Requiem by Fire

by Wayne Caldwell

  “This love business cuts two ways. If you loved me, you’d find a real job. You’d put a decent roof over our heads—in Buncombe County. Hell, Jim, I wouldn’t mind if you took a third-shift job. Oh, Jim, if only you’d understand.” It was all she could do to keep her eyes from flooding.

  He stared at the dimple above her elbow like he could dive into it. “Nell, I don’t know what else to say. I can’t just up and quit. This place…” He looked toward the ridgetop, then eyed the creek in the opposite direction. “Nell, I was born here.”

  “I was born in West Asheville. So what?”

  “Cataloochee’s different. I don’t know, there’s something about taking care of this land that fits me like my favorite shirt. If I was to leave here now, it’d pull me back inside of a month. This place needs me.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How, Jim? How can you say you love this godforsaken place more than me?”

  “You know it’s not that, Nell.” He took off his Stetson and fingered the brass NPS insignia.

  “Then, what is it? Why can’t you just come with me?”

  He took a deep breath. “Duty. And if I quit, I’d always have a question in the back of my mind. ‘Did I do my best by them?’ Both the ‘them’ that stayed, like Silas, and the ‘them’ that come in here to fish and hike and such. I’d not look at myself when I’m fifty and say I let ‘them’ down.”

  She sighed. “This is like arguing with a signpost. I’m leaving in the morning. With the kids. Mother is expecting us. If you want to join us, I’d be happy as a clam. If not tomorrow, then soon. But don’t wait too long.”

  “What does that mean, Nell?”

  “Exactly what I said. And since you seem to prefer your horse’s company to mine, you can sleep with her tonight.” Eyes brimming, she went into the front room and slammed the door.

  Jim, not much of a drinker, carried the jug to the barn. At about ten he ended up in the loft, swaddled by a pile of hay. Sometime in the middle of the night he started to the outhouse and would have stepped out of the loft into thin air had he not tripped beforehand on a loose board and passed out two inches from the entrance.

  He was up at gray dawn—“first thing” to Nell meant eight-thirty—feeding, milking, and wondering what the morning would bring besides a crackling headache. He made breakfast and brought it to their bedroom. Nell came to the door wearing her beige traveling suit and a look that made him abandon all hope.

  He kissed and hugged his children and promised to see them soon. When he turned to Nell, she hugged him so quickly he wondered if she were afraid he might scald her. “Think about it,” she whispered into his ear. “Good-bye, sweetheart,” she said as airily as possible.

  Woe danced in the dust the auto raised. He shook his head, put his hat on, and looked at the house. “I’m not staying here today,” he said. “I got to be moving. I think I’ll go to Little Cataloochee. That means going by the Bennett place. I might as well see if McPeters is there.”

  Jim had taken to carrying his Winchester .30-30, which he called his “Equalizer.” He knew the only way it would impress McPeters was if he killed him with it, but it at least made fishermen respectful when he checked licenses and creels. A canteen of cool springwater hung from the left side of his saddle, and a pair of binoculars went into the right saddlebag. His horse snorted and seemed amenable to a day out.

  He set out slowly, walking her creekside, tall and somber in the bright morning light and shadow. Usually the horse’s rhythm put him almost to sleep, but he was alert, watchful, a tight feeling in his chest. Thirsty. As close to a hangover as he’d been in a long time.

  He tied the mare at creek’s edge near the CCC camp entrance. He knelt for a few handfuls of water himself, then pulled his binoculars, checked his rifle, and felt for cartridges in his pocket. If McPeters was still at the Bennett place, he wanted to give him neither warning nor opportunity. A CCC boy pointed toward himself, then toward Jim, then house-ward, as if to invite himself along. Jim, distrustful of what he called the “Peckerwood Army,” waved him off and waited for him to return to the camp.

  Halfway to the turn a toad had been flattened in the right-hand rut. Jim squatted to examine it. Flat and dry, its arms bent upward like some bizarre votive holder. It was surrounded by ants only slightly larger than pissants, circling the body at the head and doubling back under the concave body and ant-lining to their hill with whatever they plucked from underneath. “Poor old boy,” Jim whispered. “But he’s still doing some good, long as these ants are working. Probably more good than I’m likely to do today.”

