Harvest

FICTION Harvest Silas D. House CLAY HAD BEEN on the mountain since before daylight, and still he could not bring himself to do it. He held up the shotgun, calmed his nervous breathing, and focused on the bead. The trigger was cold and hard, blood was drumming in his ears, and despite the metallic air of autumn, sweat popped out on his forehead. He knew how much depended upon his unsteady finger. A movement soft as a breath and a shot would echo out across the hollow—the squirrel would tumble down through chilled air to find its death among golden leaves. The squirrel might as well have been a little child, perched up there on the thick tree limb, because he could not kill it. He did not possess this power. He brought down the gun, tucked it beneath this arm and took a long satisfying breath. He was ashamed of his timidness, but not unthankful for it, and decided to stop this hunt good and proper. He found a scarred hickory with roots bursting out of the ground at its base, and settled within its hard, round arms. He fished down into his coveralls for a cigarette and lit one hungrily. There was nothing but the sound of falling leaves, like women whispering among the trees. The old mountain gave no voice, and neither the damp cliffs nor the mist made a sound. He admired the death of the leaves as they fell around him, blurring his view. They had held on since spring, and now they gave up, floating down with the grace of feathers on a windless day. They drifted to the ground in fiery quilts, patchworks of gold and red and orange. It was easy to forget the rest of the world, sitting on a mountain like that, and he quickly did so. It was early morning, and even though the sun had been up for more than an hour, it had not offered much light or warmth. The gray sky churned above him like a living thing. The mist spread itself out over the mountain, and it seemed to Clay that it did not part to move around him or the trees, but burned right through them. He listened for the sizzle of cool touching hot. With one swift motion he stubbed out the cigarette and ground it down into the dark soil. He wanted to breathe nothing but this damp, cold air. He reckoned if he sucked in enough of that, it might 45 eat away all his feelings of guilt and hate. Air like that could cure anything. He put his head back against the hard truck of the hickory, closed his eyes, and imagined his mother's ghost moving through his body. That was what he had always considered the mist to be. It was the only thing he saw every morning of his life, the only constant he could always depend on. A gunshot rang out from across the ridges, seeming to tear through the treetops above his head. It bounced off the cliffs lining the valley and offered proof that his uncle, Gabe, had killed another one, since he never missed. Gabe would be disappointed because none of Clay's bullets had been spent. He would know that Clay had wasted the morning reading the veins of leaves, tasting the air, looking more at the moving sky than at the populated tree-limbs. Clay was twenty years old now, and he really didn't care what Gabe thought anymore. He wondered why his uncle couldn't see that Clay's refusal to hunt might have stemmed from seeing his mother dead and bleeding in the snow. That was Clay's excuse, anyway. Gabe and Clay had never been like creatures, and the older they got, the more obvious this fact became. Sitting in the crooks of the hickory, Clay remembered realizing this for the first time, when he was ten years old. "You know this path, now don't you?" Gabe asked him that day, eyeing the mountain. "Why, yeah. Travel it everyday." "Well, you go on down there and I'm going up this ridge. Now walk easy...