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.