Fire on the Mountain Read Free

Yasmin looked for them, her own tears wouldn’t come.
    Harriet was at the Center, Pearl said—working on Sunday, was that what socialism was all about, come on in? Not that Harriet would ever even consider going to church; she was like her Daddy that way, God Rest His Soul, sit down. This was the week for the Mars landing, and Pearl found it hard to listen to on the radio until they had their feet on the ground, if ground was what they called it there, even though she wished them well, and prayed for them every night. God didn’t care what planet you were on; have some iced tea. Or even if you weren’t on one at all. Sugar? So Pearl hoped Yasmin didn’t mind if the radio was off.
    Yasmin didn’t mind. She sat at the kitchen table and sipped that unchanging-as-the-mountains sweet Virginia iced tea that she had never been able to bring herself to tell Pearl she couldn’t stand, listening to Pearl talk while she rolled out pie dough for the social at the church. What would God and Jesus do without their pies? Yasmin wondered. They would neither of them ever have to find out. War, slavery, revolution, civil war, socialist reconstruction, nothing slacked the flow of chess, apple, pecan, and banana cream pies from the Appalachians. Pearl gave Yasmin the bowl to lick as if to remind her that, even at thirty-six, her boy’s girl was still a kid to her.
    Yasmin loved the tiny little woman with her seamed glowing face, tiny mahogany hands ghosted with flour, white hair like a veil, tied up; loved her in that way women never get to love their own mothers because there is not enough unsaid, and too much said, between them.
    Still. She decided not to tell Pearl her news. She would tell Harriet first. That was only fair.
    The house felt stuffy and, as always, too filled with junk. Walking through the tiny rooms, Yasmin found the usual holograms of Douglass, Tubman, and Jesus oppressive; the familiar P.A.S.A. cosmonaut photo, with Leon mugging at the end of the row, had finally stopped tearing at her heart and now only tugged at it like a child pulling a sleeve.
    She clicked on the vid, and, at the sight of stars, as quickly clicked it off.
    She decided to get her gifts out of the car.
    Back in the kitchen, she helped Pearl tidy up and explained that she was only staying for the night. She had to leave first thing in the morning to take her great-grandfather’s papers to Harper’s Ferry, as specified in his will. Yes, she would be back to watch the Mars landing. Promise. Meanwhile, this was for Pearl. And she gave her ring-mother a helping basket from Arusha, showing her how it would grow or shrink, shaping itself to fit whatever was put into it.
    “Wait till Katie Dee sees this,” Pearl said. “She’s deaf as a post, but she loves baskets.”
    “I didn’t forget her. I brought her a scarf,” Yasmin said, realizing even as she said it that it was scarves, not baskets that her ring-mother loved. Why did she always get the little things backward? “But wait till you see what I brought Harriet.” She patted the flat little box on the table, not even aware that she was listening for them until she heard the clatter of feet on the porch, shouted goodbyes, and Harriet burst through the door. Twelve last summer, still all legs and hands and feet. Bearing in her face like an undimmed ancient treasure her daddy’s God-damn big brown eyes.

    On the Fourth of July, 1859, I was with old Deihl, winding up the Boonesborough Pike north of the Potomac, carrying a load of cedar posts to a cattleman in trade for a horse that was said to be lamed, but healed, but testy. Deihl owned a livery stable and speculated in “bad” horses. It was just before dawn on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t our Independence Day then, great-grandson, like it is now, it was only theirs; but even “colored” boys like firecrackers, and I was busy figuring where I could get a few later that day. Old Deihl was snoring on the wagon seat as we passed a line of