by Josh Ritter
Bright looked up into the black length of the barrel. “That’s my mother’s rifle.”
The old man’s eyes glinted. He kicked the horse hard and the animal lunged forward, knocking Bright back against the side of the barn wall with its shoulder. “All your running away,” he said, “and you run right to me. A coward always ends up running toward what he wishes to escape. There is no irony in it.” He glanced to either side, looking for something. “My goddamn boys are off somewhere,” he said. “My useless goddamn boys are off somewhere, but”—he pushed the muzzle of the rifle forward into Bright’s face—“it makes no difference to you and me.”
Bright looked past the gun into the horse’s eyes. “You’re gonna let him kill me now?”
“Fear not, Henry Bright.” The angel’s voice was calm.
“But I did everything you told me to!”
“All is well.”
Forgetting the rifle pointed down at him, he stepped toward the horse. The Colonel kicked him in the teeth, knocking him painfully back against the barn wall again. His eyes had begun to water hard from the smoke, burning so that it was a struggle to keep them open.
“My daughter.” The Colonel, too, was weeping as he ran a sleeve across his mouth. “She was my beautiful girl. You stole her away from me.” The tears streamed freely down his face and dropped onto his grandchild as he looked down at the infant. For a moment the old man on the horse seemed to forget that Bright was even there, then his head snapped up once more. “You stole her away from me just like your mother tried to do,” he said. “I should have killed you both. I should have shot you down when you were small and buried you where you fell.” A thick cloud of smoke enveloped them. The Colonel doubled over, coughing in the saddle. The rifle barrel dipped as he struggled for breath.
“Stay very still, Henry Bright,” the angel commanded serenely. “Stay very still and close your eyes.”
Another rolling barrage of heat washed over them as the bales of hay inside the barn caught fire. The wind whipped the Colonel’s hat off and sucked it behind him into the whirling vortex. He didn’t seem to notice. He pulled the rifle hammer back.
Henry Bright looked up into the Colonel’s eyes briefly, but the fear was gone, and neither the old man or the waiting infinity of the rifle were of interest anymore. He found that all he wanted to do in the remaining moments of his life was to look at his son. The baby seemed strangely at peace in the conflagration. His coppery hair blew out in all directions. Bright realized that he, too, felt a kind of peace.
If he had lived, it occurred to him, he might have eventually felt that same kind of peacefulness at home, watching his boy grow up. He would have tended to his chickens and rabbits and goats and taught his son the things that his own mother had taught him. And, should he ever again smell the scent of lemons, he might one day have been able to think of sweet tea or lemonade instead of a pile of bodies on the edge of a ragged November tree line.
Maybe, he thought. If he had lived.
He thought about Rachel, whom he had loved since they were small. He felt happy to have held, even for a short while, the son whom she had delivered into his arms. He wondered if his own father had felt such a moment of grace as the earth collapsed around him.
He took one last look at his son and closed his eyes.
The last thing he felt before he heard the gunshot was the breath of the angel on his cheek. After that there was nothing but the heat and the drifting sensation of time continuing to pass in the world beyond his eyelids. He was in hell, he thought. In hell or the War.
He opened his burning eyes to find out which it was.
Above him the Colonel sat erect in the saddle, so still that he could have been posing for his portrait. A purple flower had blossomed beneath his right eye. It bloomed, then wilted and ran down over his cheekbone and into his collar. The old man’s face sagged, and then his head drooped and he looked down at his chest as if someone were in the process of pinning a medal there.
The Colonel slumped forward in the saddle. Behind him, a pistol in his outstretched arm, was a man Bright had never seen before. Next to him, faces white and slick with sweat, stood Amelia and Brigid. The Colonel listed in the saddle, his deadweight pulling the horse off balance. Bright pushed away from the barn wall, lunging to catch the old man’s body before it toppled off the horse and crushed his son.
The horse began to stamp, but Bright grabbed a stirrup and held the animal where it was as Brigid rushed forward and took the reins. He couldn’t reach high enough to pull the sling over the Colonel’s head, so he began to ease the body gently down out of the saddle. The buttons of the old man’s jacket were hot to the touch.
