Burning Bright

THE CORPSE BIRD

Perhaps if work had been less stressful, Boyd Candler would not have heard the owl.
But he hadn’t slept well for a month. Too often he found himself awake at three or four in the morning, his mind troubled by engineering projects weeks behind schedule, possible layoffs at year’s end. So now, for the second night in a row, Boyd listened to the bird’s low plaintive call. After a few more minutes he left the bed, walked out of the house where his wife and daughter slept to stand in the side yard that bordered the Colemans’ property. The cool late-October dew dampened his bare feet. Jim Coleman had unplugged his spotlight, and the other houses on the street were unlit except for a couple of porch lights. The subdivision was quiet and still as Boyd waited like a man in a doctor’s office expecting a dreaded diagnosis. In a few minutes it came. The owl called again from the scarlet oak behind the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die.
Boyd Candler had grown up among people who believed the world could reveal all manner of things if you paid attention. As a child he’d watched his grandfather, the man he and his parents lived with, find a new well for a neighbor with nothing more than a branch from an ash tree. He’d been in the neighbor’s pasture as his grandfather walked slowly from one fence to the other, the branch’s two forks gripped like reins, not stopping until the tip wavered and then dipped toward the ground as if yanked by an invisible hand. He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered, and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, and a life about to end.
Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin.
It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.


The next morning at breakfast Boyd didn’t mention the owl to his wife or daughter. What had seemed a certainty last night was more tenuous in daylight. His mind drifted toward a project due by the week’s end. Boyd finished his second cup of coffee and checked his watch.
“Where’s Jennifer?” he asked his wife. “It’s our week to carpool.”
“No pickup today,” Laura said. “Janice called while you were in the shower. Jennifer ran a temperature over a hundred all weekend. It hasn’t broken so Janice is staying home with her.”
Boyd felt a cold dark wave of disquiet pass through him.
“Have they been to the doctor?”
“Of course,” Laura said.
“What did the doctor say was wrong with Jennifer?”
“Just a virus, something going around,” Laura said, her back to him as she packed Allison’s lunch.
“Did the doctor tell Janice anything else to watch out for?” Boyd asked.
Laura turned to him. The expression on her face wavered between puzzlement and irritation.
“It’s a virus, Boyd. That’s all it is.”
“I’ll be outside when you’re ready,” Boyd told his daughter, and walked out into the yard.
The neighborhood seemed less familiar, as though many months had passed since he’d seen it. The subdivision had been built over a cotton field. A few fledgling dogwoods and maples had been planted in some yards, but the only big tree was the scarlet oak that grew on an undeveloped lot behind the Colemans’ house. Boyd assumed it was once a shade tree, a place for cotton field workers to escape the sun a few minutes at lunch and water breaks.
The owl was still in the oak. Boyd knew this because growing up he’d heard the older folks say a corpse bird always had to perch in a big tree. It was one way you could tell it from a regular barn or screech owl. Another way was that the bird returned to the same tree, the same branch, each of the three nights.
His family had moved to Asheville soon after his grandfather’s death. Boyd had been an indifferent student in Madison County, assuming he’d become a farmer, but the farm had been sold, the money divided among his father and aunts. At Asheville High Boyd mastered a new kind of knowledge, one of theorems and formulas, a knowledge where everything could be explained down to the last decimal point. His teachers told him he should be an engineer and helped Boyd get loans and scholarships so he could be the first in his family to attend college. His teachers urged him into a world where the sky did not matter, where land did not blacken your nails, cling to your boots, or callous your hands but was seen, if at all, through the glass windows of buildings and cars and planes. The world irrelevant and mute. His teachers had believed he could leave the world he had grown up in, and perhaps he had believed it as well.
Boyd remembered the morning his college sociology class watched a film about the folklore of Hmong tribesmen in Laos. After the film the professor asked if similar beliefs could be found in other cultures. Boyd raised his hand. When he’d finished speaking, the professor and the other students stared at Boyd as if a bone pierced his nostrils and human teeth dangled from his neck.
“So you’ve actually witnessed such things?” the professor asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied, knowing his face had turned a deep crimson.
