Chapter Four

     The young man stretched his wet shirt back over himself and pulled his shoes on. He stood. The girl came to the shore and sat on the same rock the man had just left. “We heard you hollering the other night, is why I ask,” she said, slipping her finger into the heels of her sneakers to situate inside them. She stretched her thin pink legs out and scratched her shins. “Sounded like someone was dying, but I guess it was none of our business even so. What’s your name?”
     He had been known in the past to yell in his sleep. Doctors told him he suffered from pavor nocturnus, night terrors – episodes during sleep that had seized his body with fear and had not allowed him to waken himself. His mother had seen him contract like a spring sometimes, had other times heard him weeping in his bed. On the worst nights, he’d scream that there were people at the footboard, women, crying and digging their fingernails into his legs, or that he could literally feel his chest prying itself open. He never remembered what had happened, and she never told him what exactly he’d done the night before, or how he’d terrified her until she herself had wept and wept.
      “Jacob,” he said. “Aren’t you freezing?” He rubbed himself with the palms of his hands and looked back over his shoulder at the trailer. “I didn’t figure I was trespassing.”
      “You are a little, I think.”
      “Who owns the place?”
      “Oh, the owners have been dead five years now. My name’s Sadler. Thanks for asking. You’re stepping on history up there, that’s all. You’ve been sleeping on the devil’s mattress, I can tell you that.”

     They walked up the hill together, half-heartedly looking for her dog and whistling every now and then. She used her fingers to whistle and the sound was so piercing that it lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. She propelled herself with the help of the trunks of younger trees, up through the fallen leaves, while he braced himself on his knees and pushed up on the strength of his legs alone. He was well winded by the time they got to the fire pit in the front yard. His shins were both frozen and burning.
      “Can I go in?” she said.
      “Why?”
      “Yes or no.”
      “I guess so.”
     She looked at each step on to the porch with some regard, considering angles, marveling at the damage that can be done to a house with five years gone by unoccupied. She took the handle of the door and pulled it open. The entry was dark and moist, a thin brown dust floating through and around, and she came in with a certain familiarity, moving to the kitchen and looking out the window, down to the bathroom to flush the toilet which didn’t work anymore. She stopped in front of the fish tank and swiped her fingertips down the face of it. She lifted each of the bottles on the windowsill and smiled at the buckshot holes in the wall above the table. She picked up a piece of shot and threw it at him. “I guess you’ve just made yourself at home, haven’t you?”
      “I don’t expect to be here long,” he said.
     She nudged the mattress with her shoe and picked up his pillow and turned it over and threw it back down. “No, I don’t guess you do.”
     She went to the hall closet and opened it. He could tell she knew what she was doing, knew exactly where to look for what she was looking for. She took the stack of pictures from the shelf and went back out to the stoop and sat.
      “This is my grandfather’s house,” she said when he came out behind her. “I spent half my life here before my grandparents died.”
      “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m here because my wife is dead. So.” His voice trailed. He’d said too much.
      “You come up here and live in this because your wife is dead?”
      “Call it paying my respects.”
     She turned to regard the sinking corners of the house, the dead lawn, the roof rotting and bowed under rainfall, mushrooms pushing themselves between the walls and the siding. “Gotcha.”
     The dog, muddy and panting, trotted by a few hundred feet down the driveway and caught her scent and came up to press his nose in her lap. She shook his ears between her fingers and scratched beneath his chin. “This is Bluebeard,” she said.
      “So I figured.” He bent down and held out his fist and the dog lapped its tongue across his knuckles.
     The girl handed Jacob a picture, the one of the people on the stairs, and said, “See, here. That old woman up front is my grandmother, one who used to live here. The bald one on the right is my granddad. That’s me, over beside the porch, with the guitar.”
      “Who are the rest of them?”
      “It’s the congregation of my church, mile or so down the road you came in on. That’s our pastor, Jim Thorne, up on top with the army haircut.” The man with the look in his eyes. The black book he clutched above his belt was the Bible.
      “What are you? Baptists? Methodists?”
     She shifted. “We’re Charismatics." Cleared her throat. "Pentecostals?"

Chapter Three

     Though he didn’t expect to be alive much longer and though he knew it was irrational he set coffee cans behind the front door, which led to the stoop, and the back door, which led to a four-foot drop where a deck used to be, so that he would hear an intruder even though far more likely was that he be killed by a shotgun blast in the morning, while he was eating beans for breakfast, and for the bleak, breathless minute he would remain alive he might see everything in the world except the person who held the gun. He set a beer bottle on the edge of the window in the living room so it would tip if someone jarred the sash.
     He picked up the tooth with a plastic bag over his hand and flicked it out the busted front door, past the porch.

