Chaneysville Incident (7 page)

“Bring the matches too,” he said. “There, in the can. Can’t have light without strikin’ fire.”

I took the candle and the can and brought them back to the table, moving slowly, unsure of my footing. He took them from me, opened the can, extracted a match. I stood beside him while he struck it, feeling the acid fumes tickle my nose. He lit the candle and extinguished the match, then he held the candle sideways, over the table. I watched, fascinated, as the melted wax formed a pool on the slate. When he judged it big enough he set the candle in the pool, held it while the wax hardened. We waited then, while the flame steadied, the light from the candle added to that from the lamp making the room seem almost too bright. He leaned over then and blew out the lamp, and the light faded.

“Put the matches back,” he said. “Always put things back where you found ’em so you’ll know where they are when you need ’em again.”

There was no answer. The clouds of condensation blossomed in front of my face. I waited, listening. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, the pounding of blood in my ears. I wanted to push the door open and just go in, but you do not do that to a man, not even to save his life. And so I waited, and waited, and raised my hand to knock again. Then I heard the sound coming from behind the weather-ravished door: a long, racking cough. I shoved the door open and stepped inside. “Jack?” I said, as the door swung to behind me.

He coughed again. His breath came in harsh asthmatic whistles, and after each exhalation I could hear the squeaky sucking sounds of mucus shifting in his chest. Pneumonia. But I didn’t mind; at least he was breathing. I moved towards where he lay and looked down, although I knew I could not see him. I could smell him, though. He stank of urine and feces and unhealthy perspiration. “Jack,” I said stupidly, “you all right?”

He chuckled, the same deep, throaty chuckle he had always had, and my heart lifted. But then the chuckle ended in a cough, not a rumbling cough, but a high, deep, tight one. I shuddered at the sound of it, for I knew what it was like to lie in a bed feeling the vise closing down on your chest, knew that he would be feeling no relief, just a harsh burning every time he tried to clear his lungs. I waited silently until he stopped coughing, feeling the pain as if it were in my own chest, wishing that my feeling it would somehow make it less for him, knowing it would not.

He stopped coughing. I could hear his mouth working as he got up some spit and swallowed it to soothe his throat. “Hey,” he said finally, “if it ain’t the Perfessor. What brings you up this way?” His voice was a croak, but I could hear the bitterness in it; it had been a long time.

I didn’t say anything.

“It does me good to see you, Johnny,” he said, finally.

“It does me good to see you,” I said. I reached out through the darkness, but I stopped myself before I touched him; he would not want that, not now, when it would feel like the touch of a nurse. He would rather die than have that.

“I
T’S TIME YOU LEARNED HOW TO BUILD A FIRE,”
he had said, his voice sounding softer and more resonant than it did at other times. I said nothing. For I had learned that when he spoke in that voice, it was a time not for talking but for listening.

“Fire’s the most important thing in the world. You know why?”

“No,” I said. My voice was different too, softer and quieter, almost like a whisper.

He had paused to spit tobacco juice in a dark arc that ended, sizzling, in the campfire. “There’s four things a man needs,” he said. “He needs air an’ he needs land an’ he needs water an’ he needs sun. Ain’t nothin’ else he needs, or could need, or want, or, anyways, oughta want, that don’t come from those four. You understand that?”

I thought about it, trying to think of something that did not come from them. He waited patiently while I thought; it was one of the things I loved about him: he always gave me time to think. “Almost,” I said. “He needs air to breathe and he needs water to drink. I don’t know about the ground.”

“He needs somethin’ to stand on,” he said. “A man can’t stand on air an’ he can’t stand on water. He needs a place to stand.”

I nodded.

“An’ what about the sun?”

I hesitated. “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought heat and I thought light, but you said—”

