Requiem by Fire

by Wayne Caldwell

  “You can’t remember this old mug, there’s something wrong. But, yes, make my picture.”

  Spee posed his five friends and Silas across the fire and snapped a few photos. Silas suggested some more from the other side. “You wouldn’t want to remember this sorry fire,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Wright. If you give me an address, I’ll mail you copies.”

  “Cataloochee, North Carolina, is all you need.”

  “You mean you get mail back in here?”

  “Every day, son. It might not look like where you boys is from, but it’s still North Carolina.”

  Rain stopped as Silas reined Maude up at Jim’s porch. He had been afraid the warden would be gone, but Jim raised his hand in greeting at the kitchen door. “Morning, Silas.” He wore the uniform less jacket, tie, and hat. “What brings you so early?”

  “Hello, Jim.” He dismounted and tied the horse. “It ain’t early. I been up three hours.”

  “True. I’m having trouble getting started. Didn’t sleep good.”

  “You have a dram before bed?”

  “I’ve never been much to drink.”

  “Me neither. But a dram of a morning and another at night keep a man going. Kind of like cutting the switch on and off. You ought to try it.”

  Jim nodded. “How about some coffee?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Jim held the door for Silas, who stooped as he entered the warm room. As he stood by the cookstove, his clothes began to steam. “Kindly damp,” he said.

  “We need the rain,” said Jim, pouring two cups. “How about a biscuit and jelly?”

  “Is that what you’re getting by on, Jim Hawkins?”

  “You want a load of breakfast? I’ll be happy to cook it up.”

  Silas laid his hat on the scarred trestle table and sat. “No, Jim. I didn’t mean it that way. Looks like me and you are bachelors hunkered at the ends of the valley.”

  Jim sat opposite. “I appreciate your asking. Looks like I’ll be by myself for a long while. But I’ll not starve. I’m a lot like you, Silas. I can get along fine.”

  Silas sipped his coffee. “What’s fine at seven in the morning can be awful at midnight. Seven in the morning, a man’s got some small reason to hope he’ll have a good day. Come dark, he knows he ain’t had one, and he’s got eight more hours to put up with whatever ghosts his mind might care to entertain.”

  Jim nodded and drank. “God, that’s the truth.” He stood and looked out the window.

  “Jim, you got to keep busy.”

  He turned and smiled. “I do. I’m really doing pretty good, neighbor. And I appreciate your words. But you didn’t ride all the way down here just to hold my hand.”

  Silas nodded. “I crave a little advice.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Silas took Evans’s letter from his inside pocket and spread it on the table. “I don’t know how serious to take this.”

  Jim read the letter and laid it faceup, like the last card in a game of stud poker. “I’d have to study about that, Silas. He means what he says, of course. Will you send the money?”

  “Not inclined to.”

  “I know that. I asked if you will.”

  “What if I didn’t?”

  “I assume you have it.”

  “Of course I do. I also have principles.”

  Jim chuckled. “So you ask me, who makes his living with the service, whether you ought to disobey it?”

  “Who better to ask?”

  “I have principles, too.”

  “Jim, we all got them. Question is, do we have loyalties?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need to know if I’m asking somebody who’s first a human being and my Christian neighbor, or a man who’s a dad-jim government employee before he’s a human being.”

  “Let me put it this way. You can trust me. If I need to tell you something you don’t care to hear, I’ll do it. Fair enough?”

  “Okay. So what does he mean by ‘no farming’? How do you not farm? Does that mean I can’t milk until I pay up?”

  Jim smiled. “I’d milk, just to keep the cow quiet. Of course, the only way to enforce that is for him to catch you farming, whatever that means. And he’s pretty busy.”

  “So I could sow corn, and go ahead like last year and send money after I sell my cattle?”

  “I didn’t say that. All I meant was you could likely get away with it. Unless, of course, Evans told me to enforce it.”

  “Now we get down to it. Say you got orders to get that sixty dollars from old Wright up there. What then?”

  “I’d be obliged to ask for it. By mail, because I wouldn’t want to catch you farming.”

  “But you’d eventually come see me.”

