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

that?” the old man says. “What you offering to make me think I don’t need to call the law?”
    “I got a ten-dollar bill in my wallet that has your name on it,” Wesley says, and I almost laugh at the sass of him. We have a shotgun leveled at us and Wesley’s trying to lowball the fellow.
    “You got to do better than that,” the old man says.
    “Twenty then,” Wesley says. “God’s truth that’s all the money I got on me.”
    The old man ponders the offer a moment.
    “Give me the money,” he says.
    Wesley gets his billfold out, tilts it so the old man can’t see nothing but the twenty he pulls out. He reaches the bill to the old man.
    “You can’t tell nobody about this,” Wesley says. “None but us three knows a thing of it.”
    “Who am I going to spread it to?” the old man says. “In case you’d not noticed, my neighbors ain’t much for conversing.”
    The old man looks the twenty over careful, like he’s figuring it to be counterfeit. Then he folds the bill and puts it in his front pocket.
    “Course you could double that easy enough,” Wesley says, “not do a thing more than let us dig here a while longer.”
    The old man takes in Wesley’s offer but doesn’t commit either way.
    “What are you all grubbing for anyways,” he says, “buried treasure?”
    “Just Civil War things, buckles and such,” Wesley says. “No money in it, just kind of a sentimental thing. My great-great-granddaddy fought Confederate. I’ve always been one to honor them that come before me.”
    “By robbing their graves,” the old man says. “That’s some real honoring you’re doing.”
    “I’m wearing what they can’t no longer wear, bringing it out of the ground to the here and now. Look here,” Wesley says. He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. “I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great-great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause.”
    I’ve never even seen a politician lie better, because Wesley lays all of that out there slick, figuring the old man has no knowing of the buckle’s worth. And that seemed a likely enough thing since I hadn’t the least notion myself till Wesley showed me the prices.
    The old man fetches a flashlight from his coveralls. He lays its light out on the stone. “North Carolina Sixty-fourth,” he reads off the stone. “My folks sided Union,” the old man says, “in this very county. Lots of peopledon’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought Union as Confederate. The Sixty-fourth done a lot of meanness in this county back then. They’d shoot a unarmed man and wasn’t above whipping women. My grandma told me all about it. One of them women they whipped was her own momma. I read up on it some later. That’s how come me to know it was the Sixty-fourth.”
    The old man clicks off his flashlight and stuffs it in his pocket and pulls out an old-timey watch, the kind with a chain on it. He pops it open and reads the hands by moonlight.
    “Two-thirty,” he says. “You fellows go ahead and dig him up. The way I figure it, his soul’s a lot deeper, all the way down in hell.”
    “Give him his twenty dollars,” Wesley says to me.
    I only have sixteen and am about to say so when the old man tells me he don’t want my money.
    “I’ll take enough pleasure just in watching you dig this Hutchinson fellow up. He might have been the one what stropped my great-grandma.”
    The old man steps back a few feet and perches his backside on a flat-topped stone next to where we’re digging. The shotgun’s settled in the crook of his arm.
    “You ain’t needing for that shotgun to be nosed in our direction,” Wesley says. “Them things can go off by accident sometimes.”
    The old man keeps the gun barrel where it is.
    “I don’t think I’ve heard the truth walk your lips yet,” he tells Wesley. “I’ll trust you better with it pointed your way.”
    We