Rass ratted up a rusted bucket. “I’ll throw snow on the fire.”
Levi Marion nodded. “Yes, we don’t need to burn the house down. It’s been a comfort.”
From the porch Spruce Mountain’s top in sudden sunshine seemed chiseled from alabaster. Jaybirds stirred—a hawk keened behind the house.
“I like living in the valley,” said Levi Marion, “but a man could get used to such a view.”
“Our house is more comfortable,” said Rass.
Levi Marion smiled and cuffed his son’s shoulder. “I believe you’re right.” They headed down the mountain, until Levi Marion stopped. “Son, I was setting there. And yonder’s that cherry tree Uncle Will fell out of. That elk stood just shy of it.” The color had returned to Levi Marion’s cheeks and his eyes looked normal. “You still don’t think I saw nothing, do you?”
“Papa, I don’t know.” The snow his father pointed to was perfectly void of animal tracks.
Downhill went considerably faster than up. Will had gone home, so they turned to his house, fifty yards downcreek from the mill. Neighboring frame houses made Will’s one-story log cabin seem as antique as a blunderbuss. Thick chimney smoke coursed upward. “He’s put a fresh log on,” Levi Marion said. They knocked.
Will invited them into a room musty with tobacco smoke and liniment. Levi Marion wanted to get home, but Aunt Mildred, a birdlike woman with a stutter, insisted they eat. Over pound cake and coffee he told about the elk. Will cocked his head in disbelief at first, then slowly leaned toward his nephews, ever closer, a look in his eye like came when he read the Bible. “Levi Marion,” he said, “you seen a vision.”
“What do you mean, Uncle Will?” said Rass.
“Uncle Fate told about a Cherokee who went to the woods in the old days and starved hisself. After a while he’d see all kinds of critters, elk, buffalo, bear, and, for all I know, tigers and jayroos. Uncle Fate put it down to Indian ways. But I’ve always said it was more’n that. They knew forest was made for something besides giving a man furniture and firewood.”
“Uncle Will, what does it mean?”
Will stood, hands trembling more than usual. “Maybe it’s the park.” He paced before the hearth, canting his head first one way, then the other. “Yes, Nephew, it’s the park.” He snapped his fingers. “Indians killed off the elk, or if they didn’t, we finished them off. Then we marched the Indians to Oklahoma.” His bushy eyebrows arched. “Now we’re getting run off our own selves.”
“Uncle Will, what do you mean, ‘we’? Our people always was friendly with Indians, even hid them in the old days.”
“Levi Marion, pay attention to your elders. Look in your Bible—old men dream, young men have visions. I’m interpreting your vision. That elk you seen was the beginning of leaving. Now you’re the tail end. It’s come full circle.”
“P-pshaw, Will Carter,” said Mildred, rising from the sofa. “You’re t-touched in the head. I’ll give them some blackberry jelly, then they can g-get home. V-Valerie’ll be on her ear.”
After the children were asleep, Levi Marion cleaned his shotgun by the firelight, rag and stick pungent with gun oil. Valerie darned socks. After hanging the weapon over the door, he sat with the Bible.
“Going to read me a story?” Valerie asked.
Levi Marion turned the pages. “First I need to find something. I’m looking for ‘dreaming dreams and having visions.’”
Valerie had been a sword drill champion. “Joel,” she said, looking back to her darning. “Between Hosea and Amos. I always admired them words. And it’s getting cold in here, honey.”
“The last of the second chapter,” he said. He read to himself. When Valerie looked up, he stared at the fireplace.
“Levi Marion, are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m just studying.”
“And I said it’s getting cold.”
He put a wild cherry split on the fire, which popped and sparked. He took up the Bible and cleared his throat. “‘It shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’” He gazed into the fire. “Valerie, we was nearly at George Sutton’s old place, and I took a spell, had to sit. Rass went on up the mountain. I set real still, prayed, and I don’t know, might have gone to sleep. First thing I knowed a big bull elk bugled at me. I opened my eyes and I swear, it looked at me straight on.”
“What did it do?”
