‘Bright’s Passage’ (Excerpt)
By JOSH RITTER
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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