Burning Bright

by Ron Rash

  “You don’t ever take them home, do you,” he said. “You eat them here, right?”

  The child nodded.

  “Go ahead and eat it then,” Jacob said, “but you can’t come back anymore. If you do, your daddy will know about it. You understand?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, the first word she’d spoken.

  “Eat it, then.”

  The girl raised the egg to her lips. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin as she opened her mouth. The shell crackled as her teeth bit down.

  “Go home now,” he said when she’d swallowed the last bit of shell. “And don’t come back. I’m going to put another hook in them eggs and this time there won’t be no line on it. You’ll swallow that hook and it’ll tear your guts up.”

  Jacob watched her walk up the skid trail until the dark enveloped her, then sat on the stump that served as a chopping block. He blew out the lantern and waited, though for what he could not say. After a while the moon and stars faded. In the east, darkness lightened to the color of indigo glass. The first outlines of the corn stalks and their leaves were visible now, reaching up from the ground like shabbily dressed arms.

  Jacob picked up the lantern and turpentine and went to the shed, then on to the house. Edna was getting dressed as he came into the bedroom. Her back was to him.

  “It was a snake,” he said.

  Edna paused in her dressing and turned. Her hair was down and her face not yet hardened to face the day’s demands and he glimpsed the younger, softer woman she’d been twenty years ago when they’d married.

  “You kill it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Her lips tightened.

  “I hope you didn’t just throw it out by the henhouse. I don’t want to smell that thing rotting when I’m gathering eggs.”

  “I threw it across the road.”

  He got in the bed. Edna’s form and warmth lingered on the feather mattress.

  “I’ll get up in a few minutes,” he told her.

  Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn’t be found, shacks where families lived who didn’t even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.

  BACK OF BEYOND

  When Parson drove to his shop that morning, the sky was the color of lead. Flurries settled on the pickup’s windshield, lingered a moment before expiring. A heavy snow tonight, the weatherman warned, and it looked to be certain, everything getting quiet and still, waiting. Even more snow in the higher mountains, enough to make many roads impassable. It would be a profitable day, because Parson knew they’d come to his pawnshop to barter before emptying every cold-remedy shelf in town. They would hit Wal-Mart first because it was cheapest, then the Rexall, and finally the town’s three convenience stores, coming from every way-back cove and hollow in the county, because walls and windows couldn’t conceal the smell of meth.

  Parson pulled his jeep into the parking lot of the cinder-block building with PARSON’S BUY AND SELL hung over the door. One of the addicts had brought an electric portable sign last week, had it in his truck bed with a trash can filled with red plastic letters to stick on it. The man told Parson the sign would ensure that potential customers noticed the pawnshop. You found me easy enough, Parson had replied. His watch said eight forty and the sign in the window said nine to six Tuesday through Saturday, but a gray decade-old Ford Escort had already nosed up to the building. The back windshield was damaged, cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb. The gas cap a stuffed rag. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. She could have been waiting ten minutes or ten hours.

  Parson got out of his truck, unlocked the door, and cut off the alarm. He turned on the lights and walked around the counter, placed the loaded Smith & Wesson revolver on the shelf below the register. The copper bell above the sill tinkled.

  The woman waited in the doorway, a wooden butter churn and dasher clutched in her arms. Parson had to hand it to them, they were getting more imaginative. Last week the electric sign and false teeth, the week before that four bicycle tires and a chiropractic table. Parson nodded for the woman to come on in. She set the churn and dasher on the table.

  “It’s a antique,” the woman said. “I seen one like it on TV and the fellow said it was worth a hundred dollars.”

  When the woman spoke Parson glimpsed the stubbed brown ruin inside her mouth. He could see her face clearly now, sunken cheeks and eyes, skin pale and furrowed. He saw where the bones, impatient, poked at her cheeks and chin. The eyes glossy but alive, restless and needful.