     He dreamed that night that he’d lost all his teeth, and he tried to mash his food into a pulp in order to feed himself, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t feel anything except the ache and shivering of a starving body. His gums were raw and they trickled blood that leaked into his spit and his tongue lashed out of his mouth like it was coated in the skin of old pennies. He woke in the dark and the room around him smelled of rank sweat, of fear, of the decomposition of bodies left too long out in the open without their proper respects having been paid.

     Through a whiskey haze on the drive up, he had promised himself that he would save time to remember the beautiful things about his wife, that he would recall conversations as turning points in their young love, that though he might grow a beard he would otherwise keep his body clean so he would not be an embarrassment to her memory and, he told himself, so that he would not be repulsive when they met in the afterlife. He took his soap and a cloth through the trees to the river and stripped to his bare bones.
     The river this late in the fall came over his limbs like a rumor of serious trouble. He took the cloth to his pinched skin and swabbed it gently back and forth and he watched his cobweb breath leave him in sheets like tracing paper. His knees cracked against each other and his toes curled around the river stones and he lathered soap on himself until he was more skeleton than man. He poured handfuls of water over the crown of his head and rubbed it into his face. When he was done he put his hands against his chest and fell backward.
     He used his dirty shirt to dry himself off and sat in his jeans on a boulder at the edge of the water. He tried to guess the distance to the far side from here, the distance to the bend in the river’s course to the north, the distance to the farm and the dogs he’d given away.

     When she came around the bend, the girl was barely even there, a firefly skimming across the water. Her yellow hair burned through the gray clouds behind her like a flare in a rainstorm, and as she came closer he saw that she was walking through the middle of the water as though it were the deepest part of July. The current wrapped her white dress around her hips and settled it in front of her. She walked with her hands open and her palms hovering over the surface of the water.
     A dog’s barking echoed through the forest and she stopped where she was, still a hundred yards or more downstream from where the young man sat, and surveyed the hillside back and forth. The dog barked again and she turned backward to face the current and looked behind her for its whereabouts. The young man leaned back to cover his shape with river brush and birch saplings. He blinked and the girl was moving again.
     She walked like a flag in a lazy wind, used her arms to steady herself but did it with the grace of a priest and no sign of panic in her muscles. Her dress clung to her body like she’d swam right in it. When she came close enough to talk to rather than shout at, he could see she had a pair of sneakers slung over her shoulder, tied to each other by the laces, and that her dress was patterned on its low collar with the image of sunflowers. He eased himself sideways behind the brush and waited for her to pass.
     She was wet with river water. It slid down the tiny blonde hairs on her cheeks and dripped from the back of her hair. It darkened her shoes, pulled her veins to her skin, and collected in slow drops in the dimple of her lip. The young man was ten feet away from her. He looked on her like she was the last little bit of beauty the world had left for him to see. When she was right in front of him, she turned her head like a hungry bird and fixed herself right on his being. His body collapsed in on itself like paper in a fire.
     She crossed a hand in front of her belly and wrapped the other one around it, an attempt at modesty that served in fact to admit him to the paler fields of her skin on the undersides of her arms and in the bend of her elbows. For several moments he thought she may be a ghost, a lost life searching the hills for the lover that killed her or the baby that had been swept away in the current. When she opened her mouth to speak his heart turned backward and beat toward his lungs.
      “Have you seen a yellow dog?” she said.
     He thought about what it would take to tell her he hadn’t. He thought about the mechanics of speech, the movement of the tongue and the vibration of the vocal chords, and when he tried to operate his voice nothing came of it.
      “Excuse me,” she said. “Have you seen a big stinky old dog?”
     Nothing.
      “You ain’t dead, are you?”
     Yes, he thought. “No, I’m not dead.”
      “That’s a relief. His name’s Bluebeard. He doesn’t do this, most times.” Hands to her hips, eyes around the world.
      “I haven’t seen him.”
      She moved to face him. Her dress melted across her stomach and buckled upwards where it met the water. “You the guy been sleeping in the trailer up there?”

