When These Mountains Burn

by David Joy

  “And never once wanted for nothing.”

  Outside, the chickens were scratching about the yard and Tommy Two-Ton chased them in zigzags until they were cooped and clucking. Feathers floated down like fat flakes of snow and settled on the yellowed grass.

  “I guess me and Tommy are going to need a ride to the house.”

  “I guess you are.”

  Ray looked off at what was left of the sun and pulled his cigars from the chest pocket of his overalls. He didn’t yet know what to make of anything that had happened, but he was satisfied in believing the worst of it was behind him now.

  FORTY

  The coyotes wailed on the hill behind Ray’s house that night. He couldn’t sleep, so about midnight he crawled out of bed and went outside to listen to them yip and howl.

  Temperatures had come up over the weekend, leaving the night air to hover in the low fifties. A few days shy of December, the mountains felt more like early fall than winter. Ray walked out into the yard and stared straight overhead. The wind kicked up and shreds of clouds raked across the stars. A waning crescent moon was carved back to an eyelash that for now held still, but would slowly float down toward the ridge and disappear by morning.

  Ray sat down in his rocking chair and pushed himself back on his heels. He was barefooted and the ground was cold against the soles of his feet. The coyotes were really singing and Tommy Two-Ton clawed at the front door, but Ray would not let the dog out because for now he just wanted to sit there and listen.

  On the way home he’d forgotten to ask Leah to swing by the store and once he was at the house he didn’t feel like going into town. He was down to his last cigar and had already smoked half, having stubbed it out on the arm of the chair a few hours before. He pulled what was left from the pouch in his pocket, struck fire to the end, then waited for his eyes to resettle from the strike of light.

  A coyote began to howl directly behind the house. The animal was close, maybe seventy-five yards up the ridge, so that Raymond could almost feel the sound resonating against the back of his neck. Across the holler the howl was answered by another, then another, a series of calls strung together by intervals of distance so that it seemed that what started at a singular point might stretch on in every direction the entire world over.

  The calls quickened into a high-pitched symphony, an eerie and beautiful wave of dissonance as if God were running his hands over a theremin. Raymond closed his eyes and let the sound come through him, bury itself someplace deep that for a long time nothing else had been able to touch. All of a sudden the great conductor flattened his hands and the woods fell silent. Ray waited and listened, but as quickly as it had come it had vanished, and that was the way of the world.

  His mind turned instantly back to what had been troubling him over the past week. He was grieving the loss of a place and a people. It was hard enough to bury the bodies of those you loved, but it was another sadness altogether to witness the death of a culture. There was the gone and the going away, and there was the after. He found it difficult to imagine what would become of this place, harder still to witness what it was already becoming.

  For years he’d been trying to put his finger on the moment things started to fall apart. As silly as it sounded, sometimes he blamed it on the arrival of television. When people could see what folks had on the outside they started to want those things for themselves. They heard the way people spoke off the mountain and slowly began to change the way they talked. Things that seemed trivial and harmless at the time looking back had signified a beginning. But even before that, before the outside began to press in, the communities were breaking apart and the people were leaving.

  When the timber was gone and the mountains were left as naked as the moon, families packed up and headed west to places like Oregon and Washington where the trees had yet to be touched. Jump forward sixty years and it was the same old story when the paper mills shut down, when the old plastics plant at the south end of the county left, when Dayco laid off everybody in Waynesville or when Ecusta disappeared from Brevard. The jobs came on slick-tongue promises from outsiders driving fancy cars and dressed in fancy suits, and left again folded in their ostrich-skin wallets when everything that could be taken was took. The people ran desperately behind them waving their hands through the dust and exhaust, dusty and exhausted, out of breath, beaten, and broken, and when they finally keeled over and stopped, they looked around to realize they were standing in places unfamiliar, that they were lost as turned-around dogs.

  Those who stayed raised their children to do better. They told them to go to college. They told them to get an education so that they could find a good job, one that didn’t leave their hands callused, their skin cracked, their bones broken and mended. We don’t want you to have to work like we did. That was what they said and it was a noble thought with an ominous end. Instead of remaining rooted to the place that carried their name, they took their names with them when they left. The very fabric that once defined the mountains fragmented and was replaced with outsiders who built second and third homes on the ridgelines and drove the property values so high that what few locals were left couldn’t afford to pay the taxes on their land.