  Jim sat and rubbed his forehead. In a minute he leveled his gaze at Silas. “Yes, if Evans ordered me to. Then I’d need that sixty dollars.”

  “What if I didn’t fork it over?”

  “I’d have to report, then wait on Evans’s reply. That’d take another week or two.”

  “But eventually you’d nail my ass to the wall.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, Silas. Let’s say I’d have to enforce the law.”

  “You’d evict me?”

  Jim shook his head slowly. “I don’t know if I could, Silas. I don’t know if I could. But listen here. Why don’t you write another letter. Tell Evans you’ll do your best to send the money. Keep doing that every couple of weeks. That might keep us off your porch.”

  Silas folded the letter and put it away. “Good advice. But, truth to tell, I don’t know if I want to stay, after what I saw this morning.”

  “What was that?”

  “Bunch of boys camping smack in the middle of Lucky Bottom. Beat anything I ever laid eyes on.”

  “Yeah, I saw them yesterday. Nice guys.”

  “They don’t know no better’n to try to start a fire with wet wood. You think there’ll be more critters like that in here?”

  “Sure. But we’ll restrict them to the permanent campground. That way we can keep them to one place. Less risk of setting the woods on fire.”

  “Ain’t no danger of that from those boys. So I’m seeing the start of something, eh?”

  “Yep. Afraid so.”

  “Well, I reckon I’ll go on home, if you don’t think the government will come for me.”

  “It’ll be a while, Silas. More coffee?”

  “No, Jim, I’ll need to stop six times to piss as it is.”

  The men stood. “Hope I didn’t make you mad, Silas.”

  “No, son, I ain’t mad. I just needed to know if you was still a man I could deal with. This is more important than that fishing business we agreed on a few years ago.”

  “Take care of yourself, Silas. If you were to happen to find sixty dollars laying around, bring it down. I’ll send it to Evans.”

  “Not likely. I’d just as soon write them letters.”

  Jim watched the old man struggle to get his foot into the stirrup for a few seconds, then turned away. The whole world was growing old and lonesome.

  Requiem

  January 22, 1935

  CHAPTER 36

  His Solitary Way

  Silas Wright, dreaming.

  Ahead of him railroad tracks laddered until they converged at the eastern horizon, while behind him they splayed whorishly toward the west. Hunkered beside a thicket of white-blooming roses, Silas pointed his aquiline nose eastward, as if preferring to smell fire and hot metal instead of fragrant blossoms.

  He moved an errant briar cane, pricking his finger. Muttering to himself, he dislodged the point with his hawksbill. At his age even slight punctures bade fair to bleed him dry, but this wound healed immediately. His skin was no longer papery, nor were the backs of his hands spotted with troubles or time. A young man of quickening spirit.

  After whetting the knife on his boot, he dropped it into his pocket. The eastern sky was intense, impasto
, blue, like an ancient Florentine pot. He felt in his fob and pulled out a scrap of newspaper from May 1873, then found a filigreed gold watch with red hands that indicated a quarter after twelve.

  Time usually shadowed him, hurling headlong insults, but this afternoon he felt no urgency, as if nearly nine decades had not diminished his body. He clicked the watch closed and glanced to his left.

  His friend Hiram, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat and chewing a stalk of orchard grass, touched his hat brim and winked. “She’s a-coming,” he said quietly. Silas nodded and reviewed the horizon. Their mounts, tied to a pair of tulip trees close to a ravine dropping sharply westward, nickered nervously.

  Hiram removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. His dark hair shone above his brow, unlined, like Silas’s. He wore no ring on his left hand. Both men scanned the east intently, like train jumpers, desperadoes.

  Hiram pointed. Silas barely made out gradually approaching smoke past the Padgett farm. There was no station where they crouched, but they stood and hitched their trousers like the train would stop simply because two whippersnappers wanted to study it.

  They watched the machine toil closer through a shimmering curtain of heat. Then through tremulous light burst a thoroughly old-fashioned locomotive, huge, a wood burner guaranteed to cover both passengers and freight with a downfall of ash and live coals. Smoke poured from an oversize diamond-shaped stack, on the front of which hung a cyclopean lantern. Ground vibrated under Silas’s boots. Their mounts, bridles and all, vanished.

