Burning Bright: Stories (9 page)

Carl looked at her then, his blue eyes clear and depthless.

“I know that too,” he said.

After supper Carl sat on the porch while Marcie switched on the TV. She kept turning away from the movie she watched to look through the window. Carl sat in the wooden deck chair, only the back of his head and shoulders visible, less so as the minutes passed and his body merged with the gathering dusk. He stared toward the high mountains of the Smokies, and Marcie had no idea what, if anything, he was thinking about. He’d already smoked his cigarette, but she waited to see if he would take the lighter from his pocket, flick it, and stare at the flame a few moments. But he didn’t. Not this night. When she cut off the TV and went to the back room, the deck chair scraped as Carl pushed himself out of it. Then the click of metal as he locked the door.

When he settled into bed beside her, Marcie continued to lie with her back to him. He moved closer, placed his hand between her head and pillow, and slowly, gently, turned her head so he could kiss her. As soon as his lips brushed hers, she turned away,
moved so his body didn’t touch hers. She fell asleep but woke a few hours later. Sometime in the night she had resettled in the bed’s center, and Carl’s arm now lay around her, his knees tucked behind her knees, his chest pressed against her back.

As she lay awake, Marcie remembered the day her younger daughter left for Cincinnati, joining her sister there. I guess it’s just us now, Arthur had said glumly. She’d resented those words, as if Marcie were some grudgingly accepted consolation prize. She’d also resented how the words acknowledged that their daughters had always been closer to Arthur, even as children. In their teens, the girls had unleashed their rancor, the shouting and tears and grievances, on Marcie. The inevitable conflicts between mothers and daughters and Arthur’s being the only male in the house—that was surely part of it, but Marcie also believed there’d been some difference in temperament as innate as different blood types.

Arthur had hoped that one day the novelty of city life would pale and the girls would come back to North Carolina. But the girls stayed up north and married and began their own families. Their visits and phone calls became less and less frequent. Arthur was hurt by that, hurt deep, though never saying so. It seemed he aged more quickly, especially after he’d had a stent placed in an artery. After that Arthur did less around the farm,
until finally he no longer grew tobacco or cabbage, just raised a few cattle. Then one day he didn’t come back for lunch. She found him in the barn, slumped beside a stall, a hay hook in his hand.

The girls came home for the funeral and stayed three days. After they left, there was a month-long flurry of phone calls and visits and casseroles from people in the community and then days when the only vehicle that came was the mail truck. Marcie learned then what true loneliness was. Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight. She bought extra locks for the doors because at night she sometimes grew afraid, though what she feared was as much inside the house as outside it. Because she knew what was expected of her—to stay in this place, alone, waiting for the years, perhaps decades, to pass until she herself died.

I
t was mid-morning the following day when Sheriff Beasley came. Marcie met him on the porch. The sheriff had been a close friend of Arthur’s, and as he got out of the patrol car he looked not at her but at the sagging barn and empty pasture, seeming to ignore the house’s new garage and freshly shingled roof. He didn’t take off his hat as he crossed the yard, or when he stepped onto the porch.

“I knew you’d sold some of Arthur’s cows, but I
didn’t know it was all of them.” The sheriff spoke as if it were intended only as an observation.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have if there’d been some men to help me with them after Arthur died,” Marcie said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”

“I guess not,” Sheriff Beasley replied, letting a few moments pass before he spoke again, his eyes on her now. “I need to speak to Carl. You know where he’s working today?”

“Talk to him about what?” Marcie asked.

“Whoever’s setting these fires drives a black pickup.”

“There’s lots of black pickups in this county.”

“Yes there are,” Sheriff Beasley said, “and I’m checking out everybody who drives one, checking out where they were yesterday around six o’clock as well. I figure that to narrow it some.”

“You don’t need to ask Carl,” Marcie said. “He was here eating supper.”

“At six o’clock?”

“Around six, but he was here by five thirty.”

“How are you so sure of that?”

“The five-thirty news had just come on when he pulled up.”

The sheriff said nothing.