Chapter Two

     All of this land had once been the province of Cherokee Indians, had become that of the Scots-Irish – those hard-nosed homesteaders who took the mountains upward and shook the dust out of them and used it to flavor their stew. The woods had been cover for bootleggers and thieves and were now the dominion of pot growers, true hippies, entrepreneurs who lived in log cabins with their curtains drawn and who walked for miles to reap their fields.
     The fire tower had sunken into the sod enough that moss had grown up its legs and covered the underside of the platform. The young man pushed off the cross brackets in a lame attempt to check the structure’s strength, his hands returning wet and cold. In one move he swung himself up onto the third rung of the ladder and scaled it despite its old nails groaning inside the wood. He ignored the flimsy, waterlogged caution signs and came up onto the platform on his knees and went silent for a second while his eyes adjusted to the shade. Sunlight came in through the corners where the boarded windows had expanded with weather and he shuffled across the floor and pushed at a side. When it budged he lifted his boot and kicked it and its plank came unhinged and fell twenty feet to the ground and rolled on its side halfway to the river. The pink sun came into the tower and covered his chest and he squinted his eyes and the building swayed on its legs through a gust of wind from up and over the hill.
     He sat with his knees bent over the side of the tower’s door and took a picture of his wife from his wallet. She was resting on a suitcase in the airport in Seattle, her arms around her knees, her thin brown legs in shorts dirtied from a week of camping on Bainbridge Island, looking at his camera but not at him, a tired smile easing its way through a pair of cracked lips and her dirty brown hair. Her sneakers were untied and she wore a bell clipped to her belt loop in case she’d gotten lost out looking for chanterelles. Six months after the picture was taken they would be married. Sixteen months and she’d be dead.
     He began to cry quietly and the forest drank up the sound and sent it spinning out over the running water and buried arrowheads, the rusted stills laid out on their sides against the roots of birch trees. The loaded pistol stuck out of his vest pocket.

     That second night at the trailer he set a pile of sticks and leaves on fire and watched the cinders grow taller toward the sky. It had been three days since he’d talked to another human being, and even that had only been the clerk at the electric company who’d processed his request to discontinue service at the farm. He’d spent his first morning as a widower rounding up the sheep and letting them escape the fenced paddock and driving their two dogs around to the neighboring farms until he’d found one that wanted to take them in. He cleaned out the truck, the blood from his wife’s nose that had come and come and come, stuffed his dad’s army rucksack with clothes, mostly at random, threw a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment and drove the long, deep-rutted path out to the main road. He left the tractor uncovered and the keys in the ignition and the lights in the farmhouse all shut off at the same time an hour after he was gone.
     While his fire burned down in the front yard, he went inside and started opening doors. The bathroom cupboard smelled like a bag of vitamins. Inside he found a small cardboard box of bobby pins, a military-issued set of fingernail clippers identical to a set his grandfather had used, a metal tin of band aids, a bar of soap still in its wrapper. In the hall closet a sweeper leaned against a box of blankets with collapsing sides and chew marks up through its corners. He took a stack of yellowing pictures from a shelf and thumbed through them. There were pictures of children playing in the front yard of a house, tiny among the trees behind them. An old woman with a guitar leaning against her leg sat in a camp chair, smoking a cigarette. A girl he guessed to be around sixteen or seventeen sang and played what looked like the same guitar. The last picture was a group of people, twenty or thirty of them, standing close together on the porch of the house. The men wore short-sleeved button-downs and pencil neckties. The women wore floral-print sundresses. The older wives had tightly curled hair and sour faces. The younger daughters all had blonde hair falling down their backs and bright red lips curled up in posing smiles. A tall man, taller than the others, stood in the corner of the group, staring into the camera as if his concentration alone could burn the film. He clutched a black book against his belt buckle and wore his hair high-and-tight, like a football player or a marine. He was clean-shaven and proud, like he’d just beaten the devil at cards.
     In the cabinets at the base of the kitchen sink, he found a rusty coffee can full of nails, a ball of plastic grocery bags, and a tube sock filled with pennies. There was a small tool kit with a hammer and an adjustable wrench. He left it all where it was and smelled his hands, copper and oil, the sweet smell of a mechanic’s office.
     When he pushed himself up from the dirty linoleum, he caught a sharp pain in the ball of his thumb. He opened his hand and pulled a tiny ball-bearing from a dimple in his flesh – buckshot, and more of it than just this, all across the kitchen floor. In the far wall, above the table, faint bits of moonlight seeped in through a thousand tiny holes.

