Burning Bright: Stories by Ron Rash Read Free Book Online Page A

toward the caretaker’s shack. He slides up his sleeve and checks his watch. “One fifteen. We making good time,” he says.
    We start down the hill, weaving our way through the stones laid out like a maze. Then a cloud smudges the moon and there’s not enough light from the stars to see our own feet. We stop and I have a worrisome thought of something holding that cloud there the rest of the night, me and Wesley bumping into stones and losing all direction, trapped in that graveyard till the dawn when anyone on the road could see us and the truck too.
    But the moon soon enough wipes clear the cloud and we walk on, not more than fifty yards from the caretaker’s place when we stop. We’re close enough to see the light that’s been glowing is his back-porch light. Wesley flares his lighter at the grave to check it’s the right one and I see the stone is for both Lieutenant Hutchinson and his wife. His name is on the left so it’s easy enough to figure that’s the side he’s laying on.
    “Eighteen and sixty-four,” says Wesley, moving the lighter closer to the stone. “I figure a officer killed during the war would for sure be buried in his uniform.”
    I get the shovel and pickax in my right hand and lean them toward Wesley.
    “Your turn,” I say.
    “I was thinking you could get it started good and then I’d take over,” he says.
    “I’ll do most of it,” I say, “but I ain’t doing it all.”
    Wesley sees I aim not to budge and reaches for the pickax. He does it in a careless kind of way and the pickax’s spike end clangs against the shovel blade. A dog starts barking down at the caretaker’s place and I’m ready to make a run for the truck but Wesley shushes me.
    “Give it a minute,” he says.
    We stand there still as the stones around us. No light inside the shack comes on, and the dog shuts up directly.
    “We’re okay,” Wesley says, and he starts breaking ground with the pickax. He’s working in fourth gear and I know he’s wanting this done quick as I do.
    “I’ll loosen the dirt and you shovel it away,” Wesley gasps, veins sticking out on his neck like there’s a noose around it. “We can get it out faster that way.”
    Funny you didn’t think of that till it was your turn to dig, I’m thinking, but that dog has set loose the fear in me more than any time since we drove up. I take the shovel and we’re making the dirt fly, Wesley doing more work in fifteen minutes than he’s done in twelve years on the road crew. And me staying right with him, bothof us going so hard it’s not till we hear a growl that we turn around and see we’re not alone.
    “What are you boys up to?” the old man asks, waggling his shotgun at us. The dog is haunched up beside him, big and bristly and looking like it’s just waiting for the word to pour its teeth into us.
    “I said, what are you boys up to?” the old man asks us again.
    What kind of answer to give that question is as far beyond me as the moon up above. For a few moments it’s beyond Wesley as well but soon enough he opens his mouth, working up some words like you’d work up a good spit of tobacco.
    “We didn’t know there to be a law against it,” Wesley says, which is about the stupidest thing he could have come up with.
    The old man chuckles.
    “They’s several, and you’re going to be learning all of them soon as I get the sheriff up here.”
    I’m thinking to make a run for it before that, take my chances with the dog and the old man’s aim if he decides to shoot, because to my way of thinking time in the jailhouse would be worse than anything that dog or old man could do to me.
    “You ain’t needing to call the sheriff,” Wesley says.
    Wesley steps out of the two-foot hole we’ve dug, gets up closer to the old man. The dog growls deepdown in its throat, a sound that says don’t wander no closer unless you want to limp out of this graveyard. Wesley pays the dog some mind and doesn’t go any nearer.
    “Why is