Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich
The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
—CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian When the swords flash, let no idea of love, piety, or even the face of your fathers move you.
—JULIUS CAESAR
CHAPTER
1
WESTERN RIDGE, JOHNSON’S GAP
BULL MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA
1949
1.
“Family,” the old man said to no one.
The word hung in a puff of frozen breath before dissipating into the early-morning fog. Riley Burroughs used that word the same way a master carpenter used a hammer. Sometimes he just gave it a gentle tap to nudge one of his kin toward his way of thinking, but sometimes he used it with all the subtlety of a nine-pound sledge.
The old man sat in a wooden rocker, slowly squeaking it back and forth on the worn and buckled pine slats of the cabin’s front porch. The cabin was one of several hunting shelters his family had built all over Bull Mountain throughout the years. Rye’s grandfather, Johnson Burroughs, built this one. Rye imagined the elder statesman of the Burroughs clan sitting in this very spot fifty years earlier and wondered if his brow ever got this heavy. He was sure it did.
Rye pulled a pouch of dried tobacco from his coat and rolled a smoke in his lap. Ever since he was a boy, he’d come out here to watch Johnson’s Gap come to life. This early, the sky was a purple bruise. The churning chorus of frogs and crickets was beginning to transition into the scurry of vermin and birdsong—a woodland changing of the guard. On frigid mornings like this one, the fog banked low over the veins of kudzu like a cotton blanket, so thick you couldn’t see your feet to walk through it. It always made Rye smile to know that the clouds everyone else looked up to see, he looked down on from the other side. He reckoned that must be how God felt.
The sun had already begun to rise behind him, but this gap was always the last place to see it. The shadow cast down from the Western Ridge kept this section of the mountain almost a full ten degrees cooler than the rest of it. It would be well into the afternoon before the sun could dry up all the dew that made the forest shimmer. Only thin beams of light broke through the heavy canopy of oak trees and Scotch pine. As a kid, Rye used to believe those rays of light warming his skin were the fingers of God, reaching down through the trees to bless this place—to look out for his home. But as a man, he’d grown to know better. The children running underfoot and the womenfolk might have some use for that superstitious nonsense, but Riley reckoned if there was some Sunday-school God looking out for the people on this mountain, then the job wouldn’t always fall on him.
The old man sat and smoked.
2.
The sound of tires crunching gravel soured the morning. Rye tamped out his smoke and watched his younger brother’s old Ford flatbed pull up the drive. Cooper Burroughs climbed out and snatched his rifle from the mount on the back window. Cooper was Riley’s half brother, born nearly sixteen years after him, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them side by side. They both had the chiseled features of their shared father, Thomas Burroughs, but carried the weight of life on Bull Mountain heavy in the jowls, making both men appear much older than they were. Cooper pulled his hat down over his shaggy red hair and grabbed a backpack from the front seat. Rye watched as Cooper’s nine-year-old son, Gareth, appeared from the passenger side and walked around the truck to join his father. Rye shook his head and breathed out the last of the cold smoke in his lungs.
It’s just like Cooper to bring a buffer when there is a chance of tempers getting flared. He knows I wouldn’t put an ass-whuppin’ on him in front of his boy. Too bad he can’t use them smarts when it matters.
Rye stepped off the porch and opened his arms.
“Good morning, brother . . . and nephew.”
Cooper didn’t answer right away, or bother to hide his disdain. He curled up his lip and spit a slick string of brown tobacco juice at Rye’s feet.
“Save it, Rye, we’ll get to it soon enough. I got to get some food in me before I can stomach listening to your bullshit.”
Cooper wiped the sticky trail of spit from his beard. Rye dug his heels into the gravel and balled his fists. The boy standing there be damned, he was ready to get this thing done. Gareth stepped between the two men in an attempt to ease the tension.