This one is an exercise in style; the ironic twist came as a surprise even to me.
• • •
Light spread gray through the sycamores, igniting billions of hanging droplets with the black trunks standing among them looking not fixed to the earth but suspended from above like stalactites. A mockingbird awoke to release its complex scan into the sopping air. There was no answer and the song was not repeated. Leaves crackled, drying.
The man was already awake, a tense silhouette against a yellowing sun louvered by vertical tree shafts, a knee on the ground, the other drawn up to his chest and one fist wrapped around a rifle with its butt planted in the moist earth. His profile was sharp, with a pointed nose like a check mark, the angle dramatized by a long stiff bill tilting down from a green cap with JOHN DEERE embossed in block letters in a patch on the front of the crown. His shirt was coarse and blue under a red-and-black-checked jacket with darns on the elbows. His jeans had been blue but were now earth-colored, like his boots under their cake of silver clay. He had been there in that position since an hour before dawn.
From where he was crouched, the ground fell off forty-five degrees to a berry thicket that girdled the mountain. The thicket had been transplanted by his great-grandfather from a nearby bog and allowed to grow wild until it resembled the tangled barbed wire in which the great-grandfather’s son would snare himself thirty years later and wait for the Germans to discover him in a muddy place called Ypres. This natural barrier had trapped a number of local men the same way, to wait like the soldier and, now, like the soldier’s grandson for the dawn and what the dawn would bring. The slope bristled with leafed trees and cedars and twisted jack pines, heirs to the great towering monarchs that had fallen to the timber boom of another century. Their black stumps still dotted the mountainside like rotted teeth.
A third of the way down the slope, a hundred feet below him and two hundred feet above the thicket, stood his own shack. It had been built of logs when James Monroe was president, but a later ancestor had nailed clapboard over the logs to make it resemble a proper house. A four-paned window that had been covered with oiled paper before the coming of the railroad now reflected sunlight from three panes, emphasizing the blank space where a bullet had shattered the glass.
Now, as the sun lifted, its light struck sparks off tiny fragments on his jeans. He flicked them away carefully. Before tumbling out of the shack he had made sure to remove his wristwatch and anything else that might catch light and betray him.
He knew who had fired the bullet. Inside the shack, its cracked black cover freshly nicked by that same projectile, lay a Bible as thick as a man’s thigh, its cream flyleaves scribbled over in old brown ink with names of his forebears and the dates of their births and deaths going back to 1789, when an indentured servant from Cornwall bought the book secondhand in London and recorded the birth of a son named Jotham. Four generations of names followed before the simple entry: “Eben Candler, murdered by Ezekiel Finlayson, Hawkins County, Kentucky, May 11, 1882. His will be done.” Eighteen similar notations appeared on succeeding pages, in differing hands, until the survivors wearied of keeping count. The final line, “Jotham Edward Candler, born September 8, 1951,” written in his father’s formal script, commemorated his own birth. Finlayson losses were not included.
No one remembered the specifics of that first encounter between a Candler and a Finlayson, although it had something to do with the ownership of forty acres of bottomland in Unicoi County. Only the casualties were remembered. Jotham’s own coming of age had been marked by a daily catechism in which he was expected to recite, in whatever order asked, the names of the Candler slain, their murderers, and the dates of their deaths as they had been recorded in the big Bible; and when he was strong enough to lift a squirrel rifle, he had been taught to think of his small, furry targets not as squirrels but as Finlaysons.
It did not matter that no one knew who held title to those forty acres—that was as gone as the bottomland itself, seized by the bank during the Panic of 1893—or that the fecundity of the Candler and Finlayson women had led to considerable interbreeding between the two families during the long truces. Hatred was an inheritance as solid and treasured as the old Bible and Great-Grandmother Candler’s homely samplers, their red embroidery and white linen gone the same dead-skin brown on the walls of the tiny shack. Jotham, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and three years in Vietnam behind him, was growing marijuana on plots that had supported his father’s stills, and the Finlaysons had sold Ezekiel’s farrier’s shop to buy a funeral home and the first of a chain of hardware stores, but aside from that little had changed. Bad blood was bad always.
As the sun cleared the mountain, its light turned leafy green coming down through the branches. Creatures stirred in the dry-shuck mattress of last year’s leaves, and the last wisp of woodsmoke left the shack’s chimney in a bit of shredded tissue that vanished into the thatch of fog now treetop-high as it lifted and broke apart. Jotham’s assailant would know by that that he was no longer inside. The waiting had almost ended.
Jotham was the last Candler to bear that surname. His sisters were married and his only brother had died in Korea before Jotham was old enough to remember him. He would carry the name to the grave with him because of what the army’s defoliants had done to his genes in Da Nang. In view of that temptation—the opportunity to wipe out by one death the long line of Candlers—young Bertram Finlayson’s attempt to kill him in his sleep that morning seemed long overdue.