A student sitting behind him snickered.
“And this folklore, you believe in it?” the professor asked.
“I’m just saying I once knew people who did,” Boyd said. “I wasn’t talking about myself.”
“Superstition is nothing more than ignorance of cause and effect,” the student behind him said.
Rational. Educated. Enlightened. Boyd knew the same words he’d heard years ago in college, the same sensibility that came with those words, prevailed in the subdivision. Most of his neighbors were transplants from the Northeast or Midwest, all white-collar professionals like himself. His neighbors would assume that since it was October the owl was migrating. Like the occasional possum or raccoon, the owl would be nothing more to them than a bit of nature that had managed to stray into the city and would soon return to its proper environment.


But Boyd did worry, off and on all morning and afternoon. He couldn’t remember Allison ever having a fever that lasted three days. He thought about calling the Colemans’ house to check on Jennifer, but Boyd knew how strange that would seem. Despite the carpool and their daughters’ friendship, the parents’ interactions were mostly hand waves and brief exchanges about pickup times. In their six years as neighbors, the two families had never shared a meal.
Though Boyd had work that he’d normally stay late to finish, at five sharp he logged off his computer and drove home. Halloween was five nights away, and as he turned into the subdivision he saw hollow-eyed pumpkins on porches and steps. A cardboard witch on a broomstick dangled from a tree limb, turning with the wind like a weather vane. At another house a skeleton shuddered above a carport, one bony finger extended as if beckoning. A neighborhood contest of sorts, and one that Jim Coleman particularly enjoyed. Each year Jim glued a white bedsheet over a small parade float. He tethered its nylon cord to a concrete block so that his makeshift ghost hovered over the Coleman house.
There had been no such displays when Boyd was a child, no dressing up to trick-or-treat. Perhaps because the farm was so isolated, but Boyd now suspected it had been more an understanding that certain things shouldn’t be mocked, that to do so might bring retribution. As Boyd passed another house, this one adorned with black cats, he wondered if that retribution had already come, was perched in the scarlet oak.
It was almost dark when he pulled into the driveway behind his wife’s Camry. Through the front window, Boyd saw Allison sprawled in front of the fire, Laura sitting on the couch. The first frost of the year had been predicted for tonight and from the chill in the air Boyd knew it would be so.
He stepped into the side yard and studied the Colemans’ house. Lights were on in two rooms upstairs as well as in the kitchen and dining room. Both vehicles were in the carport. Jim Coleman had turned on a spotlight he’d set on the roof, and it illuminated the ghost looming overhead.
Boyd walked into the backyard. The scarlet oak’s leaves caught the day’s last light. Lambent, that was the word for it, Boyd thought, like red wine raised to candlelight. He slowly raised his gaze but did not see the bird. He clapped his hands together, so hard his palms burned. Something dark lifted out of the tallest limb, hung above the tree a moment, then resettled.
In the living room, Allison and her schoolbooks lay sprawled in front of the hearth. When Boyd leaned to kiss her he felt the fire’s warmth on her face. Laura sat on the couch, writing month-end checks.
“How is Jennifer?” he asked when he came into the kitchen.
Laura set the checkbook aside.
“No better. Janice called and said she was going to keep her home again tomorrow.”
“Did she take her back to the doctor?”
“Yes. The doctor gave her some antibiotics and took a strep culture.”
Allison twisted her body and turned to Boyd.
“You need to cut us some more wood this weekend, Daddy. There are only a few big logs left.”
Boyd nodded and let his eyes settle on the fire. Laura had wanted to switch to gas logs. Just like turning a TV on and off, that easy, his wife had said, and a lot less messy. Boyd had argued the expense, especially since the wood he cut was free, but it was more than that. Cutting the wood, stacking, and finally burning it gave him pleasure, work that, unlike so much of what he did at his job, was tactile, somehow more real.
Boyd was staring at the hearth when he spoke.
“I think Jennifer needs to see somebody else, somebody besides a family doctor.”
“Why do you think that, Daddy?” Allison asked.