“Just stood there, then nodded. I don’t know why, but I leveled my shotgun. Couldn’t have missed nothing that big. But then it was gone. Couldn’t find as much as a bird track in the snow. No blood, no nothing. Uncle Will says I seen a vision. But I’m not a young man. What you reckon is wrong with me?”
She sat on the arm of his chair and mussed his thinning hair. “I’m as worried that you played in the snow as I am over what you think you saw.”
He laid his hand, palm up, atop her leg. She squeezed his hand with both of hers. “The rest of that Scripture talks about blood and fire. Maybe you were vouchsafed a sign Jesus is coming back.”
“How do you get from a bull elk to Jesus?”
“Maybe we better pray about it.” She kissed him, stood, stretched to what she knew was still to her advantage, and went into the bedroom. Levi Marion shook his head and banked the fires, remembering each stick’s journey to and from the woodshed. When he scooted into bed beside his wife, she held him in what he wished were everlasting arms.
BOOK 3
Fire and Hearth
April 1931–June 1933
CHAPTER 18
Sweet Savor
Rafe McPeters rattled around in an enormous shack, part log, part frame, rambling over Rough Fork Mountain toward the head of Carter Fork, far enough from everyone that he did what he pleased. It had begun as a one-room cabin where he and his young wife, Matilda, a Tennessee Sutton, had set up housekeeping after the Civil War. Following each baby he added another wing in which he swore to hole up forever, away from crying and mewling. These excrescences sprouted like fungi. Some faced north, others east; some were appended to the original cabin, others to additions. The structure resembled what a disturbed child might erect with toy blocks.
Folks had known Rafe was low-down mean since the time he blinded one of his father’s hound bitches with a rusty nail. When the war broke out, Rafe enlisted with the Confederates but deserted to steal horses from one side and sell them to the other. After the war he claimed to have been a captain, a lie neither believed nor challenged.
Matilda, as unlucky a Sutton as any who ever wed, died of childbed fever after her sixth delivery, in 1872. She had passed an uncelebrated twenty-third birthday. Folks figured nobody else would have Rafe, but shortly he left in a rickety wagon pulled by a mismatched team. In a fortnight he returned with a second bride, Bess, a Moore from Thickety. Women clucked disapproval—she wasn’t much more than thirteen—but visited to scrutinize this, politely put, extremely homely girl. Men privately wondered how many bags Rafe had to put over her head before he could stand to top her. She soon proved fertile.
Bess was hardier than Matilda but no luckier. After six children in eight years she hid a knife under her mattress to fend Rafe off when he tried to violate her before she’d healed. Lurching into her bedroom while she nursed their sickly two-week-old daughter, he grabbed the child and dumped her into the cradle, where she whimpered. Bess reached for the knife. Rafe enveloped her wrist with his right hand and her exposed breast with his left. He nearly broke her wrist, threw the blade, raped her, and swaggered out.
She nursed and rocked the child to sleep. “You’ve got to do the best you can,” she said, then gently laid her in the cradle. She picked up the knife, her thighs sticky with blood and semen. She sat on the bed and laid her wrists open.
Rafe reappeared in the doorway. “Goddamn you!” he shouted, and slapped her. He got his kit bag and stitched her like she was a hunti
ng dog sliced by a bear claw. “Try that again and I’ll kill you,” he sneered. She outfoxed him, dying of septicemia a week later.
Next time he brought a woman, the winter of 1880, nobody visited. This one was named Bonnie, but folks learned neither maiden name nor birthplace. For all they knew, Rafe had bought her from a white slaver. But she had pluck. After three years and as many children she refused to die barefoot and pregnant. “I’m damned if you’ll ever have any more of me,” she said one afternoon as he headed to the porch.
He could not have looked any more slack-jawed surprised if the dog had spoken. “What’ll I do for pussy?”
“Without,” she said, backing away from the door. When he started to slap her, she waved her hand. “Why don’t you diddle them damned worthless girls?”
A few of her stepdaughters lay about the place like feral cats. Such a thing had crossed Rafe’s mind before, but when he asked if they wanted some of what made them, they laughed. If he ordered them to his bed, they ignored him. But offering to kill them was effective with those too lazy or twisted to leave. Soon he found those girls to his liking. If one conceived, he hauled her and a load of firewood to Waynesville, and traded for an abortion.
