It’s only as her truck crunches to a stop in the gravel parking lot that Lil realizes she can’t remember the last time she went to Pop’s. It’s the best smokehouse in town, probably in the state, with tarp walls and a tiny worn-out interior. The wide timber posts are littered with recognition, magazine features, local and national awards. Outside there’s a window for orders and picnic tables with tablecloths of red-checkered vinyl. The air smells like woodsmoke and honey. There’s always a line out the door at lunch, and though he serves customers until the cupboards are bare, Pop usually closes well before three. Sasha worked here as a teenager, somehow never rushed as she counted out change at the register or stacked mile-high sandwiches with smoked pork watched by fifty pairs of impatient eyes. In his heyday, Pop had kept the smokehouse going seven days a week—and isn’t it sad when towns start using the word “heyday,” which can only be defined once it’s over.
Pop himself is older now, with bad knees and no staff, so he can’t get up the gumption to smoke every day anymore. When she drives by, she usually looks whether the single bulb over the door is turned on, meaning he’s there, but lately it seems like Pop’s is closed more often than not. Only today, it’s open, the tables out back humming. A few townies raise their hands to her from their places in line as she passes. The sky is the kind of bright clean blue that only comes in early fall, and Jason waits for her. He’s wearing a faded firehouse shirt, fingers busy organizing the complimentary sugar and Sweet’N Low packets people use to sweeten their own iced tea.
Lil stuffs her hands in her pockets, swings a leg over the bench, and plops down. She’s still exhausted. She had been too wired to sleep. All night, she felt the creep of kudzu scratching at her window, the lonely howl of the train. When she finally passed out, she only fell into fevered, gasoline fantasies that felt too real, and woke up to Jason’s phone call, reminding her to meet him for lunch. From the window, Pop bellows an order number.
“I already ordered for us,” Jason says, not looking up from the mixed-up white and pink packets he’s organizing. “If you’re not in line by eleven fifty-five, you’re doomed.”
That little aside sends a prickle of irritation up the back of her neck. As if she doesn’t know that. As if she hasn’t eaten here more at this point than he has. “It’s cute that you remember that,” Lil replies, swiping a pink sweetener out of the tin and deliberately slipping it back into the sugars. “Got any other hot tips for me? Where should I go for a good book, the library?”
Jason finally deigns to glance up at her, but it’s only to roll his eyes. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night after all that.”
Lil resists the urge to droop against the table. “I didn’t either. Did you order me something with caffeine?”
Jason opens his mouth to answer, but Pop thunders across the yard, “Finch! Order up!” He jumps up and soon returns with two enormous platefuls of smoked ribs, a miniature tureen of sauce, a side of baked beans, a pile of pickles, and two huge Styrofoam cups of long-steeped iced tea. He pushes her little paper tray over and gets to work on his own. “Too hungry to talk,” he says around a bite.
It’s as good as always, so tender it falls apart like paper in the rain. Lil pops a pickle in her mouth. “We weren’t drunk. We didn’t imagine it. I know that much.”
Jason scoffs, tossing a sand-blasted rib bone onto his plate. “That fire,” he murmurs. “I’ve only ever seen a fire like that in my dreams. I thought it’d eat us all alive.”
“Have you ever seen one vanish into thin air?” She tosses one on his plate too.
He doesn’t answer right away, long enough for her to look up at him. Even in bright noon light, his eyes are very dark, no sun catching there. “Why do you hold on so tight to this place?” he asks, voice a smoke-broken rasp.
Lil balls a napkin in between her hands. “Jason. You know.” The midday light, golden syrup gilding the trees. Mom humming as she cracked pecans on the porch, Sasha complaining that her fingers are cramping. Thunderstorms that shiver down Lil’s spine. The night in the pond, Jason’s fingers digging into the soil behind her, learning to move together that first time. “Don’t you?” Lil shrugs helplessly. “You know how special it is here. You know I can’t just leave this place.”
Jason is the only person outside the family who has seen the pond in Lil’s lifetime, if not the golden pecans. Still, he’s seen more of her than even Sasha, maybe. She chose the Clearwater orchard over him. He is quiet, reading her face. Then he nods swiftly. “Then I think I need to show you something.”
“What?” Lil asks, but he’s already standing, leaving the bones of their lunch, and offering her his hand. “Fine.” She pushes herself up. “Let’s go.”
They jump into Lil’s pickup, and she turns to him with a raised eyebrow. “We’re going up to the old cemetery,” Jason instructs, hair blowing back from his face as they turn out. “Park in the ferry lot.”
Situated at the top of the ridge, on a long bluff overlooking both the town and the river, the town’s tiny necropolis could never have been a good idea. It’s a logistic nightmare, only a narrow one-lane road, the ground too rocky for easy below-ground burials. No, the early Methodists must’ve known it wasn’t the best place for a cemetery, but they’d done it for the glory, so that the dead here would be up high, expectant, among the first to rise on Judgment Day. Jason and Lil park and take the long winding stairs up the ridge. Soon their hike turns—in fits and starts—into a race.
“There’s a reason the Finches have always been buried in the western churchyard,” Jason pants, hooking a switchback in the stairs to pass her. “This is so damn…inconvenient up here.”
“I think it’s a nice run.” She jogs forward, looping around him and bounding up the next few steps. “Relaxing,” she taunts over her shoulder. They careen up the path neck and neck, Jason a glint of gold in her periphery, until the gates are visible at the top of the ridge.
