Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  “He can’t have no say over the sun, either. An’ the truth is, the little bit a say he’s got over ground an’ water don’t mean much. On accounta the winds come an’ the sun burns an’ the floods come an’ wash the ground away—that can happen anytime. An’ even if it don’t, havin’ that little piece a say over a piece a ground or a stretch a water is ’most like havin’ no kinda say at all. On accounta soon as you build your fences an’ plow your land an’ put in your crop, you gotta stay an’ wait for harvest. You got say over the land, but it has say over you. Same with water. An’ a man that spends his time just tryin’ to have say over them things, he ain’t much of a man. That’s how come it useta be women that put in crops, an’ women that went to get the water. So them things ain’t all that important when you get right down to it. Fire is. You see why?”

  “No,” I said, feeling uneasy, because I didn’t understand.

  “It gives a man say. Gives him final say. It lets him destroy. Lets him destroy anything. There ain’t nothin’ in the world that won’t burn or melt or change some way if you get it hot enough, if you got enough fire. An’ when the fire’s gone, there ain’t nothin’ left, for nobody. If a man comes to take your house, you can burn it, an’ he can’t have it. You can burn your crops. You do the same to his. You can get things right down to where they was to start with, down to ground an’ air an’ water an’ sun. Now, that ain’t much say, an’ it ain’t the best kinda say, but it’s bettern havin’ no say at all. Because a man with no say is an animal. So a man has to be able to make a fire, has to know how to make it in the wind an’ the rain an’ the dark. When he can do that, he can have some say.”

  I nodded.

  “We’ll start tomorrow mornin’,” he said. “We’ll start in the stove, where it’s easy. Then we’ll go on. ’Fore we’re done, you’ll know how to make a fire anyplace, anytime. Then you’ll have say.”

  “Will that make me a man?” I said.

  “No,” he had said. “Nothin’ makes you a man. It means you can be a man. If you decide you want to.”

  The cabin had closed in around me. The darkness hung there, pushed back only a little way by the light of the lantern, and in the darkness, at the very limits of my vision, lurked the walls. I could not see them, but I knew they were there; I could hear them. They took the sounds of our past breathing—his an uneven wheezing, mine a series of short, hard inhalations and exhalations, too rapid and too shallow by half—and sent them back to merge with the sounds of our present breathing. The result was something more than an echo, something less than a clear reverberation, a dark and clotted sound that grew and grew and grew until I could not listen to it and I could not ignore it; until I could not do anything but accept it and try to keep my mind on what I was doing: making a fire.

  I had made the preparations slowly and carefully, because I knew neither of us could afford to be long without heat. I had started with the stove, clearing the grate with an iron poker, then sliding the box of ashes out and carrying them outside and spreading them along the path. Then I had cut wood, chunks of hardwood for lasting heat, slabs of pine for faster burning, strips of kindling. And then I had prepared the tinder, twisting sheets of old newspaper into tight wands.

  Now I laid the tinder in the firebox, keeping it an open, crisscross pattern. On top of it I built a fragile edifice of kindling and small pieces of wood. Then I went to the shelf and got the old, rusted coffee can in which he had always kept his matches. I found it there, in precisely the same spot it had always occupied, and as I pried the lid off with fingers turned to ice I wondered how many days’ worth of minutes he had saved in all the years of putting the can back, and how much longer it would make any difference. But I put the can back on the shelf before I lit my fire. The smell of phosphorus burnt my nostrils as I maneuvered the match into the stove. I watched as the fire caught the dry newspaper and began to devour the records of the goings on in the County three months back, and I wondered if some unimaginative scholar in some unimaginable future would have given his eyeteeth for the very bit of newspaper I had burned. Historians think that way, losing sleep over documents that they deem precious, but which, in the evaluation of people who have reason to know, are most useful as tinder, or mattress stuffing, or papier-mâché. I was burning sacred primary source material; but it was heat that mattered right then, not history.

