Burning Bright: Stories by Ron Rash Page B

put up the groceries and placed a chuck roast on the stove to simmer. She did a load of laundry and swept off the front porch, her eyes glancing down the road for Carl’s pickup. At six o’clock she turned on the news. Another fire had been set, no more than thirty minutes earlier. Fortunately, a hiker was close by and saw the smoke, even glimpsed a pickup through the trees. No tag number or make. All the hiker knew for sure was that the pickup was black.
    Carl did not get home until almost seven. Marcie heard the truck coming up the road and began setting the table. Carl took off his boots on the porch and came inside, his face grimy with sweat, bits of sawdust in his hair and on his clothes. He nodded at her and went into the bathroom. As he showered, Marcie went out to the pickup. In the truck bed was the chain saw, beside it plastic bottles of twenty-weight engine oil and the red five-gallon gasoline can. When she lifted the can, it was empty.
    They ate in silence except for Carl’s usual compliment on the meal. Marcie watched him, waiting for a sign of something different in his demeanor, some glimpse of anxiety or satisfaction.
    “There was another fire today,” she finally said.
    “I know,” Carl answered, not looking up from his plate.
    She didn’t ask how he knew, when the radio in his truck didn’t work. But he could have heard it at Burrell’s as well.
    “They say whoever set it drove a black pickup.”
    Carl looked at her then, his blue eyes clear and depthless.
    “I know that too,” he said.
    After supper Carl sat on the porch while Marcie switched on the TV. She kept turning away from the movie she watched to look through the window. Carl sat in the wooden deck chair, only the back of his head and shoulders visible, less so as the minutes passed and his body merged with the gathering dusk. He stared toward the high mountains of the Smokies, and Marcie had no idea what, if anything, he was thinking about. He’d already smoked his cigarette, but she waited to see if he would take the lighter from his pocket, flick it, and stare at the flame a few moments. But he didn’t. Not this night. When she cut off the TV and went to the back room, the deck chair scraped as Carl pushed himself out of it. Then the click of metal as he locked the door.
    When he settled into bed beside her, Marcie continued to lie with her back to him. He moved closer, placed his hand between her head and pillow, and slowly, gently, turned her head so he could kiss her. As soon as his lips brushed hers, she turned away,moved so his body didn’t touch hers. She fell asleep but woke a few hours later. Sometime in the night she had resettled in the bed’s center, and Carl’s arm now lay around her, his knees tucked behind her knees, his chest pressed against her back.
    As she lay awake, Marcie remembered the day her younger daughter left for Cincinnati, joining her sister there. I guess it’s just us now, Arthur had said glumly. She’d resented those words, as if Marcie were some grudgingly accepted consolation prize. She’d also resented how the words acknowledged that their daughters had always been closer to Arthur, even as children. In their teens, the girls had unleashed their rancor, the shouting and tears and grievances, on Marcie. The inevitable conflicts between mothers and daughters and Arthur’s being the only male in the house—that was surely part of it, but Marcie also believed there’d been some difference in temperament as innate as different blood types.
    Arthur had hoped that one day the novelty of city life would pale and the girls would come back to North Carolina. But the girls stayed up north and married and began their own families. Their visits and phone calls became less and less frequent. Arthur was hurt by that, hurt deep, though never saying so. It seemed he aged more quickly, especially after he’d had a stent placed in an artery. After that Arthur did less around the farm,until finally he no