by Amy Jo Burns
Ruby—before Briar—was rosy, eager, resolute. Flynn had studied her all through high school, ever since they’d entered ninth grade and she sat in the first row of every class. Ruby raised her hand with the correct answer at the ready, even in chemistry. She never flaunted her smarts. Ruby’s mind was a pistol kept at her side, brandished only when she intended to use it. Every word she spoke held the cadence of life and death, even if Flynn’s ear was the only one tuned to hear it.
He couldn’t part himself from the feeling any more than he could part himself from Briar, different though the boys had always been. Flynn’s daddy’s whiskey had been a sore spot between them even then. Briar swore you couldn’t serve both God and liquor, and Flynn swore you could. But the boys still had enough hope in the strength of their friendship to weather a perennial disagreement. Flynn had dreamed of making his own shine for as long as Briar had planned to take up his own serpents. Years before Flynn realized that those snakes would cost him the woman he wanted to make his own, he made it his business to see that his friend catch one.
* * *
They were fourteen years old, fearless, and brimming with nerve, when the pair embarked on their first fall snake hunt. They’d seen their fathers hunt venomous snakes for sport dozens of times—or at least they’d seen Flynn’s father, Sherrod, hunt them, since Briar’s daddy was forever riding the timber wave across Appalachia. Armed with window-washing poles and wire pincers, men set out in flanks like Civil War infantrymen, scouring the hollows and abandoned barns for snakes to spike. Flynn’s mother thought it was a foolish tradition. Mountain men get to leave home to look for danger, he’d once heard her whisper on the phone to her sister. But trouble always finds a woman at her doorstep. Flynn couldn’t figure what she meant.
Sherrod—who was known throughout the hills by only his last name—forbade the boys to come along for the hunt, but he’d never said they couldn’t set out on their own. Casting off together felt better than drinking whiskey in church, and it was a feeling Flynn would chase for the rest of his life. Briar and Flynn scoped the creek line for rattlers with only a threadbare pillowcase and a forked oak branch between them. After a long hour of stalking the reeds, they came to a bend in the creek with a small dam. Briar turned to take a piss.
“Hey,” Flynn said as Briar zipped up his fly. “Look at that.”
Up the bank the boys spotted the shell of an F-86 Sabre plane nestled against a gnarled tree trunk. It was small, built to fit a pilot and little else. The plane’s nose had rusted clean through its rivets, and it dipped down into the water like a basset hound lapping up the stream. They waded into the water to get a closer look.
“Looks like a fighter plane to me,” Flynn said. “World War II, maybe.”
“Naw,” Briar said, pressing a palm against the plane.
“This part of the creek runs up against Arledge’s land,” Flynn said. “Arledge must be hiding it.”
“From who?”
“Scrap collectors.”
Flynn’s thoughts settled on Ruby then, whose father liked to scavenge through Arledge’s junkyard on the west end of the mountain. Her name rested on the rise of his tongue, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak it. He didn’t dare direct Briar’s gaze toward the one thing he wanted for himself. As far back as Flynn could remember, Ruby had been a fixture of his life in the highlands, until the day he found himself bewitched by the way she knelt in the fields to gather wild violets in her lap. She lifted her eyes to the clouds, her spirit like a bird destined for far skies where Flynn could not follow. To him a snake in the holler seemed a far simpler thing to capture.
“Naw,” Briar repeated as he stared at the plane. “Can’t be worth much.”
Flynn glanced at his friend, who wielded the branch and pillowcase overhead like a butterfly net. Briar, the naive know-it-all, knew nothing about money. “Spirit rich and body poor,” Sherrod liked to call Briar, and Flynn loved his friend for it. He gave Briar a leg up onto the nose of the plane before scrambling after him. Together they peered into the gutted cockpit.
“Window’s busted,” Briar said. “Along with everything else.”
Flynn ran a hand on the seam of bolts that edged the window before snapping it back into his chest. “Oh, shit, Briar. Look at that.”
Below him a coachwhip snake sat bundled in the well of the pit where the pilot’s seat should have been. Coachwhips weren’t native to West Virginia, but Arledge liked to collect reptiles alongside his rusted antiques, and this one must have gotten loose. Its head held steady while the rest of its body roiled into tethers. Briar slanted into the window, his face lit like a jar of fireflies.
“Look at that,” he said. “Its tail is brighter than the rest of its body.” He stood on his toes. “How’d it get in there?”
“Do you want to bag it or grab it?” Flynn responded.
Briar winched his lips between his teeth. He’d already flirted with a serpent in the church parking lot, and he was determined to capture one of his own. “I’ll snag it with the branch. You hold open the net.”
Snatching that coachwhip was just as hard as it looked. The snake lurched. Briar screamed. It wasn’t venomous, but its fangs would still leave a nasty bite. Flynn hung the pillowcase on a propeller petal and held it open with a stick. Briar courted the snake like it was a preacher’s daughter until all six feet of it were wound up good and tight around the branch. Then he thrust it into the case and bound it with a rubber band from his wrist. The snake threw a fit inside it, so the friends tied the bag to the end of their snake pole. They took turns carrying it all the way home, arms straight out like they were fishing for what they’d already caught.
