Burn Forever

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1935, renewed 1963 by Zenith Brown.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

  CHAPTER 1

  Marie Davidge, elegantly groomed from the top of her snowy perfectly coiffed head to the tip of her silver sandal, completely assured of her position and her charm, put her glass down on the ivory lace cloth and smiled at the heavyset baldheaded man with the red ribbon diagonally across his white shirt front.

  “My son? How charming of you to remember him. Well, he’s quite mad . . . like most of his father’s people.”

  She smiled at her husband opposite her across the gleaming candle-lit sea of silver and flowers.

  “He finished Harvard, spent a couple of years moping wretchedly in his father’s office, and then went quietly out of his mind. Packed up, went to the Northwest and did something about trees for three years. Now he’s a forester down in the Tennessee Valley, and he loves it. Quite mad!”

  She laughed a soft golden laugh that showed how little she meant it, and raised the glass to her lips.

  “We exposed him to every temptation. We even sent him to Paris. I think I should have died of mortification if he hadn’t been so incredibly in demand every time a débutante or her mother laid eyes on him.”

  The bald man smiled.

  “But he writes to you?”

  “Never. Apparently they didn’t teach him to write at St Paul’s. We do get a telegram, once in a while, and sometimes we look up from the bridge table and there he is, just putting his bag down and knocking out his pipe in the goldfish bowl.”

  “You are not worried?”

  “Worried? My dear Baron, we adore it. Imagine anyone simply walking out on all the cocktail parties and assorted follies of the world.”

  Mrs. Davidge’s delicate face with its luminous dark eyes clouded. She glanced across the table again.

  “I think it’s what his father would have liked to do. But his father kept him at it. I used to see something in his eyes that looked like the wide open spaces when we were first married. I think he’s glad Ben went out to find them.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The harvest moon was a smooth yellow apricot rolling up behind the wooded Tennessee ridge, throwing the long shadow of the Curriers’ great cedar across the Hollow like a sharp black brush stroke across, a silver screen. It drenched the log cabin, vine-covered under its sloping moss-grown roof and long swayback ridgepole, with white unearthly light, thrusting it deep into the shadows at the foot of the hill rising obliquely behind it.

  The dirt courtyard before the cabin was empty. The low stable on one side, against the hill, and the corn crib on the other, at the edge of the river branch, lay deep in the shadows. Soft smoke fingers wove like frail ghosts out of the broken-lipped chimney at the end of the cabin, a chicken flew cackling from under the porch and scrambled across the yard. A dog moved lazily out of the recesses of the porch and stood for a moment on the top steps, his huge gaunt head raised, sniffing the night.

  The girl hidden behind the corn crib pressed her slim body closer into the deep shadows and closed her eyes.

  “Oh, God, I’m afear’d,” she whispered. She clung to the rough boards with trembling icy hands. The crib was nearly empty, there were only a few bushels in the bottom where the wire netting to keep out the rats caught in her stocking and scratched her leg. She could see through the spaces between the boards, and she waited, her heart bursting in her throat, waited for the dog sniffing at the air. She saw him wag his long straight tail and come stiffly down the steps, stretch himself, dragging his lean belly on the ground, coming towards her.

  “They’ll see him here. Then they’ll find me.”

  The girl’s throat ached with an agony of stark living terror.

  The dog crossed the shadowy black path of the great cedar tree on the hill, and thrust his wet muzzle into her hand. His bony tail thwacked against the corner of the crib.

  She crouched down, her rough copper-toed shoes scraping on the dry ground.

  “Here, boy!” she whispered. She drew the dog into the shadow, pressing his hard starved body close to her side. “Peace, boy! Peace, Kilgore.”

  She laid her head against his long ears. The dog flicked her cheek with his wet tongue and growled uneasily. She could feel his body stiffen in her arms. Her fingers tightened convulsively in his loose hide as she raised her head. Her lips moved, breathing a pitiful little prayer.

  “Oh, God, please don’t let ’em catch me. Let me get away, I can’t marry him, God. Amen.”

  The dog licked her aching throat above the homespun collar. Julie Currier pressed her forehead against the cool wood of the crib and peered through the wide cracks out to where the black shadow of the cedar fell like a burden across the porch steps. Her mind went back over the grim months since fear had crept into the Hollow, eating through their lives like a brown worm in an ear of ripe corn.

  At first it was only a rumor that the mail carrier had brought over the ridge, about the great dam, and the water sixty-five feet deep where the rain barrel with the big C burned in it stood under the eaves at the corner of the cabin. They hadn’t believed it, not until the roads got passable again in the spring and government agents began coming back into the hills, making strange marks on the trees and talking with her grandfather down by the gate. It was then that they began to follow her with their eyes, the three of them—Nathan Currier her grandfather, Old Doss his brother, and Young Doss, Old Doss’s son—until she felt the cold terror of a snared bird. She knew what it meant when her grandfather came up from the workshop alone and sat on the porch whittling a stick, his head bent on his rough homespun shirt. They were trying to make him let young Doss marry her.

