‘Bright’s Passage’
By JOSH RITTER
(Excerpt)
1
The
baby boy wriggled in his arms, a warm, wet mass, softer than a goat and hairier
than a rabbit kit. He held a blade over a candle flame for some time, then cut
the cord and rubbed the baby with a wetted shirt. When this was done he laid
the child in a basket near the fire and then stood at the head of the bed and
looked down at his wife’s face a long moment. Abruptly, he bent low and placed
his head near her mouth, staying all the while stone silent, waiting for some
whisper from her lips. At last he stood straight once more, seeming to
disappear into the still blackness of the low rafters as if he had become just
another of the cabin’s shadows. The child began to cry, and he turned to look
at it lying there by the glow of the dying fire.
The man
paced the floor, biting the large front knuckle of his fist. At length he
picked the child up from its basket and lifted the flap of heavy hide over the
doorway, stepping out into the last of the blue twilight as the rising sun
began to gild the topmost trees along the crest of the ridge.
Although
he’d lived in its shadow almost his whole life, he stood there watching the
sleeping leafy hulk closely as if for the first time. The forest was in the
full trembling swell of high summer, the trees clamorous for sunlight,
permitting only a few stray drops of gold to fall between their leaves and onto
the scraggly undergrowth below. The ridge would offer nothing in the way of
hindrance should men take it upon themselves to cross it. He again put his hand
to his mouth and could be seen from the dark of the nearby chestnut tree to
bite down hard on that knob-knuckled, much-abused fist. When the fit had passed
he sat down cross-legged on the ground, his crying baby boy in his lap. The
child’s eyes were shut tightly, but its paw searched the air waveringly for
something until the man put his finger down and the little hand grasped it,
held it. The two waited there a while.
By and
by the angel spoke from the darkness by the chestnut tree. “She’s gone.”
“Course
she’s gone! What am I doing out here with the baby if she ain’t gone?”
There
was silence.
“Yeah,”
he said after a while, his voice catching, “she’s gone.”
“That’s
how it had to be.”
“You
didn’t tell me that she had to die,” the man said accusingly. “You said to do
whatever you told me to do and you’d keep us safe . . .”
The
silence continued for so long that he knew the angel would not answer him, but
he continued to sit there anyway, one arm holding the child close while the
other arm worked a stick into the packed dirt. The child had red hair and cried
and cried.
Nearby,
a hutch held several hens clucking pointlessly at one another, and atop the
hutch, white against the still-dark trees, stood the she-goat. Without his
mother’s rifle he had not been able to hunt that winter, and he had been forced
to slaughter the goat’s kids, and finally the billy, one by one. Now the white
little widow stood atop the hutch all day every day, coming down to the dirt
only to forage or to be milked.
Even
when his wife was hugely pregnant she had milked the she-goat to keep the milk
flowing, but yesterday morning her water had broken before she’d had the
chance, and the ensuing afternoon and evening had been long and frightful. Now
the goat’s udder was strained to bursting. He fetched the basket from the
cabin, set it on a stump, and laid his son inside it. Then, kneeling by the
stream, he washed his hands clean of blood and grime. He rose with much fatigue
and made his way slowly across the bedraggled stretch of dirt to the hutch,
lifted the goat down and squeezed the milk into a bucket.
When
the bottom of the bucket was covered with milk, he took it to the baby. Dipping
his finger in the froth, he held it to the boy’s suckling mouth. He sat and fed
the baby like this as the last of the dark was drawn away and the dawning sky
was revealed, pink and leafed with clouds. When the baby was done eating it
seemed to crumble in upon itself, and for a terrible moment he thought that the
infant had died, until, by the movement of its tiny fingers, it became clear
that the boy was only sleeping.
He went
inside and pulled a small black lacquer box off the shelf and from this box
removed an ivory comb, yellowed with age and impossibly delicate. The comb’s
handle was carved in the shape of a kneeling woman, her hands folded in prayer.
She wore a long gown with flowers on the fringe, and her hair was plaited into
two flowing tresses on either side of her face beneath a tiny crown. It was
ancient, this comb, having belonged to his mother and before that to a Queen of
England.
He sat
near the head of the bed and began to comb the tangles from his wife’s hair.
She had thrashed all night and the odor of stale sweat hung in the room, mixing
with the plummy tang of blood. He spoke softly to her and touched her face
often as he ran the comb through her hair, parting it at the scalp and
arranging it on either side down her shoulders like the woman on the comb. Then
he straightened her body in the bed, arranging her arms across her breasts so
that her palms met in an attitude of prayer.
When
this was done he took a dead black ember from the fire and, using a nail, mixed
it with some of the goat’s milk in a tin cup. He pulled the Bible off the
shelf, lifted the age-slackened cover of the heavy book, and, using the nail as
a quill, beneath the names of long-dead others wrote:
Rachel
Bright
1900–1920
Wife of Henry Bright
1900–1920
Wife of Henry Bright
He
lifted the nail from the page and surveyed the grisly black scrawl of the
epitaph. Outside, the horse began to slap its tail against the trunk of the
chestnut tree. He dipped the nail once more in the ink and added:
Mother
to the Future King of Heaven
When
this was done he held the Bible open on his knee and read the other names, but,
except for his mother and father’s and his aunt Rebecca’s, they were all
strangers to him. As he read, his hand worried absently through the pages and
pulled a thistle from between the leaves where it had marked, like new grass
over a grave, some passage that had been special to his mother. He looked now
for the page, but it was lost to him, and he threw the thistle to the coals.
He went
to the cabin door and looked out on the child, then gazed up to the hills
again, watching them closely. Nothing but the quantity of the light upon the
canvassed green trees had changed. He retrieved the long-handled shovel that he
had last used for mucking out the chicken hutch and walked beneath the dark
spread of the chestnut tree to where his horse stood.