  The iron horse screeched and clanked and hissed like a threshing machine separating nuts from bolts in hell. It pulled no cars save the tender. On it rode three soot-blackened men flinging wood into the firebox as fast as they could pitch. Every fifth log seemed to shoot straight out the smokestack, like thick flaming arrow shafts spreading destruction. Silas turned to run from the apparition, but his legs would not obey. When he looked at Hiram, the stalk of grass in his friend’s teeth incinerated. Hiram’s hat burned on the ground behind him. The train was by then behind them, spitting brimstone, while fire ate everything in its path. Hiram himself caught fire, and just as Silas braced to be engulfed, he awoke.

  Even from dreamless sleep, these days it took a while for Silas to figure out who—and when—and where he was. Over a quarter of an hour he changed from the young man in his nightmare to an old man, in the winter of 1935, in an even older bed, in a frame house, the last occupied dwelling save one in Cataloochee. Cataloochee, itself no more, everything except Silas’s time-harried soul engulfed and digested by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

  He sat shivering on the side of the bed. A few inadequate fireplace coals glowed. He stood at the edge of the hearthstone and stirred them with a shiny-handled poker. Adding a stick of dry deadfall, he muttered. “How in hell do them bastards expect a man to keep fire all night with one stick of green wood?” The piece caught.

  His shaky hand threw in another stick. He sat on the bed and stared at the flames. “Hiram Carter. My Lord. How long’s he been gone? Let’s see… he died spring of ’26, and it’s winter of ’35. Near about nine years. God, time flies.”

  Yawning, stretching, he stood again and banked a larger stick in front of the first two, and wondered how long that would heat the room. “Wasn’t so damn much trouble I’d heat with coal,” he said. “But I ain’t got nobody to fetch it from town. Guess I’ll stay cold.”

  He padded to the kitchen for a drink of springwater, cold enough to hurt his teeth. Outside dry snowflakes fell from an iron sky. He had no hope of further sleep, but on the other hand found no enthusiasm to begin a day that augured to be disagreeable. He went back to bed and pulled quilts about his chin. An inventory of aches and rasping joints uncovered a new pain toward the back of his head. Closing his eyes against it, he was asleep within ten minutes, breathing shallowly.

  Silas Wright, dreaming, again.

  The fire started in the schoolhouse he and Hiram and George had burned years ago, and although a brigade arrived, they could not bail enough creek water to do any good. People Silas had not seen in decades battled with buckets and hats and brooms, but they simply spread flame from tree to tree. Soon the church erupted in tongues of fire—all rushed there to no avail. The big field Hiram used to sow in oats itself blazed and threatened the sky. Animals bawled and brayed and barked as when an eclipse obscures the sun.

  Silas wondered why he didn’t feel warm as he walked slowly through the conflagration. A burning yellow-eyed mongrel dog seven hands high brushed his leg as it howled out of sight. The road simmered in front of him, and the only place not aflame was the creek. As Silas walked toward the water, it moved away from him, snakelike through the flames. Jumping trout incinerated immediately. His head hurt sharply.

  Out of his barn loomed Rhetta’s buggy pulled by four flaming draft horses. The driver, a woman who resembled his dead wife, wore a fiery dress. Like an opera character, she held a silver-strawed broom like a spear in her right hand and gentled a smoldering three-legged fice with her left.

  The roof of his house exploded in flames. He walked to the front porch, sat, and looked back toward the valley. All Cataloochee—a burnt offering. He leaned against the skinny porch column to think. My father’s house. Built as a one-room cabin. I finished framing it. The structure collapsed behind him. He saw a flaming chariot, whether lowering or riding atop a whirlwind, he could not tell, nor did he much care, for whatever was in the back of his head claimed his ultimate attention.

  Jim Hawkins woke to a fine dusting of snow, weather that always made him want to hunt rabbits. Upon reflection, he had no desire to kill and dress a mess of them just for himself. Yesterday’s mail had included two postcards for Silas, so he figured to tote his shotgun on the way in case he jumped a couple. If he did, he’d fix him and the old man some dinner.

