Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,1

for work. But it was hard to believe any of them had less than Hartley and his family.

When Hartley saw Jacob he nodded but did not slow his pace. They were neither friends nor enemies, neighbors only in the sense that Jacob and Edna were the closest folks down the cove, though closest meant a half mile. Hartley had come up from Swain County eight years ago to work at the sawmill. The child had been a baby then, the wife seemingly decades younger than the cronish woman who walked beside the daughter. They would have passed without further acknowledgment except Edna came out on the porch.

“That hound of yours,” she said to Hartley, “is it a egg-sucker?” Maybe she wasn’t trying to be accusatory, but the words sounded so.

Hartley stopped in the road and turned toward the porch. Another man would have set the pokes down, but Hartley did not. He held them as if calculating their heft.

“What’s the why of you asking that?” he said. The words were spoken in a tone that was neither angry nor defensive. It struck Jacob that even the man’s voice had been worn down to a bare-boned flatness.

“Something’s got in our henhouse and stole some,” Edna said. “Just the eggs, so it ain’t a fox nor weasel.”

“So you reckon my dog.”

Edna did not speak, and Hartley set the pokes down. He pulled a barlow knife from his tattered overalls. He softly called the hound and it sidled up to him. Hartley got down on one knee, closed his left hand on the scruff of the dog’s neck as he settled the blade against its throat. The daughter and wife stood perfectly still, their faces blank as bread dough.

“I don’t think it’s your dog that’s stealing the eggs,” Jacob said.

“But you don’t know for sure. It could be,” Hartley said, the hound raising its head as Hartley’s index finger rubbed the base of its skull.

Before Jacob could reply the blade whisked across the hound’s windpipe. The dog didn’t cry out or snarl. It merely sagged in Hartley’s grip. Blood darkened the road.

“You’ll know for sure now,” Hartley said as he stood up. He lifted the dog by the scruff of the neck, walked over to the other side of the road and laid it in the weeds. “I’ll get it on the way back this evening,” he said, and picked up the pokes. Hartley began walking and his wife and daughter followed.

“Why’d you have to say something to him,” Jacob said when the family had disappeared down the road. He stared at the place in the weeds where flies and yellow jackets began to gather.

“How’d I know he’d do such a thing?” Edna said.

“You know how proud a man he is.”

Jacob let those words linger. In January when two feet of snow had shut nearly everyone in, Jacob had gone up the skid trail on horseback, a salted pork shoulder strapped to the saddle. “We could be needing that meat soon enough ourselves,” Edna had said, but he’d gone anyway. When Jacob got to the cabin he’d found the family at the plank table eating. The wooden bowls before them held a thick liquid lumped with a few crumbs of fatback. The milk pail hanging over the fire was filled with the same gray-colored gruel. Jacob had set the pork shoulder on the table. The meat had a deep wood-smoke odor, and the woman and child swallowed every few seconds to conceal their salivating. “I ain’t got no money to buy it,” Hartley said. “So I’d appreciate you taking your meat and leaving.” Jacob had left, but after closing the cabin door he’d laid the pork on the front stoop. The next morning Jacob had found the meat on his own doorstep.

Jacob gazed past Hartley’s dog, across the road to the acre of corn where he’d work till suppertime. He hadn’t hoed a single row yet but already felt tired all the way to his bones.

“I didn’t want that dog killed,” Edna said. “That wasn’t my intending.”

“Like it wasn’t your intending for Joel and Mary to leave and never darken our door again,” Jacob replied. “But it happened, didn’t it.”

He turned and walked to the woodshed to get his hoe.

The next morning the dog was gone from the roadside and more eggs were missing. It was Saturday, so Jacob rode the horse down to Boone, not just to get his newspaper but to talk to the older farmers who gathered at Mast’s General