“Power,” he said. “The sun is power. The sun is what makes everything else happen. When the sun is weak the water turns to ice an’ the ground is hard as nails an’ the air ain’t fit to breathe.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Good. Now, them’s the four things a man needs, but he don’t need them on accounta he’s a man, he needs ’em on accounta he’s an animal. An’ if he stops when he’s got ’em, he won’t never be nothin’ but an animal. He won’t be a man. He won’t be a man on accounta he can’t make none a them things. So he ain’t got no say. If he don’t have no say over the things he needs to live, he ain’t got no say over whether he lives at all, an’ if he ain’t got no say over that, he ain’t no man. A man has to have say. You understand that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That’s what it’s all about. Everything a man does, that makes any kinda sense, anyways, is on accounta he wants some say. That’s why he builds a fence around his land, an’ digs in the ground an’ plants in rows; so every time he looks at that piece a ground he’ll know, maybe he didn’t make it, but he had some say. That’s why he builds a dam or a bridge an’ digs a channel for the water in a crick; so every time he stops the water or goes over it or sees it goin’ where he wants, ’stead a where it went before, he’ll know, maybe he can’t make water, but he can have some say. That’s why he fears the wind, why when it’s dark an’ the wind blows you feel that little shiver up your back—on accounta there ain’t no way a man can have no say over the air. You understand that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He can’t have no say over the sun, either. An’ the truth is, the little bit a say he’s got over ground an’ water don’t mean much. On accounta the winds come an’ the sun burns an’ the floods come an’ wash the ground away—that can happen anytime. An’ even if it don’t, havin’ that little piece a say over a piece a ground or a stretch a water is ’most like havin’ no kinda say at all. On accounta soon as you build your fences an’ plow your land an’ put in your crop, you gotta stay an’ wait for harvest. You got say over the land, but it has say over you. Same with water. An’ a man that spends his time just tryin’ to have say over them things, he ain’t much of a man. That’s how come it useta be women that put in crops, an’ women that went to get the water. So them things ain’t all that important when you get right down to it. Fire is. You see why?”

“No,” I said, feeling uneasy, because I didn’t understand.

“It gives a man say. Gives him
final
say. It lets him destroy. Lets him destroy anything. There ain’t nothin’ in the world that won’t burn or melt or change some way if you get it hot enough, if you got enough fire. An’ when the fire’s gone, there ain’t nothin’ left, for nobody. If a man comes to take your house, you can burn it, an’ he can’t have it. You can burn your crops. You do the same to his. You can get things right down to where they was to start with, down to ground an’ air an’ water an’ sun. Now, that ain’t much say, an’ it ain’t the best kinda say, but it’s bettern havin’ no say at all. Because a man with no say is an animal. So a man has to be able to make a fire, has to know how to make it in the wind an’ the rain an’ the dark. When he can do that, he can have some say.”

I nodded.

“We’ll start tomorrow mornin’,” he said. “We’ll start in the stove, where it’s easy. Then we’ll go on. ’Fore we’re done, you’ll know how to make a fire anyplace, anytime. Then you’ll have say.”

“Will that make me a man?” I said.

“No,” he had said. “Nothin’
makes
you a man. It means you can be a man. If you decide you want to.”

The cabin had closed in around me. The darkness hung there, pushed back only a little way by the light of the lantern, and in the darkness, at the very limits of my vision, lurked the walls. I could not see them, but I knew they were there; I could hear them. They took the sounds of our past breathing—his an uneven wheezing, mine a series of short, hard inhalations and exhalations, too rapid and too shallow by half—and sent them back to merge with the sounds of our present breathing. The result was something more than an echo, something less than a clear reverberation, a dark and clotted sound that grew and grew and grew until I could not listen to it and I could not ignore it; until I could not do anything but accept it and try to keep my mind on what I was doing: making a fire.

I had made the preparations slowly and carefully, because I knew neither of us could afford to be long without heat. I had started with the stove, clearing the grate with an iron poker, then sliding the box of ashes out and carrying them outside and spreading them along the path. Then I had cut wood, chunks of hardwood for lasting heat, slabs of pine for faster burning, strips of kindling. And then I had prepared the tinder, twisting sheets of old newspaper into tight wands.

Now I laid the tinder in the firebox, keeping it an open, crisscross pattern. On top of it I built a fragile edifice of kindling and small pieces of wood. Then I went to the shelf and got the old, rusted coffee can in which he had always kept his matches. I found it there, in precisely the same spot it had always occupied, and as I pried the lid off with fingers turned to ice I wondered how many days’ worth of minutes he had saved in all the years of putting the can back, and how much longer it would make any difference. But I put the can back on the shelf before I lit my fire. The smell of phosphorus burnt my nostrils as I maneuvered the match into the stove. I watched as the fire caught the dry newspaper and began to devour the records of the goings on in the County three months back, and I wondered if some unimaginative scholar in some unimaginable future would have given his eyeteeth for the very bit of newspaper I had burned. Historians think that way, losing sleep over documents that they deem precious, but which, in the evaluation of people who have reason to know, are most useful as tinder, or mattress stuffing, or papier-mâché. I was burning sacred primary source material; but it was heat that mattered right then, not history.