  Of course there were the drugs. There was the decade of meth, the transition to pain pills and needles, and that wasn’t a mountain problem so much as an American problem. That was the escapist cure for systemic poverty, the result of putting profit margins ahead of people for two hundred years. And when it all boiled down, that was the root cause of it all.

  It wasn’t just a matter of economics. It wasn’t the drugs. It was an abandonment of values. It was trading hard work for convenience. It was marking the nearest Starbucks as a place more important than the front porch.

  Ray remembered the old days, he remembered being a kid and how when Dottie Dills needed a new roof the community got together and built it themselves over the course of a weekend with smiles on their faces, food in their bellies, and laughter hung in their throats. They did it for no other reason than that they were neighbors and it was something that needed done. Nowadays, people didn’t even know their neighbors’ names, and what was worse was that they didn’t want to. They sold off their heritage and bought it back in the form of bumper stickers. They strutted around in T-shirts with mason jars on the front, wearing the words SOUTHERN CHARM with a disillusioned pride, wholeheartedly believing that those two words and that single image somehow represented where they came from.

  They’d all run off and left themselves.

  They’d run off and left the very best parts of themselves.

  Now everyone was sitting around watching the last of it flicker like a sunset with eyes blind and minds dumb to the fact that when the night finally came there would come no light again. The very nature of things demanded that there would come a moment in history when hopefulness would equate to naïveté, when the situation would have become too dire for saving. Raymond knew this, and it was that final thought that had left his heart in ruins.

  But oddly enough, over the past few hours, there’d come this unfamiliar feeling. Looking around at what had happened, he did not believe the world had reached that place quite yet. How could he believe that it was over when he looked into Leah Green’s eyes and saw her father, his best friend, staring back at him? How could Raymond believe there’d come an ending when there were still communities willing to pull together for the greater good? Sometimes all it took were inches of open soil to stop a wildfire. Three feet of bare earth was enough to stop the burning.

  The cigar had burned down to nothing between his fingers and Raymond stood up and tossed it onto the ground. He kicked some dirt over it with his foot and the wind came off the mountain through the tree limbs and laurel so that it roared like the sound of an ocean. When he walked inside, Tommy Two-Ton was sprawled on the doormat chasing rabbits through the windrows of her dreams. Raymond was still not quite ready to sleep.
He poured himself a glass of whiskey to polish off the night.

  On the television, Gatlinburg was burning. Almost a week before, a fire had broken out at the north spire of Chimney Tops five miles north of Clingmans Dome. When the winds picked up over the weekend, spot fires began to jump the containment area, and over the past twenty-four hours the fires had spread to Cliff Branch and Wiley Oakley, Park Vista and Turkey Nest. Now the blaze had reached downtown. An entire community was engulfed. Cars sat at a standstill with flames on both sides of the road. People crowded together in shelters, having fled their homes with no other place to run. Footage broke to Cupid’s Chapel of Love burning to the ground, its heart-shaped sign still standing while the building crumbled to cinder and ash.

  Ray thought about all the times he’d visited Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge through the years, how Doris had always wanted to take a ride in October. They’d wind their way up the back roads through Cherokee and drop over the ridgeline into Tennessee, always opting for the long road so they could see the trees changing color. She always wanted to see the leaves in fall. She always wanted to see the flowers in spring and the birds any time they were singing.

  He remembered one summer when Ricky was about eight, how he’d taken an entire roll of pennies with him to Dollywood for the pressed penny machines. They spent a whole day trying to find every machine—one at Country Fair, three at Craftsman’s Valley, one at Timber Canyon, another at Rivertown, and two at Showstreet—because he wanted to have the whole collection. Ricky was going to put smashed pennies all over his bedroom door, but instead he wound up supergluing them around the edges of a picture frame. That Christmas when Ray and Doris opened their present from their son, there was a photograph a passerby had taken of the three of them standing on the walking bridge in downtown Gatlinburg. Ricky had put that photograph inside that frame and it had sat on the mantel ever since.