The puniest of his fifteen children died from anything from diphtheria to neglect. Survivors turned out as mean as snakes smoking lit firecrackers, or damaged beyond hope. In the late 1920s, half a dozen slept at least part-time on the ramshackle compound, two women—one a dim-witted slattern, the other lucid or as mad as a hatter, depending on which personality dominated—and four men, who killed anything from rabid coons to, it was rumored, unwanted spouses.
Bonnie, by then sixty, had walked out of Cataloochee years before and had ended up a scullery maid at the Meat Skin Hotel in Waynesville. From the rear she could be mistaken for an outsize icebox. Her wages were barely more than room and board, but, considering, she felt as lucky as Miss Astor.
Rafe, nearer ninety than eighty, spent summer days on his porch. His rheumy eyes looked over the valley, hands scratching a fetid crotch. He remembered getting his children but not their names. In winter he visited the store on Carter Fork, where men gave him all the room by the heater he wanted, no longer from fear but from disgusting odor.
In 1931, only old Rafe and Willie still lived at the compound. Born in 1883, Rafe and Bonnie’s last child had bright, beady eyes that were set close like those of the wild hogs he grew up to hunt and kill. He never darkened a schoolhouse door. He took up tobacco as much to watch the smoke as to ingest nicotine, and never ventured close enough to a church to be baptized, even during revivals, when visiting preachers urged congregants to search highways and hedges for lurking miscreants.
He tended the family’s various hearths, and cut and split wood simply to relish the resulting fire. He threw firewood onto porches and into the yard instead of using their decrepit woodshed. Hunters on Carter Fork took him along on damp nights, for even when very young he could coax fire from doty wood. But when he was ten, he doused a stray hound with naphtha and lit a match to her to see what would happen. Even his family began to keep distance from him.
The summer he turned twelve, in 1895, he took to laying out of a night, something every McPeters did sooner or later. He was a tad too young to tomcat in and out of women’s windows but was beginning to connect flame with desire.
He made a lair in a hemlock stand halfway down the mountain. It smelled like fuel in there and needles hit like sleet on the forest floor—canopy so thick that during a thunderstorm half an hour might pass before water found his head.
He carried flint and steel in a leather bag and rediscovered that hemlock knots made torches a man could carry for an hour. He soon prowled all over the mountain, hip pockets full of knotty limbs.
Mack Hawkins’s farm occupied the last bottomland before the road snaked up to Rough Fork Gap. Mack’s brand-new colicky baby, Fred, had driven Mack to the porch, where he gave up sleep in favor of sitting, watching stars, and listening to his wife tend the shrieking child.
Mack sat on the porch facing the ridgeline, nearly about to doze, when a scuttling possum startled him. A light at the ridgetop—whether lantern, foxfire, or ghost he could not tell—caught his eye. Next evening it was closer to the valley.
In a rare quiet moment he mentioned it to his wife.
“Will-o’-the-wisp,” she said. “My daddy used to see such in Macon County. Jacky Lantern, some call him.”
“Is he wicked?”
“No more’n any ghost—some’s good, some not. Old folks say he can lead you into trouble, or get you out of a jam, depending.”
“Could he set a man’s barn on fire?”
She scratched her chin. “I doubt it.”
For a night or two the light appeared around nine and moved till dawn, ever closer to Mack’s place. Wednesday night he sat on the porch with a lapful of double-barreled twelve-gauge.
At close range this was no foxfire, which he had seen, green and stationary—nor swamp gas, which he had not, for Cataloochee had no bogs. The yellow-orange light hovered head height and swung like its holder searched for objects on either side of a zigzag line. It loomed toward his outbuildings.
Mack inched toward the barn, a two-bay affair open on both ends. On the back side a front-lit man-size figure passed into an empty stall. The horse and mule whinnied nervously, the cow lowed.
Mack eased inside, pulled one hammer back, and leveled the shotgun. “Don’t do nothing stupid or I’ll blow your brains out.”
Willie McPeters silently held up the torch.
