Heavy rains all season stopped the mountains from ever seeing much color that fall, just a dull yellow fading to brown, then gone. The trees were empty now and had been for weeks. It was early November and the world as Aiden McCall had always known it was no more.
He’d driven to Sylva to pick up some things he needed: some lamp oil, stove matches, and a tarpaulin to fix the hole rusted in the roof, a carton of cigarettes, and a fifth of Travelers Club that was marked down. Dented cans of Dinty Moore beef stew were on sale, so Aiden stocked up with about twenty cans of that and some potted meat and a sack of potatoes and onions. He grabbed a pack of salt-cured ham, then a loaf of bread, and some Duke’s to make mayonnaise sandwiches for lunch. The bread was the only thing that wouldn’t keep, but the mice had been getting into stuff anyways, so he’d have to eat it quickly whether the mold got to it or not. Aiden didn’t mind sharing with the field mice. They were almost like pets. But he did wish they’d stick to a single slice or two rather than nibbling the corners off every piece in the bag. If they kept that up, he’d probably have to set traps.
There were only a few hundred dollars left from the cash they’d found at Wayne Bryson’s, but he’d yet to spend any of the money April gave him. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and when everything was packed and she was just about to drive away, she shoved a wad of money into his hand. They stared at each other for a long time and didn’t say anything. Looking at her, he could tell she had just as many thoughts running through her mind as he had in his, but there wasn’t time to say what needed said, and maybe there weren’t even words. They both knew it was the last time they’d ever see each other. Aiden was the one who finally broke the silence. He told her he loved her. She smiled and told him good-bye. Then she was gone.
There were five thousand dollars in hundreds. He’d counted the money at least once a day. It was enough to get out of Jackson County and put him up for three or four months until he found a job or the money ran out, whatever happened first. He was going to go to Asheville like he’d planned and make a go of it. He didn’t know how things would pan out, but he knew he had to leave. There were still just a few things he had to do first.
He drove past the logging road that wound up the mountain to Sugar Creek Gap and headed farther up Charleys Creek like he’d done a thousand times before. He could almost see the property from the road, but pulled in and drove up like he still lived there. This time he stopped short and just sat and looked at what was left. The trailer had been smashed into a pile of warped metal and dirtied pink insulation, jagged scraps of two-by-fours and heaps of trash. Whoever had bought the place had hired someone with a dozer to tear the single-wide to pieces. It was probably cheaper to haul scrap than move the trailer in one piece, and that appeared to be what they were going to do, but for now it was just a mound of crumpled metal and wood.
Up the hill, only a few sections of framed walls remained standing, the posts and beams black and crumbling into coals. The rest of the house had burned into cinders that still smoldered in places, little trails of smoke wavering out of ashen rubble. The people who bought the place had donated the home to the fire department for a training exercise for the firemen and a tax write-off for themselves. A bunch of young boys in turnout gear with shit-eating grins had lit the fire and watched everything Aiden ever knew burn to the ground.
April had said the people who bought the place were going to plant Christmas trees. There wasn’t any money in Christmas tree farming, especially not on a place this size and especially not when the people growing the trees didn’t know poplar from piss oak. There was no chance in hell they’d ever succeed. Aiden figured they’d never be able to grow anything at all on that ground. From everything he’d ever witnessed, the place bore hardship. But the more he sat there and thought, the more he came to realize that maybe a place couldn’t be cursed, maybe only people could, and maybe that’s why there’d never been a goddamn thing worked out for him, Thad, or April. Perhaps God just had it out for certain folks and he’d been born one of the unlucky ones. So maybe those people would be able to grow those trees after all. Maybe they’d be just fine.
The locust rail fence he’d laid around April’s property was still there and the radio tower stood with its metal frame piercing the sky. He and Thad had spent entire summers listening to country out of Nashville or the rock-and-roll sets students at the university in Cullowhee spun some nights when they had the air. He and Thad used to sit on the porch and drink cold beer and smoke cigarettes and stare off into nothing with the only sound between them that crystal-clear music humming down from above and coursing through the speakers without even a tick of static.
