Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,4
the child’s mouth and dabbed the wound, did the same outside to the cheek.
“Okay,” Jacob said. He reached out his hands and placed them under her armpits. She was so light it was like lifting a rag doll. The child stood before him now, and for the first time he saw that her right hand held something. He picked up the lantern and saw it was an egg and that it was unbroken. Jacob nodded at the egg.
“You don’t ever take them home, do you,” he said. “You eat them here, right?”
The child nodded.
“Go ahead and eat it then,” Jacob said, “but you can’t come back anymore. If you do, your daddy will know about it. You understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered, the first word she’d spoken.
“Eat it, then.”
The girl raised the egg to her lips. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin as she opened her mouth. The shell crackled as her teeth bit down.
“Go home now,” he said when she’d swallowed the last bit of shell. “And don’t come back. I’m going to put another hook in them eggs and this time there won’t be no line on it. You’ll swallow that hook and it’ll tear your guts up.”
Jacob watched her walk up the skid trail until the dark enveloped her, then sat on the stump that served as a chopping block. He blew out the lantern and waited, though for what he could not say. After a while the moon and stars faded. In the east, darkness lightened to the color of indigo glass. The first outlines of the corn stalks and their leaves were visible now, reaching up from the ground like shabbily dressed arms.
Jacob picked up the lantern and turpentine and went to the shed, then on to the house. Edna was getting dressed as he came into the bedroom. Her back was to him.
“It was a snake,” he said.
Edna paused in her dressing and turned. Her hair was down and her face not yet hardened to face the day’s demands and he glimpsed the younger, softer woman she’d been twenty years ago when they’d married.
“You kill it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Her lips tightened.
“I hope you didn’t just throw it out by the henhouse. I don’t want to smell that thing rotting when I’m gathering eggs.”
“I threw it across the road.”
He got in the bed. Edna’s form and warmth lingered on the feather mattress.
“I’ll get up in a few minutes,” he told her.
Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn’t be found, shacks where families lived who didn’t even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.
BACK OF BEYOND
When Parson drove to his shop that morning, the sky was the color of lead. Flurries settled on the pickup’s windshield, lingered a moment before expiring. A heavy snow tonight, the weatherman warned, and it looked to be certain, everything getting quiet and still, waiting. Even more snow in the higher mountains, enough to make many roads impassable. It would be a profitable day, because Parson knew they’d come to his pawnshop to barter before emptying every cold-remedy shelf in town. They would hit Wal-Mart first because it was cheapest, then the Rexall, and finally the town’s three convenience stores, coming from every way-back cove and hollow in the county, because walls and windows couldn’t conceal the smell of meth.
Parson pulled his jeep into the parking lot of the cinder-block building with PARSON’S BUY AND SELL hung over the door. One of the addicts had brought an electric portable sign last week, had it in his truck bed with a trash can filled with red plastic letters to stick on it. The man told Parson the sign would ensure that potential customers noticed the pawnshop. You found me easy enough, Parson had replied. His watch said eight forty and the sign in the window said nine to six Tuesday through Saturday, but a gray decade-old Ford Escort had already nosed up to the building. The back windshield was damaged, cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb. The gas cap a stuffed rag. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. She could have been waiting ten minutes or ten hours.
Parson got out of his truck, unlocked the door, and cut off the alarm. He turned on the lights and walked around the counter, placed the