Unlike the sparsely shaded stones of the newer cemetery, this place is cramped with graves, mausolea, and stacked burials huddled together beneath old withering trees. Kudzu twists over the gates and slinks across the ground. Jason steps carefully across a dense green tangle straying into the path, leading the way between the silent stone structures. They are watched on all sides by stone monuments.
“I went on a jog this morning and found myself up here,” Jason explains. “I guess I just wanted to see the whole town.”
“It’s a beautiful view.” Clearwaters historically have made their final homes here, in some dark corner. Mom used to take them to visit occasionally; Lil has a stark memory of a little boy’s grave, some distant relative who died by drowning. The oldest of the graves are long since cracked and devoured. “But what do you want me to see?”
The twisted shadows of bare branches fall across Jason’s back, pass like ghostly antlers over his head, and she pauses on the path, the scent of dead leaves caught in her lungs. For a blink between shade and light, he doesn’t look quite right, too thin, too quick, too—something. “Jason?” she calls.
“Come here. Look.”
They sit on the low stone wall. Below them is the town. The river gleams away over her shoulder, Sasha somewhere down there humming some tuneless river song. Right under them, there’s the central square, the courthouse, and the stately columns of Town Hall, where everybody’s favorite ineffectual, semicrooked mayor, Marshall Braxton, is no doubt indulging in his after-lunch nap at his desk. Nearby is Su’s grocery, First Methodist, and the park. Down Main Street, Autumn’s bakery sits at the corner across from the closed-down five-and-dime and Wade’s ancient shoe store, whose display hasn’t changed in about twenty-five years. Wade wasn’t at Russ’s funeral, was he?
The town has a single stoplight. Off that intersection are their elementary school and the old neighborhoods, where most houses have at least one pecan tree in their front yards, and those with larger backyards have a few more tucked away. That’s also the way to the new high school—new, because it replaced an older one around 1928—its football field ever verdant, bounded by bleachers. Players scrimmage on the field, sunlight glinting off their helmets. And beyond the school are fields and the long curving boundary of the ridge.
But the other way, through the stoplight, is west, where the six blocks of real town give way to pecan trees on every side. The railroad to the south snakes closer to the highway, as if it’s squeezing the old orchards. And the kudzu, lurid and clutching, is creeping in, running up trees and down hills, over houses and into wells, turning the world into walls and carpet of unbroken acid green. Up here, Lil can see its boundary point, and it catches her breath how much closer it’s gotten: the Finch orchard is the last line of defense, now that the Winstons and, in their wake, the Coopers, packed it in. It’s too far to really make out, but she knows those trees out there, now lumpy with scab. Left untended, their roots don’t have enough zinc to send upward. They get rosette. The leaves darken, turn spotty. The husks crack.
She squints past all that, at the anonymous empty places where the kudzu has taken hold. Any people who might still be out there, miles out, don’t come to town. It’s always fire season there, where the ground is so parched it begs for a lit match.
Then there’s the old WPA bridge, cracked in two and half sunk when the highway was destroyed in that storm. The repairs are ongoing, subject to endless delays, either funding issues from Town Hall, or weather, or men quitting at the site. But they’re working today; Lil can hear the distant call of voices, the occasional industrial clang. Any day now, they’ll finish laying the new road and the town will take its first deep breath in who knows how long.
Any day now.
Her entire life is below her, everything and everyone. It looks like one of Lou’s model train set up here on the ridge, watched over by the quiet dead.
“What did you want to show me?” Lil asks again, catching Jason’s eye. He’s been watching her. “What?”
“Look at the library,” he murmurs.
The town’s library is just off the central square. It is a repurposed old house, a squat off-white building with the pillared porch that faces the courthouse. At first, it’s hard to make out what Jason is talking about. But in that bright noon light, there is some gentle shimmer around it. A shimmer, and above, a darkening billow of smoke.
The library is on fire. Before her eyes, a char runs up the back, flames busting through windows. Lil lunges instinctively forward, but Jason puts a hand out to anchor her. There’s a palpable rumble as the roof shifts, like at any moment the whole thing might cave in. She can’t see them, but the books inside must be peeling apart, the air noxious with melting glue, running ink, curling and blackened pages.
“Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” she growls at him. A breeze carries over the chemical smell of smoldering insulation, and with it she can feel the heat of that fire creep over the back of her neck.
But Jason just shakes his head. “Look again.”
Her fury rises, but Lil looks.
The fire is gone.
Desperately, she glares at Jason again. He’s still holding her hand, tight as a vise against his knee. “This morning, it was the same house fire we fought last night, blinking in and out like a light.”
“What—how could—I don’t…” Fires that vanish one minute, consume the next. She scans the town again. Empty football fields. Quiet streets. The light is off at Autumn’s bakery. The library looks perfectly safe again. This is hardly the first time this land has shown her sights that defy her senses. But the pond and the tree are known to her. This? She’s never seen this in her town before. She doesn’t know what it means.
“What do you think?” Jason asks, still watching her. He’s so…calm. Why isn’t he bothered by what he’s shown her up here? Denial?
“I don’t know.” Behind them, the trees sigh and release a shudder of leaves, the wind pushing them against their ankles. “But I’m going to find out.”