Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,31
to a woman living alone. It was something a lot of other men wouldn’t have done, wouldn’t even have thought to do. Marcie asked for a phone number and Carl gave her one. I’ll call you tomorrow if I need you, she said, and watched him drive off in his battered black pickup, a chain saw and red five-gallon gas can rattling in the truck bed. She phoned Preacher Carter after Carl left.
“He’s new in the area, from down near the coast,” the minister told Marcie. “He came by the church one afternoon, claimed he’d do good work for fair wages.”
“So you sent him up here not knowing hardly anything about him?” Marcie asked. “With me living alone.”
“Ozell Harper wanted some trees cut and I sent him out there,” Preacher Carter replied. “He also cut some trees for Andy West. They both said he did a crackerjack job.” The minister paused. “I think the fact he came by the church to ask about work speaks in his favor. He’s got a good demeanor about him too. Serious and soft-spoken, lets his work do his talking for him.”
She called Carl that night and told him he was hired.
Marcie cut off the spigot and looked at the sky one last time. She went inside and made her shopping list. As she drove down the half-mile dirt road, red dust rose in the car’s wake. She passed the two other houses on the road, both owned by Floridians who came every year in June and left in September. When they’d moved in, she’d walked down the road with a homemade pie. The newcomers had stood in their doorways. They accepted the welcoming gift with a seeming reluctance, and did not invite her in.
Marcie turned left onto the blacktop, the radio on the local station. She went by several fields of corn and tobacco every bit as singed as her own garden. Before long she passed Johnny Ramsey’s farm and saw several of the cows that had been in her pasture until Arthur died. The road forked and as Marcie passed Holcombe Pruitt’s place she saw a black snake draped over a barbed-wire fence, put there because the older farmers believed it would bring rain. Her father had called it a silly superstition when she was a child, but during a drought nearly as bad as this one, her father had killed a black snake himself and placed it on a fence, then fallen to his knees in his scorched cornfield, imploring whatever entity would listen to bring rain.
Marcie hadn’t been listening to the radio, but now a psychology teacher from the community college was being interviewed on a call-in show. The man said the person setting the fires was, according to the statistics, a male and a loner. Sometimes there’s a sexual gratification in the act, he explained, or an inability to communicate with others except in actions, in this case destructive actions, or just a love of watching fire itself, an almost aesthetic response. But arsonists are always obsessive, the teacher concluded, so he won’t stop until he’s caught or the rain comes.
The thought came to her then, like something held underwater that had finally slipped free and surfaced. The only reason you’re thinking it could be him, Marcie told herself, is because people have made you believe you don’t deserve him, don’t deserve a little happiness. There’s no reason to think such a thing. But just as quickly her mind grasped for one.
Marcie thought of the one-night honeymoon in Gatlinburg back in April. She and Carl had stayed in a hotel room so close to a stream that they could hear the water rushing past. The next morning they’d eaten at a pancake house and then walked around the town, looking in the shops, Marcie holding Carl’s hand. Foolish, maybe, for a woman of almost sixty, but Carl hadn’t seemed to mind. Marcie told him she wanted to buy him something, and when they came to a shop called Country Gents, she led him into its log-cabin interior. You pick, she told Carl, and he gazed into glass cases holding all manner of belt buckles and pocketknives and cuff links, but it was a tray of cigarette lighters where he lingered. He asked the clerk to see several, opening and closing their hinged lids, flicking the thumbwheel to summon the flame, finally settling on one whose metal bore the image of a cloisonné tiger.
At the grocery store, Marcie took out her