Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,47

it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin.

It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.

The next morning at breakfast Boyd didn’t mention the owl to his wife or daughter. What had seemed a certainty last night was more tenuous in daylight. His mind drifted toward a project due by the week’s end. Boyd finished his second cup of coffee and checked his watch.

“Where’s Jennifer?” he asked his wife. “It’s our week to carpool.”

“No pickup today,” Laura said. “Janice called while you were in the shower. Jennifer ran a temperature over a hundred all weekend. It hasn’t broken so Janice is staying home with her.”

Boyd felt a cold dark wave of disquiet pass through him.

“Have they been to the doctor?”

“Of course,” Laura said.

“What did the doctor say was wrong with Jennifer?”

“Just a virus, something going around,” Laura said, her back to him as she packed Allison’s lunch.

“Did the doctor tell Janice anything else to watch out for?” Boyd asked.

Laura turned to him. The expression on her face wavered between puzzlement and irritation.

“It’s a virus, Boyd. That’s all it is.”

“I’ll be outside when you’re ready,” Boyd told his daughter, and walked out into the yard.

The neighborhood seemed less familiar, as though many months had passed since he’d seen it. The subdivision had been built over a cotton field. A few fledgling dogwoods and maples had been planted in some yards, but the only big tree was the scarlet oak that grew on an undeveloped lot behind the Colemans’ house. Boyd assumed it was once a shade tree, a place for cotton field workers to escape the sun a few minutes at lunch and water breaks.

The owl was still in the oak. Boyd knew this because growing up he’d heard the older folks say a corpse bird always had to perch in a big tree. It was one way you could tell it from a regular barn or screech owl. Another way was that the bird returned to the same tree, the same branch, each of the three nights.

His family had moved to Asheville soon after his grandfather’s death. Boyd had been an indifferent student in Madison County, assuming he’d become a farmer, but the farm had been sold, the money divided among his father and aunts. At Asheville High Boyd mastered a new kind of knowledge, one of theorems and formulas, a knowledge where everything could be explained down to the last decimal point. His teachers told him he should be an engineer and helped Boyd get loans and scholarships so he could be the first in his family to attend college. His teachers urged him into a world where the sky did not matter, where land did not blacken your nails, cling to your boots, or callous your hands but was seen, if at all, through the glass windows of buildings and cars and planes. The world irrelevant and mute. His teachers had believed he could leave the world he had grown up in, and perhaps he had believed it as well.

Boyd remembered the morning his college sociology class watched a film about the folklore of Hmong tribesmen in Laos. After the film the professor asked if similar beliefs could be found in other cultures. Boyd raised his hand. When he’d finished speaking, the professor and the other students stared at Boyd as if a bone pierced his nostrils and human teeth dangled from his neck.

“So you’ve actually witnessed such things?” the professor asked.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, knowing his face had turned a deep crimson.

A student sitting behind him snickered.

“And this folklore, you believe in it?” the professor asked.

“I’m just saying I once knew people who did,” Boyd said. “I wasn’t talking about myself.”

“Superstition is nothing more than ignorance of cause and effect,” the student behind him said.

Rational. Educated. Enlightened. Boyd knew the same words he’d heard years ago in college, the same sensibility that came with those words, prevailed in the subdivision. Most of his neighbors were transplants from the Northeast or Midwest, all white-collar professionals like himself. His neighbors would assume that since it was October the owl was migrating. Like the occasional possum or raccoon, the owl