“You need me to sign something I will,” Marcie said.

“No, Marcie. That’s not needed. I’m just checking off folks with black pickups. It’s a long list.”

“I bet you came here first, though, didn’t you,” Marcie said. “Because Carl’s not from around here.”

“I came here first, but I had cause,” Sheriff Beasley said. “When you and Carl started getting involved, Preacher Carter asked me to check up on him, just to make sure he was on the up and up. I called the sheriff down there. Turns out that when Carl was fifteen he and another boy got arrested for burning some woods behind a ball field. They claimed it an accident, but the judge didn’t buy that. They almost got sent to juvenile detention.”

“There’ve been boys do that kind of thing around here.”

“Yes, there have,” the sheriff said. “And that was the only thing in Carl’s file, not even a speeding ticket. Still, his being here last evening when it happened, that’s a good thing for him.”

Marcie waited for the sheriff to leave, but he lingered. He took out a soiled handkerchief and wiped his brow. Probably wanting a glass of iced tea, she suspected, but she wasn’t going to offer him one. The sheriff put up his handkerchief and glanced at the sky.

“You’d think we’d at least get an afternoon thunderstorm.”

“I’ve got things to do,” she said, and reached for the screen door handle.

“Marcie,” the sheriff said, his voice so soft that she turned. He raised his right hand, palm open as if to offer her something, then let it fall. “You’re right. We should have done more for you after Arthur died. I regret that.”

Marcie opened the screen door and went inside.

When Carl got home she said nothing about the sheriff’s visit, and that night in bed when Carl turned and kissed her, Marcie met his lips and raised her hand to his cheek. She pressed her free hand against the small of his back, guiding his body as it shifted, settled over her. Afterward, she lay awake, feeling Carl’s breath on the back of her neck, his arm cinched around her ribs and stomach. She listened for a first far-off rumble, but there was only the dry raspy sound of insects striking the window screen. Marcie had not been to church in months, had not prayed for even longer than that. But she did now. She shut her closed eyes tighter, trying to open a space inside herself that might offer up all of what she feared and hoped for, brought forth with such fervor it could not help but be heard. She prayed for rain.

(In Memory of Robert Holder)

I
t had been raining that morning in Charlotte. Only when the bus groaned and sputtered into the high mountains above Lenoir did the first snowflakes flutter against the windshield, stick a moment before being swept away by the wipers. But here it has snowed for hours, with no sign of letting up. He swings the duffel bag across his back, wincing when the helmet’s hard curve bangs his shoulder blade. The bus shudders into first gear and heads on to Boone. Then the only sound is water. He steps onto the bridge and lingers a few moments above the middle fork of the New River. The snow on the banks makes the water
look dark and still, like water in a well. A few yards farther downstream Holder Branch, the creek that begins on his family’s land, enters the larger stream. His right hand clasps the jacket lapels tight against his neck as he steps off the bridge and begins the two-mile walk up Goshen Mountain.

He wonders how many times he has made this walk in his head the last two years. Six hundred, maybe more? All those nights he’d lain awake in his tent, bare chest covered with sweat as sporadic sniper fire and mortar rounds broke through the whir and drone of insects. Because he knew oceans had currents the same way creeks and rivers did, he’d imagine one drop of water making its way from his home in North Carolina to the green waters of the South Pacific. He would follow that drop of water back to its source—first across the Pacific and on through the Panama Canal, then across the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi to the Ohio River, then the New River, then the New River’s middle fork, and finally up Holder Branch. Sometimes he never made it all the way back. Somewhere between what his grandfather called the Boone toll road and his family’s farmhouse he would fall asleep.

Snowflakes cling to his lashes. He shakes them free and clasps the jacket collar tighter. It’s getting dark and he looks down at his wrist, forgetting his watch is gone, lost or stolen somewhere between the Philippines
and North Carolina. He passes the meadow where he and his uncle Abe used to rabbit hunt, then passes his uncle’s farmhouse, the tractor that hasn’t been driven since June rusting in the barn. No light comes from the windows, his aunt down in Boone with her daughter until warmer weather. The creek is beside the road now, but an icy caul muffles its sound, just as the snow muffles his footsteps. The world is as quiet as the moments after the Japanese sniper fired at him from a palm tree.

