Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,57

out of the hole as Vaughn loosed a long lowing moan.

She watched from above, waiting to see if she’d need to figure out how to use the musket. After almost a minute, Vaughn’s mouth grimaced, the teeth locking together like a dog tearing meat. He pushed himself backward with his forearms until he was able to slump his head and shoulders against the dirt wall. Lily could hear his breaths and see the rise of his chest. His eyes moved, looking her way now. Lily did not know if Vaughn could actually see her. He raised his right hand a few inches off the root cellar’s floor, palm upward as he stretched his arm toward the entrance, as if to catch what light leaked in from the world. Lily closed and latched the cellar door, covered the entrance with the rhododendron branches before walking back to the cabin.

The child was awake and fretting. Lily went to the crib but before taking up the boy she pulled back the bedding and removed the butcher knife, placed it in her dress pocket. She nursed the child and then fixed herself a supper of cornbread and beans. As Lily ate, she wondered if the Confederate had told anyone in Boone where he was headed. Maybe, but probably he wouldn’t have said which particular farm, wouldn’t have known himself which one until he found something to take. Ponder something else, she told herself, and thought again of names for the coming child. Girl names, because Granny Triplett had already rubbed Lily’s belly and told her this one would be a girl. Lily said those she’d considered out loud and again settled on Mary, because it would be the one to match her boy’s name.

After she’d cleared the table and changed the child’s swaddlings, Lily set him in the crib and went outside, scattering shell corn for the chickens before walking back through the rhododendron to the root cellar. There was less light now, and when she peered though the slats in the wood door she could see just enough to make out Vaughn’s body slumped against the earthen wall. Lily watched several minutes for any sign of movement, listened for a moan, a sigh, the exhalation of a breath. Only then did she slowly unlatch the door. Lily opened it a few inches at a time until she could see clearly. Vaughn’s chin rested on his chest, his legs splayed out before him. The needle was still in his stomach, every bit as deep as before. His face was white as his belly now, bleached looking. She quietly closed the door and latched it softly, as if a noise might startle Vaughn back to life. Lily gathered the rhododendron branches and concealed the entrance.

She sat on the porch with the child and watched the dark settle in the valley. A last barn swallow swept low across the pasture and into the barn as the first drops of rain began to fall, soft and hesitant at first, then less so. Lily went inside, taking the coverlet and yarn with her. She lit the lamp and nursed the child a last time and put him back in the crib. The supper fire still smoldered in the hearth, giving some warmth against the evening’s chill. It was the time of evening when she’d usually knit some more, but since she couldn’t do that tonight Lily took the newspaper from under the mattress and sat down at the table. She read the article again about the war being over by summer, stumbling over a few words that she didn’t know. When she came to the word Abraham, she glanced over at the crib. Not too long before I can call him by his name to anyone, Lily told herself.

After a while longer, she hid the newspaper again and lay down in the bed. The rain was steady now on the cabin’s cedar shingles. The young one breathed steadily in the crib beside the bed. Rain hard, she thought, thinking of what she’d be planting first when daylight came. Bad as it was that it had happened in the first place, there’d been some luck in it too. At least it wasn’t winter when the ground was hard as granite. She could get it done by noon, especially after a soaking rain, then rest a while before doing her inside chores, maybe even have time to plant some tomato and squash before supper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to my editor, Lee Boudreaux, and my agent, Marly Rusoff. Thanks also to Abigail Holstein, Mihai Rdulescu, Western Carolina University, and my family.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: “Hard Times” in Sewanee Review; “Back of Beyond” and “The Ascent” in Tin House; “Dead Confederates” in Shenandoah; “The Corpse Bird” in South Carolina Review; “Waiting for the End of the World” in Oxford American; “Into the Gorge” in Southern Review; “Burning Bright” in Ecotone; “Return” in Saltgrass; “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars” in Carolina Quarterly; “Falling Star” in Crossroads; “Lincolnites” in Smoky Mountain Living.

About the Author

RON RASH is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Serena, which was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and three collections of stories, including Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash teaches at Western Carolina University.

www.harpercollins.com/ronrash

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ALSO BY RON RASH

FICTION

Serena

The World Made Straight

Saints at the River

One Foot in Eden

Chemistry and Other Stories

Casualties

The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth

POETRY

Raising the Dead

Among the Believers

Eureka Mill

BURNING BRIGHT. Copyright © 2010 by Ron Rash. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198135-7

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