When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  Ricky Mathis was the first person in his family to be cremated, a decision Ray made because burial carried the expectancy of visitation. There was blood kin and church family and close friends and folks who didn’t really know Ray but knew of him and respected him, so would feel obligated to show. Those people had kids and grandkids, and the thought of having to see that many faces and shake that many hands was overwhelming. He just wanted it to be over.

  A red clay pull-off cut a half moon into the shoulder along Highway 281 just a mile or so short of Wolf Lake. Anybody who wasn’t born and bred in Little Canada wouldn’t even have noticed there was anything there. A small seam in a thicket of greenbrier marked the trailhead, but the path really didn’t open up for twenty yards or so. From the road that seam didn’t look like anything more than a part in hair, a place a man might pull over, take a leak, and catch chiggers if he wasn’t careful.

  Ray pinched the vines between his fingers to avoid the stickers and slowly brushed his way into the thicket. When the trail opened, a rocky path climbed through thick shrubs of sumac and pokeweed, stubs of sassafras filling the air with the smell of root beer. Two gnarled dogwoods stood at the entrance to the graveyard. The trees were planted a gate-length apart so that their limbs converged to form a natural arbor. There was a chain-linked fence surrounding the yard, more a deterrent for bear and deer than to ward off trespassers. Weeds had grown high against the fence.

  Ray’s second cousin Lester used to weed-eat the place so the old-timers could come up on Sunday evenings when the weather was fair and put flowers on the graves, but from the looks of things, Lester hadn’t come in ages. Most the old-timers were gone. Truth was, Lester was ticking toward seventy himself and Ray wasn’t far behind. As he flipped the fork latch and swung open the gate, he thought maybe there had come a changing of the guard, and that fleeting thought hit hard because there was no next generation. Lester didn’t have kids and the last of Ray’s family was hanging there in his hand. There were two more graves to be dug at best. Sooner or later a day would come when the trees grew up and the names washed from stone and the bones in the ground became just another forgotten part of the place.

  A honey locust leaned out over the headstones at the back corner of the lot and that’s where Doris was buried. Ray’s mother had died a fairly young woman in her fifties, not long after Ray got married, and it was at her funeral that Doris had chosen this spot for her own. Everyone else had gone back to the church, but Ray’d needed some time to himself. They were sitting together holding hands by the freshly covered grave when a doe and her yearling fawn came into the clearing. The older deer craned her neck to pull a few low-hanging pods from the branches of the tree. Doris whispered in Ray’s ear that when the time came, that was where she wanted to lay.

  Of course that bean tree was scraggly back then, maybe fifteen feet high with limbs sprawled out like vines. Forty years had straightened it some, but for the most part it had grown out rather than up so that it now cast a wide oval of shade. On a limb above his wife’s grave marker, Ray’d hung an old set of wind chimes that she loved, but there was no breeze, no sound, just an unseasonable heat and the smell of smoke easing in from someplace not so far away. The Tellico fire had grown by thirty-eight hundred acres over the weekend. There was no end in sight.

  He opened the bag and dabbed his finger into his son’s remains, smearing the ash between his forefinger and thumb. As he was studying the tan gray color and the way the ash felt almost oily between his fingers, his mind took him back to the sound of his son’s laugh, a memory so vivid and sensory that he looked around, unsure whether it was in his mind or reality.

  When Ricky was a boy he’d get so tickled that his face would turn purple. He’d forget to breathe. He’d keel over laughing so hard that often Ray was afraid to take things any farther for fear the boy might actually suffocate. Ray was remembering one time when he borrowed an old leaky johnboat from Odell Green and plugged the holes with plumber’s silicone to keep the vessel from sinking. He took Ricky across Cedar Cliff Lake to catch walleye at the base of a waterfall. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten and back then he’d seemed to believe his old man was God’s gift. They split a lunch of Lance crackers that Ray called nips, and dropped peanuts into glass-bottle RC Colas for dessert. Between the peanut butter in the crackers and the peanuts in the soda, Ray’d caught the gas that killed Elvis, and every time he let one rip, that boy liked to have died. Ricky was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep still and Ray fit a life jacket around his neck, believing wholeheartedly they were going to flip the boat and drown.

  Ray shut his eyes and waited for the remembering to fade. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been plenty of good times. It was just that the good times hurt too much anymore, that they were so far gone they could leave a man wondering what was the fucking point.

  Walking a slow circle around the base of the tree, he shook the remains from the bag a bit at a time like he was spreading fertilizer. When the bag was empty, he pinched the seal closed, then folded the plastic into a tight square that he slid into his billfold pocket. Ray looked down at his wife’s grave marker, a simple granite plaque with only her name and the dates bookending her life. A few leaves lay atop the stone and he knelt down to brush them away. When he lifted his head, there was a coyote standing within thirty feet watching him curiously.

  Ray couldn’t move. He held his breath until suddenly he could feel all the blood rushing into his face, his heartbeat throbbing at his temples. He could hear his pulse and he imagined the animal could hear that beating as well and he wanted desperately for his heart to stop so as not to break the spell.

