Ron Rash - Burning Bright

Martha didn’t look like she believed him. She got slowly out of the bed and Ray did as well. They put on their shoes, then moved tentatively to the trailer’s door, seemingly with little pleasure. They hesitated.

“Go on,” Parson said. “I’ll bring the heater.”

Parson went and got the kerosene heater. He stooped and lifted it slowly, careful to use his legs instead of his back. Little fuel remained in it, so it wasn’t heavy, just awkward. When he came into the front room, his brother and sister-in-law still stood inside the door.

“Hold the door open,” he told Ray, “so I can get this thing outside.”

Parson got the heater down the steps and carried it the rest of the way. Once inside the farmhouse he set it near the hearth, filled the tank, and turned it on. He and Ray gathered logs and kindling off the front porch and got a good flame going in the fireplace. The flue wasn’t drawing as it should. By the time Parson had adjusted it a smoky odor filled the room, but that was a better smell than the meth. The three of them sat on the couch and unwrapped the sandwiches. They did not speak even when they’d finished, just stared at the hearth as flame shadows trembled on the walls. Parson thought what an old human feeling this must be, how ten thousand years ago people would have done the same thing on a cold night, would have eaten, then settled before the fire, looked into it and found peace, knowing they’d survived the day and now could rest.

Martha began snoring softly and Parson grew sleepy as well. He roused himself, looked over at his brother, whose eyes still watched the fire. Ray didn’t look sleepy, just lost in thought.

Parson got up and stood before the hearth, let the heat soak into his clothes and skin before going out into the cold. He took the revolver from his pocket and gave it to Ray.

“In case any of Danny’s friends give you any trouble,” Parson said. “I’ll get your power turned back on in the morning.”

Martha awoke with a start. For a few moments she seemed not to know where she was.

“You ain’t thinking of driving back to Tuckasegee tonight?” Ray asked. “The roads will be dangerous.”

“I’ll be all right. My jeep can handle them.”

“I still wish you wouldn’t go,” Ray said. “You ain’t slept under this roof for near forty years. That’s too long.”

“Not tonight,” Parson said.

Ray shook his head.

“I never thought things could ever get like this,” he said. “The world, I just don’t understand it no more.”

Martha spoke.

“Did Danny say where he’d be staying?”

“No,” Parson said, and turned to leave.

“I’d rather be in that trailer tonight and knowing he was in this house. Knowing where he is, if he’s alive or dead,” she said as Parson reached for the doorknob. “You had no right.”

Parson walked out to the jeep. It took a few tries but the engine turned over and he made his way down the drive. Only flurries glanced the windshield now. Parson drove slowly and several times had to stop and get out to find the road among the white blankness. Once out of Chestnut Cove, he made better time, but it was after midnight when he got back to Tuckasegee. His alarm clock was set for seven thirty. Parson reset it for eight thirty. If he was late opening, a few minutes or even an hour, it wouldn’t matter. Whatever time he showed up, they’d still be there.

Inever cared for Wesley Davidson when he was alive and seeing him beside me laid out dead didn’t much change that. Knowing a man for years and feeling hardly anything in his passing might make you think poorly of me, but the hard truth is had you known Wesley you’d probably feel the same. You might do what I done-shovel dirt on him with not so much as a mumble of a prayer. Bury him under a tombstone with another man’s name on it, another man’s birth and dying day chipped in the marble, me and an old man all of the living ever to know that was where Wesley Davidson laid in the ground.

“I’ve a notion you’re needing some extra money,” Wesley says two weeks earlier at work, which isn’t a big secret since the whole road crew’s in the DOT parking lot that afternoon when the bank man comes by to chat about my overdrawn account, saying he’s sorry my momma’s in the hospital with no insurance but if I don’t get him some money soon he’ll be taking my truck. Soon as the bank man leaves Wesley saunters up to me.

I act like I haven’t heard him, because like I said I never cared much for Wesley. He’s a big talker but little else, always shucking his work off on the rest of us. A stout man, six foot tall and three hundred easy, a big old sow belly that sways side to side when he takes a notion to work. But that’s a sight you seldom see, because he mainly leans on a shovel or lays in the shade asleep. His uncle’s the road crew boss, and he lets Wesley do about what he wants, including come in late, the rest of us all clocked in and ready to pull out while Wesley’s Ford Ranger is pulling in, a big rebel flag decal covering the back window. Wesley’s always been big into that Confederate stuff, wearing a CSA belt buckle, rebel flag tattoo on his arm. He wears a gray CSA cap too, wears it on the job. There’s no black guys on our crew, only a handful in the whole county, but you’re still not supposed to wear that kind of thing. But with his uncle running the show Wesley gets away with it.

“You want to make some easy money or not?” he says to me later at our lunch break. He grunts and sits down in the shade beside me while I get my sandwich and apple from my lunch box. Wesley’s got three Hardee’s sausage biscuits in a bag and scarfs them down in about thirty seconds, then lights a cigarette. I don’t smoke myself and don’t cotton much to the smelling of it when I’m eating. I could tell him so, could tell him I like eating my lunch alone if he’d not noticed, but getting on Wesley’s bad side would just get me on my boss’s bad side as well. It’s more than just that, though. I’m willing to listen to anyone who could help me get some money.

“What you got in mind?” I say.

He points to his CSA belt buckle.

“You know what one of them’s worth, a real one?”

“No,” I say, though I figure maybe fifty or a hundred dollars.

Wesley pulls out two wadded-up catalog pages from his back pocket.

“Look here,” he says and points at a picture of a belt buckle and the number below it. “Eighteen hundred dollars,” he says and moves his finger down the paper. “Twenty-four hundred. Twelve hundred. Four thousand.” He holds his finger there for a few seconds. “Four thousand,” saying it again. He shoves the other page in my face. It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece.

“I’d of not thought they’d bring that much,” I say.

“I’ll not even tell you what a sword brings. You’d piss your pants if I did.”

“So what’s that have to do with me getting some money?”

“Cause I know where we can find such things as this,” Wesley says, shaking the paper at me. “Find them where they ain’t been all rusted up so’s they’ll be all the more pricey. You help and you get twenty-five percent.”

And what I figure is some DOT bulldozer has rooted something up. Maybe some place where soldiers camped or done some fighting. I’m figuring it’s some kind of flimflam, like he wants me to help buy a metal detector or something with what little money I got left. He must take me for one dumb hillbilly to go along with such a scheme and I tell him as much.

He just grins at me, the kind of grin that argues I don’t know very much.

“You got a shovel and pickax?” he asks. “Or did the bank repo them as well?”