  They had been trying since she was fourteen and Doss was twenty-five. Other girls married at fourteen, and Doss could have any girl he wanted, even the school teacher across the ridge. Any but Julie. Her grandfather had always stood, a gnarled gaunt figure, stern and unbending, between her and Old Doss and her cousin—always except when she was to go to school after her mother died, and they had held out against it until he gave in. But Julie hadn’t minded as long as she didn’t have to marry Doss. And after that they had quit talking about it, until the government agents came. Even then they had never said anything to her, but she knew what they were thinking. They had to leave the Hollow, and Nathan Currier was growing old, and there was no one to take care of her, no one to protect her, except Doss.

  For weeks she had watched her grandfather, despair growing in her heart. She did not dare to speak to him. He would have thought there was someone else. She had to wait, hoping against hope that he would turn away from them. Then had come the afternoon when the truck full of boys from the CCC camp had waved
at her, and one of them had come up to the cabin steps to talk to her. Julie’s face burned suddenly, Old Doss’s scathing accusing taunts still in her ears, saying things she could not understand except to know they were wicked and cruelly wrong. It was because of that that they were in there now. She had known it at supper, when her grandfather did not raise his eyes from his food and Doss sat there with his dark face flushed, while Old Doss followed her from the table to the stove with faded colorless eyes alive with suspicion.

  Julie had watched them file out onto the porch, into the back room where they slept, her heart a cold heavy lump in her breast; finished her work, set the table for breakfast, covered it with the cloth made from bleached sugar sacks sewed together, taken the milk and butter down to the spring house. Then she had sat on the porch watching the night creep down into the Hollow, her hands cold, her throat aching with tears that would not come. And suddenly it had come to her like a living growing thing inside her, and she had sat up, eyes wide, her breath coming in quick painful little gusts. The thought of running away from the Hollow had never come into her mind before. She had crept back into the cabin and stood in the middle of the floor listening to the voices beyond the log partition, where Old Doss and Doss were talking, her grandfather’s voice silent, and looked around the dark room where she had been born and raised, where her mother had died and where she had lived for eighteen years. She could see without light her maple spool bed that Old Doss had made for her, the table, the cradle in the corner, the hickory chairs, the candlesticks, the mahogany clock, the letter from the government propped against it on the mantel. Then she had crept out on the kitchen stoop and waited a moment, listening, and then down the steps into the yard. The sound of a chair scraping against the pine floor caught her ear, and she ran to the corn crib, cowering down behind it. If they found her she was lost. They were hard men. If she was running away it would prove what Old Doss said—she was bad.

  Julie leaned her burning forehead against the rough boards and pressed the dog closer to her side, eyes straining into the black shadow of the cedar on the steps.

  “They’ll call Kilgore, then they’ll find me,” she thought.

  She heard their heavy boots on the porch floor. Then they stopped. She caught her breath and waited, cold and tense. It hadn’t occurred to her that her grandfather might look in the open door to see if she was in bed, this one night, just to tell her. Then she breathed again. He wouldn’t . . . it didn’t matter what she wanted, she was just a girl, to do as she was told.

  She could see them dimly in the shadow of the cedar. Then her grandfather came slowly out into the white moonlight and stood looking up at the sky, tall and gaunt, his face raised in the night. Julie could see the ragged black hat, the checked wool shirt, homespun breeches and high rough boots without moving her terrified glance from the glittering eyes sunk deep beneath the shaggy brows, and the long sharp nose and thin stern lips over the snuff-stained iron-gray beard.

  Nathan Currier moved down a step and stopped. Behind him Doss emerged from the dark, his father close behind him. None of them spoke. Doss’s head was thrown back. His feet were wide apart, his shotgun resting lightly on his shoulder. Julie knew he had won at last, and bent her head, biting her lips to keep the blinding tears back. Then through the rustling corn up from the narrow bed under the cypress she seemed to hear her mother whispering softly in her aching heart, a faded voice dimly remembered. “Never let them know you’re afear’d, baby lamb. Never let them know.” Suddenly she found her heart was quiet, the ache in her throat had eased. “It’s like being dead,” she thought. “They can’t hurt us when we’re dead, Kilgore.”

  The dog moved. He had heard the low whistle before Julie. Her heart stopped beating again. As she unloosed her hold on the dog her cramped foot in its heavy boy’s shoe dislodged a stone. It rolled down the bank and into the branch with a muffled splash. Her eyes widened with terror. Nathan Currier’s hand went back into the shadows of the porch, and she saw the barrel of his shotgun glisten in the moonlight.