  After breakfast Jim saddled his horse and headed up the valley, thinking of what he had seen in the last six or seven years. Lots of beauty, from the white of potato blooms in his kitchen garden to the black fire of the big woodpeckers hunting ants in dead trees. Senseless destruction, not only of perfectly good houses and barns but also of rich lives uprooted like barren trees cast into the fire. Lots of misery on the faces of the old men and women leaving to spend their last years in cold, fireless exile.

  The CCC had at least built a campground, but regulations decreed this time of year no one could use it. It seemed snatched from underground—boulders strewn like some giant’s child had been playing. Levi Marion had laid his head there that past summer, sleeping by the creek because he couldn’t rest in his new home. The Yankee tourists made fun of his stories and brogue, but he did not mind as long as he slept to the music of living water. Now he was buried near the church, and Jim wondered if he could hear the creek from there.

  At the road to Carter Fork, Jim did not turn left, nor even look that direction. The last time he’d gone there was to burn his homeplace, and that scab was still anchored to the quick.

  Empty store. Nelse a suicide. Vacant church, door nailed shut for the winter and maybe longer. Schoolhouse open to any firebug. Aunt Mary’s house and outbuildings empty of anything save hopeful snakes and dry corncobs. A hairy poison oak vine spreading hydra-like over a fence post, from which depended rusty, sagging barbwire.

  Nobody but the government would let poison oak get that rank. But Silas’s fence is still tight, so there’s hope left in the world. Haven’t seen a fool rabbit, so I reckon me and him’ll just have some coffee.

  At the edge of the yard he sat his horse. No smoke from Silas’s kitchen—very little from the main chimney. Tracks in the snow told of one lone fox loping through the yard in the night. Jim left his mount at the hitching post and came onto the porch, his boots leaving white images of his soles. He knocked several times.

  The door had a lock, but Jim had never known it to be used. He strode into the front room, and heard only the muffled pop of the floor underneath the hooked rug
. “Silas,” Jim called. “You there?” He stomped, hoping to awaken a deep sleeper. Something rattled in the corner cabinet. He called again and shook his head, fingering the mail in his jacket pocket.

  In the back bedroom he found Silas, still, unbreathing, covers to his chin, mouth open as if he had started to speak to whatever his closed eyes had seen.

  “Damn,” Jim muttered. Taking off his hat, he put a hand on Silas’s shoulder. He moved it enough to know the old man was dead.

  He poked at the fire, which responded with sparks and, after a few seconds, a piddling flame. A withy basket, its floor littered with crumbs of bark and slivers of wood, yielded enough tinder to bring a fair blaze. Jim picked up a stick of green oak, hefted it as if it were something for sale at a market, and smiled. He rejected it in favor of cured locust, which popped and spit and began to throw warmth into the room.

  He pulled up a straight chair, and sat by the bed. “I’m going to have to write you up for that firewood.” He stared at Silas like the old man might nod his head. “You know I’m kidding, Silas. Rest, brother. Just rest. You don’t need any more firewood.”

  Let’s see. I’ll get in touch with his family. I think I have Ethel’s phone number. If I can’t find a casket—there might be one in his barn—I’ll call Maney’s Furniture. I’ll have to take Maude to my place. Reckon this might be emergency enough to call Evans for a PSSUP so we can bury him.

  He pulled two postcards from his pocket. “I’ll read you your mail, anyway. You got one from the service. It’s a receipt for that sixty dollars you said you weren’t going to send. And here’s one from Knoxville.” He turned it over like it was some runic oracle. “It’s from Bud.”

  Dear Silas,

  Little Gene Silas Harrogate is cute like his mama but he’s kinda stubborn like you. Don’t let the d—n govmint run you off. Tell em I said ever body works for them’ll burn in h—l fire.

  Your friend, Bud

  Jim turned the card over and stared at the address, then read the message several times to himself. He stood, laid the card atop Silas’s stiff fingers, and prayed, “Lord have mercy on us all.” He sobbed the better part of five minutes, whether for Silas or himself he could not have told. Blowing his nose, he turned away from his neighbor and went to the porch. He looked eastward, then made his solitary way to his horse.