Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“This weather, surely…”

“We got quilts and dry clothes, even a sheet if you ain’t got me a gown,” Gunter said. “I’m going to have a fire on the bank, too. Got my wood and kindling and flint rock already waiting. So we’ll go on out there, Preacher. Have you a fire going so you don’t catch cold.”

Reverend Yates went to the manse and changed into the cotton trousers and white linen shirt he always wore for baptisms. He put on a wool scarf and his heaviest overcoat. The water might rise to his hips but the pants would dry quickly by the fire, so he took no change of clothes, only a drying cloth. The baptism pool was a quarter mile away. Reverend Yates saddled his horse and followed Eliza’s and Pearl’s footprints in the snow, unsurprised when the hoofprints of Gunter’s mount, which preceded the woman and child, merged with those of other horses.

The trail curved and the river lay before him. A man-high fire blazed at the forest’s edge, stoked with enough wood to burn for hours. Pearl and Eliza huddled beside it, Gunter close by. Reverend Yates dismounted and tethered his horse to a dogwood branch sleeved with ice. The elders stood on the riverbank. In the crook of Marvin Birch’s right arm was a rifle.

As Reverend Yates approached, Birch stepped aside so he could see the river.

“Tell me that ain’t a sign from God, Reverend,” the store owner said, facing the river as well.

The river’s deep bend that served as the baptism pool was completely iced over, the snow-limned surface unmarked but for the tracks of a single raccoon. Had Reverend Yates not known otherwise, he’d have thought a meadow or pasture lay before him.

“When have you ever seen it covered like this?” Birch asked, his thumb on the rifle’s trigger guard. “Never a one of us has. It’s a sign to us all and I’ll abide no man to profane it.”

Reverend Yates turned and looked at Gunter, who appeared in deep reflection as he, too, stared at the frozen river.

“Marvin’s right,” another elder said. “It’s surely a sign from God, Reverend.”

The other elders nodded their assent. For a few moments the only sound was the crackle of the fire.

“There will be no baptism today,” Reverend Yates finally said.

Only then did Gunter rouse himself. He shook his shoulders as if to cast off some burden.

“It’s just ice,” he said, and walked to the river’s edge. He placed a foot on the ice, pressed his bootheel more firmly until his full weight was upon it.

“Fetch me a stout tree limb, woman,” Gunter said to Eliza.

As Eliza turned from the fire, Marvin Birch stepped close to Gunter. He gripped the rifle on the upper stock and held it out.

“God won’t let you break that ice even with this, Gunter,” the store owner announced, nodding at the butt end, “and it made of hickory.”

“We’ll see about that, damn you,” the younger man replied, grabbing the rifle barrel with both hands and thrusting the butt downward.

The sharp report of shattered ice was instantly followed by a louder crack. The sounds crossed the river, echoed back. Gunter still gripped the iron barrel. He appeared to stare down at it intently as skeins of gray smoke encircled his head. He gave a violent shudder and fell forward, the webbed ice opening to accept the body. Gunter slowly sank. Soon the only sign of him was the water’s pinkish tinge.

In the months following Gunter’s death, the community made certain that Eliza and Pearl were cared for. Spring crops were planted and harvested, wood for winter set by. At sixteen, Pearl married Lewis Hampton, whose father owned the valley’s best bottomland, ensuring Eliza as well as her daughter would never again go wanting. Susanna learned of Gunter’s death through relatives and returned for Pearl’s wedding, though she did not stay, having made a life elsewhere. But Susanna and her family visited yearly even after Eliza died. On such Sundays, the sisters and their husbands and children filled a pew.

To look upon such a sight from his pulpit was surely a sign of God’s grace, Reverend Yates told himself, but on late nights he sometimes contemplated his silence when Marvin Birch offered the cocked weapon. Had his refusal to warn Gunter been a furtherance of God’s will or his own desire to be rid of the man? On such nights the parlor became nothing more than shadows and silence. The manse’s stillness widened beyond the walls into the vastness of the whole valley.

“Let’s make a bet,” my father said, on my fifteenth birthday. I remember very clearly being fifteen; or rather, I remember what fifteen feels like to a fifteen-year-old. The age is a diving board, a box half-opened.

We were sitting in stiff wooden chairs on the porch, watching the evening settle over the neighborhood, all of that harmless diffuse light softening the world.

“I bet you’ll leave here at eighteen and you’ll never come back,” he said. “Not once.”

We lived two hours outside of Los Angeles, in a suburb attached to a string of other suburbs, where the days rarely distinguished themselves unless you did it for them.

“You don’t even think I’ll come back and visit?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” My father was a reasonable man. He did not generalize. He was not prone to big, grandiose statements, and he rarely gambled. I felt hurt and excited by the suggestion.

“What about Mom?” I asked.

“What about her?”

I shrugged. It seemed she had little to do with his prediction.

“And James?” I asked.

“Not sure about James,” he said. “I can’t bet on that one.”

James was—and still is—my younger brother. I felt little responsibility to him. At ten, he was brilliant and anxious and very much my parents’ problem. My mother adored him, though she thought she had fooled me into thinking we were equal. Make no mistake: we were equally loved but not equally preferred. If parents don’t have favorites, they do have allies.

Inside, my mother was cooking dinner while James followed her around the kitchen, handing her bits of paper he’d folded into unusual shapes. Even then, he had a knack for geometry.

“Where will I go?” I asked my father. My grades were aggressively mediocre. I’d planned—vaguely, at fifteen—to transfer somewhere after a few years at the local junior college.

“It doesn’t matter where,” he said, waving away a fly circling his nose.

Next door, the quiet neighbor kid, Carl, walked his miniature pinscher, also called Carl, back and forth across his lawn. The weather was balmy.

“What happens if I do come back?” I asked.

“You’ll lose,” he said. “You’ll automatically forfeit the bet.”

I hated to lose, and my father knew it.

“Will I see you again?” I asked. I felt nostalgic in a way that felt new, at fifteen, as though the day had already turned shadowy and distant, a predetermined memory. I felt nostalgic for my father and his partly bald head and his toothpaste breath, even as he sat next to me, running his palms over his hairy knees.

“Of course,” he said. “Your mother and I will visit.”

My mother appeared on the porch with my brother, his finger slung into the back pocket of her jeans. “Dinnertime,” she said, and I kissed my father’s cheek as though I were standing on a train platform. I spent all of dinner feeling that way too, staring at him from across the table, mouthing goodbye.

My eighteenth birthday arrived the summer after I’d graduated from high school. To celebrate, I saw the musical Wicked at a theater in Los Angeles with four of my friends. The seats were deep and velvety feeling. My parents drove us, and my father gave us each a glass of champagne in the parking lot before we entered the theater. We used small plastic cups he must have bought especially for the occasion. I pictured him browsing the plastics aisle, looking at all the cups, deciding.