Ron Rash - Burning Bright

Dew wet his bare feet as he passed the far edge of the homestead and then to the woods’ edge where the ginseng was. He sat down, and in a few minutes felt the night’s chill envelop him. A frost warning, the radio had said. He thought of how his great-aunt had taken off her clothes and how, despite the scientific explanation, it seemed to Jesse a final abdication of everything she had once been.

He looked toward the eastern sky. It seemed he’d been running a week’s worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn’t begun to pale. The first pink smudges on the far ridgeline were a while away, perhaps hours. The night would linger long enough for what would or would not come. He waited.

She don’t understand what it’s like for me when she walks out the door on Monday and Wednesday nights. She don’t know how I sit in the dark watching the TV but all the while I’m listening for her car. Or understand I’m not ever certain till I hear the Chevy coming up the drive that she’s coming home. How each time a little less of her comes back, because after she checks on Janie she spreads the books open on the kitchen table, and she may as well still be at that college for her mind is so far inside what she’s studying. I rub the back of her neck. I say maybe we could go to bed a little early tonight. I tell her there’s lots better things to do than study some old book. She knows my meaning.

“I’ve got to finish this chapter,” Lynn says, “maybe after that.”

But that “maybe” doesn’t happen. I go to bed alone. Pouring concrete is a young man’s job and I ain’t so young anymore. I need what sleep I can get to keep up.

“You’re getting long in the tooth, Bobby,” a young buck told me one afternoon I huffed and puffed to keep up. “You best get you one of them sit-down jobs, maybe test rocking chairs.”

They all got a good laugh out of that. Mr. Winchester, the boss man, laughed right along with them.

“Ole Bobby’s still got some life in him yet, ain’t you,” Mr. Winchester said.

He smiled when he said it, but there was some serious in his words.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I ain’t even got my second wind yet.”

Mr. Winchester laughed again, but I knew he’d had his eye on me. It won’t trouble him much to fire me when I can’t pull my weight anymore.

The nights Lynn stays up I don’t ever go right off to sleep, though I’m about nine ways whipped from work. I lay there in the dark and think about something she said a while back when she first took the notion to go back to school. You ought to be proud of me for wanting to make something of myself, she’d said. Maybe it ain’t the way she means it to sound, but I can’t help thinking she was also saying, “Bobby, just because you’ve never made anything of yourself don’t mean I have to do the same.”

I think about something else she once told me. It was Christmas our senior year in high school. Lynn’s folks and brothers had finally gone to bed and me and her was on the couch. The lights was all off but for the tree lights glowing and flicking like little stars. I’d already unwrapped the box that had me a sweater in it. I took the ring out of my front pocket and gave it to her. I tried to act all casual but I could feel my hand trembling. We’d talked some about getting married but it had always been in the far-away, after I got a good job, after she’d got some more schooling. But I hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She’d put the ring on and though it was just a quarter-carat she made no notice of that.

“It’s so pretty,” Lynn had said.

“So will you?” I’d asked.

“Of course,” she’d told me. “It’s what I’ve wanted, more than anything in the world.”

So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness I feel. A diamond can cut through glass, I’ve heard, but I ain’t so sure anymore.

One night I dream I’m falling. There are tree branches all around me but I can’t grab hold of one. I just keep falling and falling for forever. I wake up all sweaty and gasping for breath. My heart pounds like it’s some kind of animal trying to tear out my chest. Lynn’s got her back to me, sleeping like she ain’t got a care in the world. I look at the clock and see I have thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. I’ll sleep no more anyway so I pull on my work clothes and stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee.

The books are on the kitchen table, big thick books. I open up the least one, a book called Astronomy Today . I read some and it makes no sense. Even the words I know don’t seem to lead nowhere. They just as likely could be ants scurrying around the page. But Lynn understands them. She has to since she makes all As on her tests.

I touch the cigarette lighter in my pocket and think a book is so easy a thing to burn. I think how in five minutes they’d be nothing but ashes, ashes nobody could read. I get up before I dwell on such a thing too long. I check on Janie and she’s managed to kick the covers off the bed. It’s been a month since she started second grade but it seems more like a month since we brought her home from the hospital. Things can change faster than a person can sometimes stand, Daddy used to say, and I’m learning the truth of that. Each morning it’s like Janie’s sprouted another inch.

“I’m a big girl now,” she tells her grandma and that always gets a good laugh. I took her the first day of school this year and it wasn’t like first grade when she was tearing up when me and Lynn left her there. Janie was excited this time, wanting to see her friends. I held her hand when we walked into the classroom. There was other parents milling around, the kids searching for the desk that had their name on it. I looked the room over pretty good. A hornet’s nest was stuck on a wall and a fish tank bubbled at the back, beside it a big blue globe like I’d had in my second-grade room. WELCOME BACK was written in big green letters on the door.

“You need to leave,” Janie said, letting go of my hand.

It wasn’t till then I noticed the rest of the parents already had, the kids but for Janie in their desks. That night in bed I’d told Lynn I thought we ought to have another kid.

“We barely can clothe and feed the one we got,” she’d said, then turned her back to me and went to sleep.

It’s not something I gnaw on a few weeks and then decide to do. I don’t give myself time to figure out it’s a bad idea. Instead, as soon as Lynn pulls out of the drive I round up Janie’s gown and toothbrush.

“You’re spending the night with Grandma,” I tell her.

“What about school?” Janie says.

“I’ll come by and get you come morning. I’ll bring you some school clothes.”

“Do I have to?” Janie says. “Grandma snores.”

“We ain’t arguing about this,” I tell her. “Get you some shoes on and let’s go.”

I say it kind of cross, which is a sorry way to act since it ain’t Janie that’s got me so out of sorts.

When we get to Momma’s I apologize for not calling first but she says there’s no bother.

“There ain’t no trouble between you and Lynn?” she asks.

“No ma’am,” I say.

I drive the five miles to the community college. I find Lynn’s car and park close by. I reckon the classes have all got started because there’s not any students in the parking lot. There ain’t a security guard around and it’s looking to be an easy thing to get done. I take my barlow knife out of the dash and stick it in my pocket. I keep to the shadows and come close to the nearest building. There’s big windows and five different classrooms.