Burning Bright - By Ron Rash Page 0,2

Store. As he rode he remembered the morning six years ago when Joel dropped his bowl of oatmeal on the floor. Careless, but twelve-year-olds did careless things. It was part of being a child. Edna made the boy eat the oatmeal off the floor with his spoon. “Don’t do it,” Mary had told her younger brother, but he had, whimpering the whole time. Mary, who was sixteen, eloped two weeks later. “I’ll never come back, not even to visit,” a note left on the kitchen table said. Mary had been true to her word.

As Jacob rode into Boone, he saw the truck the savings and loan had repossessed from him parked by the courthouse. It was a vehicle made for hauling crops to town, bringing back salt blocks and fertilizer and barbed wire, but he’d figured no farmer could have afforded to buy it at auction. Maybe a store owner or county employee, he supposed, someone who still used a billfold instead of a change purse like the one he now took a nickel from after tying his horse to the hitching post. Jacob entered the store. He nodded at the older men, then laid his coin on the counter. Erwin Mast handed him last Sunday’s Raleigh News.

“Don’t reckon there’s any letters?” Jacob asked.

“No, nothing this week,” Erwin said, though he could have added, “or the last month or last year.” Joel was in the navy, stationed somewhere in the Pacific. Mary lived with her husband and her own child on a farm in Haywood County, sixty miles away but it could have been California for all the contact Jacob and Edna had with her.

Jacob lingered by the counter. When the old men paused in their conversation, he told them about the eggs.

“And you’re sure it ain’t a dog?” Sterling Watts asked.

“Yes. There wasn’t a bit of splatter or shell on the straw.”

“Rats will eat a egg,” Erwin offered from behind the counter.

“There’d still be something left, though,” Bascombe Lindsey said.

“They’s but one thing it can be,” Sterling Watts said with finality.

“What’s that,” Jacob asked.

“A big yaller rat snake. They’ll swallow two or three eggs whole and leave not a dribble of egg.”

“I’ve heard such myself,” Bascombe agreed. “Never seen it but heard of it.”

“Well, one got in my henhouse,” Sterling said. “And it took me near a month to figure out how to catch the damn thing.”

“How did you?” Jacob asked.

“Went fishing,” Sterling said.

That night Jacob hoed in his cornfield till dark. He ate his supper, then went to the woodshed and found a fishhook. He tied three yards of line to it and went to the henhouse. The bantam had one egg under her. Jacob took the egg and made as small a hole as possible with the barb. He slowly worked the whole hook into the egg, then tied the line to a nail head behind the nesting box. Three yards, Watson had said. That way the snake would swallow the whole egg before a tight line set the hook.

“I ain’t about to go out there come morning and deal with no snake,” Edna said when he told her what he’d done. She sat in the ladderback rocking chair, her legs draped by a quilt. He’d made the chair for her to sit in when she’d been pregnant with Joel. The wood was cherry, not the most practical for furniture, but he’d wanted it to be pretty.

“I’ll deal with it,” Jacob said.

For a few moments he watched her sew, the fine blue thread repairing the binding of the Bear’s Claw quilt. Edna had worked since dawn, but she couldn’t stop even now. Jacob sat down at the kitchen table and spread out the newspaper. On the front page Roosevelt said things were getting better, but the rest of the news argued otherwise. Strikers had been shot at a cotton mill. Men whose crime was hiding in boxcars to search for work had been beaten with clubs by lawmen and hired railroad goons.

“What you claimed this morning about me running off Joel and Mary,” Edna said, her needle not pausing as she spoke, “that was a spiteful thing to say. Those kids never went hungry a day in their lives. Their clothes was patched and they had shoes and coats.”

He knew he should let it go, but the image of Hartley’s knife opening the hound’s throat had snared in his mind.

“You could have been easier on them.”

“The world’s a hard place,” Edna replied. “There was need for them