Ron Rash - Burning Bright

“I think I’ll go outside a while,” Jared said.

“But you can’t,” his mother replied. “You’ve got to help me tape the stars to the tree.”

By the time they’d finished, the sun was falling behind Sawmill Ridge. I’ll go tomorrow, he told himself.

On Sunday morning the baggies were empty and his parents were sick. His mother sat on the couch wrapped in a quilt, shivering. She hadn’t bathed since Friday and her hair was stringy and greasy. His father looked little better, his blue eyes receding deep into his skull, his lips chapped and bleeding.

“Your momma, she’s sick,” his father said, “and your old daddy ain’t doing too well himself.”

“The doctor can’t help her, can he?” Jared asked.

“No,” his father said. “I don’t think he can.”

Jared watched his mother all morning. She’d never been this bad before. After a while she lit the pipe and sucked deeply for what residue might remain. His father crossed his arms, rubbing his biceps as he looked around the room, as if expecting to see something he’d not seen moments earlier. The fire had gone out, the cold causing his mother to shake more violently.

“You got to go see Brady,” she told Jared’s father.

“We got no money left,” he answered.

Jared watched them, waiting for the sweep of his father’s eyes to stop beside the front door where the mountain bike was. But his father’s eyes went past it without the slightest pause. The kerosene heater in the kitchen was on, but its heat hardly radiated into the front room.

His mother looked up at Jared.

“Can you fix us a fire, honey?”

He went out to the back porch and gathered an armload of kindling, then placed a thick log on the andirons as well. Beneath it he wedged newspaper left over from the star cutting. He lit the newspaper and watched the fire slowly take hold, then watched the flames a while longer before turning to his parents.

“You can take the bike down to Bryson City and sell it,” he said.

“No, son,” his mother said. “That’s your Christmas present.”

“We’ll be all right,” his father said. “Your momma and me just did too much partying yesterday is all.”

But as the morning passed, they got no better. At noon Jared went to his room and got his coat.

“Where you going, honey?” his mother asked as he walked toward the door.

“To get more firewood.”

Jared walked into the shed but did not gather wood. Instead, he took a length of dusty rope off the shed’s back wall and wrapped it around his waist and then knotted it. He left the shed and followed his own tracks west into the park. The snow had become harder, and it crunched beneath his boots. The sky was gray, darker clouds farther west. More snow would soon come, maybe by afternoon. Jared made believe he was on a rescue mission. He was in Alaska, the rope tied around him dragging a sled filled with food and medicine. The footprints weren’t his but those of the people he’d been sent to find.

When he got to the airplane, Jared pretended to unpack the supplies and give the man and woman something to eat and drink. He told them they were too hurt to walk back with him and he’d have to go and get more help. Jared took the watch off the man’s wrist. He set it in his palm, face upward. I’ve got to take your compass, he told the man. A blizzard’s coming, and I may need it.

Jared slipped the watch into his pocket. He got out of the plane and walked back up the ridge. The clouds were hard and granite-looking now, and the first flurries were falling. Jared pulled out the watch every few minutes, pointed the hour hand east as he followed his tracks back to the house.

The truck was still out front, and through the window Jared saw the mountain bike. He could see his parents as well, huddled together on the couch. For a few moments Jared simply stared through the window at them.

When he went inside, the fire was out and the room was cold enough to see his breath. His mother looked up anxiously from the couch.

“You shouldn’t go off that long without telling us where you’re going, honey.”

Jared lifted the watch from his pocket.

“Here,” he said, and gave it to his father.

His father studied it a few moments, then broke into a wide grin.

“This watch is a Rolex,” his father said.

“Thank you, Jared,” his mother said, looking as if she might cry. “You’re the best son anybody could have, ain’t he, Daddy?”

“The very best,” his father said.

“How much can we get for it?” his mother asked

“I bet a couple of hundred at least,” his father answered.

His father clamped the watch onto his wrist and got up. Jared’s mother rose as well.

“I’m going with you. I need something quick as I can get it.” She turned to Jared. “You stay here, honey. We’ll be back in just a little while. We’ll bring you back a hamburger and a Co-Cola, some more of that cereal too.”

Jared watched as they drove down the road. When the truck had vanished, he sat down on the couch and rested a few minutes. He hadn’t taken his coat off. He checked to make sure the fire was out and then went to his room and emptied his backpack of school books. He went out to the shed and picked up a wrench and a hammer and placed them in the backpack. The flurries were thicker now, already beginning to fill in his tracks. He crossed over Sawmill Ridge, the tools clanking in his backpack. More weight to carry, he thought, but at least he wouldn’t have to carry them back.

When he got to the plane, he didn’t open the door, not at first. Instead, he took the tools from the backpack and laid them before him. He studied the plane’s crushed nose and propeller, the broken right wing. The wrench was best to tighten the propeller, he decided. He’d straighten out the wing with the hammer.

As he switched tools and moved around the plane, the snow fell harder. Jared looked behind him and on up the ridge and saw his footprints were growing fainter. He chipped the snow and ice off the windshields with the hammer’s claw. Finished, he said, and dropped the hammer on the ground. He opened the passenger door and got in.

“I fixed it so it’ll fly now,” he told the man.

He sat in the backseat and waited. The work and walk had warmed him but he quickly grew cold. He watched the snow cover the plane’s front window with a darkening whiteness. After a while he began to shiver but after a longer while he was no longer cold. Jared looked out the side window and saw the whiteness was not only in front of him but below. He knew then that they had taken off and risen so high that they were enveloped inside a cloud, but still he looked down, waiting for the clouds to clear so he might look for the pickup as it followed the winding road toward Bryson City.

On the drive home from her mother’s funeral, Ruth Lealand thinks of jaguars.

She saw one once in the Atlanta Zoo and admired the creature’s movements-like muscled water-as it paced back and forth, turning inches from the iron bars but never acknowledging the cage’s existence. She had not remembered then what she remembers now, a memory like something buried in river silt that finally works free and rises to the surface, a memory from the third grade. Mrs. Carter tells them to get out their History of South Carolina text-books. Paper and books shuffle and shift. Some of the boys snicker, for on the book’s first page is a drawing of an Indian woman suckling her child. Ruth opens the book and sees a black-and-white sketch of a jaguar, but for only a moment, because this is not a page they will study today or any other day this school year. She turns to the correct page and forgets what she’s seen for fifty years.