  “You better find that fellow then,” Parson said. “A fool like that don’t come around often.”

  “It was my great-grandma’s,” the woman said, nodding at the churn, “so it’s near seventy-five years old.” She paused. “I guess I could take fifty for it.”

  Parson looked the churn over, lifted the dasher and inspected it as well. An antiques dealer in Asheville might give him a hundred.

  “Twenty dollars,” Parson said.

  “That man on TV said…”

  “You told me,” Parson interrupted. “Twenty dollars is what I’ll pay.”

  The woman looked at the churn a few moments, then back at Parson.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She took the cash and stuffed the bills in her jeans. She did not leave.

  “What?” Parson asked.

  The woman hesitated, then raised her hands and took off her high school ring. She handed it to him, and Parson inspected it. “Class of 2000,” the ring said.

  “Ten,” he said, laying the ring on her side of the glass counter.

  She didn’t try to barter this time but instead slid the ring across the glass as if it were a piece in a board game. She held her fingers on the metal a few moments before letting go and holding out her palm.

  By noon he’d had twenty customers and almost all were meth addicts. Parson didn’t need to look at them to know. The odor of it came in the door with them, in their hair, their clothes, a sour ammonia smell like cat piss. Snow fell steady now and his business began slacking off, even the manic needs of the addicted deferring to the weather. Parson was finishing his lunch in the back room when the bell sounded again. He came out and found Sheriff Hawkins waiting at the counter.

  “So what they stole now, Doug?” Parson asked.

  “Couldn’t it be I just come by to see my old high school buddy?”

  Parson placed his hands on the counter.

  “It could be, but I got the feeling it isn’t.”

  “No,” Hawkins said, smiling wryly. “In these troubled times there’s not much chance to visit with friends and kin.”

  “Troubled times,” Parson said. “But good for business, not just my business but yours.”

  “I guess that’s a way of looking at it, though for me it’s been too good of late.”

  Hawkins took a quick inventory of the bicycles and lawn mowers and chain saws filling the room’s corners. Then he looked the room over again, more purposeful this time, checking behind the counter as well. The sheriff’s brown eyes settled on the floor, where a shotgun lay amid other items yet to be tagged.

  “That .410 may be what I’m looking for,” the sheriff said. “Who brought it in?”

  “Danny.”

  Parson handed the gun to the lawman without saying anything else.

  Hawkins held the shotgun and studied the stock a moment.

  “My eyes ain’t what they used to be, Parson, but I’d say them initials carved in it are SJ, not DP.”

  “That gun Steve Jackson’s?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sheriff replied, laying the shotgun on the counter. “Danny took it out of Steve’s truck yesterday. At least that’s what Steve believed.”

  “I didn’t notice the initials,” Parson said. “I figured it came off the farm.”

 
Hawkins picked the shotgun off the counter and held it in one hand, studying it critically. He shifted it slightly, let his thumb rub the stock’s varnished wood.

  “I think I can talk Steve out of pressing charges.”

  “Don’t do that as a favor to me,” Parson said. “If his own daddy don’t give a damn he’s a thief, why should I?”

  “How come you to think Ray doesn’t care?” Hawkins asked.

  “Because Danny’s been bringing things to me from the farm for months. Ray knows where they’re going. I called him three months ago and told him myself. He said he couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Doesn’t look to be you’re doing much about it either,” the sheriff said. “I mean, you’re buying from him, right?”

  “If I don’t he’ll just drive down to Sylva and sell it there.”

  Parson looked out at the snow, the parking lot empty but for his and Hawkins’s vehicles. He wondered if any customers had decided not to pull in because of the sheriff’s car.

  “You just as well go ahead and arrest him,” Parson added. “You’ve seen enough of these meth addicts to know he’ll steal something else soon enough.”

  “I didn’t know he was on meth,” Hawkins said.

  “That’s your job, isn’t it,” Parson replied, “to know such things?”

