by Josh Ritter
8
Bright lay awake and tried to listen through the night sounds for the vengeful tread of boots. Instead, he was almost sure that he heard the fire, rumbling so low and far off that perhaps it was only the blood rushing in his temples. The baby awoke three times in the night, and each time Bright sat up and rocked the boy in his arms and nursed him with his finger dipped in the goat’s milk. The horse stirred where it was tethered and he could see the luminous white goat sleeping beneath the leaves of a bush. He drifted off near dawn, the few clouds overhead blown in mare’s tails and limned with an orange light.
He got up sometime later, took up his child and gathered his animals, and continued following the stream that babbled its way eastward at a playful splash, oblivious to Bright’s exhaustion and wary sorrow. A little after noon, in a dark green chasm far beneath a railroad trestle, they came across a group of naked young boys swimming in a cauldron made from the large rocks that had tumbled down the mountain and into the stream.
The boys were taking turns swinging on a rope far out into the deep pool. They pretended to ignore Bright while he watered his horse and changed and fed the baby. He set the goat free from its tether and the animal jumped off the bank and into the water, swiping its hooves to keep its head above the slow, glassy current. It swam in several tight circles before clambering up on a large rock that rose above the flow. From here it looked defiantly back at Bright, as the boys smiled like he was some kind of circus man.
While Bright waited for the goat to come back, one of the boys swam across and stood a ways off from him in the water, eyeing Bright’s uniform. “Were you in the War?” he asked.
“I was.”
“Did you ever kill anybody ever?”
“Yes.”
The boy was quiet and looked back over his shoulder at his companions, who made a great show of not returning their friend’s glances. The boy turned to face Bright again and shivered, crossing his arms over his bony chest. “Want some blackberries?”
“Can you tell me where a town is at?”
“Why,” the boy brightened with his trove of information, “town is just over back that way.” He swung an arm over his shoulder, his eyes never leaving Bright’s own. “You can’t miss it.”
“Can you help me fetch my goddamn goat down off that rock?”
The boy smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Sure!” He spun in the water and began to wade deeper, before turning back. “How many Germans did you kill anyways?” he asked, squinting against the glare.
“We won, didn’t we?”
9
The Colonel stood at the lip of the grave and looked down at the body of his only daughter, Rachel. He was quiet for a long time. “Well,” said Corwin, his fat son, “that’s that.” The Colonel continued to say nothing. The black embers of the ground squeaked beseechingly beneath his boots as he shifted. Behind him were the charred remains of the cabin where his daughter had died in childbirth. In front of him, across the grave, stood the glass-black trunk of a chestnut tree from which the wildfire had begun its gallop eastward. He looked back down at his daughter. Buried deep, her body had escaped the blaze, and now her skin and the ivory-white slip that she was dressed in dazzled out like a diamond from its soot-black facet of ground.
“Well, that’s that,” Corwin said again.
“That,” said the Colonel, not lifting his eyes from the hole, “is not that. That is your sister. A year ago she was stolen from me and gotten with child. That she is now dead is an insult that will be answered for.”
“That’s what I meant,” Corwin said. “I meant that it was a insult.”
Duncan, the Colonel’s other son, stood at the head of the grave and looked down. All the way up the ridge from their home, Corwin had been whacking the crystallized black stems of burnt wildflowers, while Duncan trailed silently behind him, a wraith floating over landscape that seemed to have been rendered down into shadows by the flames.
“I told you she was dead,” Corwin said to his father. He pushed the shaft of the shovel handle at his brother’s chest. Duncan’s eyes were the same coal color as his hair. He looked long at Corwin before resettling his gaze on his sister.
His boys had at first dug up the wrong grave. After an hour, the Colonel had stood at the edge of the hole and looked down at the long-dead bones of the rogue’s mother. He’d taken the shovel and swung it at his sons for their idiocy. Then, winded, he’d sat down and waited as they dug up his daughter.
The embers he stood upon took to shrieking again as the Colonel turned and looked east, where smoke colored the sky.
“After he buried her, he set the cabin on fire,” Duncan said.
The old man looked down at his daughter. “I should have killed him sooner. The many times that I could have shot him down.”
“You didn’t have any bullets, though.”
“In the winter when he went to fetch wood. The days he took the horse to town. When he came out each morning to break the ice from the stream for water. So many times.” He shook his head and ground his front teeth. “I let him live, after all. I put aside killing him so that I could do it when his child was born, so that he could see me steal his child, like he stole mine.” He turned away from the hole.
“But you couldn’t a done it, ’cause you didn’t have no bullets.”
The Colonel swung aimlessly at Corwin, but he was distracted. “It was vanity,” he said. “He would be dead now save for my own vanity. Cover her up.”
Duncan began pushing the dirt back into the grave. His eyes were set far back in his head, his thoughts set back even farther.