  He coughed again, and I slid the lid back on the stove to make sure no smoke leaked out. He was asleep, if you could call it sleep; the pain of each breath was written on his face, and it could not have been normal sleep, or the pain would have awakened him. I turned away, lifted the lamp, and examined his shelves. There was nothing much there. He had not canned as much as he usually did. Still, there were mason jars of beans and corn and carrots, two or three of peaches and pears, one of applesauce, a couple of venison. Enough for a stew; I wouldn’t have to climb the slope to get food. I put the lantern down and checked the fire. The flame was catching the larger wood, and the metal of the stove itself was beginning to groan with the agony of uneven expansion. I slid a few larger pieces of pine into the blaze and closed the stove again, adjusted the drafts, then got the two water pails from the packing crate on which they stood, and went out.

  The sky was fully light now, and the woods were silent. I moved through the underbrush, making little noise. He had taught me how to move like that, swiftly and silently, taking me to the pine woods, heading off in what seemed to me a random direction but which never was, eventually leaving me stumbling along trying to keep up and be quiet at the same time and failing miserably at both. Inevitably I would lose him, and would stand in the midst of the forest, dark trees rising on either side, listening to the pounding of my heart as I realized that I was alone on the far side of the Hill. It was then, at those times, that I learned the most. Not woodcraft, really. Or perhaps a true form of woodcraft: to bring my breathing under control; to still my own fear; to be methodical; to accept my limitations and compensate. I could not move quietly, but I could stand quietly and watch and listen, and when he came back for me, as he always did, I could sense him. I learned to reconstruct the man from the subtle whisper of cloth on cloth, the tiny clink of a buckle. And then I would turn in the right direction and find, as often as not, that my eyes had grown used to the dimness, that I could actually see him, and I would say to him, my voice quiet with triumph, “If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake, sneak.”

  That had been early on. In time I had learned how to move in near-silence, although I never attained the total quiet and ghostly grace that accompanied his movements. One day he had looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You hunt jest like your daddy done. Could be, if you was to put the time on it, you could be as good as him.” He paused. “Mebbe better.”

  “Not better,” I said. He looked at me and shrugged. “What the hell. Ain’t no man the best there is at everything, not even Mose, an’ he come as close to bein’ the best at anything worth worryin’ about as any man I ever knowed. There was even some things Mose just couldn’t do. It took Mose a damn long time to figure out how to die, for one thing. He tried to kill hisself in more different ways than any man I ever knowed. He didn’t call it that, he called it havin’ a good time, but tryin’ to kill hisself was what it was. When they come an’ told me he was dead, all I could think was, damn, Mose finely got the hang of it.” He had been gazing off into space, but suddenly he became aware of me. “You mind me talkin’ about your daddy that way?”

  I shrugged. “You knew him better than I did.”

  “You want I should to stop?”

  “No,” I had said. “I want to hear.”

  That was the way it had been then; I always wanted to hear about Moses Washington, about what he had said and what he had done, about the adventures that had taken him, and Old Jack Crawley, and Uncle Josh White, tearing across the mountains pursued by lawmen and irate fathers and angry farmers. About the time Moses Washington had somehow managed to get a contract to supply
the detachment of soldiers that was stationed in the Town during the First World War—God knows why—with “drinking water” and had instead delivered seven wagonloads of second-rate moonshine for which the government unquestioningly paid; about the time he had convinced the local sheriff that three Revenue agents were Southern moonshiners intent on expanding operations and got them run out of town; about the time he had kept Old Jack Crawley out of shotgun matrimony by loudly proclaiming that the child was his—which could have been true—and that he wanted to marry the girl and give the child a name—which was certainly not true—but she swore she would rather mother a bastard than marry a son of a bitch; about the time he had faced a three-hundred-pound farmer who was armed with a double-barreled shotgun and intent to do bodily harm and had reduced him to tears and apoplexy simply by repeating every threat the man made as a question while grinning like an idiot; about the time he had been hailed as a hero because he had gone up onto a burning mountain and rescued a group of high school boys who had been pressed into service to fight the fire and who had somehow got cut off—that was the official version; the true story, according to Old Jack, was that Moses Washington had had a cache of his best up on that mountain, and had agreed to lead the boys to safety only on condition that they carry the whiskey down. The stories were endless, and I had never tired of them, at least not for years. No; I had never tired of them. But somewhere along the line it had occurred to me that the stories were not just stories. They were something else: clues. The stories had changed then, it seemed. And Moses Washington, a decade dead by that time, had changed. And I had changed. And none of the changes had been for the better.