He hadn’t heard the shot but felt it—a sensation like a metal fist hitting the side of his helmet. Knocked to the ground, he looked up and saw the Japanese soldier eject the spent shell. Though dazed, he managed to raise his own rifle, the BAR wavering in his hand as he emptied his clip. The sniper fell through the fronds, landing on his back, blood pooling on the front of his shirt. The Japanese soldier didn’t try to rise, but his right hand slowly reached up and freed a thin silver necklace from under his shirt. He touched something affixed to the chain, touched it as though only to make sure it was still there, then let his hand fall back on the ground. Peterson, the medic, had claimed the Japanese only worshipped their emperor. He’d believed Peterson, because Peterson had a college education and was going to be a doctor once the war was over. But now he saw Peterson was wrong, because around the wounded man’s neck was a silver cross.

The dying man spoke. The words didn’t sound angry or defiant. By this time the rest of the squad was beside them. Peterson kneeled and jerked open the soldier’s shirt and peered in.

“What did he say?” he asked Peterson.

“Hell if I know,” Peterson replied. “Probably wants water.”

He was offering his canteen to Peterson when the Japanese soldier gave a last exhalation. Peterson jerked the cross and necklace from the dead man’s neck.

“Your kill, hillbilly,” Peterson said, and offered the cross and necklace. “It’s silver. You’ll get a couple of dollars for it.”

When he hesitated, Peterson smiled.

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

He took it then.

“I didn’t check his pockets,” Peterson said as he got up. “You can do that yourself.”

Peterson and the rest of the squad walked to where a canopy of palm trees offered more shade. Once alone, he knelt beside the Japanese soldier, his back to the other men.

“Find anything else?” Peterson asked when he’d rejoined the others.

“No,” he’d said.

T
he snow falls harder, drifts forming where the road curves. The snow makes it hard to see and he follows the road as much by memory as sight. The road curves left and the incline steepens. He’s breathing hard now, unused to the thin mountain air that grows thinner each step farther up Goshen Mountain. In the Philippines the air had been so humid that it was like breathing water. The day’s fading light tinges the snow blue.

The road levels and he can just make out the black spire through the snow and trees, then the wooden building itself. He steps into the churchyard and walks around to the back. He leans on the barbed-wire fence post and looks into the graveyard. He squints and sees the new stone and for a moment cannot shake the uneasy feeling that it is his own, that he’s really still in the Philippines, dreaming this, maybe even dying or dead. But it’s his uncle’s name on the stone, not his.

He steps back onto the road and passes Lawson Triplett’s place and then crosses a plank bridge, the creek passing beneath to flow on the road’s left side. A ghost can’t cross fast-moving water, his father had once told him.

He knows there are mountains in Japan, some so high snow never melts on their peaks. The man he killed could have been from those mountains, a farmer like himself, just as unused to the loud humid island nights as he’d been—a man used to nights when all you heard
was the wind. He remembers kneeling beside the Japanese soldier, the cross and necklace clutched in his hand as he’d said a quick prayer. Then he’d wedged his fingers between the dead man’s teeth, pried them open enough to slip the cross and necklace onto the rigid tongue.

He trudges past Tom Watson’s pasture, a little farther the big beech tree he climbed as a kid. The snow is easing some, and he can see better. The creek runs close to the road, little more than a trickle as it nears its source.

The road curves a last time. On the right side is the barbed wire fence that marks his family’s property. He passes above the bottomland where he and his father will plant corn and cabbage in a few months. He imagines the rich black dirt buried deep and silent under the snow, how it’s there waiting to nurture the seeds they’ll plant.

As he approaches the farmhouse, he sees a candle in the front window, and he knows it has been lit every night for a month, placed there for him, to guide him these last few steps. But he does not go inside, not yet. He walks up to the springhouse and takes his helmet from the duffel bag. He fills the helmet with water and drinks.