Aiden wondered what April would have thought about the place now, the place she’d spent some twenty years of her life, demolished into ruin. He wondered where she had gone when she packed the few things she wanted and drove away. He hadn’t asked her and she hadn’t told, and he wondered if she’d gone to Tybee Island like she’d always talked about or maybe someplace different entirely. There was no way to know now, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. He liked to think that there would have been some sort of sorrow in her heart to see the place like this, that maybe, despite all of what had happened, there was a tiny piece of sentimentality she held for this place, if nothing else a single good memory that made her smile when she thought about it.
But when he was honest, he knew how stupid it was to think anything like that. That’s the thing about growing older in a place, is that eventually all the things remembered are torn down and replaced with something new. Most people get nostalgic, but to miss something that was gone was to have loved something that had been there in the first place. There’d been nothing here for her to love. The fact that the house was gone would make it easier to forget, and, in time, maybe it would be as if the place had never existed at all.
He lit a cigarette and backed down the drive onto Charleys Creek. He headed back the way he’d come, and this time, when he reached the old logging road that twisted up the mountain to Sugar Creek Gap, he hung a right and headed up the gravel. About halfway up the mountain, the trail to Bee Rock cut through the trees to the right and he thought about Thad camping there when he was little. He thought about how Thad had always sworn up and down that he was Cherokee and how he’d caked himself in mud and run around carving spears and arrows and bows, and setting booby traps. One time Thad got a head full of lice from sticking feathers he plucked off a dead crow he found on the side of the road into his hair, and he had to slather his head with turpentine and petroleum jelly to kill the bugs. A redheaded Indian. That son of a bitch was a sight.
When the road peaked out at Sugar Creek Gap, Aiden parked and walked over to the clearing where a view stretched until the farthest mountains were nothing but hazy blue curves on the edge of the horizon. There were only a few hours left of daylight, but the overcast skies kept the mountains in a dim gloom even with the sun having yet to sink. A crow cawed from somewhere behind him and Aiden turned just in time to see three of them burst out of the black balsams and sail down into the valley in search of a new place to light. That stand of balsams was where it all began.
Under the trees, he kicked at the roots with the toe of his boot and knelt just as he had so many years before. He could remember not knowing Thad was there until he spoke. He could remember Thad pulling that crumpled centerfold from his Velcro wallet and spreading it right there on the ground and that moment of them joking back and forth being the happiest he ever felt in his life. That was the day that Thad Broom went from being a friend to something closer than blood kin. It wasn’t like having a brother or a father. What Thad became was something new entirely, something that the world had yet to name.
Now that Thad was gone, it wasn’t so much sorrow that Aiden felt as disbelief. Every single day, he found himself looking around and waiting, listening for the sound of Thad’s voice, wondering what Thad was doing, thinking Thad had just run off into the woods for a while. Then he’d remember and there was this confusion that accompanied that first second of remembering. It would take him a second or two to recognize that Thad was gone. There would be no coming back.
He drove into the valley where Sugar Creek Gap meandered its way down the backside of Rich Mountain into Caney Fork. The road wasn’t kept up like it was when he was younger. Back then a man could’ve driven a Cadillac from Charleys Creek to Caney Fork, but nowadays the road was washed out and rutted. Curves were washboarded into rippled gravel. The state had come in and dug boulders off the hillside and dropped them into the road so that people couldn’t even pass all the way from one side to the other by vehicle anymore. Nothing was like it had been. Everything was suddenly changing.
The bottle of whiskey sloshed around on the other side of the bench seat and he leaned over to grab it, almost running off the high side of the road when he did. He opened the bottle and took a slug, wiped his chin with the back of his hand, and screwed the cap back down. He was thinking about all of the things he’d never know about Thad, what had happened while Thad was deployed, and how what he’d seen and the things he’d done had become something physical that he had to carry through this world. Aiden wondered what it must have felt like to grow up in a place where you saw your mother every single day of your life, and you always knew that no matter what you did or how hard you tried she would never love you. It was no wonder Thad had hated her, and though Aiden had lost both of his parents so early, he almost imagined it would be worse to live with that constant reminder.
At the same time, Thad had never known the reason for April being the way that she was, and now Aiden did. Knowing what had happened to April and how her son was a living, breathing reminder of that memory wasn’t something that justified how she’d treated him, but it did explain it. There were so many horrible things they had buried inside themselves, all of the memories that had come to govern their lives. He found himself wishing that he could have been the one to bear it all. He wished that he could have taken all of the bad in this world and piled it onto himself so that he would have been the only one to ever know that kind of suffering.
