Burning Bright

24 Burning Bright RON RASH fiction 25 After the third fire in two weeks, there was less talk on the TV and radio stations about careless campers or teenagers stupid enough to think torching a national forest a harmless prank. Not three fires, the parksuperintendentandcountysheriffbelieved,especiallyafter rangers had begun writing down tag numbers and helicopters hovered over the forest looking for more than pot plants. Rewards had been offered and decade-long prison sentences threatened as well. Amiracle the fires had burned only a few acres, the superintendent said, a miracle less likely to occur again with each additional rainless day. Marcie listened to the noon weather forecast, then turned off the TV and went out on the porch. She looked at the sky and nothing belied the prediction of more hot dry weather. The worst drought in a decade, the weatherman had said, showing a ten-year chart of August rainfalls. As if Marcie needed a chart when all she had to do was look at her tomatoes shriveled on the vines, the corn shucks gray and papery as hornets’ nests. She stepped off the porch and dragged a length of hose into the garden, its rubber the sole bright green among the rows. Marcie turned on the water and watched it splatter against the dust. Hopeless, but she slowly walked the rows, holding the hose just below the metal mouth, as though it were a snake that could bite her. When she finished she looked at the sky a last time and went inside. She thought of Carl, wondering if he’d be late again. She thought about the cigarette lighter he carried in his front pocket, a wedding gift she’d bought him in Gatlinburg. When her first husband, Arthur, had died two falls earlier of a heart attack, the men in the church had come the following week to cut trees on the ridge and stack them on the porch. Their doing so had been more an act of homage to Arthur than one of concern for her, or so Marcie realized the following September, when the men did not come, making clear that the church and the community it represented believed others needed their time and help more than a woman whose husband had left behind fifty acres of land, a paid-off house, and money in the bank. Carl showed up instead. “Heard you might need some firewood cut,” he told her, but she did not unlatch the screen door when he stepped onto the porch, even after he explained that Preacher Carter had suggested he come. He stepped back to the porch edge, his deep-blue eyes lowered so as not to meet hers. Trying to set her at ease, she was 26 Ecotone: reimagining place sure, appear less threatening to a woman living alone. It was something a lot of other men wouldn’t have done, wouldn’t even have thought to do. Marcie asked for a phone number and he gave her one. “I’ll call you tomorrow if I need you,” she said, and watched him drive off in his battered black pickup, a chainsaw and red five-gallon gas can rattling in the truck bed. She phoned Preacher Carter after Carl left. “He’s new in the area, from down near the coast,” the minister told Marcie. “He came by the church one afternoon, claimed he’d do good work for fair wages.” “So you sent him up here not knowing hardly anything about him?” Marcie asked Preacher Carter. “With me living alone.” “Florence Harper wanted some trees cut and I sent him out there,” Preacher Carter replied. “He cut some trees for Andy West too. They both said he did a crackerjack job. Worked hard and charged a fair price.” The minister paused. “I think the fact he came by the church to ask about work speaks in his favor. He’s got a good demeanor about him too. Serious and soft-spoken, lets his work do his talking for him.” She called Carl that night and told him he was hired. Marcie cut off the spigot and looked at the sky a last time. She went inside...