He coughed again, and I slid the lid back on the stove to make sure no smoke leaked out. He was asleep, if you could call it sleep; the pain of each breath was written on his face, and it could not have been normal sleep, or the pain would have awakened him. I turned away, lifted the lamp, and examined his shelves. There was nothing much there. He had not canned as much as he usually did. Still, there were mason jars of beans and corn and carrots, two or three of peaches and pears, one of applesauce, a couple of venison. Enough for a stew; I wouldn’t have to climb the slope to get food. I put the lantern down and checked the fire. The flame was catching the larger wood, and the metal of the stove itself was beginning to groan with the agony of uneven expansion. I slid a few larger pieces of pine into the blaze and closed the stove again, adjusted the drafts, then got the two water pails from the packing crate on which they stood, and went out.

The sky was fully light now, and the woods were silent. I moved through the underbrush, making little noise. He had taught me how to move like that, swiftly and silently, taking me to the pine woods, heading off in what seemed to me a random direction but which never was, eventually leaving me stumbling along trying to keep up and be quiet at the same time and failing miserably at both. Inevitably I would lose him, and would stand in the midst of the forest, dark trees rising on either side, listening to the pounding of my heart as I realized that I was alone on the far side of the Hill. It was then, at those times, that I learned the most. Not woodcraft, really. Or perhaps a true form of woodcraft: to bring my breathing under control; to still my own fear; to be methodical; to accept my limitations and compensate. I could not move quietly, but I could stand quietly and watch and listen, and when he came back for me, as he always did, I could sense him. I learned to reconstruct the man from the subtle whisper of cloth on cloth, the tiny clink of a buckle. And then I would turn in the right direction and find, as often as not, that my eyes had grown used to the dimness, that I could actually see him, and I would say to him, my voice quiet with triumph, “If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake,
sneak
.”

That had been early on. In time I had learned how to move in near-silence, although I never attained the total quiet and ghostly grace that accompanied his movements. One day he had looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You hunt jest like your daddy done. Could be, if you was to put the time on it, you could be as good as him.” He paused. “Mebbe better.”

“Not better,” I said. He looked at me and shrugged. “What the hell. Ain’t no man the best there is at everything, not even Mose, an’ he come as close to bein’ the best at anything worth worryin’ about as any man I ever knowed. There was even some things Mose just couldn’t do. It took Mose a damn long time to figure out how to die, for one thing. He tried to kill hisself in more different ways than any man I ever knowed. He didn’t call it that, he called it havin’ a good time, but tryin’ to kill hisself was what it was. When they come an’ told me he was dead, all I could think was, damn, Mose finely got the hang of it.” He had been gazing off into space, but suddenly he became aware of me. “You mind me talkin’ about your daddy that way?”

I shrugged. “You knew him better than I did.”

“You want I should to stop?”

“No,” I had said. “I want to hear.”

That was the way it had been then; I always wanted to hear about Moses Washington, about what he had said and what he had done, about the adventures that had taken him, and Old Jack Crawley, and Uncle Josh White, tearing across the mountains pursued by lawmen and irate fathers and angry farmers. About the time Moses Washington had somehow managed to get a contract to supply the detachment of soldiers that was stationed in the Town during the First World War—God knows why—with “drinking water” and had instead delivered seven wagonloads of second-rate moonshine for which the government unquestioningly paid; about the time he had convinced the local sheriff that three Revenue agents were Southern moonshiners intent on expanding operations and got them run out of town; about the time he had kept Old Jack Crawley out of shotgun matrimony by loudly proclaiming that the child was his—which could have been true—and that he wanted to marry the girl and give the child a name—which was certainly not true—but she swore she would rather mother a bastard than marry a son of a bitch; about the time he had faced a three-hundred-pound farmer who was armed with a double-barreled shotgun and intent to do bodily harm and had reduced him to tears and apoplexy simply by repeating every threat the man made as a question while grinning like an idiot; about the time he had been hailed as a hero because he had gone up onto a burning mountain and rescued a group of high school boys who had been pressed into service to fight the fire and who had somehow got cut off—that was the official version; the true story, according to Old Jack, was that Moses Washington had had a cache of his best up on that mountain, and had agreed to lead the boys to safety only on condition that they carry the whiskey down. The stories were endless, and I had never tired of them, at least not for years. No; I had never tired of them. But somewhere along the line it had occurred to me that the stories were not just stories. They were something else: clues. The stories had changed then, it seemed. And Moses Washington, a decade dead by that time, had changed. And I had changed. And none of the changes had been for the better.