* * *
By the time the boys neared eighteen, they’d bagged half a dozen snakes and Briar hadn’t made one mention of the luminous Ruby, despite the moon eyes Flynn gave her each time she appeared. In the summertime he saw her only on Sundays: the day nobody worked and everybody fell asleep in church. The smattering of children born on the mountain spread from the base of Trap’s city limits all the way north to the razorbacks and west to Logger’s Nook, and Sunday was the best excuse for a gathering when June came and school let out until September. Once the church service slacked into Brother Arledge’s meandering prayers, the young slipped out the back door and fled in search of shade.
Church was Briar’s refuge, but Flynn remained wary of the power it held over mountain folk. He was the brooder to Briar’s butterfly, who came to spy his Ruby as she sat with Ivy beneath the downcast boughs of a willow tree behind the gas station. Flynn’s mother hoped taking her son to church would atone for all those summer hours her husband spent toiling at the still. From June to October, Sherrod camped himself downstream from a mighty mountain spring, armed with a copper pot, a bubbling barrel of mash, and a Marlin .35 until he met his six-hundred-gallon goal for the season. When Flynn graduated high school, he’d start spending his summers with his father at the still, too.
“Oh, that boy,” the church ladies used to warn Briar as they weighed him down with biscuits and gravy to take home to his mother. “Flynn Sherrod needs saving.”
Before Ruby came between them—because that’s how the mountain would come to see their downfall, as Ruby’s fault and not their own—the two boys liked to laugh about Flynn’s salvation on parched Sunday afternoons outside the empty gas station. The church’s faithful had long feared that Flynn’s soul would be damned just because his daddy knew how to shine, and shine good.
“They’s just old church ladies,” Briar said once. “Feeding on gossip.”
“Come on.” Flynn loosened the spare ring of copper he kept around his finger. “You know those old church-lady hearts belong to you.”
“Same as their husbands’ mining wages belong to your daddy.” Briar’s lips buckled before he spit in the dirt.
Sherrod sold his moonshine off the back of his boat to out-of-the-
way bars and fish hatcheries, but his best customers were miners checking in at the coal treatment plant who left their hundred-dollar bills in a drainage tunnel and retrieved a gaggle of jars a few days later. They liked to buy their shine from an outlaw, duty-free, since so much of their own paychecks went to county taxes. Briar had nothing against the liquor itself. He’d done the whiskey-stomp dance more than once on soft summer nights when he tasted the heart of Sherrod’s run. But he didn’t like that the locals’ love for moonshine kept the church offering plate dry.
Now that high school graduation neared and neither wanted to sit at a desk or fall down a mine, Flynn and Briar had plans to fish, wrestle, and scheme a way to live off the mountain’s bounty. Their connection had formed itself into fact, the same as the setting of the sun, the rising of our Good Lord and Savior.
But then Briar got struck by lightning.
* * *
The night before, a cold front had barged in just in time to ruin Flynn’s graduation ceremony. Rain had pummeled the pasty faces of his classmates as lightning lit the sky. Flynn figured he’d find Ruby and Ivy clinging to each other in the thrall, splitting a laugh and daring the eye of the storm to come for them. But they’d gone absent. All at once Flynn felt what a game of child’s play caps and gowns were. Graduation, for a boy, might have been youth’s last call before he faced minimum wage at the diner, or years of combat, or the dark maze of the coal mines. Sobered by their own futures, those boys couldn’t see that girls like Ruby and Ivy had grown up long before. They knew how to feed other mouths before their own, to lie about leaving home after dark, to avert their eyes when men stared at them too long.
Flynn and Briar still wanted a final stab at danger, so they’d planned another snake hunt for the morning once they’d gotten their diplomas. When Flynn arrived at Briar’s cabin after an hour’s hike in the mud, the front door sighed open. The outer spigot spit water into a teeming bucket beneath it. Someone had left it running.
Flynn turned off the spigot and brought the bucket inside.
“Briar?” he called as he stepped over the threshold.
The house, dank and mussed as usual, stank of ash. Briar’s three snakes slithered in a box stuck in the fireplace. Water dripped through cracks in the roof. Up above, Briar’s mother hovered over Flynn from the loft, hands pinched around her hips.
“Come quick,” she said.
Flynn scaled the ladder to find his friend lying unconscious in bed, arms askew. A beam from the ceiling lay crosswise on the floor. Flynn’s hand steadied above Briar’s head. Heat buzzed from Briar’s body the way the copper cap on Sherrod’s still could scorch a finger when a run of shine was hot enough to pour. Flynn felt sick.
“How long has he been like this?” he asked.
“Since the storm last night.” A blush web of perspiration swathed her face. “A big crack of lightning came through the window, just like it was hunting him. Then a beam fell from the ceiling and knocked him out.”
“Did you call a doctor?”
Briar’s mother stared at her son, the veins on her forehead like lightning bolts of their own.
“Who he needs ain’t a doctor.”