“Because I think she’s real sick.”
“But she can’t miss Halloween,” Allison said. “We’re both going to be ghosts.”
“How can you know that?” Laura asked. “You haven’t even seen her.”
“I just know.”
Laura was about to say something else, then hesitated.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Laura said.


He waited until after supper to knock on the Colemans’ door. Laura had told him not to go, but Boyd went anyway. Jim Coleman opened the door. Boyd stood before a man he suddenly realized he knew hardly anything about. He didn’t know how many siblings Jim Coleman had or what kind of neighborhood in Chicago he’d grown up in or if he’d ever held a shotgun or hoe in his hand. He did not know if Jim Coleman had once been a churchgoer or had always spent his Sunday mornings working in his garage or yard.
“I’ve come to check on Jennifer,” Boyd said.
“She’s sleeping,” Jim answered.
“I’d still like to see her, if you don’t mind,” Boyd said, and showed Jim a sheet of paper. “I had Allison write down what they did in class today. She’d be real disappointed if I didn’t deliver this.”
For a moment Boyd thought he would say no, but Jim Coleman stepped aside.
“Come in then.”
He followed Jim down the hallway and up the stairs to Jennifer’s bedroom. The girl lay in her bed, the sheets pulled up to her neck. Sweat had matted the child’s hair, made her face a shiny paleness, like porcelain. In a few moments Janice joined them. She pressed her palm against Jennifer’s forehead and let it linger as though bestowing a blessing on the child.
“What was her temperature the last time you checked?” Boyd asked.
“One hundred and two. It goes up in the evening.”
“And it’s been four days now?”
“Yes,” Janice said. “Four days and four nights. I let her go to school Friday. I probably shouldn’t have.”
Boyd looked at Jennifer. He tried to put himself in her parents’ situation. He tried to imagine what words could connect what he’d witnessed in Madison County to some part of their experience in Chicago or Raleigh. But there were no such words. What he had learned in the North Carolina mountains was untranslatable to the Colemans.
“I think you need to get her to the hospital,” Boyd said.
“But the doctor says as soon as the antibiotics kick in she’ll be fine,” Janice said.
“You need to get her to the hospital,” Boyd said again.
“How can you know that?” Janice asked. “You’re not a doctor.”
“When I was a boy, I saw someone sick like this.” Boyd hesitated. “That person died.”
“Doctor Underwood said she’d be fine,” Jim said, “that plenty of kids have had this. He’s seen her twice.”
“You’re scaring me,” Janice said.
“I’m not trying to scare you,” Boyd said. “Please take Jennifer to the hospital. Will you do that?”
Janice turned to her husband.
“Why is he saying these things?”
“You need to leave,” Jim Coleman said.
“Please,” Boyd said. “I know what I’m talking about.”
“Leave. Leave now,” Jim Coleman said.
Boyd walked back into his own yard. For a few minutes he stood there. The owl did not call but he knew it roosted in the scarlet oak, waiting.
“Janice just called and she’s royally pissed off,” Laura told him when he entered the house. “I told you not to go over there. They think you’re mentally disturbed, maybe even dangerous.”
Laura sat on the couch, and she motioned for Boyd to sit down also.
“Where’s Allison?” Boyd asked.
“I put her to bed,” Laura said. “You know, you’re upsetting Allison as well as the Colemans. You’re upsetting me too. Tell me what this is about, Boyd.”
For half an hour he tried to explain. When Boyd finished his wife placed one of her hands over his.
“I know where you grew up that people, uneducated people, believed such things.” Laura said when he’d finished. “But you don’t live in Madison County anymore, and you are educated. Maybe there is an owl out back. I haven’t heard it, but I’ll concede it could be out there. But even so it’s an owl, nothing more.”
Laura squeezed his hand.
“I’m getting you an appointment with Doctor Harmon. He’ll prescribe some Ambien so you can get some rest, maybe something else for the anxiety.”