Just up ahead, the boulders blocked him from driving any farther. A four-wheel trail cut off to the right, where a small creek ran under the road through a culvert, the black stone streambed stretching from there and stacking a cobbled streak of rock up the mountain. Aiden steered onto the trail and pulled up a few hundred feet to where the cut dead-ended into a thick stand of rhododendron, its green leaves rolled up like cigarettes in the cold. He parked and climbed out of the car, grabbed the carbine from the toolbox in the back, then spread the tarpaulin onto the ground. He kept the tarp folded into a square and loaded all of his supplies onto it. When everything was there, he pulled the four corners of the tarp into his hand and slung the load over his shoulder with one hand, the rifle by his side in the other. From there, a game trail led a little over a mile to the camp.
There must’ve come a time when people gave up on those shanties at the hunting camp, because it was obvious no one had been there for years when he first went back. None of the buildings were worth living in anymore, but he took scraps from here and there and fixed up the shack farthest from the road as best he could. He stepped onto the rotten porch planks of the place he’d been living. A busted screen door with chicken wire at the bottom and a torn piece of mesh screen hanging down from the top opened to a heavier door with nine windowpanes, only two rectangles of glass unbroken. He set the rifle standing on the porch with the barrel balanced against the door frame, kept the tarp over his shoulder, and entered. The man inside was just how Aiden left him.
Samuel Mathis was tied to a metal folding chair with his feet tucked behind the crossbar running between the front legs. His ankles were bound with rope that continued behind to where his wrists hung from the empty space between the chair back and seat. His wrists were wound tightly with the same rope, and from there the cord spun around his chest so that the metal folding chair had become a part of his body, something inseparable from him. If he moved at all, he would fall, and he had, many times those first few days, though now he seemed to have given up and just sat there hunched over, huffing through his nose, his mouth duct-taped shut. The left side of Samuel’s face was so swollen that his eye seemed nothing more than a black slit cut across a plum. He was covered with blood that had dried almost black in his hair, down his face and neck.
Aiden set the tarp down by the door and started to unload the supplies. He took the cans of stew beef and the loaf of bread, the mayonnaise, the salt-cured ham, the potatoes, and onions and he put all of those things on a counter that stretched from the door along the front wall. He grabbed the carton of cigarettes and whiskey, the lamp oil and the kitchen matches, and put them on a small card table beside Samuel in the center of the room. It had looked like it might rain, or maybe even snow outside, but it was starting to get dark now and he figured it was too late to climb onto the roof and try to secure the tarp over the hole that had rusted through the tin. He bought one of the largest tarps the store had, and was planning to just stretch it all the way over the eave so that water couldn’t run beneath and seep inside. The chinking on the board shack was rotted through so that the walls did little to stop the wind. It was cold outside and getting colder. He could feel the air blowing through and he wished that there was a stove to burn wood and keep warm, but there wasn’t. The first snow had come a few days before and it would not be long until more.
A glass lamp was on the table and he removed the globe to fill the base with oil. When the lamp was filled, Aiden struck one of the kitchen matches and lit the tattered wick into a tall flame that licked at the air before he dialed the fire down into a low, steady glow. He lit a cigarette as the match burned into his fingers, drew a few swigs of whiskey from the bottle of Travelers Club, and blew a trail of smoke into Samuel’s face. A wind howled through the valley and straight through the shack, and Aiden shivered with how cold the world had become. Winter was almost upon him, and he no longer wished to stay. He would keep Samuel alive a bit longer, maybe a day or two, maybe a week. He still wasn’t sure, but what he did know was that killing Samuel Mathis would prick a pinhole in the darkness. When it was over, he would bury him and there’d be a glint of light in this wicked world because of something he’d done.
Nightfall came on and the last bit of daylight filtered through the windows. In a few minutes, the only light to be had would be that which he made. Aiden turned up the bottle and drank until the whiskey washed over him. He studied the way Samuel Mathis looked, the way he breathed, the way his eyes seemed to be begging Aiden to end it. Everyone was begging for the end. But not yet, Aiden thought. Hold off just a little bit longer. He was not quite ready to be alone.