James Burke - Light of the World

“In the behind.”

He looked into space and drank again from the pot, his lips gray from the heat. “He told you where the old man was at?”

“Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to.”

“I just want to know where Love Younger is at.”

“So you can do exactly what Caspian Younger wants you to?”

He set the coffeepot back on the stove. There was a red stripe across his palm. “Hear it?” he said.

“Hear what?”

“A train. Up on the railroad bed.”

“Those tracks were torn up decades ago. There’s nothing there except the cliff and an empty rail bed.”

“I heard it a-blowing down the line, whistling through a canyon.”

“That’s the wind.”

“No, ma’am, it ain’t. I been hearing that whistle all my life. He’s at Sweathouse Creek, ain’t he?”

“How’d you know?”

“I followed him there once. Love Younger ain’t that smart. He sired the likes of me, ain’t he?”

He slipped on his boots and stuck his sheathed bowie knife in the back pocket of his Wranglers, then pulled on a long-sleeved snap-button shirt and walked through the clutter of his living room and out the front door.

“I’m coming,” she said. “You’re not going without me.”

He turned and looked at her. Her expression was disjointed, her anatomical construction seeming to disintegrate as she approached, like a digital figure collapsing into a pile of dots. He pushed at his temple with his thumb until his vision seemed to correct itself.

“We’re in this together,” she said. She took hold of his right arm with both hands and clutched it tighter than anyone had ever held him in his life. “We’ll never be apart again. If I have to go with you to the grave, Wyatt Dixon, you hear what I’m saying to you? Don’t you ever try to leave me.”

Love Younger stood behind his cabin on Sweathouse Creek and stared up at the canyon walls. There were boulders in the canyon the size of a two-story house, even bigger, all of them surrounded by towering trees that grew cheek by jowl against the stone. He could see bighorn sheep up on a ledge, one that was no more than two feet wide. They were working their way toward the summit of the mountain while tiny rocks rilled down from their hooves, over the lip of the trail, falling at least four hundred feet onto the canopy of cottonwoods that grew along the banks of the creek. A slip, a miscalculation, a weak spot in the stone that split under their weight, and they would plummet to their deaths. Yet they never hesitated or showed fear, as though knowledge of the topography had been wired into them. Love Younger wondered why humankind did not feel the same kind of security. The sun was west of the Bitterroots now, and the air in the canyon had turned cold, and the magenta coloration above the top of the canyon was fading to a dark shade of blue that made him think of a curtain being closed on a stage.

He had taken a black-powder revolver to shoot at targets he picked out randomly along the creek — a wet rock dancing with spray, a wild rose hanging on a green stem over the current, a cedar stump that had decayed into pulp the color of rust. He aimed at all three of these targets but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. There was a stillness inside the entrance of the canyon that felt almost holy. He raised his eyes to the ledge and realized the bighorn sheep had disappeared inside a low-hanging cloud, as though the mountain had provided sanctuary from either his gaze or his firearm. Was that his role in the world? The harbinger of destruction? The twentieth century’s representative of a petrochemical empire staining the ground with the greasy imprint of his shoes?

Maybe this was not a good time to be alone, he told himself. But what merit was there in a man’s life if he had to fear solitude? Love Younger had created jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers all over the globe. His pipelines and drilling platforms delivered the oil and natural gas on which the entirety of the industrial world depended. Did any rational person believe he wanted to pollute the earth and incur environmental lawsuits that could cost his companies billions of dollars? Love Younger was a fair man. No one could say he wasn’t. The enemy was poverty, not refineries. How many environmentalists had worn clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks when they were children?

For Love Younger, depression was another term for self-pity. He had only one problem: He could not reason himself out of the black box he found himself inside. What was the truth about his life? The truth was, he woke every morning with a bête noire that he crowded out of his mind with sums and debits and concerns about the Saudi bench price on the barrel of oil in the same way a drunkard fills himself with whiskey to avoid acknowledging the catastrophe he has made of his life. The story of Love Younger was simple. He had committed the worst crime of which an ordinary human being was capable: He had destroyed his family.

He set down the heavy Navy Colt .44 on a spool table and waded into the creek. The coldness ran over the tops of his shoes and into his socks with a brittleness that reminded him of drawing water with a bucket from the stream that ran through Snakey Hollow, Kentucky, the place of his birth. As he stared at the long silvery ribbon winding through the canyon, he realized the gleam on the surface he had taken for granted was dying, as though the light were being drawn up through the trees and the canyon walls by the heavens, a shutting down of the day that was more an act of theft than a natural phenomenon.

He wondered what would happen if he began wading up the creek into the crack in the mountains that gave onto the great Idaho wilderness, disappearing inside its gathering shadows, crunching on the soft bed of sand and coppery pebbles that had been polished as bright as pennies. Could he keep going all the way to the top of the Bitterroots, where the snowmelt formed chains of lakes surrounded with miles of velvet greenery on which deer and elk and moose grazed in the sunrise?

Like the deerslayers of pre-Revolutionary America, could he walk all the way to the Missouri Breaks and follow the tributaries and the riparian paths of Indians to the inception point of the Mississippi, then find his way to Louisville and west through the bluegrass to the edge of the Cumberlands? Would his birthplace be changed significantly? Would there be a ragged child there who resembled another impoverished Kentucky child, one born during the first administration of Herbert Hoover? Was there some way to go back in time and undo his mistakes and set a straight path that would make his legacy acceptable in the eyes of others?

He knew these were foolish and vain thoughts, but if a man were contrite of heart, would not a merciful Creator make an exception and return, if only in token fashion, the children who had chosen either physical or spiritual death rather than live under the dominion of their father?

He walked farther up the creek, into a pool up to his knees, where the current was so cold that his shinbones felt as though they had been beaten with wood mallets. Holding on to a tree branch, he kept going deeper into the canyon, pulling himself along the edges of the current until he was up to his thighs and had no feeling at all beneath the dark wet line across his fly. He wondered if this would not be a bad way to go. He would simply keep walking up the creek into deeper and deeper pools until his entire body was numb and he was subsumed by the woods and the wild roses on the banks and the mist boiling at the bottom of a waterfall. Be my rod and staff, he thought.

The words angered him. Am I becoming one of the herd, the nitwits who roll in sawdust at camp meetings and dip their hands in boxes of copperheads? Get ahold of yourself.