Love and Sleep Read Free

bobwire! And it burned all the way to the river. I remember them saying there was no way to stop it, but that it would stop anyway when it got to the river. I guess it did.
    "There were always fires in those days. You remember. The sun in the summer if it was dry was a lot of times hazy and red. Smoke from some fire, somewhere."
    In the years of the postwar mining boom the prop-cutters sent out by the mine-owners cut over thousands of acres; paid by the piece, the cutters had pulled out what was easy and left the rest—cut tops and shattered detritus and good long logs as well, too hard to extract and left behind. The woods beyond Sam Oliphant's hillside were a weird wilderness of cull and old stumps, the hollers filled with tumbled logs like great dropped jackstraws, dryrotting to tinder, awaiting Pierce's match. Bird remembered—though Pierce didn't—how after the red sun set she and Hildy and Joe Boyd (Bird and Hildy's older brother, who hadn't been at the fire's birth) climbed out onto the roof through the window of the second-story closet—a window in a closet, Pierce had wondered when he was first shown this trick, but why—and sat in the ashy-tasting dark watching the slow crawl of their fire through the holler and over the mountain.
    If it was a forest fire it didn't look like one; didn't look like the fire that devastated Bambi's home, and drove the frightened animals before it. It wasn't a space of living orange flame but a line, a dull-russet smoking frontier between the burned and the unburned: not different really from the fire in the grass where it had started.
    "Your daddy's going to have to pay for that,” Joe Boyd said to Pierce, smug in the security of innocence, burning trash not being one of his chores.
    "That's not fair,” Hildy said.
    "It's true,” said Joe Boyd. “When a little kid does something, or something? The little kid can't pay, but his daddy is responsible. He has to pay."
    Pierce said nothing, unable to imagine the cost Joe Boyd meant. A mountain, two mountains? They seemed to Pierce's mind either invaluable or valueless.
    "It wasn't his fault,” Bird said, though often enough when Joe Boyd announced awful facts like that he turned out to be right; Bambi's mother (though Bird covered her ears not to hear him whisper it to her) had really died. “Besides, his father's in New York. And he's poor."
    She didn't add that it wasn't Pierce alone who set the fire, but all of them: the Invisible College, working together, pledged to one another. And that being so, Joe Boyd was guilty of it too: for Joe Boyd was himself Permanent President of this Kentucky branch of the College, duly elected by the membership. Bird didn't say any of that, because saying it meant revealing to Joe Boyd the existence of the College and the secret of his Presidency: and that was the deepest of the many secrets the Invisible College was sworn to keep.
    "Not my daddy,” Joe Boyd said, to be sure no mistake would be made about this. “ Your daddy."
    * * * *
    Pierce Moffett's wasn't the only fire burning that night in the mountains, nor the only one not put out. The Cumberlands had been burning for years, and there had never been anyone to put them out. Not only the trees that covered them: once the mountains themselves had used to burn, set afire by the dynamite used to loosen the seams of coal like teeth; the seams would ignite, and the mountain burned, smoking out of fissures, parching its earth. A hot bitter breath could be felt coming from the mine's driftmouth then, and on the mountain's back the stones under bare feet were warm as flesh.
    Slate dumps built beside the coal-tipples used to burn too: fires starting deep down from the pressure of tons of rock on the coal fragments and dust, and issuing up through fault lines in the slate and shale, to spit and smoke in long creeping veins. Now and then the bosses would set teams of men to following these fire-lines and smothering them with ashes; the men worked a