He saw his mother’s rifle only as it slipped from the Colonel’s hands. It fell to the ground, firing its single charge. Angel or no angel, the sound of the shot was finally too much for the horse. It went wild, pulling away from Brigid and charging toward Amelia and the man with the pistol as Bright fought hard to hold on. The child bounced crazily in the sling around the dead man’s drooping neck.
A second shot sounded, and the rampaging animal, seeming to remember something all of a sudden, went instantly still. It hung there frozen a moment, then collapsed on Henry Bright, pinning him to the ground by his legs. Lawrence reached down and fired a final, merciful shot into its head.
Brigid knelt. “Are you all right?” He answered something, but she was already intent on pulling the infant from the sling.
“You’re cracked, H.!” Amelia bent over and yelled down at him. “I tell you to stay put and order room service and this happens?” She watched as Lawrence jammed the Colonel’s rifle stock between the horse’s hindquarters and the ground. He and Amelia began to lever the deadweight slowly off Bright’s legs.
Bright pushed and scraped against the hot ground with his hands and elbows until he’d pulled his feet free and he could stand. They ran from the barn, doubled over, through throes of corrosive soot, washed forward by the percussive whoosh of exploding trees, surfacing finally on the great lawn like castaways.
The air was still brutally hot and he struggled to catch his breath as he looked over at Brigid holding his son. She looked back at him, her eyes widening, and yelled something that he couldn’t make out. Only when he felt his hair catch fire did he realize that his jacket was burning. He ran to the nearest of the small ponds and threw himself in.
Brigid came to the water too, and he sloshed to the girl’s side. She was looking down at the ashen-faced child with deep concern. The boy lay totally still, his expression a mask. Bright reached for the bundle in disbelief, but Brigid slapped his hands away. She bent and dunked the child in the water and, as if reborn, the boy came up howling.
Amelia and Lawrence stood at the pond’s edge looking back at the fire. The barn gave way to the flames all at once, as if it had suddenly been transformed into a great swarm of black bees, which at some signal went buzzing heavenward together. Amelia slipped her arm around Lawrence, whom she would marry in the fall, when the weather cooled and the humidity died down. Bright and Brigid looked down at Henry. As she had lifted the infant from the water, the boy had opened his eyes for the first time. They were beautiful and blue, just like Rachel’s had been.
They were coming up the bank when the figure of a man staggered out of the fire and stood encased in the dirty-yellow no-man’s-land between the trees and the pond as if trapped in amber. Although he made no sound, a serrated cry of alarm came cutting through the roar of the fire from the animal he carried on his back.
By the time Bright reached him, Duncan had sunk to his knees. He tried to pull the goat from his shoulders, but Duncan held the creature’s hooves tightly in his fists, unwilling or unable to let go. Bright knocked Duncan to the ground and climbed on top of him, as if he meant to choke him. Duncan made no move either to resist or to let go of the goat, and after a long, tangled moment, Bright grabbed the Colonel’s son by his hair and shirtfront and pulled him to his feet. He shoved him, the
goat still on his back, to the pond’s edge and pushed Duncan in. As he hit the water, the goat finally kicked herself free of Duncan’s grip and stood shakily sneezing in the mud.
“I found her,” Duncan said, sitting up in the water. “She was running around in the fire and I caught her.” He leaned forward and took a drink of water. “Do you have the baby?” Soaked, Duncan looked more like a child than a man. “He’s my sister’s baby.”
“Yes,” Bright said. “Come on.” The goat was looking at him across the water, as if trying to remember something. A dream came back to him then. In it he was kicking Duncan in the head.
Duncan woozily reached around in the pond for the goat. It made no struggle as he scooped it into his arms again. “I think I need help walking,” he said.
“Where did you come from?” He helped the Colonel’s son up the bank.
