Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

He put the sweatshirt back and sat out on the porch thinking he was experiencing a kind of breakthrough in his health, then pressed that speculation away, to the very edge of his mind, keeping it pushed up tightly there until it fell away altogether. He couldn’t see wasting whatever time he might have left on nonsense.

In the early evening when McEban and Kenneth arrived, he explained which horse he favored, and they stood together at the pickup, his hand on Kenneth’s shoulder, both of them relaxed and warm in the last shafts of sunlight.

He couldn’t make out much more than the glare of sunset over the darker rise of an uneven landscape, now and then a flash of paling color, but it was enough to mark the end of a good day. When he looked down, the boy was merely a smallish shadow. “You’re going to be just fine,” he told him.

They were listening to McEban in the corral, the horses circling. The boy didn’t respond.

“I’m saying you’ve turned out first-rate so far.” He squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “It ought to carry you through.”

“Yes, sir.”

They heard McEban come through the gate, the latch click, the hoofstrikes in the workyard.

“I just felt like I needed to tell you something,” he said. “Like I actually knew something.”

“Did you know a duck’s quack won’t echo?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought about it.”

“It’s something Rodney told me.”

“Well, thank you. That’s a good thing to know.”

McEban tied the leadrope to the bumper and they got in with Kenneth between them, then swung around and idled up the track behind the barn. The songbirds had grown louder, agitated by the coming rain.

“How’s that horse doing?” McEban asked, and the boy knelt on the seat and looked out the back window.

“He’s doing fine,” he said.

“It won’t rain for awhile yet,” Einar told them. “Not until after dark.”

“And then what?” McEban asked.

They parked in the pine and cottonwood and McEban picketed the horse at the edge of the meadow. Kenneth helped Einar to the bench and ran back into the timber, snapping off any dead branches he could reach. He made a dozen trips, carrying armloads of them back, working the dry limbs in at the bottom of the pile of antlers and bones, McEban circling behind him, sloshing kerosene up into the mess from a five-gallon can. When it was empty he sat down beside Einar and lit a cigarette.

“I didn’t know you gave up chewing,” Einar said.

“I’m doing them both now.”

He was watching the boy skirt the north edge of the bone heap, disappearing behind it, coming back toward them from the other side.

“Can I bum one from you?”

McEban handed him the cigarette he had going and lit another, staring at the figures where they stood away from the mound. “I could tip those creepy sons of bitches over,” he said. “Drag them in close enough to burn, if you wanted.”

“They’re better left where they are. I like the company.”

“I guess I’ve never known what to think about ’em.”

“I think they’re cool.” Kenneth was squatting to the side of the bench.

“If you just wanted to get out of the house we could’ve gone into town.” McEban turned to look toward the darkening sky in the west. “I don’t know why you’d want to be left out here.”

They could smell the dampness and ozone in the air, hear the rumble of the storm.

“It’s a celebration.”

“Burning this heap of shit up, you mean?”

“It was something Griff and I talked about.”

“You ought to wait for her, then. Till Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“Well, damn.” McEban looked to where the boy was bent over digging in the ground with a stick, and then back. “You’re not thinking you can swing up on that horse when you’re done, are you?”

“I thought I’d turn him loose. Hold on to his tail and let him lead me back to the corrals.”

Kenneth was standing now. “I could stay and help,” he said.

“Maybe we all ought to stay.”

“You aren’t invited.”

“Why not?” McEban laughed, gesturing toward the boy. “I didn’t hear you invite him either.”

“We’ll have more fun without you.”

“You’re probably right about that.” McEban dropped his cigarette, grinding it out under a boot tip. “I’m going to leave a shovel here with the boy. In case that grass starts up. And a flashlight.”

“You’re a good neighbor, Barnum.”

“There’s something else you’re right about.”

They could feel the pressure of the storm gathering, turning back upon itself like a large, dark animal circling into its night bed.

“You’re going to get soaked. I hope you’re not kidding yourself about that.”

“That’ll be part of the fun. Won’t it, Kenneth?”

“It’ll be like an adventure,” the boy said.

McEban carried the empty kerosene can to the truck and returned with the shovel and flashlight. He slipped his cell phone out, then put it back in his pocket. “I didn’t think there’d be reception up here.” He knelt down by the boy. “You call me when you’re done,” he said, “when you two get back to the house. If I don’t hear from you in a couple hours, I’m driving out here to find you.”

“I promise,” Kenneth said.

McEban stood. “You want another cigarette, Einar?”

“No. I enjoyed the one I had.”

McEban took the flashlight from the boy, turning it on to check the batteries, and gave it back. It was nearly dark.

“Goddamnit, Einar, I wouldn’t be doing some screwball thing like this if I hadn’t known you my whole life.”

“I wouldn’t have asked.”

“You owe me at least a dollar,” Kenneth said.

“All right, then.”

McEban kissed the top of the boy’s head, and they heard him walking away, stopping to look back, and then the sound of the truck pulling out and the rolling approach of thunder.

“You want to light it up?”

“Can I?”

Einar drew a pill bottle of wooden matches from his shirt pocket, shaking them out into the boy’s hand, and he circled the pyre, lighting the kerosene around the perimeter, and came back. It was very still, and they sat listening to the fire gather and spread.

“I better check the other side.” Kenneth picked up the shovel and disappeared behind the pile.

Einar could feel the heat now against his face, and thought that maybe Marin was right and this was only one in a succession of lives, a thousand of them, and then the heat increased and he could distinguish the oranges and reds and yellows, labile and rising into the darkness. “How we doing?” he called to the boy.

“Great.”

He could hear the boy’s laughter.

Lives of deformity, there had to be those, the losing of limbs. He felt the first drops of rain. Lives of brutal commerce, lies, lying with neighbors’ wives. A chanter of hymns. The beater of slaves, his years marked by the chains of slavery. He glimpsed the boy weaving through the figures at the edge of the dark night, at times wildly lit, in and out of shadow, circling, thrusting the wooden shaft of the shovel ahead of him. Lives of hopelessness, beauty, decency, charity, body after body consumed by fire. Kenneth came back into view again, the figures on that side of the fire seeming to move along with him.

The rain hissed in the flames, the air alive with sparks, and he wondered how many times he’s been an old man sitting at a fire in the night, a horse looking on, in a dark rain. Good men and bad, through the grind of centuries, and then there was Ella, who he imagined he could see dancing in her girl’s body, their son holding her hand, Mitch Bradley and Ansel Magnuson. He heard the accretion of their laughter rising from the flames. The rain fell in sheets, the fire sizzling, snapping.