  He had not been to the spring in a long while. The soft earth at the edge of the water was printed by the feet of small animals, the hooves of a pair of deer, but bore no track of man. He had not cleaned the spring in a long time, either. The bottom of it was littered with waterlogged leaves, and I knew that below them would be a film of mud. That would make the dipping difficult. But I had no choice; I knelt down and slowly and gently maneuvered the edge of a bucket into the water, not pushing it too deeply, trying to let the water move without setting up a current. He had taught me how to do that, how to dip clean water from a shallow, leaf-choked spring. It was not an easy thing to learn; it required strength and patience and practice, and it had taken me years to really learn to do it right, for the very simple reason that each time I had failed, I had had to wait for the detritus to settle before I could try again. He had watched me do it, sitting silent and unperturbed, correcting my mistakes in a soft voice: I had got excited, I had got rushed, I had moved too quick, I had moved too jerky, I must wait there, quietly, until the dirt had settled, and then I must try again. Because someday it would be important that I do it right and do it right the first time. And now the day had come. And I was nervous, and frightened, not sure I remembered how to do it, not sure at all.

  But I did remember. Something in me did, and I was calm and patient when I needed to be, and I was strong and steady when I needed to be, and I filled the buckets without disturbing the mess that cluttered the bottom.

  I stood up then, feeling satisfaction at having done something so simple, and looked around at the mountains, trying to remember the days when this was exactly what I had wanted out of life: to get up in the morning and build a fire and go to the spring and pay a visit to the privy, and then cook my breakfast. But it was not that way now; now I stood in the shadow of the Hill and looked down the slope towards the gray, unsturdy-looking outhouse and almost dreaded the time when I would have to use it. But then I stopped daydreaming and paid more attention to the land that lay beyond the privy, and what I saw frightened me.

  I was standing in the shadow, but there, on down the slope, I could see the sunlight. And it was weak sunlight, without warmth and without force, not at all the way it should have been on a clear March morning. I looked up at the sky. The clouds were low and gray, drifting almost imperceptibly northward. The air was wet and heavy. Snow. It was going to snow. Not one of those benign snows that lay light on the ground; it would be a blizzard. I knew how it would go; for as long as I could remember, for as long as anybody could remember, the pattern of the blizzards had been the same. First the slow drifting of cloud cover, coming in from the south, pushed by the south wind. The cloud could build for hours or days, perhaps losing a little moisture in snow or freezing rain, but staying, until the storm center drifted far enough northward and drove the winds hard against the mountains. Then the snow would fall, fast and furious. That was the first phase. How long it would last no one could say. But sooner or later the matronly south wind would tuck up her skirts, go scuttling off across the mountains, taking the clouds with her. Then there would be calm, and clearing skies; the second phase. It might last a night or a week. But sooner or later it would end. And then the witch wind, the west wind, cold and sterile, would come slicing across the mountains, making a weird, oddly pitched, indescribable sound, ripping the snow from the ridges and making it go boiling down into the valleys to build impassable drifts. That was the third phase. It could last, it seemed, forever. I would have to get out of there before that happened; I would have to get him out of there before the snow fell deeply, or I wouldn’t get him out of there at all.

  I picked up the buckets and went up the path as quickly as I could. When I reached the door I stopped and waited a minute, catching my breath. Then I nudged the door open with my foot and went inside.