Chapter One

     The young widower was well drunk by the time he stopped his truck on the side of the hill. He leaned his temple against the steering wheel and looked out at the property – the rutted front yard, the trail now overgrown, stretching through the birch and box elder on its way to the river, the trailer, sagging on its hip under the weight of dead wet leaves and acorn nuts. Its back was pressed against a parapet of limestone and shale, a billion years of forest crushed beneath itself and dissected by rain and rain and rain.
     He took easy steps through the mud, steadied himself on the rear-view mirror, pulled his dad’s army rucksack to the ground and dragged it to the stoop. The plastic windows in the front door were all punched out, and he released the deadbolt from the inside. When the door swung open a yellow sheet of dust kicked up from the carpet and shuffled in a front across the living room and fell over a different section of the house and over a tarp that covered a fish tank on the back wall. The tank was black, molded, covered inside with algae or bugs or both. The young man coughed and almost threw up and put his dad’s rucksack on the floor.
     He spent the evening slowly shaking his head to dislodge the intoxication and turning the trailer into a respectable place to die. He flicked chicken bones out the window and picked dog fur out of the carpet. He set the t.v. up on a wicker chair, its cracked blue screen toward the corner. An old, awful mattress stood on its long side against the wall in a back bedroom and      he dragged it out and let it flop onto the floor and so he had a place to sleep. The windowsill in the kitchen was cluttered with brown and green beer bottles and a potato plant grown out of another potato. He would cook with a camp stove. He would read with a battery-powered lantern. He would piss in the yard.
     Unpacking his gear in the living room floor, he saw the divots left in the carpet by a couch, still planted deep, and he looked above him and saw a nicotine stain in the ceiling tiles the size and shape of a flat tire. He unfolded a newspaper that he found on top of the toilet and laid out his toothbrush and toothpaste and a bar of soap. He hadn’t bothered with a razor. He hadn’t bothered with very many things. The newspaper was from nineteen ninety-three and its front page was a picture of Hillary Clinton shaking hands with someone from somewhere else.
     That night he sat on the porch and sipped at a warm beer that he’d stuffed in the side pouch of the rucksack. He thought he could hear traffic on Interstate 64, headed east toward Lewisburg or west toward California, and the clicking song of what he’d always called cicadas but knew couldn’t be. A hundred million stars flickered between naked branches over the house and an airplane’s beacon light wove quietly through the connect the dots of old fires burning quietly out.

     He woke up in the night to screaming in the trees. His fingers crisscrossed the floor, sweeping for his glasses, while wolves were fighting or an abandoned baby was rolling toward the river or a young girl was being stabbed. He came through the dirty brown air of the early morning and flicked open the door, scanned the woods for a murderer or a body. The wind crawled along the forest floor and through the hair on his legs. He came out onto the porch and looked down the road he’d come in on, thought he saw motion down the way. When the screaming started again he saw its shape – a screech owl, bigger than a ten year old boy, clinging to a maple branch and wailing into nothing, calling to her lover to come back with food for their children. He thought how she might wait for hours for him to come back, might wait all night, might still be unsatisfied when he got there.He choked back a mouthful of dry air and said to the owl, “It may or may not work out.” He went back inside and laid on the filthy mattress.
     In the morning the southern sun burned through to the ground, twined through the kudzu, wrapped around tree trunks and flipped sparks up and over the lapping waves of the riverbank where he sat. He held his head halfway between his legs, rubbing the balls of his bare feet through the silt at the water’s edge, and ate the only banana that hadn’t died blackened at the bottom of his pack. He’d slept little that night after the owl, had focused instead for hours on a white dot on the floor beside his mattress, lit by a sliver of moonlight stealing inside through a crack between the wall and the window frame. It was a human tooth and he knew it was a human tooth but he wasn’t bothered, not at first. He wondered whose it might have been. He hadn’t thought that someone had been there before him. Of course, it had to be true, but who would leave their teeth in the floor?
     For lunch he cooked brown beans on the camp stove and drank the leftovers of his beer, flat from sitting on the kitchen counter overnight. He ate with one hand and loaded his pistol with the other, a .44 that had belonged to his grandfather and had eventually ended his grandfather’s life. After lunch he would walk the woods, back down to the river and around its bank a few miles toward the fire tower left abandoned and dangerous by the Forest Service in the forties. He could climb back up the hill and look out from the tower and be back to the trailer before sundown.

Introduction

     Welcome to Old Fires, an experiment in literary fiction that allows readers to follow a story as it is written and to participate in its writing through constant updates on the direction the story is taking, the development of characters, and the challenges of crafting a first novel.
     My original intention was to update the story on a weekly basis, but as of right now it's coming along more quickly than I'd anticipated. From now on, I will post new chapters as they come around, and will announce new postings via Facebook. Please tell your friends and family to come and join the story of Jacob Glazer... the more the better.
Happy reading.