Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,36

then the New River, then the New River’s middle fork, and finally up Holder Branch. Sometimes he never made it all the way back. Somewhere between what his grandfather called the Boone toll road and his family’s farmhouse he would fall asleep.

Snowflakes cling to his lashes. He shakes them free and clasps the jacket collar tighter. It’s getting dark and he looks down at his wrist, forgetting his watch is gone, lost or stolen somewhere between the Philippines and North Carolina. He passes the meadow where he and his uncle Abe used to rabbit hunt, then passes his uncle’s farmhouse, the tractor that hasn’t been driven since June rusting in the barn. No light comes from the windows, his aunt down in Boone with her daughter until warmer weather. The creek is beside the road now, but an icy caul muffles its sound, just as the snow muffles his footsteps. The world is as quiet as the moments after the Japanese sniper fired at him from a palm tree.

He hadn’t heard the shot but felt it—a sensation like a metal fist hitting the side of his helmet. Knocked to the ground, he looked up and saw the Japanese soldier eject the spent shell. Though dazed, he managed to raise his own rifle, the BAR wavering in his hand as he emptied his clip. The sniper fell through the fronds, landing on his back, blood pooling on the front of his shirt. The Japanese soldier didn’t try to rise, but his right hand slowly reached up and freed a thin silver necklace from under his shirt. He touched something affixed to the chain, touched it as though only to make sure it was still there, then let his hand fall back on the ground. Peterson, the medic, had claimed the Japanese only worshipped their emperor. He’d believed Peterson, because Peterson had a college education and was going to be a doctor once the war was over. But now he saw Peterson was wrong, because around the wounded man’s neck was a silver cross.

The dying man spoke. The words didn’t sound angry or defiant. By this time the rest of the squad was beside them. Peterson kneeled and jerked open the soldier’s shirt and peered in.

“What did he say?” he asked Peterson.

“Hell if I know,” Peterson replied. “Probably wants water.”

He was offering his canteen to Peterson when the Japanese soldier gave a last exhalation. Peterson jerked the cross and necklace from the dead man’s neck.

“Your kill, hillbilly,” Peterson said, and offered the cross and necklace. “It’s silver. You’ll get a couple of dollars for it.”

When he hesitated, Peterson smiled.

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

He took it then.

“I didn’t check his pockets,” Peterson said as he got up. “You can do that yourself.”

Peterson and the rest of the squad walked to where a canopy of palm trees offered more shade. Once alone, he knelt beside the Japanese soldier, his back to the other men.

“Find anything else?” Peterson asked when he’d rejoined the others.

“No,” he’d said.

The snow falls harder, drifts forming where the road curves. The snow makes it hard to see and he follows the road as much by memory as sight. The road curves left and the incline steepens. He’s breathing hard now, unused to the thin mountain air that grows thinner each step farther up Goshen Mountain. In the Philippines the air had been so humid that it was like breathing water. The day’s fading light tinges the snow blue.

The road levels and he can just make out the black spire through the snow and trees, then the wooden building itself. He steps into the churchyard and walks around to the back. He leans on the barbed-wire fence post and looks into the graveyard. He squints and sees the new stone and for a moment cannot shake the uneasy feeling that it is his own, that he’s really still in the Philippines, dreaming this, maybe even dying or dead. But it’s his uncle’s name on the stone, not his.

He steps back onto the road and passes Lawson Triplett’s place and then crosses a plank bridge, the creek passing beneath to flow on the road’s left side. A ghost can’t cross fast-moving water, his father had once told him.

He knows there are mountains in Japan, some so high snow never melts on their peaks. The man he killed could have been from those mountains, a farmer like himself, just as unused to the loud humid island nights as he’d been—a