“You didn’t send for anyone?” Flynn wanted to shake her.
Her voice dropped. “I prayed for someone to come, and you did.”
Flynn was ready to spit. “You know I can’t help him.”
“You can get someone who can.”
“If a doctor can’t help him, then who?”
“Marcella.”
Flynn pushed the breath he’d been holding out of his mouth. Marcella was the mountain healer who lived way up next to the gorge at Violet’s Run, beneath the razorbacks. Briar didn’t have time for this kind of folly.
“I’m going for a doctor,” he said, starting for the ladder.
“I ain’t as crazy as you think,” she said. Her teeth crowded behind her lips. “Old Marcella knows how to heal a burn better than any doctor.”
Flynn rubbed the back of his neck. He’d heard stories of faith healers, and he counted them as fables. But it would take hours to make it to Trap’s medical clinic, and even then he didn’t know if he could convince anyone to scale the mountainside after a storm. He had little choice.
“How do I find her?” he asked.
“She’s got a crooked garden in that sunny patch of land not far from the humpback bridge. I suspect she’s tending her plants.”
“And if she ain’t?”
Briar’s mother didn’t answer. She fixed her eyes on her son.
“I’ll be back,” Flynn said.
He left the house, and then he ran.
The garden that he found beneath an easy shaft of sunlight looked more like a jungle. Glass bottles hanging from the branches glittered in the light.
“I need help,” Flynn called out into the open. “My friend got burned real bad.”
“Phone the doctor.” A gnarled arm parted the brush. “I ain’t a magician.”
Flynn grabbed her hand before it could slip back into the foliage. “Please,” he said. “He got struck by lightning.”
The leaves parted again, and this time a hoary face appeared. Marcella’s onyx eyes latched onto Flynn’s.
“Lightning?” she asked.
He nodded. “You have to come,” he said.
Marcella’s chin dimpled as she examined the young man before her, drenched to his knees in muck. “Did you run here?” she asked.
He nodded again.
“We’ll take my truck if you can drive it through the sludge.”
Flynn thrust out his hands for the keys. He’d been primed for this kind of task. Sherrod had taught him to drive his old Chevy backward down a hill in the rain in case they ever needed to abandon their still site and make a quick escape from the law. When Flynn and Marcella reached Briar’s house, Flynn helped her up the ladder to the loft. She strode to Briar’s bedside and hovered her hands over his body.
Marcella swiveled her neck toward Mrs. Bird. “Lightning, you said?”
Mrs. Bird nodded. “Struck his eye, I believe.”
Marcella’s gaze orbited from Briar’s face to the scorch marks left on the floor to the open window across the room. She blew on Briar’s bare skin as she flicked the air away from his body three times. Then she murmured something so low that Flynn had to lean forward to hear it.
He recalled it as a verse from the Book of Isaiah:
When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned.
After repeating the phrase three times, Marcella started for the ladder.
“You can’t leave yet,” Flynn said. “He ain’t healed.”
“I healed plenty,” she spit. “He’ll be right by morning.”
Flynn rose to follow her, but she snatched the keys from his hand.
“Stay,” Marcella said. “Keep watch over your friend.”
After the sound of Marcella’s truck engine faded into the holler, Flynn eyed Briar from the far corner of the room. Soft air from the open window curved itself around him. He crossed the loft and grabbed the top of the ladder.
“I’m going for a doctor,” he said, and Mrs. Bird touched his back.
Flynn turned to see that Briar had opened an eye.
“Hey, there, Flynn,” he said.
Flynn took a step toward him. “You all right?” he asked.
“I am.”
Flynn leaned over him and felt his shoulder. It was cool. Then he looked into his friend’s face.
“Briar,” he said. “Your eye.”
Briar rubbed a delicate film from his lashes. Then he blinked as he waited for Flynn to speak.
“What is it?”
Flynn leaned in closer. “Your iris is white. Can you see?”
“It’s blurry,” was all Briar said.
His mama cried o
ut as she fell to her knees. “It’s a miracle.”
And Flynn supposed it was.
* * *
The first Sunday that Flynn mustered the guts to talk to Ruby was also the first Sunday that Briar didn’t show. The storm had hit on a Friday night, and only a lightning strike could keep Briar from missing a church sermon. By the end of the weekend, word had spread about Briar’s escapades in the storm. When Ruby and Ivy left the service during communal prayer, Flynn planted himself in the shadow of the weeper beyond the churchyard, praying for the right words to flood his mouth. Ruby spoke first.
“How’s your friend?” she asked, her hands braiding Ivy’s hair.
“Heard he got lit up good,” Ivy said.
“He’s doing better,” Flynn answered. “Since he got help.”
He told Ruby nothing of his role in saving his friend’s life. Any moonshiner knew to conceal his actions, no matter their measure. Tall tales of that night had already begun to swell: Briar had set the house on fire, Briar’s toes had curled, Briar had fought the devil himself. Always the lightning had hunted him, just as his mama said. In less than two days, Flynn had already been cut out of the story.
“Well,” Ruby said. “I’m glad he’s all right.”