  “There’s too many of them to keep up with. This meth, it ain’t like other drugs. Even cocaine and crack, at least those were expensive and hard to get. But this stuff, it’s too easy.” The sheriff looked out the window. “This snow’s going to make for a long day, so I’d better get to it.”

  “So you’re not going to arrest him?”

  “No,” Hawkins said. “He’ll have to wait his turn. There’s two dozen in line ahead of him. But you could do me a favor by giving him a call. Tell him this is his one chance, that next time I’ll lock his ass up.” Hawkins pressed his lips together a moment, pensive. “Hell, he might even believe it.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Parson said, “but I’ll do it in person.”

  Parson went to the window and watched as the sheriff backed out onto the two-lane and drove toward the town’s main drag. Snow stuck to the asphalt now, the jeep blanketed white. He’d watched Danny drive away the day before, the tailgate down and truck bed empty. Parson had known the truck bed would probably be empty when Danny headed out of town, no filled grocery bags or kerosene cans, because the boy lived in a world where food and warmth and clothing were no longer important. The only essentials were the red-and-white packs of Sudafed in the passenger’s seat as the truck disappeared back into the folds of the higher mountains, headed up into Chestnut Cove, what Parson’s father had called the back of beyond, the place where Parson and Ray had grown up.

  He placed the pistol in his coat pocket and changed the OPEN sign to CLOSED. Once on the road, Parson saw the snow was dry, powdery, which would make the drive easier. He headed west and did not turn on the radio.

  Except for two years in the army, Ray had lived his whole life in Chestnut Cove. He’d used his army pay to buy a farm adjacent to the one he’d grown up on and had soon after married Martha. Parson had joined the army as well but afterward went to Tuckasegee to live. When their parents had gotten too old to mend fences and feed livestock, plant and harvest the tobacco, Ray and Martha did it. Ray had never asked Parson to help, never expected him to, since he was twenty miles away in town. For his part, Parson had not been bitter when the farm was willed to the firstborn. Ray and Martha had earned it. By then Parson owned the pawnshop outright from the bank, had money enough. Ray and Martha sold their house and moved into the farmhouse, raised Danny and his three older sisters there.

  Parson slowed as the road began a long curve around Brushy Mountain. The road soon forked and he went left. Another left and he was on a county road, poorly maintained because no wealthy Floridians had second homes on it. No guardrails. He met no other vehicle, because only a few people lived in the cove, had ever lived up here.

  Parson parked beside Ray’s truck and got out, stood a few moments before the homestead. He hadn’t been up in nearly a year and supposed he should feel more than the burn of anger directed at his nephew. Some kind of nostalgia. But Parson couldn’t summon it, and if he had, then what for? Working his ass off in August tobacco fields, milking cows on mornings so cold his hands numbed—the very things that had driven him away in the first place. Except for a thin ribbon of smoke unfurling from the chimney, the farm appeared forsaken. No cattle huddled against the snow, no TV or radio playing in the front room or kitchen. Parson had never regretted leaving, and never more so than now as his gaze moved from the rusting tractor and bailer to the sagging fences that held nothing in, settled on the shambling farmhouse itself, then turned toward the land between the barn and house.

  Danny’s battered blue-and-white trailer squatted in the pasture. Parson’s feet made a whispery sound as he went to deal with his nephew before talking to his brother and sister-in-law. No footprints marked the snow between house and trailer. Parson knocked on the flimsy aluminum door and when no one answered went in. No lights were on and Parson wasn’t surprised when he flipped a switch and nothing happened. His eyes slowly adjusted to the room’s darkness, and he saw the card table, on it cereal boxes, some open, some not, a half-gallon milk container, its contents frozen solid. The room’s busted-out window helped explain why. Two bowls scabbed with dried cereal lay on the table as well. Two spoons. Parson made his way to the back room, seeing first the kerosene heater beside the bed, the wire wick’s muted orange glow. Two closely lumped mounds rose under a pile of quilts. Like they’re already laid out in their graves, Parson thought as he leaned over and poked the bigger form.