“Corwin and me weren’t allowed to stay inside the hotel with the other folks ’cause of some of the things he used to do. They all blamed me too. One of them knocked me down and he was beating me, but a man from the hotel stopped him. We still had to leave, though, so we went to the barn.” Duncan coughed. His ribs seemed about to poke through his skin. “And at the barn there was all these chickens. I looked at Corwin. I saw what was in his mind.”
Bright looked in those deep-set eyes. “Where’s Corwin?”
“That hotel man came across the field just when Corwin was starting in on the chickens. He tried to stop Corwin but it wasn’t no use. He didn’t know about my brother. Corwin knocked him down and then … He wouldn’t stop. Finally I took a shovel and I hit Corwin over the head with it real hard and it killed him. That didn’t make no difference to the hotel man, though. He was already gone. I saw my father coming across the field, so I dragged my brother over behind the barn. Your goat was standing there. She took one little look at me and just lit out. I said to myself, ‘She’s gonna run right into the fire.’ So I chased after her until I caught her.”
He looked around wildly. “Where’s he at? My father?”
“He died,” Bright said. “I’m sorry,” he added.
“I’m not.”
They passed a group of men going in the opposite direction, shepherding the big pumper toward the pond. Some were already wearing gas masks. Farther on, others were just setting out for the fire, most still dressed raggedly in the clothes that they had been wearing when they were driven from their homes. Among them were some of the hotel guests in shirtsleeves, their faces blanching in the temperature. Near the gate, people worked furiously to dig firebreaks with whatever they had. Some used shovels, but others turned the ground with hoes, knives, even spoons. The auntly woman from the general merchandise store was there, ripping great, green chunks of soil and grass from the ground with a pickax. A line of children waited with buckets at a water pump by the kitchen entrance. A hose now ran out of the fountain and was being used to wet the lawn.
“Kill him, Henry Bright.”
Bright heard the voice but did not stop walking.
“Henry Bright, you must kill Duncan. Then we will find a mother for the child.” Bright glanced toward the goat hanging exhausted in Duncan’s arms. Even its ears dangled listlessly. Suddenly it looked up at him, its pupils golden keyholes, its voice serene and confident. “He must die, Henry Bright. The safety of the Future King of Heaven demands it.”
Bright looked away and didn’t speak. They rejoined Brigid and his boy in the milling crowd near the fountain. The girl held the child closely and smiled as Bright approached. He reached out and touched his son’s hair. “I have to do something,” he told her. “I’ll be back directly.”
He turned to Duncan. “I was in the War. I went to France and I saw some things there.” He paused. “No, I saw a lot of things that I wish I’d never seen. Awful things. Sometimes I still see them.” Bright’s hands clenched tightly at his sides, and he ground his teeth as he fought with some inner thought. Then, suddenly, “Were you there?”
“Where?” Duncan asked.
“Did you go to the War? Did you come out of the farmhouse that night?”
For once, the black stones of Duncan’s eyes seemed to register surprise. “Me?” he said. “I never been this far from home.”
Bright searched those eyes for any traces of the farmhouse that might be hidden in them. Then his face relaxed and the tautness went out of his shoulders. He reached out to pet the goat in Duncan’s arms. “I guess you were right about one thing after all,” he said to it.
“What?” Duncan asked.
“I have to take my goat now,” Bright said to him. “Don’t you worry, she’ll be safe. Maybe you and I will find a new goat when this is all over,” he added.
Duncan gave the goat to Bright and sat down on the edge of the fountain.
“You must kill him, Henry Bright. If you do, I will help you find a mother for your son.”
At his feet, the hotel steps rippled upward like the train of a wedding dress. He ascended them, the she-goat tucked under his arm, and passed through the revolving doors into the silence of the now-deserted lobby. Once inside, man and goat looked up into that domed sweep of beneficent blue sky, so different from the apocalyptic orange world without.