“Now git,” he said. The horse was
standing directly above where he wished to bury his wife. “Now git,” he said
again, and pushed himself against the horse’s shoulder.
“We
have to go from here,” said the horse. “We have to take the Future King of
Heaven and leave.”
“Why?”
“That
will be made known to you in due time, Henry Bright. First we have to leave
this place. You will burn it down.” The horse bent to the patch of timothy
grass and pulled up on it, munching with a broad satisfaction.
“Where
are we gonna live if we burn it down?” Bright watched the plate-shaped muscles
of the big jaws working.
“That
will be answered once we leave,” said the angel.
Bright’s
eyes wandered over the cabin he had grown up in. His father had gone away to
the coal mines to earn money before Henry was born and had died in a cave-in,
leaving his wife to raise their son amid a wilderness of tendrils and gnats
that seemed always on the verge of devouring the little house. Much later,
after his mother died and Henry had gone off to the War, the chimney had
returned itself to the land, becoming a tunnel of vines and birds’ nests so
thick that the first time he had tried to cook over the fire after he came
back, the smoke had driven him outside and the mourning doves had thrown
themselves from the eaves to the ground in confused jumbles. Sometimes, as they
lay in bed at night, it had seemed to Rachel and him as if the whole cabin was
hurtling at great speed through the dark, so loudly did the wind wail through
the chinks in the caulking.
“Why do
you want me to burn it down?” he asked again. “That’s our house. We ain’t got
any other house.”
“Then
stay here — ”
“My boy
needs a roof over his head.”
“ — and
let your son die.”
Bright
shoved the animal again, to little effect. The horse stood its ground. “We can
leave, angel, but I ain’t gonna burn it down!” he yelled. “It’s all I got
left!”
On the
stump behind him, the baby began to cry. Bright whirled around, shielding his
own tears from the horse’s view. He stood with his back to the angel for a long
time, his shoulders jerking violently at first and then slowing to a composed
rise and fall. He ran the back of a hand across his face and looked at the
cabin.
“Henry
Bright,” the angel said, finally breaking the silence, “do as I say.”
The
back of Bright’s head fell forward as his chin sank to his chest. “I can’t
believe this,” he said. “All right. All right, I’ll burn it down.”
He ran
a hand across his face again and then, turning back, he gave the horse a final
push and the animal stubbornly relinquished his ground. Then he set about
digging a grave for his wife next to that of his mother. When he was knee-deep
in the ground, he heard the baby begin to cry again, and so he climbed up from
the hole and moved the basket out of the sunlight. He fed the boy with the
goat’s milk again and returned to digging. When he had finished the grave, he
went inside and cut his wife out of her clothes.
Opening
the large trunk, he looked down at what to dress her in. The white dress lay
there, its stiff collar holding up determinedly against desperate age and the
fungal dampness of high July. He reached beneath this garment to where the
slip, with its tiny lace eyelets, waited primly. He had bought the slip for her
in Fells Corner, an extravagant wedding gift that was almost the only thing she
had worn until she was finally too big with child even for it to fit. It glowed
out at him with a spectral whiteness in the ill-lit lowness of the cabin. After
that came the brutal, delicate task of getting her stiffening body into the
garment, but when he was done he again arranged her beautiful hair on either
side of her shoulders, the way he liked it best. Finally, he opened the black
lacquer box once more and removed a length of golden ribbon. He tied it around
her head like a crown and stood up to survey his work.
He’d
dug enough graves to know that she would fit perfectly into this one, but even
so he stood there with her body in his arms, a rack of painful hesitation as he
considered taking a few planks from the cabin in order to build her a box that
would keep her from ending up so dirty.
“There’s
no time!” the horse nickered behind him, as if it knew his mind, which perhaps
it did. “Leave her buried deep and let’s go.”
He sat
at the edge of the grave, his legs hanging into the hole, and dropped her in.
He whispered something down at her, then he stood up and began to shovel in the
dirt as a preacher might baptize someone in frigid water: quickly, to overcome
the shock of the cold. He began to cry again. While he worked, the horse stood
nearby, dark and still, perhaps gone to sleep. He filled the grave and then
knelt, spreading leaves and sticks over the slight mound. The heat was coming
on hard now, and sweat ran over his brow and into his eyes before continuing
down his face and neck in the long, dusty canals that had already been carved
by his tears.
When he
stood up from the grave, he went to the cabin flap and pulled a handful of corn
kernels from a sack hanging just inside the doorway where the animals could not
get at it. Then he stood in the yard near the chickens. Stock-still, his arms
hanging loosely at his sides, he let a few of the kernels fall from between his
fingers. The three birds pecked at the kernels and then looked up, pinning him
against the sky with their tiny black eyes and waiting for more. He chose the
hen he would try for, and when it looked up at him again he let a few more
kernels fall. When he and Rachel had been small, they used to play with the
chicks in the yard of the elderly couple his mother had cooked for. Rachel
liked to hold the little yellow things against the nape of her neck and would
laugh as their feathers tickled her. He would lie very still on his back and
they would see how many she could put on his chest.
The
third time Bright let the kernels fall, the chickens did not look up but busily
went about their feeding. He bent quickly, grabbed the hen by its head, and
broke its neck. The goat watched on without emotion from atop her perch.
He
plucked the body quickly, then went inside and placed it on a spit above the
embers of the dying fire. He brought the baby in and laid it on the bed where
it might survey the room it was born in. Maybe someday the Future King of
Heaven would need to describe his own humble beginnings.
Continues...
Excerpted from
"Bright's Passage" by Josh Ritter. Copyright © 2011 by Josh Ritter.
Excerpted by permission of The Dial Press. All rights reserved. No part of this
excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal
use of visitors to this web site.
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