  “Get up, boy,” Parson said.

  But it was Ray’s face and torso that emerged, swaddled in an array of shirts and sweaters. Martha’s face appeared as well. They seemed like timid animals disturbed in their dens. For a few moments Parson could only stare at them. After decades in the most cynical of professions, he was amazed that anything could still stun him.

  “Why in the hell aren’t you in the house?” Parson asked finally.

  It was Martha who replied.

  “Danny, he’s in there, sometimes his friends too.” She paused. “It’s just better, easier, if we’re out here.”

  Parson looked at his brother. Ray was sixty-five years old but he looked eighty, his mouth sunk in, skinny and feeble. His sister-in-law appeared a little better off, perhaps because she was a large, big-boned woman. But they both looked bad—hungry, weary, sickly. And scared. Parson couldn’t remember his brother ever being scared, but he clearly was. Ray’s right hand clutched a quilt end, and the hand was trembling. Parson and his wife, DeAnne, had divorced before they’d had children. A blessing, he now saw, because it prevented any possibility of ending up like this.

  Martha had not been above lording her family over Parson in the past, enough to where he’d made his visits rare and short. You missed out not having any kids, she’d said to him more than once, words he’d recalled times when Danny pawned a chain saw or posthole digger or some other piece of the farm. It said much of how beaten down Martha appeared that Parson mustered no pleasure in recalling her words now.

  He settled his eyes on the kerosene heater emitting its feeble warmth.

  “Yeah, it looks to be easier out here all right,” he said.

  Ray licked his cracked lips and then spoke, his voice raspy.

  “That stuff, whatever you call it, has done made my boy crazy. He don’t know nothing but a craving.”

  “It ain’t his fault, it’s the craving,” Martha added, sitting up enough to reveal that she too wore layers of clothing. “Maybe I done something wrong raising him, petted him too much since he was my only boy. The girls always claimed I favored him.”

  “The girls been up here?” Parson asked. “Seen you like this?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “They got their own families to look after,” she sa
id.

  Ray’s lower lip trembled.

  “That ain’t it. They’re scared to come up here.”

  Parson looked at his brother. He had thought this was going to be so much easier, a matter of twenty dollars, that and relaying the sheriff’s threat.

  “How long you been out here, Ray?”

  “I ain’t sure,” Ray replied.

  Martha spoke.

  “Not more than a week.”

  “How long has the electricity been off?”

  “Since October,” Ray said.

  “Is all you’ve had to eat on that table?”

  Ray and Martha didn’t meet his eyes.

  A family photograph hung on the wall. Parson wondered when it had been put up, before or after Danny moved out. Danny was sixteen, maybe seventeen in the photo. Cocksure but also petulant, the expression of a young man who’d been indulged all his life. His family’s golden child. Parson suddenly realized something.

  “He’s cashing your Social Security checks, isn’t he?”

  “It ain’t his fault,” Martha said.

  Parson still stood at the foot of the bed, Ray and Martha showing no indication of getting out. They looked like children waiting for him to turn out the light and leave so they could go to sleep. Pawnbrokers, like emergency room doctors and other small gods, had to abjure sympathy. That had never been a problem for Parson. As DeAnne had told him several times, he was a man incapable of understanding another person’s heart. You can’t feel love, Parson, she’d said. It’s like you were given a shot years ago and inoculated.

  “I’ll get your electricity turned back on,” Parson told his brother. “Can you still drive?”

  “I can drive,” Ray said. “Only thing is, Danny uses that truck for his doings.”

  “That’s going to change,” Parson said.

  “It ain’t Danny’s fault,” Martha said again.

  “Enough of it is,” Parson replied.

  He went to the corner and lifted the kerosene can. Half full.

  “What you taking our kerosene for?” Martha asked.