  Knees popping, he stood, light-headed, spots swimming before his eyes. “I’ve known water to get a man drunk again after a hard night. I ain’t going on such a toot again, women be damned.” A hawk keened toward the eastern ridge as Jim began to step quietly toward the bend.

  At least McPeters hadn’t burned the house down. Jim stopped behind a tulip tree and studied the building for a while. Still close to the creek’s murmur, he strained to hear other than natural sounds. The breeze was from behind. No motion in or around the building.

  No curtains helped him read the windows. A ground squirrel skittered from a woodpile back of the house and raced under the underpinning. The second story commanded most of Jim’s attention. A small bird hopped on the railing behind which McPeters had fired. When he glassed it he saw a finch, which he took for a good sign.

  Save for the sweat on his upper lip, he felt as dry as Ezekiel’s bones. He imagined a quart of iced tea, then figured he’d about trade his soul for just a cube from the pitcher.

  He didn’t want to take all day figuring out whether his nemesis was there, but equally did not want to be shot between the eyes. He figured to be no hero. As a stripling he had read about Alvin York but saw nothing in his mettle to compare. “Might as well get this over with,” he muttered. “He shoots me, wonder if Nell’ll care at all.” He thought about throwing rocks on the porch, but decided the Winchester would either frighten or challenge McPeters if he were there, and either prospect seemed better than dying of thirst this close to a creek.

  The first shot sounded like the crack of doom and took out a pane in the second-story window just above the absent finch. Jim waited a couple of minutes, but no return fire came. He disturbed silence with three more shots over ten minutes, listening hard when the ringing in his ears subsided.

  He remembered a trick from the moving pictures, and hung out his hat on his rifle barrel. It attracted no fire. “Guess the only way to find out is to go in.”

  Putting his hat back on, he stepped from behind the tree, scanning all windows for glint of weapon or any movement. Running in a crouch, he gained the front porch and stood with his back to the wall. He made himself stay until his heart calmed down, eyeing a wasp nest the size of his palm for signs of hostility. He heard nothing save the creek. He would have felt the floor shake if someone were walking inside.

  He opened the door and stepped inside carefully. McPeters had been there by the look of the dusty boards, but not lately. Jim heard nothing moving upstairs. Some animal had scattered hickory hulls over the floor, and for some strange reason a glass inkwell sat in the corner. Something smelled sweet and musty, like a small creature had died some weeks before.

  He’d about decided he was safe when he heard a thump upstairs. What in hell was that? Something blown off a windowsill? McPeters? Had he shot him? A fine string of dust descended from where he thought he’d heard the noise. Dusty spiderwebs moved in the breeze.

  He stood as still as a fence post until his neck hurt and his left hand shook. No more racket from upstairs. He walked slowly to the stairs, floor creaking, and put his weight on the first step. This journey would be loud and slow.

  At the top he wheeled with his weapon and nearly fired into a wad of blankets that had hosted generations of mice. Something in the front room cast a lurking shadow. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and
sidled to the door.

  Later he couldn’t figure why he’d noticed no odor until he’d entered the room, rifle first. McPeters was slumped against the eastern wall, naked as the day he was born. Clothes piled beside were covered in blood, shit, and blowflies. His legs were splayed quite unnaturally. Between them on the floor sat an empty glass jar, beside which lay a few wooden matches, one of which had been struck.

  Between his legs hung something charred, nothing recognizable. His face was bloated and fly-covered, but just before Jim turned to throw up, he thought an incipient smile lurked behind the body’s black tongue.

  Before he left, Jim looked for a wound but found none save whatever had happened to the man’s crotch. The jar on the floor smelled of kerosene. How in the world did the building not catch? And am I reading this right? He about shit himself to death, then set his pecker on fire? Damned if that ain’t the awfulest thing I ever saw.

