Burning Bright

by Ron Rash

  “I’ve got to finish this chapter,” Lynn says, “maybe after that.”

  But that “maybe” doesn’t happen. I go to bed alone. Pouring concrete is a young man’s job and I ain’t so young anymore. I need what sleep I can get to keep up.

  “You’re getting long in the tooth, Bobby,” a young buck told me one afternoon I huffed and puffed to keep up. “You best get you one of them sit-down jobs, maybe test rocking chairs.”

  They all got a good laugh out of that. Mr. Winchester, the boss man, laughed right along with them.

  “Ole Bobby’s still got some life in him yet, ain’t you,” Mr. Winchester said.

  He smiled when he said it, but there was some serious in his words.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I ain’t even got my second wind yet.”

  Mr. Winchester laughed again, but I knew he’d had his eye on me. It won’t trouble him much to fire me when I can’t pull my weight anymore.

  The nights Lynn stays up I don’t ever go right off to sleep, though I’m about nine ways whipped from work. I lay there in the dark and think about something she said a while back when she first took the notion to go back to school. You ought to be proud of me for wanting to make something of myself, she’d said. Maybe it ain’t the way she means it to sound, but I can’t help thinking she was also saying, “Bobby, just because you’ve never made anything of yourself don’t mean I have to do the same.”

  I think about something else she once told me. It was Christmas our senior year in high school. Lynn’s folks and brothers had finally gone to bed and me and her was on the couch. The lights was all off but for the tree lights glowing and flicking like little stars. I’d already unwrapped the box that had me a sweater in it. I took the ring out of my front pocket and gave it to her. I tried to act all casual but I could feel my hand trembling. We’d talked some about getting married but it had always been in the far-away, after I got a good job, after she’d got some more schooling. But I hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She’d put the ring on and though it was just a quarter-carat she made no notice of that.

  “It’s so pretty,” Lynn had said.

  “So will you?” I’d asked.

  “Of course,” she’d told me. “It’s what I’ve wanted, more than anything in the world.”

  So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness I feel. A diamond can cut through glass, I’ve heard, but I ain’t so sure anymore.

  One night I dream I’m falling. There are tree branches all around me but I can’t grab hold of one. I just keep falling and falling for forever. I wake up all sweaty and gasping for breath. My heart pounds like it’s some kind of animal trying to tear out my chest. Lynn’s got her back to me, sleeping like she ain’t got a care in the world. I look at the clock and see I have thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. I’ll sleep no more anyway so I pull on my work clothes and stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee.

  The books are on the kitchen table, big thick books. I open up the least one, a book called Astronomy Today. I read some and it makes no sense. Even the words I know don’t seem to lead nowhere. They just as likely could be ants scurrying around the page. But Lynn understands them. She has to since she makes all As on her tests.

  I touch the cigarette lighter in my pocket and think a book is so easy a thing to burn. I think how in five minutes they’d be nothing but ashes, ashes nobody could read. I get up before I dwell on such a thing too long. I check on Janie and she’s managed to kick the covers off the bed. It’s been a month since she started second grade but it seems more like a month since we brought her home from the hospital. Things can change faster than a person can sometimes stand, Daddy used to say, and I’m learning the truth of that. Each morning it’s like Janie’s sprouted another inch.

  “I’m a big girl now,” she tells her grandma and that always gets a good laugh. I took her the first day of school this year and it wasn’t like first grade when she was tearing up when me and Lynn left her there. Janie was excited this time, wanting to see her friends. I held her hand when we walked into the classroom. There was other parents milling around, the kids searching for the desk that had their name on it. I looked the room over pretty good. A hornet’s nest was stuck on a wall and a fish tank bubbled at the back, beside it a big blue globe like I’d had in my second-grade room. WELCOME BACK was written in big green letters on the door.

  “You need to leave,” Janie said, letting go of my hand.

  It wasn’t till then I noticed the rest of the parents already had, the kids but for Janie in their desks. That night in bed I’d told Lynn I thought we ought to have another kid.

  “We barely can clothe and feed the one we got,” she’d said, then turned her back to me and went to sleep.

  It’s not something I gnaw on a few weeks and then decide to do. I don’t give myself time to figure out it’s a bad idea. Instead, as soon as Lynn pulls out of the drive I round up Janie’s gown and toothbrush.

  “You’re spending the night with Grandma,” I tell her.

  “What about school?” Janie says.

  “I’ll come by and get you come morning. I’ll bring you some school clothes.”

  “Do I have to?” Janie says. “Grandma snores.”

  “We ain’t arguing about this,” I tell her. “Get you some shoes on and let’s go.”

  I say it kind of cross, which is a sorry way to act since it ain’t Janie that’s got me so out of sorts.

  When we get to Momma’s I apologize for not calling first but she says there’s no bother.

  “There ain’t no trouble between you and Lynn?” she asks.