He had no doubt it was Bertram. Eight years Jotham’s junior, he had been too young to serve in Vietnam, and had spent that frustration in turkey shoots across the state, winning a caseful of trophies to display under the antlered heads on the walls of his fine house in town. His arsenal was a legend among collectors of firearms and he often boasted that he had used them to kill every kind of animal that lived in the county but one. He was the only Finlayson young enough and mean enough to bother about a fight that most had thought was buried with Jotham’s father.
Several times since Jotham had returned from college on the G.I. Bill, Bertram had tried to draw him into something in town, from which Jotham had always walked away. Witnesses said it was because he had had enough of killing in Asia. But those who said that were thinking of other wars, did not understand that the object of his had been to stay alive; killing came secondary, if at all. And now here he was, twelve years and ten thousand miles later, trying to stay alive in another jungle.
A squirrel began chattering, a high-pitched coughing noise like a small engine trying to start. Something was annoying it. Not him; the squirrel was too far away, high in an ash on the other side of the shack. He spotted its humped profile on the side of the trunk sixty feet up and scanned the ground at the base. A treefall twenty yards down the slope looked promising. He raised the .30-06, lined up the iron sights, and sent a bullet into the center of the fall. Something jumped, startled. Dead leaves rattled on the inert branches.
The echo of his first report was still snarling in the distance when he fired again, into those moving leaves. Almost instantly, a section of bark on a cedar a foot to Jotham’s right exploded in a cloud of splinters, followed quickly by the crack of a .30-30. He hurled himself and his weapon headlong down the slope, rolling and coming up on the other side of a clump of suckers grown up around a pine stump. The squirrel had stopped chattering.
Bertram was a cooler hand than he’d thought. After the first shot he had waited, then fired at Jotham’s second muzzle flash.
Again the waiting began.
Once, after exchanging fire with a Cong he had never seen, Jotham had waited for eleven hours in a fog of mosquitoes and heavy air, unmoving, his survival dependent upon his either killing the guerrilla or boring him into moving on. At the end the Cong had lost patience first, and when he rose from cover to investigate, Jotham had taken his head off with a burst from his M-16. How to wait was the hardest lesson of all. He settled himself on the other knee to give that haunch a rest.
The sun climbed into a thin sheeting of clouds that parted from time to time, changing the light as in an ancient motion picture. The air warmed, grew hot and thick. Twice he was attacked by wood ticks, once on the back of a hand, the other time, very painfully, on his neck. He did not move to brush them away. Eventually they’d crawled off drunkenly, bloated with his blood.
When the sun was directly overhead, he knew a terrible urge to get up and find out if Bertram was still there. More than the heat, it made the sweat stand out in burrs on his forehead and greased his armpits and crotch. It must have been what the Cong had felt just before he committed suicide. But Jotham held his position and it subsided.
No one came up the mountain. In other years, uninvited visitors had met moonshiners’ buckshot, and now even the authorities counseled against wandering the hills and chancing the protective wrath of marijuana growers and mad survivalists.
Around midafternoon the sky darkened and big drops pattered the leaves on the ground and rolled along the edge of the bill of Jotham’s cap and hung quivering before falling to his raised thigh with loud plops. He swung the rifle horizontal to keep moisture out of the barrel. But the rain passed swiftly. A rainbow arched over the shack and melted away.
The air cooled toward dusk. Bertram would have to move soon. Jotham’s new knowledge of his enemy’s instincts told him that he would not again risk darkness in the woods with an experienced jungle fighter. Jotham reversed legs again, working the stiffness out of the long muscles in his thighs.
The woods to the west were catching fire in the lowering sun when a buck mule deer that Jotham had never heard went crashing off through the trees on the opposite side of the shack, blatting a warning to others of its kind. At that moment the treefall shook and a pair of bull shoulders with a hatless head nestled in between reared against a sky striped with tree trunks. Light sheared along something long and shiny.
Jotham raised his rifle without aiming, trusting to the barrel to find its mark because he could no longer see the front sight, and touched the trigger. The butt pulsed against his shoulder, but he did not hear the blast. It had been that way when he’d killed the Cong. In roaring silence the bull shoulders hunched and the hatless head went back and the silhouette crumpled in on itself like a balloon deflating. The long and shiny thing flashed, falling.
Jotham let the sun slip to a red crescent before rising. In gray light he approached the treefall, lifting his feet clear of the old stumps more from memory than from sight, his eyes fixed on the dark thing draped over the fallen tree with the .30-30 on the ground in front of it. Carefully he used a foot to slide the rifle farther out of the reach of the dangling hands, then took another step and grasped a handful of straw-colored hair and raised a slack face with open eyes and mouth into the last ray of light. It was Bertram Finlayson.
He let the face drop and started down the mountain toward town to tell his sister Lucy that she was a widow.