  The news anchor said that when it was over there would likely be nothing left, and though the thought struck him as cold, Ray found himself believing that maybe it was for the best. Maybe it would be better if the whole world burned away into nothing. Sometimes it was easier to just start from scratch than it was to keep building on top of something irreparably broken.

  For so long, that’s exactly what he’d been trying to do. He was rebuilding a life on joists that were burned clean through and staring slack-jawed and speechless when what he built collapsed around him. If he ever wanted to move forward, if he ever wanted to be truly happy, he could not continue to dwell on what was. Happiness was not a passive thing. Joy so often required pursuit.

  When he buried Doris, Ray’d stayed in the ground with her. What he’d feared was that moving forward would be a matter of forgetting, and if he forgot her it would be as if she’d never lived at all. But what he now realized was that there would never come a moment in his life when he would not remember. What he had truly forgotten was the simplicity that had made their life together so beautiful.

  The first time Raymond ever took Doris on a date in high school, they’d gone to the head of Moses Creek and listened to a grouse drum. Neither said a word. They sat there by that trembling branch of stream and listened until the woods fell dark around them. On the way back to the truck that evening, while the spring peepers sang a chorus around them, they held hands. In forty-five years of marriage, neither one let go.

  They’d go to the woods in late March and search for the first trout lilies to lift their sulking heads from the winter’s leaf. They’d walk game trails through the timber after spring rains and hunt down morels, kiss each other with ramps on their lips and laughter on their tongues. They’d fish the big bend just south of Wayehutta where Doris’s father had taken her when she was a girl, and they’d dust the trout with cornmeal, fry them lightly in the cast iron. Even at the end, it was sitting on the porch with her and watching the birds sift through the yard. It was bringing her flowers and holding them to her nose for one last magical breath. How could he walk these hills and not remember? How could he ever taste this world again without being consumed by her memory?

  There was a forever that came from the remembering, and that single thought struck Raymond Mathis as the most beautiful thing his mind had ever conjured.

  When the days grow shallow, there are only the memories, the stories that remain scattered like seed, the tales that bind us in this world. We can retell them, gather the remnants of souls that have exploded into the infinite, piece the shattered bits back to form, and breathe life into the ones we’ve loved and lost. As we stare into the oblivion and slowly fade from the familiar, those stories will be the faces that surround us, and the voices we hear when we too come to pass.

  In his dying hour and the years that would follow, Raymond knew that he would become a mere remembrance to the ones who remained. Every casket will be closed. Every life will be returned to the ground. There is no escaping the mortality of the world, a limited life-span that not only touches those who breathe but the stones along the riverbed, the stars blanketing the sky.

  Yet, in those glimpses through the half-lit glow of memory lie parts of us that remain, pieces buried too deeply for tears. And there, flickering in the darkness for those who hold still and wait, for those who stare long enough to see, are fragments of what once were, are now, and will always be.

  When the end finally came, it would be Raymond, his wife, and his son gathered together under that locust at the back of his family plot forever and ever, but for now the remembering was as close as he could come. Life was for the living and death was for the dead, and there was enough beauty and grace in both to mend the most tender and broken.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Charles Thomas—aka Charlie, Chaz, Cuckleburr, Charlie Britches, Chuck, Stinkpot, Chuckwagon, et al.—for being the best goddamn dog that ever walked this world. To Ash for bringing candles and sandwiches when I was lost in the dark of the cave. To Matt Yelen for packing grits. To the squirrel who jumped in my lap when I was propped against the trunk of a dogwood. To the pair of yellow flickers who landed on the limb above me when I was twenty feet up a pine. To the charm of golden finches who filled that hickory like a firework when the rest of the woods had long gone gray. To Zeno Ponder for bringing the jug. To Son-in-Law, Florida Joe, Burt, Carole, Walkabout Billy, Jax, Willy, the South Carolina boys, Screwy Lewy, Emory, Nancy, Diana, Randall, and Lowell for passing that jug around the fire. To Bunn for clucking and purring like the bearded hen he is. And, most important, to my agent, Julia Kenny; editor, Sara Minnich; publicist, Elena Hershey; and the entire team at Putnam, who I love like family and would bloody my knuckles for.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Joy is the author of The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 SIBA Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications, and he is the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey and a co-editor for Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

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