The Colonel walked up to the top of the rise and surveyed the plumes of smoke as if they came from the camps of some mighty army. To the north ran ridge upon ridge of unbroken forest, but off to the south, where these crenulations began to broaden and grow larger, a silver thread of railroad track stretched east and west, glinting out like a necklace along the nape of the mountainsides. The Colonel came back down the slope to find his sons waiting, sweaty and sullen, by the freshly filled hole.
10
Rachel doted on that mangy old horse. She searched out tart wild apples, brought it thistles and fistfuls of stinging nettles and mint from downstream where the ground turned marshy. As September oranged into October and such treats became harder to find, she would harry Bright for bags of sweet dried corn when he went to town so that she might hold handfuls of it lovingly under the horse’s greedy snout. Sometimes, in the wood-smoke-blue mornings, he would watch her leaning against its warm flank, one arm thrown up and across its withers, whispering into its ear as she ran his mother’s ivory comb through the animal’s forelock. Despite all the girl’s attentions, however, the horse’s thickening pelt took on a shagged and greasy appearance that, along with its baleful gaze and consumptive ribs, made it look like some moss-covered mule wandered in from a fairy tale.
“She spoils you and I don’t know what for,” he said to the back of the horse’s head one early morning after the first frost. “I don’t know what kind of hold you got on her.” Horse and man were on the road to Fells Corner for supplies and dried corn. “And don’t pretend you don’t hear me, ’cause I know you hear me.” He twitched the reins pettishly.
“Henry Bright, you have a beautiful wife.”
“I know it. I married her, didn’t I?”
“No need to sound so jealous. I helped you, so it is only right that you should share her with me.”
“Helped nothing!” Bright laughed bitterly atop the animal. “I had to drag you inside that goddamn house, remember? If you were gonna steal her and marry her on your own, you coulda done it the minute you thought of it, and with my blessing too, but you couldn’t, could you? You don’t even have no hands! What if there was a doorknob or something?”
“Henry Bright …” The angel affected to sound weary.
“Keep it,” Bright snapped. “I’m telling you whatever sweettalking you’re doing to my wife, quit it. She don�
��t need those kinds of distractions right now. We’re gonna have a baby.”
“The child has been conceived.”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? So quit whatever other mischief you got on your mind for her and remember the promise that you made to me.”
“Which was?” The horse’s steaming breath swirled numinously around its ears in the cold air.
“Which was that you were gonna keep her and the baby safe from the Colonel and his boys like you done for me in the War. Remember when you said all that? That you’d protect us and the Future King of Heaven and all that?”
“When did it happen?”
“What?”
“When was the child conceived?”
“What the hell does that matter? It got conceived, didn’t it? Don’t try to change the subject. You gonna keep your promise to me or what?”
“We have done well.”
“What do you mean, ‘We’?”
The angel said nothing but clomped along thoughtfully.
“Angel?” Bright snapped the reins. “Angel, what do you mean by ‘We’? You ain’t done nothing yet. Angel?” Receiving no answer, he sprang from the saddle and stood in the horse’s path, bringing it to a desultory halt before him. “I’d hit a horse,” he said. “You probably think I wouldn’t, but I would.”
The two stood there on the empty forest road, their eyes locked. Finally Bright resumed his place in the saddle and they continued on toward town.
“So fearful,” the angel tsked.
“Yeah, well, it’s your fault if I am. We’re in trouble now,” Bright said. “I hope you know what you got us into.”
“Trouble?” the horse chuckled softly. “From the old man? From his half-wit sons?”
Bright bit his knuckle. “The things those boys did in that house over there in the War.” He shivered in the cold air. “It wasn’t half-wits that did all that.”
“Which is why it could not have been the Colonel’s sons.”
“Course it was them!” he said, though he spoke under his breath, almost to himself. “I know it was. I know it was them.” Bright twisted in the saddle and looked back down the road in the direction of the cabin. He scanned the forest to either side of the road for faces. The motley fall curtain of leaves drifted and swelled in the breeze, but none were revealed.
“I told you to close your eyes as the figures approached you where you lay. How then did you see their faces?”
“I opened them while they were standing above me.”
“In the darkness?”
“It was getting to be day—”
“Come now, Henry Bright.”
“What?! I’m telling you, it was them. Duncan stuck his fingers in my mouth to see if I was still alive, remember?”
“How do you know it was Duncan with your eyes closed in the dark?”
“It wasn’t dark!”
“It was pitch dark and you know it.”
“His fingers.”
“You knew it was Duncan by his fingers?”
“They’re skinnier than Corwin’s. Corwin has those big fat fingers.”
“I see.”
“Oh, why don’t you shut up!” He kicked the horse with his heels. “You ain’t blind. You seen how fat Corwin’s fingers are.” He shivered again at the thought of Duncan’s bony fingers in his mouth. “They knew I was alive, but they let me live. I think they let me live ’cause they wanted to torture me later. I told you about the other things those boys used to do when we were kids.” He snapped the reins curtly against the horse’s neck to dispel the memory. “You were there in the ditch with me, angel. You saw it all happen. You ain’t gonna make me think I’m crazy.”