  “No ma’am,” I say.

  I drive the five miles to the community college. I find Lynn’s car and park close by. I reckon the classes have all got started because there’s not any students in the parking lot. There ain’t a security guard around and it’s looking to be an easy thing to get done. I take my barlow knife out of the dash and stick it in my pocket. I keep to the shadows and come close to the nearest building. There’s big windows and five different classrooms.

  It takes me a minute to find her, right up on the front row, writing down every word the teacher is saying. I’m next to a hedge so it keeps me mostly hid, which is a good thing for the moon and stars are out. The teacher ain’t some old guy with glasses and a gray beard, like what I figured him to be. He’s got no beard, probably can’t even grow one.

  He all of a sudden stops his talking and steps out the door and soon enough he’s coming out of the building and I’m thinking he must have seen me. I hunker in the bushes and get ready to make a run for the truck. I’m thinking if I have to knock him down to get there I’ve got no problem with that.

  But he don’t come near the bushes where I am. He heads straight to a white Toyota parked between Lynn’s Chevy and my truck. He roots around the backseat a minute before taking out some books and papers.

  He comes back, close enough I can smell whatever it is he splashed on his face that morning. I wonder why he needs to smell so good, who he thinks might like a man who smells like flowers. Back in the classroom he passes the books around. Lynn turns the books’ pages slow and careful, like they would break if she wasn’t prissy with them.

  I figure I best go ahead and do what I come to do. I walk across the asphalt to the Chevy. I kneel beside the back left tire, the barlow knife in my fist. I slash it deep and don’t stop cutting till I hear a hiss. I stand up and look around.

  Pretty sorry security, I’m thinking. I’ve done what I come for but I don’t close the knife. I kneel beside the white Toyota. I start slashing the tire and for a second it’s like I’m slashing that smooth young face of his. Soon enough that tire looks like it’s been run through a combine.

  I get in my truck and drive toward home. I�
��m shaking but don’t know what I’m afraid of. I turn on the TV when I get back but it’s just something to do while I wait for Lynn to call. Only she don’t. Thirty minutes after her class let out, I still ain’t heard a word. I get a picture in my mind of her out in that parking lot by herself but maybe not as by herself and safe as she thinks what with the security guard snoring away in some office. I’m thinking Lynn might be in trouble, trouble I’d put her in. I get my truck keys and am halfway out the door when headlights freeze me.

  Lynn don’t wait for me to ask.

  “I’m late because some asshole slashed my tire,” she says.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I say.

  “The security guard said he’d put on the spare so I let him. That was easier than you driving five miles.”

  Lynn steps past and drops her books on the kitchen table.

  “Dr. Palmer had a tire slashed too.”

  “Who changed his tire?” I ask.

  Lynn looks at me.

  “He did.”

  “I wouldn’t have reckoned him to have the common sense to.”

  “Well, he did,” Lynn says. “Just because somebody’s book-smart doesn’t mean that person can’t do anything else.”

  “Where’s Janie?” Lynn asks when she sees the empty bed.

  “She took a notion to spend the night with Momma,” I say.

  “How’s she going to get to school come morning?” she asks.

  “I’ll get her there,” I say.

  Lynn sets down her books. They’re piled there in front of her like a big plate of food that’s making her stronger and stronger.

  “I don’t reckon they got an idea of who done it?” I ask, trying to sound all casual.

  Lynn gives a smile for the first time since she got out of the car.

  “They’ll soon enough have a real good idea. The dumb son of a bitch didn’t even realize they have security cameras. They got it all on tape, even his license. The cops will have that guy in twenty-four hours. At least that’s what the security guard said.”

  It takes me about two heartbeats to take that in. I feel like somebody just sucker-punched me. I open my mouth, but it takes a while to push some words out.

  “I need to tell you something,” I say, whispery as an old sick man.

  Lynn doesn’t look up. She’s already stuck herself deep in a book.

  “I got three chapters to read, Bobby. Can’t it wait?”

  I look at her. I know I’ve lost her, known it for a while. Me getting caught for slashing those tires won’t make it any worse, except maybe at the custody hearing.

  “It can wait,” I say.

  I go out to the deck and sit down. I smell the honeysuckle down by the creek. It’s a pretty kind of smell that any other time might ease my mind. A few bullfrogs grunt but the rest of the night is still as the bottom of a pond. So many stars are out that you can see how some seem strung together into shapes. Lynn knows what those shapes are, knows them by their names.

  Make a wish if you see a falling star, Momma would always say, but though I haven’t seen one fall I think about what I’d wish, and what comes is a memory of me and Lynn and Janie. Janie was a baby then and we’d gone out to the river for a picnic. It was April and the river was too high and cold to swim but that didn’t matter. The sun was out and the dogwoods starting to whiten up their branches and you knew warm weather was coming.

