said again, louder this time.

Jesse did as he was told. The park ranger came closer, picked up the backpack, and stepped away. Jesse watched as he opened the compartment with the ginseng root, then the smaller pouch. The ranger took out the .32-20 and held it in his palm. The gun had belonged to Jesse’s grandfather and father before being passed on to Jesse. The ranger inspected it as he might an arrowhead or spear point he’d found.

“That’s just for the snakes,” Jesse said.

“Possession of a firearm is illegal in the park,” the ranger said. “You’ve broken two laws, federal laws. You’ll be getting some jail time for this.”

The younger man looked like he might say more, then seemed to decide against it.

“This ain’t right,” Jesse said. “My daddy planted the seeds for this patch. That ginseng wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for him. And that gun, if I was poaching I’d have a rifle or shotgun.”

What was happening didn’t seem quite real. The world, the very ground he stood on, felt like it was evaporating beneath him. Jesse almost expected somebody, though he couldn’t say who, to come out of the woods laughing about the joke just played on him. The ranger placed the pistol in the backpack. He unclipped the walkie-talkie from his belt, pressed a button, and spoke.

“He did come back and I’ve got him.”

A staticky voice responded, the words indiscernible to Jesse.

“No, he’s too old to be much trouble. We’ll be waiting on the logging road.”

The ranger pressed a button and placed the walkie-talkie back on his belt. Jesse read the name on the silver name tag.
Barry Wilson.

“You any kin to the Wilsons over on Balsam Mountain?”

“No,” the younger man said. “I grew up in Charlotte.”

The walkie-talkie crackled and the ranger picked it up, said okay, and clipped it back on his belt.

“Call Sheriff Arrowood,” Jesse said. “He’ll tell you
I’ve never been in any trouble before. Never, not even a speeding ticket.”

“Let’s go.”

“Can’t you just forget this,” Jesse said. “It ain’t like I was growing marijuana. There’s plenty that do in this park. I know that for a fact. That’s worse than what I done.”

The ranger smiled.

“We’ll get them eventually, old fellow, but their bulbs burn brighter than yours. They’re not big enough fools to leave us footprints to follow.”

The ranger slung the backpack over his shoulder.

“You’ve got no right to talk to me like that,” Jesse said.

There was still plenty of distance between them, but the ranger looked like he contemplated another step back.

“If you’re going to give me trouble, I’ll just go ahead and cuff you now.”

Jesse almost told the younger man to come on and try, but he made himself look at the ground, get himself under control before he spoke.

“No, I ain’t going to give you any trouble,” he finally said, raising his eyes.

The ranger nodded toward the logging road.

“After you, then.”

Jesse moved past the ranger, stepping through the broom sedge and past the ruined chimney, the ranger
to his right, two steps behind. Jesse veered slightly to his left, moving so he’d pass close to the old well. He paused and glanced back at the ranger.

“That trowel of mine, I ought to get it.”

The ranger paused too and was about to reply when Jesse took a quick step and shoved the ranger with two hands toward the well. The ranger didn’t fall until one foot went through the rotten tin, then the other. As he did, the backpack dropped from his hand. He didn’t go all the way through, just up to his arms, his fingernails scraping the tin for leverage, looking like a man caught in muddy ice. The ranger’s hands found purchase, one on a hank of broom sedge, the other on the metal’s firmer edging. He began pulling himself out, wincing as the rusty tin tore cloth and skin. He looked at Jesse, who stood above him.

“You’ve really screwed up now,” the ranger gasped.

Jesse bent down and reached not for the younger man’s hand but his shoulder. He pushed hard, the ranger’s hands clutching only air as he fell through the rotten metal, a thump and simultaneous snap of bone as he hit the well’s dry floor. Seconds passed but no other sound rose from the darkness.

The backpack lay at the edge and Jesse snatched it up. He ran, not toward his farmhouse but into the woods. He didn’t look back again but bear-crawled through the ginseng patch and up the ridge, his breaths loud pants.
Trees thickened around him, oaks and poplars, some hemlocks. The soil was thin and moist, and he slipped several times. Halfway up the ridge he paused, his heart battering his chest. When it finally calmed, Jesse heard a vehicle coming up the logging road and saw a pale-green forest service jeep. A man and a woman got out.

Jesse went on, passing through another patch of ginseng, probable descendants from his father’s original seedlings. The sooner he got to the ridge crest, the sooner he could make his way across it toward the gorge head. His legs were leaden now and he couldn’t catch his breath. The extra pounds he’d put on the last few years draped over his belt, gave him more to haul. His mind went dizzy and he slipped and skidded a few yards downhill. For a while he lay still, his body sprawled on the slanted earth, arms and legs flung outward. Jesse felt the leaves cushioning the back of his head, an acorn nudged against a shoulder blade. Above him, oak branches pierced a darkening sky. He remembered the fairy tale about a giant beanstalk and imagined how convenient it would be to simply climb off into the clouds.

Jesse shifted his body so his face turned downhill, one ear to the ground as if listening for the faintest footfall. It seemed so wrong to be sixty-eight years old and running from someone. Old age was supposed to give a person dignity, respect. He remembered the night the searchers brought his great-aunt out of the
gorge. The men stripped off their heavy coats to cover her body and had taken turns carrying her. They had been silent and somber as they came into the yard. Even after the women had taken the corpse into the farmhouse to be washed and dressed, the men had stayed on his great-aunt’s porch. Some had smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, others had bulged their jaws with tobacco. Jesse had sat on the lowest porch step and listened, knowing the men quickly forgot he was there. They did not talk of how they’d found his great-aunt or the times she’d wandered from her house to the garden. Instead, the men spoke of a woman who could tell you tomorrow’s weather by looking at the evening sky, a godly woman who’d taught Sunday school into her seventies. They told stories about her and every story was spoken in a reverent way, as if now that his great-aunt was dead she’d once more been transformed back to her true self.