Later that night he lay in bed, waiting for the owl to call. An hour passed on the red digits of the alarm clock and he tried to muster hope that the bird had left. He finally fell asleep for a few minutes, long enough to dream about his grandfather. They were in Madison County, in the farmhouse. Boyd was in the front room by himself, waiting though he didn’t know what for. Finally, the old man came out of his bedroom, dressed in his brogans and overalls, a sweat rag in his back pocket.
The corpse bird’s call roused him from the dream. Boyd put on pants and shoes and a sweatshirt. He took a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and went into the basement to get the chain saw. The machine was almost forty years old, a relic, heavy and cumbersome, its teeth dulled by decades of use. But it still ran well enough to keep them in firewood.
Boyd filled the gas tank and checked the spark plug and chain lube. The chain saw had belonged to his grandfather, had been used by the old man to cull trees from his farm for firewood. Boyd had often gone into the woods with him, helped load the logs and kindling into his grandfather’s battered pickup. After the old man’s health had not allowed him to use it anymore, he’d given it to Boyd. Two decades had passed before he found a use for it. A coworker owned some thirty acres near Cary and offered Boyd all the free wood he wanted as long as the trees were dead and Boyd cut them himself.
Outside, the air was sharp and clear. The stars seemed more defined, closer. A bright orange harvest moon rose in the west. He clicked on the flashlight and let its beam trace the upper limbs until he saw it. Despite being bathed in light, the corpse bird did not stir. Rigid as a gravestone, Boyd thought. The unblinking yellow eyes stared toward the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew these were the same eyes that had fixed themselves on his grandfather.
Boyd laid the flashlight on the grass, its beam aimed at the scarlet oak’s trunk. He pulled the cord and the machine trembled to life. Its vibration shook his whole upper body. Boyd stepped close to the tree, extending his arms, the machine’s weight tensing his biceps and forearms.
The scrub trees on his coworker’s land had come down quickly and easily. But he’d never cut a tree the size of the scarlet oak. A few bark shards flew out as the blade hit the tree, then the blade skittered down the trunk until Boyd pulled it away and tried again.
It took eight attempts before he made the beginnings of a wedge in the tree. He was breathing hard, the weight of the saw straining his arms, his back, and even his legs as he steadied not only himself but the machine. He angled the blade as best he could to widen the wedge. By the time he finished the first side, sawdust and sweat stung his eyes. His heart banged against his ribs as if caged.
Boyd thought about resting a minute but when he looked back at the Colemans’ house, he saw lights on. He carried the saw to the other side of the trunk. Three times the blade hit the bark before finally making a cut. Boyd glanced behind him again and saw Jim Coleman coming across the yard, his mouth open and arms gesturing.
Boyd eased the throttle and let the chain saw idle.
“What in God’s name are you doing,” Jim shouted.
“What’s got to be done,” Boyd said.
“I’ve got a sick daughter and you woke her up.”
“I know that,” Boyd said.
Jim Coleman reached a hand out as though to wrest the chain saw from Boyd’s hand. Boyd shoved the throttle and waved the blade between him and Jim Coleman.
“I’m calling the police,” Jim Coleman shouted.
Laura was outside now as well. She and Jim Coleman spoke to each other a few moments before Jim went into his house. When Laura approached Boyd screamed at her to stay away. Boyd made a final thrust deep into the tree’s heart. He dropped the saw and stepped back. The oak wavered a moment, then came crashing down. As it fell, something beaked and winged passed near Boyd’s face. He picked up the flashlight and shone it on the bird as it crossed over the vacant lot, disappeared into the darkness it had been summoned from. Boyd sat down on the scarlet oak’s stump and clicked off the flashlight.
His wife and neighbor stood beside each other in the Colemans’ backyard. They spoke softly to each other, as though Boyd were a wild animal they didn’t want to reveal their presence to.
Soon blue lights splashed against the sides of the two houses. Other neighbors joined Jim Coleman and Laura in the backyard. The policeman talked to Laura a few moments. She nodded once and turned in Boyd’s direction, her face wet with tears. The policeman spoke into a walkie-talkie and then started walking toward him, handcuffs clinking in the policeman’s hands. Boyd stood up and held his arms out before him, both palms upturned, like a man who’s just set something free.