  The coyote’s yellow eyes stared unblinking, its ears raised to attention. Ray could see the dog’s nose working to make sense of him, but for a brief moment there was just this invisible, fragile thing stretched between them like a length of thread. He felt air touch the back of his neck first and then the chimes above him began their slow, dull song. The coyote raised its head ever so slightly, snout angled toward the breeze, and in one soundless movement turned and was gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  Shook Cove Road followed the East Fork of the Tuckaseigee to Cedar Cliff Lake, then on up to Bear. Not long after pavement turned to gravel, the grade steepened and an old farm reached from the road to the river. Llamas lifted their heads out of the grass and watched with strange alien faces as Ray eased along the barbed wire fence. Just down the road, Leah Green lived in an old Sears, Roebuck house she’d bought for next to nothing.

  Her old man had thought she was crazy as a bedbug for buying the place. Even the real estate broker laughed as he handed her the keys and told her, “Good luck.” Despite all that, Ray’d kind of admired her gall. At the time, the front porch had collapsed, a good third of the cypress siding had rotted clean through, and the cedar-shingle roof was little more than a bowed bed of moss. The yellow pine flooring inside had somehow managed to survive, but other than that the place was in shambles.

  That first summer she stayed with her folks while a crew out of Franklin put a new roof on the place—trusses, joists, sheathing, shingles, everything. Soon as the roof was finished, Leah moved in and went to work. As Ray pulled into the yard that afternoon, he couldn’t believe what she’d done to the place. From rebuilding the porch to replacing the siding, she’d finished every bit of the remodel herself and now the house looked just like the picture in the catalog.

  He parked the Scout beside her patrol car at the back of the house. A dozen naked-neck chickens eyed him curiously and took off for the coop the second he opened the door. No one else in Jackson County had ever raised chickens that ugly, bald-headed so that they looked about like tiny buzzards bobbing around the yard. Leah’s father started the line with a breeding pair he bought from an English fellow at the livestock auction in Clyde one summer. Richard Petty and Lynda was what he’d named them.

  Ray opened the screen door, stepped ont
o the back porch, and before he could wipe his boots on the doormat, Leah invited him inside.

  “What in the world you doing out this way?” she asked. “I’ve about got supper ready if you’re hungry. I’d be more than happy to fix you a bowl. There’s plenty.”

  The back door entered directly into the kitchen and Ray took a seat at a small white dining room table. Leah wore a black tank top and a pair of royal blue sweatpants with the word MUSTANGS down one leg in silver letters. Her hair was pulled back into a frizzy ponytail that hung over one shoulder. She was barefoot and her heels thumped against the floor as she walked over to the sink.

  “Oh, I’m just out loafing around. Can’t stay. Got to get home and feed the dog. Sure smells good, though.”

  “Bear stew.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Working a wreck this spring up in Sapphire. Some fellow from Fort Lauderdale come around a corner too fast and hit a big bear right there by Mica’s. Tore the little beamer he was driving all to shit, but when we got the road open, I asked the trooper what he was going to do with the bear and he said nothing, so I called Ernie Messer to see if he had any interest in it. Him and Evan rode up there and loaded it onto his flatbed. They canned it and gave me six or eight quarts.”

  “You and Evan still seeing each other?”

  “Off and on, but not really.” Leah sidestepped from the sink to a Crock-Pot on the counter. She lifted the lid and spooned a taste to her lips, blowing the soup so as not to burn her tongue. “Why? You going to start in on me about getting married, tell me a woman my age ought to settle down and think about raising a family?”

  “No, I hadn’t planned on saying that.” Ray shook his head. “I’ve known you all your life, girlie, and I don’t think there’s a thing in this world you need a man for unless you just up and decide you want one around.”

  “Everybody else sure seems to think different,” Leah said. “You sure you don’t want something to eat?”

  “How about a glass of water.”

  Leah took a cup from the cabinet and walked over to the fridge. “Ice?”

  Ray shook his head.

  She filled the cup with water, then joined him at the table.

  Ray turned the cup in a slow circle to read the monogrammed logo on the side. He took a sip and cleared his throat. “I wanted to come see if you had any updates on that lead I gave you.”

  “I sure don’t.” She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers behind her head. “I’ve still been on nights. Everybody’s gone by the time I get there. I passed what you said along to the lieutenant that’s over that end of the county. He works pretty closely with the tribe on things. They’ve got a pretty good relationship, at least a lot better than it used to be. I can shoot him an email and see if he’s heard anything, but I doubt he has. I’ll let you know what he says, though.”

  “What use was telling you if they’re just going to sit on their hands?”

  “What do you want us to do, Ray? You want us to get a posse together and ride up there and kick down the door? That’s not how things work and you know that. It might take months for an investigation. Sometimes it takes years and that’s if they’re ever able to build a case at all.”

  Ray cocked his head to the side and scratched between his shoulder blades. He set both hands on the table, opening and closing his fingers into fists as he stared off through the window over the sink.