“You really think it was them,” the angel stated flatly.
“I’m telling you, it was!”
“Well, then, half-wits or not, you should be happy that upon your return from the War I told you to save Rachel from them.”
“Yeah, yeah. But it’s me the Colonel’s gonna come kill, not some angel. Must be nice being you! All you get these days is apples and corn and I get nightmares about what them boys did over there in France.” His face turned red and he spluttered, “And I tell you what else, I bet that if the Colonel and those boys came down over the ridge today and did to us what they did to those people in that farmhouse during the War, all you’d have to do would be disappear and it wouldn’t be no bother to you no more. You’d be just fine, wouldn’t you, angel?”
“Peace,” the angel said. “They won’t come today.”
“How do you know that?”
“Shush.”
“Don’t you shush me!”
“Shush.”
11
The boys fetched the goat off the rock in the stream and, shortly after, the baby slung securely around his chest and his livestock in tow, Henry Bright climbed the incline of shale and slate tailings to the road and struck out toward the town to buy a new box of matches. He’d been riding only a few minutes when he heard the growl of an automobile coming around the curve of the mountainside. It swerved to avoid them and then was gone around the next bend, a buff-colored, open-topped blur, its tires spraying his face with bits of gravel, the chemical fumes of its engine exhaust settling in his nose a moment before being picked up by the wind and blown behind him, out across the gorge, through the slats of the railroad trestle and into the sky where it would eventually join with the great veil of smoke that was rising from the forest at his back.
A while later the road changed from gravel to macadam, and the smell of roast chicken and chives, of mint and fresh-baked bread, threaded the air as he and his son rode through drowsing afternoon heat into the town. It seemed a tidy place of dappled white houses and American flags, and he found it almost impossible to keep the greedy animals back from the banquet of flowers spilling down to the street from arbor after shady arbor. Children could be heard, as could the lovely low hum of leisurely work being done: painting of fences, canning of tomatoes and runner beans, gossip over cooling pies. Even the trees here seemed to have a kind of deep green and prepossessing prosperity that the trees of the forest could have no share in.
He found Main Street and tethered the horse and goat under the sign of the general-merchandise store. Inside was long and narrow, and he stood with the baby on his chest in the doorway a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the cool darkness of the aisles. The boards under his feet had been worn to a honey luster by workboots and linseed oil. To his left, a long counter supported an ornate brass register, behind which bolts of colored fabric stood row on row. In front of the till, amid a dawdling, noisy clutch of hip-high children, a young woman with a round milky-white face listened to an older woman address the little ones from behind the counter with an auntly air.
Bright walked down the far aisle, listening to their talk, his son sleeping warm against his chest. As he approached with his new box of matches, the two women broke off their conversation and the younger began to arrange her children about her. He laid the matches down on the counter alongside a dime.
The girl turned toward him. “Oh! What a beautiful baby!”
Bright made no reply but tilted his chin down against his chest to peer in acknowledgment at the infant who was just now waking and thrusting tiny fists aimlessly at the air. She pulled back the edge of the sling on his chest to peek in at the boy. “Hello … hello,” she cooed.
“I believe he needs a diaper,” the auntly one said, crinkling her nose. A bleached and sparkling rag appeared off the shelf from somewhere behind her and the woman laid it on the counter, pulling its edges taut and trim with the expert grace of long service. Next, she reached across and lifted the boy from Bright’s chest. After undoing the esoteric knots of his own efforts, she laid the child flat on the pristine square of fabric and looked the baby over, pinching a foot, pulling its arms to full extension, clucking first to the right and left of the boy’s ears, and finally looking straight down into its tightly closed face. The boy twisted on his bac
k like an overturned turtle. “Few mosquito bites,” she said, nuzzling its belly. All at once she tilted her head and looked up at Bright, her eyes gone flinty. “Where’s his mother?”
“She passed.”
The auntly woman looked at Bright for a long moment and then back down at the boy. The younger one leaned in for a closer look at the baby. The children sucked on candies near the door or else fussed around an old tomcat suffering them from a patch of sun by the front window. “Margaret,” the older woman asked, “will it be you or I that shows this poor man how to change a diaper?”
“You do it,” the girl named Margaret said. “You’re so much better at it than me.”
The old woman shook her head in disapproval. “Well, if you haven’t learned yet I just don’t know …”
“Oh, I don’t have to do any of that kind of thing,” Margaret said. “They have their own nannies for that kind of thing.”
The auntly woman shook her head again at this. She looked back up at Bright. “Are you coming from the fire?” It was the first time that Bright had heard someone besides the angel or himself speak of it.
“I saw it yesterday morning,” he said finally.
They looked at him expectantly, waiting for more.
“After he was born and”—he paused—“and …” He looked at the box of matches there on the counter. “Yes, Ma’am, I saw it,” he said.