Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,7

than now as his gaze moved from the rusting tractor and bailer to the sagging fences that held nothing in, settled on the shambling farmhouse itself, then turned toward the land between the barn and house.

Danny’s battered blue-and-white trailer squatted in the pasture. Parson’s feet made a whispery sound as he went to deal with his nephew before talking to his brother and sister-in-law. No footprints marked the snow between house and trailer. Parson knocked on the flimsy aluminum door and when no one answered went in. No lights were on and Parson wasn’t surprised when he flipped a switch and nothing happened. His eyes slowly adjusted to the room’s darkness, and he saw the card table, on it cereal boxes, some open, some not, a half-gallon milk container, its contents frozen solid. The room’s busted-out window helped explain why. Two bowls scabbed with dried cereal lay on the table as well. Two spoons. Parson made his way to the back room, seeing first the kerosene heater beside the bed, the wire wick’s muted orange glow. Two closely lumped mounds rose under a pile of quilts. Like they’re already laid out in their graves, Parson thought as he leaned over and poked the bigger form.

“Get up, boy,” Parson said.

But it was Ray’s face and torso that emerged, swaddled in an array of shirts and sweaters. Martha’s face appeared as well. They seemed like timid animals disturbed in their dens. For a few moments Parson could only stare at them. After decades in the most cynical of professions, he was amazed that anything could still stun him.

“Why in the hell aren’t you in the house?” Parson asked finally.

It was Martha who replied.

“Danny, he’s in there, sometimes his friends too.” She paused. “It’s just better, easier, if we’re out here.”

Parson looked at his brother. Ray was sixty-five years old but he looked eighty, his mouth sunk in, skinny and feeble. His sister-in-law appeared a little better off, perhaps because she was a large, big-boned woman. But they both looked bad—hungry, weary, sickly. And scared. Parson couldn’t remember his brother ever being scared, but he clearly was. Ray’s right hand clutched a quilt end, and the hand was trembling. Parson and his wife, DeAnne, had divorced before they’d had children. A blessing, he now saw, because it prevented any possibility of ending up like this.

Martha had not been above lording her family over Parson in the past, enough to where he’d made his visits rare and short. You missed out not having any kids, she’d said to him more than once, words he’d recalled times when Danny pawned a chain saw or posthole digger or some other piece of the farm. It said much of how beaten down Martha appeared that Parson mustered no pleasure in recalling her words now.

He settled his eyes on the kerosene heater emitting its feeble warmth.

“Yeah, it looks to be easier out here all right,” he said.

Ray licked his cracked lips and then spoke, his voice raspy.

“That stuff, whatever you call it, has done made my boy crazy. He don’t know nothing but a craving.”

“It ain’t his fault, it’s the craving,” Martha added, sitting up enough to reveal that she too wore layers of clothing. “Maybe I done something wrong raising him, petted him too much since he was my only boy. The girls always claimed I favored him.”

“The girls been up here?” Parson asked. “Seen you like this?”

Martha shook her head.

“They got their own families to look after,” she said.

Ray’s lower lip trembled.

“That ain’t it. They’re scared to come up here.”

Parson looked at his brother. He had thought this was going to be so much easier, a matter of twenty dollars, that and relaying the sheriff’s threat.

“How long you been out here, Ray?”

“I ain’t sure,” Ray replied.

Martha spoke.

“Not more than a week.”

“How long has the electricity been off?”

“Since October,” Ray said.

“Is all you’ve had to eat on that table?”

Ray and Martha didn’t meet his eyes.

A family photograph hung on the wall. Parson wondered when it had been put up, before or after Danny moved out. Danny was sixteen, maybe seventeen in the photo. Cocksure but also petulant, the expression of a young man who’d been indulged all his life. His family’s golden child. Parson suddenly realized something.

“He’s cashing your Social Security checks, isn’t he?”

“It ain’t his fault,” Martha said.

Parson still stood at the foot of the bed, Ray and Martha showing no indication of getting out. They looked like children waiting for him to turn out the