Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,34
Smokies, and Marcie had no idea what, if anything, he was thinking about. He’d already smoked his cigarette, but she waited to see if he would take the lighter from his pocket, flick it, and stare at the flame a few moments. But he didn’t. Not this night. When she cut off the TV and went to the back room, the deck chair scraped as Carl pushed himself out of it. Then the click of metal as he locked the door.
When he settled into bed beside her, Marcie continued to lie with her back to him. He moved closer, placed his hand between her head and pillow, and slowly, gently, turned her head so he could kiss her. As soon as his lips brushed hers, she turned away, moved so his body didn’t touch hers. She fell asleep but woke a few hours later. Sometime in the night she had resettled in the bed’s center, and Carl’s arm now lay around her, his knees tucked behind her knees, his chest pressed against her back.
As she lay awake, Marcie remembered the day her younger daughter left for Cincinnati, joining her sister there. I guess it’s just us now, Arthur had said glumly. She’d resented those words, as if Marcie were some grudgingly accepted consolation prize. She’d also resented how the words acknowledged that their daughters had always been closer to Arthur, even as children. In their teens, the girls had unleashed their rancor, the shouting and tears and grievances, on Marcie. The inevitable conflicts between mothers and daughters and Arthur’s being the only male in the house—that was surely part of it, but Marcie also believed there’d been some difference in temperament as innate as different blood types.
Arthur had hoped that one day the novelty of city life would pale and the girls would come back to North Carolina. But the girls stayed up north and married and began their own families. Their visits and phone calls became less and less frequent. Arthur was hurt by that, hurt deep, though never saying so. It seemed he aged more quickly, especially after he’d had a stent placed in an artery. After that Arthur did less around the farm, until finally he no longer grew tobacco or cabbage, just raised a few cattle. Then one day he didn’t come back for lunch. She found him in the barn, slumped beside a stall, a hay hook in his hand.
The girls came home for the funeral and stayed three days. After they left, there was a month-long flurry of phone calls and visits and casseroles from people in the community and then days when the only vehicle that came was the mail truck. Marcie learned then what true loneliness was. Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight. She bought extra locks for the doors because at night she sometimes grew afraid, though what she feared was as much inside the house as outside it. Because she knew what was expected of her—to stay in this place, alone, waiting for the years, perhaps decades, to pass until she herself died.
It was mid-morning the following day when Sheriff Beasley came. Marcie met him on the porch. The sheriff had been a close friend of Arthur’s, and as he got out of the patrol car he looked not at her but at the sagging barn and empty pasture, seeming to ignore the house’s new garage and freshly shingled roof. He didn’t take off his hat as he crossed the yard, or when he stepped onto the porch.
“I knew you’d sold some of Arthur’s cows, but I didn’t know it was all of them.” The sheriff spoke as if it were intended only as an observation.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have if there’d been some men to help me with them after Arthur died,” Marcie said. “I couldn’t do it by myself.”
“I guess not,” Sheriff Beasley replied, letting a few moments pass before he spoke again, his eyes on her now. “I need to speak to Carl. You know where he’s working today?”
“Talk to him about what?” Marcie asked.
“Whoever’s setting these fires drives a black pickup.”
“There’s lots of black pickups in this county.”
“Yes there are,” Sheriff Beasley said, “and I’m checking out everybody who drives one, checking out where they were yesterday around six o’clock as well. I figure that to narrow it some.”
“You don’t need to ask Carl,” Marcie said. “He was here eating supper.”
“At six o’clock?”
“Around six, but he