  After a while Janie got sleepy and Lynn put her in the stroller. She came back to the picnic table where I was and sat down beside me. She laid her head against my shoulder.

  “I hope things are always like this,” she said. “If there was a falling star that would be all I’d wish for.”

  Then she’d kissed me, a kiss that promised more that night after we put Janie to bed.

  But there wasn’t any falling star that afternoon and there ain’t one tonight. I suddenly wish Janie was here, because if she was I’d go inside and lay down beside her.

  I’d stay there all night just listening to her breathe.

  You best get used to it, a voice in my head says. There’s coming lots of nights you’ll not have her in the same place as you, maybe not even in the same town. I look up at the sky a last time but nothing falls. I close my eyes and smell the honeysuckle, make believe Janie’s asleep a few feet away, that Lynn will put away her books in a minute and we’ll go to bed. I’m making up a memory I’ll soon enough need.

  THE CORPSE BIRD

  Perhaps if work had been less stressful, Boyd Candler would not have heard the owl.

  But he hadn’t slept well for a month. Too often he found himself awake at three or four in the morning, his mind troubled by engineering projects weeks behind schedule, possible layoffs at year’s end. So now, for the second night in a row, Boyd listened to the bird’s low plaintive call. After a few more minutes he left the bed, walked out of the house where his wife and daughter slept to stand in the side yard that bordered the Colemans’ property. The cool late-October dew dampened his bare feet. Jim Coleman had unplugged his spotlight, and the other houses on the street were unlit except for a couple of porch lights. The subdivision was quiet and still as Boyd waited like a man in a doctor’s office expecting a dreaded diagnosis. In a few minutes it came. The owl called again from the scarlet oak behind the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die.

  Boyd Candler had grown up among people who believed the world could reveal all manner of things if you paid attention. As a child he’d watched his grandfather, the man he and his parents lived with, find a new well for a neighbor with nothing more than a branch from an ash tree. He’d been in the neighbor’s pasture as his grandfather walked slowly from one fence to the other, the branch’s two forks gripped like reins, not stopping until the tip wavered and then dipped toward the ground as if yanked by an invisible hand. He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered, and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, and a life about to end.

  Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin.

  It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.

  The next morning at breakfast Boyd didn’t mention the owl to his wife or daughter. What had seemed a certainty last night was more tenuous in daylight. His mind drifted toward a project due by the week’s end. Boyd finished his second cup of coffee and checked his watch.

  “Where’s Jennifer?” he asked his wife. “It’s our week to carpool.”

  “No pickup today,” Laura said. “Janice called while you were in the shower. Jennifer ran a temperature over a hundred all weekend. It hasn’t broken so Janice is staying home with her.”

  Boyd felt a cold dark wave of disquiet pass through him.

  “Have they been to the doctor?”

  “Of course,” Laura said.

  “What did the doctor say was wrong with Jennifer?”

  “Just a virus, something going around,” Laura said, her back to him as she packed Allison’s lunch.

  “Did the doctor tell Janice anything else to watch out for?” Boyd asked.

  Laura turned to him. The expression on her face wavered between puzzlement and irritation.

  “It’s a virus, Boyd. That’s all it is.”

  “I’ll be outside when y
ou’re ready,” Boyd told his daughter, and walked out into the yard.

  The neighborhood seemed less familiar, as though many months had passed since he’d seen it. The subdivision had been built over a cotton field. A few fledgling dogwoods and maples had been planted in some yards, but the only big tree was the scarlet oak that grew on an undeveloped lot behind the Colemans’ house. Boyd assumed it was once a shade tree, a place for cotton field workers to escape the sun a few minutes at lunch and water breaks.

  The owl was still in the oak. Boyd knew this because growing up he’d heard the older folks say a corpse bird always had to perch in a big tree. It was one way you could tell it from a regular barn or screech owl. Another way was that the bird returned to the same tree, the same branch, each of the three nights.

  His family had moved to Asheville soon after his grandfather’s death. Boyd had been an indifferent student in Madison County, assuming he’d become a farmer, but the farm had been sold, the money divided among his father and aunts. At Asheville High Boyd mastered a new kind of knowledge, one of theorems and formulas, a knowledge where everything could be explained down to the last decimal point. His teachers told him he should be an engineer and helped Boyd get loans and scholarships so he could be the first in his family to attend college. His teachers urged him into a world where the sky did not matter, where land did not blacken your nails, cling to your boots, or callous your hands but was seen, if at all, through the glass windows of buildings and cars and planes. The world irrelevant and mute. His teachers had believed he could leave the world he had grown up in, and perhaps he had believed it as well.

  Boyd remembered the morning his college sociology class watched a film about the folklore of Hmong tribesmen in Laos. After the film the professor asked if similar beliefs could be found in other cultures. Boyd raised his hand. When he’d finished speaking, the professor and the other students stared at Boyd as if a bone pierced his nostrils and human teeth dangled from his neck.