  McPeters’s rifle proved the only thing worth taking from the house. Damned if this house ain’t full of ghosts. The first house got burned by the Yankees—reckon I’ve heard that story a thousand times. Now here I am—Old Man Bennett would say I work for the Yankee government, too—about to burn the new place down, with a secret that this time I hope will stay dead a long time. He came downstairs and stopped.

  Behind the screen door stood the boy who had signaled him from the CCC camp, peering in like he was watching a baseball game through a knothole. He might have been twenty. Jim knew he wasn’t a mountaineer. He had black curly hair, thick eyeglasses, and nearly lobe-less ears. “What are you looking for?” Jim asked.

  “Just looking,” he said.

  Jim stepped outside. The boy was generally innocent of soap, by the smell of him. “Do me a favor,” said Jim.

  “What?”

  “That’s ‘What, sir.’”

  “Oh. Since when did you boss the CCC?”

  “Since right now. You peckerwood army boys are in my territory. Do me a favor.”

  “Maybe.” He paused. “Sir.”

  “Get a can of gasoline. And a rake or broom or two.”

  “Why, sir?”

  “We’re about to burn a house.”

  The young man brightened considerably. “Yes, sir!”

  He reappeared in five minutes with a can and two companions with rakes over their shoulders. These boys looked no better than the first. Jim wondered how dumb you had to be to be camp-bound while your colleagues were out cutting trails, but figured some help was better than none. “Okay, men. Give me that gasoline. I’ll douse inside. You’uns soak the porch. Then we’ll see if we can keep from starting a brush fire.”

  He dashed inside and soaked what was left of McPeters, then trailed the liquid down the stairs and out to the porch. The boys used the rest of the can on the exterior. Jim lit one of McPeters’s matches and threw it at the porch.

  The initial whoosh nearly sucked all the oxygen from their lungs. All four retreated from the blaze with singed eyebrows. The house required a full hour to crumple in on itself and its dirty secret, a body Jim hoped might be a holocaust, somehow putting his world back into kilter.

  CHAPTER 33

  Good-Luck Birds

  Jim woke with what he would have called a hangover, except he had drunk nothing to cause it. Headache, dry mouth, a slight disorientation as if he had slept in unfamiliar territory. He looked the bed over but found himself, as always, these days, alone. By himself with a cotton-filled head and a yearning for sex. On the one hand, he’d love a tumble, but on the other, that required a woman, and he didn’t want life to be any more complicated.

  It was the first of December 1933, a Friday, his mother’s birthday. She had been gone two years—longer than that, really, for hardening of the arteries had claimed her mind well before she’d died. Jim sat on the bed’s edge and remembered how she’d abhorred any fuss over her birthday. She wanted neither presents nor party, and chided people for spending hard-earned money on a card.

  Besides his wife, the women he knew best were his mother and sister, both retiring, shy. In a room full of people you might not notice them. Nell was their pluperfect opposite, so what he knew of them helped him not at all to understand his—what exactly was she now? Wife? Estranged wife? His “ex”? Words he knew very little about.

  He had not seen Nell and the children since they’d left in September, the day he’d burned the Bennett house and its awful mystery. He had sent penny postcards in care of her mother, two to Nell and three to Mack and Little Elizabeth, but gave up when Nell didn’t reply. He knew Nell’s mother waited for the sound of the postman’s shoes on the porch, and usually visited with him while looking through the mail. So she could have intercepted and destroyed those cards.

  She would not have found them very revealing one way or the other. His notes held no begging—in fact, he tried to sound as happy as possible without making Nell think he was better off without her. Which, despite the pain, some days he thought he was. Life was, however lonesome, simpler. When he was honest with himself—something that happened fairly seldom—except in bed, he missed his children more sharply than he did her.

  He dressed quickly. Poking at the front room fireplace, he found enough coals to rekindle a blaze. Firewood was low, but the weather promised to be sunny enough not to require a fire all day. He meant finally to get things ready for winter, something he should have taken care of in August, when life had become too crowded.

  He had yet to knock last season’s creosote from the chimneys, and needed to order a couple of bags of coal. And firewood. He would not do anything the residents of the valley could not do, so he cut no green wood but snaked what deadfall he could find. Last season he had bought a load of green wood from a miller who’d hauled it into Cataloochee at what Jim considered to be highway robbery.