“You’re a McPeters.” Mack backed one step out of the stall. “The one set fire to that dog. Get hell out of my barn before you burn it down.” The shotgun stared into Willie’s eyes.
He nodded and followed Mack outside, porcine face drawn into a smirk.
For a man starved for sleep, Mack kept the gun steady. “I never want you here without it’s daylight and you got business.” He cocked the other hammer.
McPeters started toward the woods.
“Not so fast, damn you. Head up the road. I’ll make sure you get home safe or fill you full of holes, one. Get.”
Rafe, his own weapon in his lap, was sitting on the porch when Mack stomped into the yard behind Willie. He shouted the dogs quiet. “Who’s that?”
“Mack Hawkins, Captain McPeters. I made sure your boy come back home instead of burning my barn down. I’d take it kindly if you’d have a talk with him about other people’s property.”
Rafe cocked his pistol, a Civil War relic with a hefty caliber. “I don’t recall this boy being any of your goddamn interest.”
“If I find him in my barn again with another burning stick, I’ll blow his head off.”
Rafe aimed the pistol. “Get off my land or you’ll not be able to blow your whore-mongering nose, mister.”
By then Willie stood beside his father, and torchlight jumped eerily on the porch. Mack lowered his shotgun and tipped his hat brim. “Have a good evening,” he said mildly, backed into the darkness, and headed back down the mountain. The rest of the summer Mack saw light occasionally but never on his property, and gave thanks for soaking dog-day rains.
Twenty-one years later a revenue man named Grover Cleveland Moody nosed around for a day, but was never seen again. Willie McPeters shortly thereafter bought both a fine Marlin rifle—model 94, chambered .44–40, perfect for hog and bear—and fancy boots, with cash money. Anyone who visited the McPeters place would have seen Moody’s silver badge pinned to a dried squirrel hide in Willie’s end of the house.
When Cataloochans began leaving, Willie McPeters, by then a man in his mid-forties who had ceased to speak to anyone but himself, and then only sparingly, rummaged their abandoned houses, sometimes finding a comb or plow point. Mostly he uncovered broken glass, rusty wire, or splintered furniture. Once, inexplicably, he discovered, hanging like a huge bat smack in the middle of Bus Bennett’s smokehouse, a single ham.
Early in 1931 Willie visited
the old Brooks barn, a half mile south of the McPeters compound, and heard something knock over a fair-size metal container. He readied the Marlin. Entering the barn, he immediately shot an animal streaking out the other side. The half-wild barn cat was in mid-leap when the bullet hit its left haunch and spun it like a screaming pinwheel. Torn in two, it glared at McPeters with appreciable malevolence. He stomped its head and walked beside the barn to take a piss.
His penis became a fire hose knocking hay bits and dried manure in various directions. It might have been a pen scribbling filthy words in the dirt had he known how to spell. He shook it dry, then kept at it and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he focused on a shed composed only of locust posts, roof, and rail, in which was stacked a wealth of stove wood. He shoved himself back into his pants and buttoned up.
The Brooks twins, Donald and Ronald, had farmed this place since the early 1880s, when they came from Buncombe County and bought the Elbert Carter place. Bachelors, they had not particularly cared about the inside of the house, but everything outside had had to be just so. Maple cut half a foot long by Donald had been stacked with precision the length of the woodshed under a four-foot-high rail by Ronald. The base layer was all splits, bark-side down, over which rounds and splits had been laid to create a four-foot wall of firewood. Two full cords, ripe for the plucking.
McPeters looked the building over. While impressed with the quantity of firewood, if not its precise arrangement and uniformity of species, he especially grinned at the contents of a spidery white snuff glass wedged into a roof brace—in which a piece of oilcloth swaddled a dozen white-tipped lucifer matches.
He walked home for mule and wagon, then returned to watch three crows argue with a considerable number of flies and yellow jackets over the dead cat. He destroyed the Brooks brothers’ orderly labor, throwing wood haphazardly into the wagon bed. In an hour his loaded wagon swayed in the middle, the outside rear wheel appeared ready to leave its axle, and any movement made the wagon shed sticks like long ashes off cigarettes.
Requiem by Fire Page 17