Ron Rash: Burning Bright

© 2010

Jacob stood in the barn mouth and watched Edna leave the henhouse. Her lips were pressed tight, which meant more eggs had been taken. He looked up at the ridgetop and guessed eight o’clock. In Boone it’d be full morning now, but here light was still splotchy and dew damped his brogans. This cove’s so damn dark a man about has to break light with a crowbar, his daddy used to say.

Edna nodded at the egg pail in her hand.

“Nothing under the bantam,” Edna said. “That’s four days in a row.”

“Maybe that old rooster ain’t sweet on her no more,” Jacob said. He waited for her to smile. When they’d first started sparking years ago, Edna’s smile had been what most entranced him. Her whole face would glow, as if the upward turn of her lips spread a wave of light from mouth to forehead.

“Go ahead and make a joke,” she said, “but little cash money as we got it makes a difference. Maybe the difference of whether you have a nickel to waste on a newspaper.”

“There’s many folks worse off,” Jacob said. “Just look up the cove and you’ll see the truth of that.”

“We can end up like Hartley yet,” Edna replied. She looked past Jacob to where the road ended and the skid trail left by the logging company began. “It’s probably his mangy hound that’s stealing our eggs. That dog’s got the look of a egg-sucker. It’s always skulking around here.”

“You don’t know that. I still think a dog would leave some egg on the straw. I’ve never seen one that didn’t.”

“What else would take just a few eggs at a time? You said your ownself a fox or weasel would have killed the chickens.”

“I’ll go look,” Jacob said, knowing Edna would fret over the lost eggs all day. He knew if every hen laid three eggs a night for the next month, it wouldn’t matter. She’d still perceive a debit that would never be made up. Jacob tried to be generous, remembered that Edna hadn’t always been this way. Not until the bank had taken the truck and most of the livestock. They hadn’t lost everything the way others had, but they’d lost enough. Edna always seemed fearful when she heard a vehicle coming up the dirt road, as if the banker and sheriff were coming to take the rest.

Edna carried the eggs to the springhouse as Jacob crossed the yard and entered the concrete henhouse. The smell of manure thickened the air. Though the rooster was already outside, the hens clucked dimly in their nesting boxes. Jacob lifted the bantam and set it on the floor. The nesting box’s straw had no shell crumbs, no albumen or yellow yolk slobber.

He knew it could be a two-legged varmint, but hard as times were Jacob had never known anyone in Goshen Cove to steal, especially Hartley, the poorest of them all. Besides, who would take only two or three eggs when there were two dozen more to be had. The bantam’s eggs at that, which were smaller than the ones under the Rhode Island Reds and leghorns. From the barn, Jacob heard the Guernsey lowing insistently. He knew she already waited beside the milk stool.

As Jacob came out of the henhouse he saw the Hartleys coming down the skid trail. They made the two-mile trek to Boone twice a week, each, even the child, burdened down with galax leaves. Jacob watched as they stepped onto the road, puffs of gray dust rising around their bare feet. Hartley carried four burlap pokes stuffed with galax. His wife carried two and the child one. With their ragged clothes hanging loose on bony frames, they looked like scarecrows en route to another cornfield, their possessions in tow. The hound trailed them, gaunt as the people it followed. The galax leaves were the closest thing to a crop Hartley could muster, for his land was all rock and slant. You couldn’t grow a toenail on Hartley’s land, Bascombe Lindsey had once said. That hadn’t been a problem as long as the sawmill was running, but when it shut down the Hartleys had only one old swaybacked milk cow to sustain them, that and the galax, which earned a few nickels of barter at Mast’s General Store. Jacob knew from the Sunday newspapers he bought that times were rough everywhere. Rich folks in New York had lost all their money and jumped out of buildings. Men rode boxcars town to town begging for work. But it was hard to believe any of them had less than Hartley and his family.

When Hartley saw Jacob he nodded but did not slow his pace. They were neither friends nor enemies, neighbors only in the sense that Jacob and Edna were the closest folks down the cove, though closest meant a half mile. Hartley had come up from Swain County eight years ago to work at the sawmill. The child had been a baby then, the wife seemingly decades younger than the cronish woman who walked beside the daughter. They would have passed without further acknowledgment except Edna came out on the porch.

“That hound of yours,” she said to Hartley, “is it a egg-sucker?” Maybe she wasn’t trying to be accusatory, but the words sounded so.

Hartley stopped in the road and turned toward the porch. Another man would have set the pokes down, but Hartley did not. He held them as if calculating their heft.

“What’s the why of you asking that?” he said. The words were spoken in a tone that was neither angry nor defensive. It struck Jacob that even the man’s voice had been worn down to a bare-boned flatness.

“Something’s got in our henhouse and stole some,” Edna said. “Just the eggs, so it ain’t a fox nor weasel.”

“So you reckon my dog.”

Edna did not speak, and Hartley set the pokes down. He pulled a barlow knife from his tattered overalls. He softly called the hound and it sidled up to him. Hartley got down on one knee, closed his left hand on the scruff of the dog’s neck as he settled the blade against its throat. The daughter and wife stood perfectly still, their faces blank as bread dough.

“I don’t think it’s your dog that’s stealing the eggs,” Jacob said.

“But you don’t know for sure. It could be,” Hartley said, the hound raising its head as Hartley’s index finger rubbed the base of its skull.

Before Jacob could reply the blade whisked across the hound’s windpipe. The dog didn’t cry out or snarl. It merely sagged in Hartley’s grip. Blood darkened the road.

“You’ll know for sure now,” Hartley said as he stood up. He lifted the dog by the scruff of the neck, walked over to the other side of the road and laid it in the weeds. “I’ll get it on the way back this evening,” he said, and picked up the pokes. Hartley began walking and his wife and daughter followed.

“Why’d you have to say something to him,” Jacob said when the family had disappeared down the road. He stared at the place in the weeds where flies and yellow jackets began to gather.

“How’d I know he’d do such a thing?” Edna said.

“You know how proud a man he is.”

Jacob let those words linger. In January when two feet of snow had shut nearly everyone in, Jacob had gone up the skid trail on horseback, a salted pork shoulder strapped to the saddle. “We could be needing that meat soon enough ourselves,” Edna had said, but he’d gone anyway. When Jacob got to the cabin he’d found the family at the plank table eating. The wooden bowls before them held a thick liquid lumped with a few crumbs of fatback. The milk pail hanging over the fire was filled with the same gray-colored gruel. Jacob had set the pork shoulder on the table. The meat had a deep wood-smoke odor, and the woman and child swallowed every few seconds to conceal their salivating. “I ain’t got no money to buy it,” Hartley said. “So I’d appreciate you taking your meat and leaving.” Jacob had left, but after closing the cabin door he’d laid the pork on the front stoop. The next morning Jacob had found the meat on his own doorstep.