  He had to laugh. Silas Wright’s got a world of green firewood behind his house—that little trail to and from his woodlot wasn’t made by possums—but can I ask him to let me buy some of it? I can hear him now. “Jim Hawkins, I bet you’d need one of them fancy permits just to ask me about it.” And the prospect of a resident finding a warden cutting firewood was too ironic to think about.

  The outside thermometer read forty-two degrees. He backed to the fireplace. As the hinder parts of his wool trousers warmed, he saw dust blow across the floor. Nell was right about one thing—this is a drafty old house. This year I’m a good mind to bunk in the kitchen. Just shut up the rest of the place. Maybe I’ll do that today.

  Chimneys were his first concern, for a chimney fire could set the whole house ablaze. His father had advocated periodic chimney burns to clean his flues. He would build a big fire, then make a newspaper torch, light it, and shove it up the flue. Within seconds the chimney would roar as the creosote burned, a whooshing in-suck and out-blow that would put Jim in mind of a giant fairy-tale dragon. His father would then throw water on the fire, which, at least in theory, would send steam up the flue and put out the conflagration.

  Jim was hardly that adventuresome. He hauled a rope and a rock the size of a small cabbage to the roof over the kitchen, tied the rock securely, and lowered it into the chimney, swinging it east to west, north and south, up and down, over and over, beating the inside until he was certain he’d dislodged all the accretion.

  Inside the kitchen he set a bucket on the range’s warmer and slowly removed the pipe between stove and flue. He had knocked a gallon of shiny creosote from the chimney itself, which he swept into the bucket. The stuff reminded him of obsidian, and he wondered if a man could sharpen the bigger chunks. When he held the stovepipe over the bucket and knocked it sharply with a screwdriver handle, the black flakes sounded like dry raindrops. He replaced the stovepipe and stowed the bucket. Next time he had a roaring fire, he’d feed the contents to it.

  Before dinner he was atop the high part of the roof, cleaning the front room chimney. The fire beneath had gone out, but the chimney’s breath felt warm and smelled ashy. Sunshine also warmed him, an
d there was no breeze. He peeled off his denim jacket and hung it on the comb of the roof. He started the rock on its downward journey. Looking up, he saw a soft, gray motion in the creek, whether imagined or real he couldn’t decide. The presence seemed suspended in a patch of shade in the bend, its outline deckle-edged, fuzzy.

  It was maybe a yard tall and as thin as a hoe handle. Jim quietly brought the rock out of the chimney and tiptoed down the ladder. The still shape turned slightly to align perfectly with Jim’s vision, shrinking to the thickness of a galax bloom. It might have been a vertical line drawn by an unseen hand.

  Jim smiled. I can be as still as he can. If it’s what I think it is, I mean to see it up close.

  After a minute or two the creature turned slowly, as if on creaky joints. Two steps upstream it was not quite broadside to Jim but enough for him to make out a great blue heron’s question mark of head and neck.

  Herons rarely visited Cataloochee, a place with nothing save skinny water in which to fish. Perhaps it’s on its way to the big lake and decided to find a snack. The bird stood in the creek bend and peered patiently into shallows, where water dashed around rocks. It stretched its neck toward the boiling surface and soon speared an unfortunate crayfish, which in a trice disappeared down the long neck.

  Don’t know why they call them blue. This one’s Confederate gray. Don’t ever see one without it reminds me of Papa. He thought they were good-luck birds.

  I’m not superstitious, least not like him. Thought a hat on a bed was bad luck. Wouldn’t let you give gloves, said that was bad luck. He’d always go out the same door he came in at. If you’d have nailed the door shut, he’d have sat there until doomsday, or you unnailed the door, one.

  I don’t know where these ideas come from. Why would it be good luck to see a heron and bad luck to see a hawk? I guess because a heron won’t kill chickens. Anyway, I’m not as bad as Papa, but there’s still something in me that would be obliged if this bird changed my luck.