Ron Rash - Burning Bright

Dr. Timrod smiles and sips from the styrofoam cup.

“Now you have some support for your belief.”

Ruth folds the paper and places it in her purse.

“I wonder when they disappeared from South Carolina?”

“I have no idea,” Dr. Timrod says.

“What about them?” Ruth asks, pointing at the parakeets.

“Later than you’d think. There were still huge flocks in the mid-1800s. Audubon said that when they foraged the fields looked like brilliantly colored carpets.”

“What happened?”

“Farmers didn’t want to share the crops and fruit trees. A farmer with a gun could kill a whole flock in one afternoon.”

“How was that possible?” Ruth asks.

“That’s the amazing thing. They wouldn’t abandon one another.”

Dr. Timrod turns to his bookshelf, takes off a volume, and sits back down. He thumbs through the pages until he finds what he’s looking for.

“This was written in the 1800s by a man named Alexander Wilson,” Dr. Timrod says, and begins to read. “‘Having shot down a number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me.’”

Dr. Timrod looks up from the book.

“‘The affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase,’” he says softly. “That’s a pretty heartbreaking passage.”

“Yes,” Ruth says. “It is.”

Dr. Timrod lays the book on the desk. He looks at his watch.

“I’ve got a meeting,” he says, standing up. He comes around the desk and offers his hand. “Congratulations. You may be on the cutting edge of South Carolina jaguar studies.”

Ruth takes his hand, a stronger, more calloused hand than she’d have expected. Dr. Timrod opens the door.

“After you,” he says.

Ruth stands up slowly, both hands gripping the chair’s arms. She walks out into the bright May morning.

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you for your help.”

“Good luck with your search,” Dr. Timrod says.

He turns from her and walks down the pathway. Ruth watches him until he rounds a curve and disappears. She walks the other way. When she comes to where the river is closest to the walkway, Ruth stops and sits on the bench. She looks out at the river, the far bank where the Columbia skyline rises over the trees.

The buildings crumble like sand and blow away. Green-and-yellow birds spangle the sky. Below them wolves and buffalo lean their heads into the river’s flow. From the far shore a tree limb rises toward her like an outstretched hand. On it rests a jaguar, blending so well with its habitat that Ruth cannot blink without the jaguar vanishing. Each time it is harder to bring it back, and the moment comes when Ruth knows if she closes her eyes again the jaguar will disappear forever. Her eyes blur but still she holds her gaze. Something comes unanchored inside her. She lies down on the bench, settles her head on her forearm. She closes her eyes and she sleeps.

After the third fire in two weeks, the talk on TV and radio was no longer about careless campers. Not three fires. Nothing short of a miracle that only a few acres had been burned, the park superintendent said, a miracle less likely to occur again with each additional rainless day.

Marcie listened to the noon weather forecast, then turned off the TV and went out on the porch. She looked at the sky and nothing belied the prediction of more hot dry weather. The worst drought in a decade, the weatherman had said, showing a ten-year chart of August rainfalls. As if Marcie needed a chart when all she had to do was look at her tomatoes shriveled on the vines, the corn shucks gray and papery as a hornet’s nest. She stepped off the porch and dragged a length of hose into the garden, its rubber the sole bright green among the rows. Marcie turned on the water and watched it splatter against the dust. Hopeless, but she slowly walked the rows, grasping the hose just below the metal mouth, as if it were a snake that could bite her. When she finished she looked at the sky a last time and went inside. She thought of Carl, wondering if he’d be late again. She thought about the cigarette lighter he carried in his front pocket, a wedding gift she’d bought him in Gatlinburg.

When her first husband, Arthur, had died two falls earlier of a heart attack, the men in the church had come the following week and felled a white oak on the ridge. They’d cut it into firewood and stacked it on her porch. Their doing so had been more an act of homage to Arthur than of concern for her, or so Marcie realized the following September when the men did not come, making it clear that the church and the community it represented believed others needed their help more than a woman whose husband had left behind fifty acres of land, a paid-off house, and money in the bank.

Carl showed up instead. Heard you might need some firewood cut, he told her, but she did not unlatch the screen door when he stepped onto the porch, even after he explained that Preacher Carter had suggested he come. He stepped back to the porch edge, his deep-blue eyes lowered so as not to meet hers. Trying to set her at ease, she was sure, appear less threatening to a woman living alone. It was something a lot of other men wouldn’t have done, wouldn’t even have thought to do. Marcie asked for a phone number and Carl gave her one. I’ll call you tomorrow if I need you, she said, and watched him drive off in his battered black pickup, a chain saw and red five-gallon gas can rattling in the truck bed. She phoned Preacher Carter after Carl left.

“He’s new in the area, from down near the coast,” the minister told Marcie. “He came by the church one afternoon, claimed he’d do good work for fair wages.”

“So you sent him up here not knowing hardly anything about him?” Marcie asked. “With me living alone.”

“Ozell Harper wanted some trees cut and I sent him out there,” Preacher Carter replied. “He also cut some trees for Andy West. They both said he did a crackerjack job.” The minister paused. “I think the fact he came by the church to ask about work speaks in his favor. He’s got a good demeanor about him too. Serious and soft-spoken, lets his work do his talking for him.”

She called Carl that night and told him he was hired.

Marcie cut off the spigot and looked at the sky one last time. She went inside and made her shopping list. As she drove down the half-mile dirt road, red dust rose in the car’s wake. She passed the two other houses on the road, both owned by Floridians who came every year in June and left in September. When they’d moved in, she’d walked down the road with a homemade pie. The newcomers had stood in their doorways. They accepted the welcoming gift with a seeming reluctance, and did not invite her in.

Marcie turned left onto the blacktop, the radio on the local station. She went by several fields of corn and tobacco every bit as singed as her own garden. Before long she passed Johnny Ramsey’s farm and saw several of the cows that had been in her pasture until Arthur died. The road forked and as Marcie passed Holcombe Pruitt’s place she saw a black snake draped over a barbed-wire fence, put there because the older farmers believed it would bring rain. Her father had called it a silly superstition when she was a child, but during a drought nearly as bad as this one, her father had killed a black snake himself and placed it on a fence, then fallen to his knees in his scorched cornfield, imploring whatever entity would listen to bring rain.