  The cabin seemed almost warm now. It wasn’t really, but the fire had made some difference; the chill was off the air and his breathing seemed less labored. I closed the door quickly to keep the heat inside, and then I stood there for a minute while my eyes adjusted to the dimness. As I stood I grew more calm, more sensible. My run up the hill, I realized, had been silly. Because there was no real hurry. The snow would not fall all at once, and even if it did there would be no rushing; there would never be any rushing Old Jack.

  So, when my eyes adjusted, I took the buckets over and filled the reservoir on the stove; I would need hot water before the reservoir would supply it, but eventually it would raise the humidity and make his breathing easier. Then I added some hardwood to the pine that was burning in the stove—I needed even heat now; steady heat. Then I put some water in the kettle and set it to boil.

  I opened my pack then, and took out some of the supplies I had brought: every vitamin we had had in the house; the penicillin Judith kept around, defying her own best medical advice; aspirin. I laid it out on the table.

  The kettle was almost ready to boil by then, and I made a quick search for his shelves. I found his cups, two of them, enameled metal. His honey supply was low, and what was there was so clotted by the cold that it would not have poured inside an hour. He had a little sugar, though. And he had plenty of whiskey, fifteen bottles of the stuff. Store-bought, he would have called it, implying that it was not good. And he would have been right; it was terrible stuff, as cheap as dirt and as harsh as kerosene, but it had alcohol in it and it would taste all right mixed with sugar and water. It would taste a lot better than nothing.

  I mixed two toddies, using the recipe he had taught me: four fingers of whiskey, and if you have no honey, three thumbloads of sugar, and when the water boils, pour it slow till the fumes rise and make your mouth water. That had been on a winter night, when the winds had brought wet, sleety rain, and I had arrived on his doorstep soaked and shivering. He had instructed me to take off my clothes, had hung them close to the stove, and by the time the toddy was ready the aroma of wet, steamy clothes had pervaded the air. I had grown to really love the taste of whiskey that night, while he had spun some improbable tale into the fetid air. Standing there waiting for the water to boil, I tried to remember what the story had been about.

  But I couldn’t. There had been too many stories, told over too many years, too many years ago; they all blurred together in my mind. I wondered if they would be blurred in his. And then I began to think about wh
at a man’s dying really means: his story is lost. Bits and pieces of it remain, but they are all secondhand tales and hearsay, or cold official records that preserve the facts and spoil the truth; the sum is like a writer’s complete works with crucial numbers missing: the works of Macaulay minus the essay on Milton; the Complete Henry Hallam without The Constitutional History. The missing volumes are often not the most important, but they are the stuff of background, the material of understanding, the real power of history. The gaps in the stories of the famous are filled eventually; overfilled. Funeral eulogies become laudatory biography, which becomes critical biography, which becomes history, which means everyone will know the facts even if no one knows the truth. But the gaps in the stories of the unknown are never filled, never can be filled, for they are larger than data, larger than deduction, larger than induction. Sometimes an attempt is made to fill them; some poor unimaginative fool, calling himself a historian but really only a frustrated novelist, comes along and tries to put it all together. And fails. And so, like a poor cook trying to salvage a culinary disaster, he peppers his report with deceptive phrases—“it appears” and “it would seem” when he is fairly sure but has no evidence, “clearly” and “almost certainly” when he has no idea at all, and salts it with obscure references and then he pretends (to no one in particular because no one in particular usually cares) that the seasoned mess is Chateaubriand instead of turkey hash.

  The water boiled then, and I filled his cup and set the kettle on the back of the stove. I stirred his toddy and carried it to him.

  “Jack?” I said. I waited. His breathing changed ever so slightly. I leaned over and waved the cup under his nose. He stirred.

  “Johnny?” he said, without opening his eyes.

  “It ain’t George Washington.”

  He smiled, opened his eyes. “I dreamed you was here.”

  “Wasn’t dreamin’,” I said. “I got here at just after daybreak.”