At the center of the great, round room, beneath the eternal early-fall clarity of the painted dome, stood the batholithic piano, impenetrably dark. He carried the creature across the room toward the glossy black slab, turning a slow full circle and checking that the sky above them was as empty as it had appeared earlier. When he was sure that it was, he placed the she-goat atop the piano. Her hooves clicked soundingly against the ebony, causing faint vibrations in the strings. Somehow the sounds were magnified beneath the high ceiling, as if, high above, a discordant orchestra had begun to tune.
“Jee-roosh needs a mother, Henry Bright. The Future King of Heaven needs someone to care for him until he can take the throne.”
“Enough of that,” Bright said. “Keep it. I’ve heard enough.”
“Do as I say!”
“We’ve had our differences, you and me, but everyone should have a home, and it weren’t a trouble to bring you here. You kept me safe when I was in the War, and maybe I wouldn’t have married Rachel if it wasn’t for you, and maybe we wouldn’t a had a son.” He paused to consider the thought. “Maybe that’s all true. I don’t have any idea one way or the other. But I do know that without you, I wouldn’t have burned down our cabin and the whole forest and all those people’s homes and let my horse get shot. And,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let anybody make me believe I couldn’t raise my own boy.”
He looked at the goat. “I hope that this place will make you happy. If the fire don’t reach the hotel I guess you’ll be safe enough. There’s no one else around you in that sky to bother you, so just get out of that goat and go on up there now. Git.”
“Don’t leave me here, Henry Bright,” the angel commanded.
“Maybe if you’re happy here,” Bright continued, “you’ll just let me go on about my life with my boy.” He looked up into the blue and closed his eyes a moment. He was very tired.
“I know you’re angry with me,” he said, opening them again after a while. The goat was staring at him ponderously, her little teeth sliding back and forth against one another. He smiled at this. “I guess that’s all a load of junk you told me about the King of Heaven and everything, but if any of it is the truth, if my son Henry really is the future King of Heaven, then I figure when he gets old enough, if you’re still mad at me for leaving you here, maybe he can straighten things out between the two of us.”
He leaned over the piano’s edge and kissed the goat on her nose. The animal snuffled at the collar of his uniform, and the two of them stayed there a long moment. Then, without looking back, Bright spun on his heels and strode out from beneath the cool light of the dome and through the revolving doors.
At the edge of the lawn, the tumult of flames and smoke was smearing the sky into the ground. Toward the fire’s sway march
ed lines of men and women, holding tiny buckets of water with which to soak the grass. At times throughout the night, they seemed to turn from real, living people into mere photographs of people, and then from photographs into memories, which are like photographs, and finally, as the ground blurred beneath them, whatever parts of them that could be seen from afar seemed to float like ghosts in the rippling air as they went about their work.
He descended the steps and wove his way back through the crowd of refugees. Amelia and Lawrence, arm in arm, were being fretted over by a knot of well-dressed people. Duncan stood near them, looking about him at the world through red-rimmed eyes as if for the first time. Bright found Brigid where he had left her, holding his son in her arms. He smiled at her and she returned the smile. He looked into his son’s blue eyes and laughed. It was a strange sound to hear coming from his mouth. He leaned forward to kiss the boy’s forehead. With her free hand, Brigid reached out and brushed stiff, white goat hairs from the shoulders of his jacket and then gently pulled him forward by a lapel and kissed his own smoke-stained forehead. He looked at the mother and child together for a long time and then made to join some men heading to fight the fire. Abruptly, though, he turned to face her once more and, drawing from his pocket a small and ancient ivory comb, he pressed it into her hand for safekeeping.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without my editor, Noah Eaker. Great thanks as well to Scott Moyers. Thanks to my manager and friend, Darius Zelkha, and to Tim Craven, Liam Hurley, Austin Nevins, Sam Kassirer, Zack Hickman, the Ricks, the Leahys, Mary Moyer, Carla Sacks, Maria Braeckel, Kathy Lord, Dave Brewster, Sue Devine, Doug Rice, Dave O’Grady, Dan Cardinal, Brian Stowell, Scott Hueston, Robert Pinsky, Ed Romanoff, Jonathan Horn, and Kathleen Denney.