  “Other day I had to ride over to the Tractor Supply in Clyde to get a new come-along and pick up a bag of dog food.” Ray stroked his beard as he talked. “When I got off the highway and got down at the bottom of the exit right there across from Lowe’s, I looked up on that hill and they had this sign up telling how many folks had overdosed in Haywood County this year, how many had died. I went on over to the Tractor Supply and got what I needed and started home. I get a couple exits up the road and realize I’m about out of gas so I swing into a BP over there in Hazelwood. I run inside to go to the bathroom and there was a sharps container there on the wall right by the sink. You know how bad it’s got to be that they’re hanging something like that in a filling station bathroom? We’re talking about Hazelwood, now. Twenty minutes down the road.”

  “I know, Ray. I see it every day. I’m out there every—”

  “Then tell me why the fuck they’re sitting on their hands when I’ve told you one of the places it’s coming from?” Ray gritted his teeth and tried to hold that feeling in, but he couldn’t stand it anymore. He was sick of keeping things to himself for the sake of saving feelings.

  Leah didn’t seem able to look at him. She had her right hand on the table and was scratching the side of her thumb with her index finger nervously.

  “Every day the number on that sign goes up and every day somebody like me is left putting his son or daughter in the ground. So you’re going to have to forgive me, but we don’t got months, girlie, and we sure ain’t got years.”

  “I know,” Leah said. She refused to meet his eyes.

  “Folks nowadays can’t seem to understand why people like me and your daddy, our generation, our parents’ generation, never had much use for the law. They look at some of the things used to be commonplace, how somebody might come up missing or somebody might get burned out of their house, and they equate that with lawlessness. Well, it wasn’t lawlessness. Matter of fact, it was the opposite. These mountains used to have their own kind of order.” Ray drank the rest of his water, then slid the empty cup into the center of the table. “Used to be we took care of our own up here. Used to be when something needed done we took care of it ourselves. Then we let folks from the outside come in and tell us how we ought to run things, and I want you to look around at where that’s got us.”

  Leah didn’t speak.

  “It’s got us in a goddamn mess.”

  “So what are you saying, Uncle Raymond?”

  “I don’t know, girlie. I don’t know what I’m saying exactly. I guess I’m just tired. I guess I’m just old and tired.”

  When he left Leah’s house, the sun was already behind the trees. The evening was still warm and Ray couldn’t stand the thought of going home right then. He figured walking the woods might ease his mind a bit, so when he got to 107 he took a left and headed south through the Tuckasegee Straight for Cashiers.

  At the trailhead off Buck Creek Road, Ray checked the time on his cell phone and it was almost seven o’clock. In his prime, he could make it up the mountain and back to the truck in four hours, but nowadays his knees were all but shot. He knew before he ever tightened the laces of his boots that he’d be lucky to make it back to the parking area in six. Didn’t matter. The only thing waiting at home was the dog, and Tommy Two-Ton had always been just fine on her own. Ray kept a pack ready in the back of the Scout and he checked his water before strapping the bag tight to his shoulders.

  The trail was nearly five solid miles of craggy ascent and descent. He topped one ridge only to drop back into the pit, climbed another only to lose what elevation was gained as he dropped off the other side. He was far enough south that the sky was clear. The moon was just a few days shy of full, so he needed no headlamp to light his path. Switchbacks snaked their way over rocky ground. Cole Mountain led to Shortoff Mountain, then over Goat Knob. It was a route he knew by heart.

  As he peaked out on the final climb, the Yellow Mountain fire tower shone blue in the moonlight, white-painted boards reflecting the color of sky. By the time Ray started working for the Forest Service in the mid-’70s, most the fire towers were no longer in use. Airplanes could cover more ground, so the old ways fell by the wayside and eventually died out. Ray’s grandfather had helped build this tower as part of a Roosevelt-era Civilian Conservation Corps job, so when the tower fell into disrepair in the ’80s Ray was one of the people who fought to save it. For all of those reasons, this had always been a special place to him, a place he cou
ld come to set his mind right. There’d been nights he slept on the ground here in the weeks and months after Doris died.

  He ran his hand along the stacked cobble walls of the first story. A large wood-framed observation deck was built on top of the stone. Climbing the rungs of the ladder, Ray got on the deck and stared across the landscape. From such height and in such darkness, the mountains took on the look of water. The ripple and swell of earth seemed to move at this vantage, a sort of undulating vibration as if he were staring out over the sea from the crow’s nest of some prayerful vessel. Ray closed his eyes and took a deep breath into his nose. The smell delivered him back to what brought him here.

  In the distance he could see the fires burning in every direction. He could see the faint glow of Dicks Creek smoldering far to the north, still not extinguished after nearly a month afire. Off to the west, there were too many spot fires to count. Over a thousand acres were burning at Rocky Knob, three thousand at Camp Branch. The largest fire in sight raged in Tellico, where the latest estimates reached nearly fourteen thousand acres. The feeling was that the walls were closing in from all sides. Standing there, he felt claustrophobic, as if he’d been backed into a corner and reached a moment of inevitable finality.

  The anger found him then and he clenched the railing hard in his hands until his arms quaked and every bone in his body shook with an insatiable rage. A day of reckoning loomed in the not so far away. There was no longer anywhere to hide and it had never been in him to run. For a man with no intention of ever leaving this place, the only choice now was to stand his ground and bare teeth.