  “Now they’ll come,” she whispered, fighting back the cry bursting in her throat. Kilgore moved out from behind the shadows, stretched on his belly, and crawled to the old man on the steps, ears drooping, fawning. Then they were coming down the steps, and Julie waited for the sharp scrunch of hard boots in the dirt, iron fingers gripping her shoulder, accusing eyes boring into hers. They’d never believe she wasn’t out meeting the boy from the CCC camp. She leaned against the boards, sick with hopelessness, listening for the sound of their steps. There was no sound.

  She braced her foot against a clump of coarse grass on the edge of the bank and peered through the boards. Old Doss was on the bottom step, as thin and dry as a lone cornstalk left in a parched field. He was looking back, gun over his shoulder, at the cabin. None of them had spoken, they only stood, waiting, it seemed to Julie. Then fear greater than the fear for herself crept into her heart. Fear of the unknown. The fear that frontier women have when their men go out into the night, stern-faced and silent. The white face and black shiny hair of the CCC boy floated through her mind. She shuddered, looking through at them, standing motionless in the white light, like the wax image of Jess Kilgore that Mis’ Mincey made for Old Doss to burn so Jess would waste away till he died.

  Julie’s tongue flicked her dry lips, watching. Maybe it wasn’t the white-faced boy, or Jess Kilgore. Maybe it was the men who came late at night and drove down to the workshop with the truck and talked to Doss and his father. She had never seen them, they never spoke of them, but they came, once a week now, never oftener and sometimes not so often. She had never asked why, she was afraid to ask even her grandfather.

  She waited silently. After a moment her grandfather moved towards the gate that led into the narrow backwoods road, Doss and the dog Kilgore following, Old Doss a step behind them. Julie closed her eyes, counting the dry scrunch of the hobnailed boots on the ground. She could tell without looking when her grandfather stopped, waiting for Doss to open the gate, and then to close it again and fasten the rusty chain to the cedar post. In a moment she could not hear them, but she waited, counting slowly one, two, three . . . until she had counted one hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred. That would take them down the road into the wagon tracks across the cornfield. She counted fifty more, then relaxed her tense body and stepped out into the yard.

  She stood for a moment looking up at the long straight stem of the cedar tree outlined against the clear sky. The dark branches at the top were like the flame of a candle. Julie smiled suddenly. Beyond the tree, high tonight, shone her star. She raised her delicate face with its pointed chin and wide-set haunted eyes deeply fringed above the high pale cheek bones and whispered, “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.” When she had repeated the lonely ritual she stood staring up, strangely unhappy, poignantly longing for something she could not name.

  “You can’t wish for something when you don’t know what there is,” she thought “I wish I knew what there was to wish, out there where we’ve got to go when the water comes. I wish I wouldn’t have to marry Doss. No—I wish the government wouldn’t cover up the Hollow with water. Please, God, don’t let them cover up the Hollow. For Gran I wish it, not for me. It’ll put out the fire if they do.”

  She looked back at the cabin. The thin smoke rose out of the chimney like the smoke of incense from an altar. The fire on the Currier hearth had never been out; it had burned there night and day, winter and summer, lighting birth and death, for over a hundred years. People came from miles in the summer to “borry” from it, new married people “borried” it too, to start their own hearth fires in their cabins in the hills . . . though some said it was bad luck, because Nate Currier’s wife had run off and Doss Currier’s wife had died in childbirth.

  She stood a moment looking down the Hollow as the three men had done. A single faint beam of light shone from the door of Doss Currier’s workshop, almost a quarter of a mile down the branch. She ran across t
he yard and started to climb over the gate. She was on the top rail when her quick ears caught the twang of a guitar coming plaintively out of the darkness. She clung to the rail and raised her head. Edrew Mincey was somewhere in the hills. She could close her eyes and see the staring china blue eyes and dark lank hair of the afflicted boy, the loose hanging lips, the buck teeth showing in his simple terrible grin as he hopped along the roads on his twisted foot, picking at the guitar hanging from his neck. She shrank back, remembering the steel grip of those moist skeleton fingers buried in her shoulder once when he had jumped at her from behind a tree in the road. She could still feel her heart pounding again in her throat as she tore silently, terrified beyond belief, down the steep deep-guttered road towards the cabin, and stopped to hide at the foot of the hill while she got her breath back, knowing she must never tell the two old men. Because . . . she couldn’t say why. But she knew instinctively that she mustn’t tell what Edrew had done. She knew in some way that they were always thinking about something else when she spoke of a boy at school, or even the mail carrier. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew it wasn’t anything that really touched her, except in their own dour minds.

  She hung poised on the gate for an instant, listening, trying to bring her courage to the point to carry her away from the moonlit hollow across the hill where Edrew Mincey was wandering somewhere, picking out his sad melodies to the things that moved at night. Edrew could see in the dark, they said, and also he had some way not given to other folk of going quickly from place to place. Everyone had heard his guitar far in the distance and then suddenly a few yards away.

  Julie held her breath to keep from drowning the soft whisper of the notes disappearing in the white night. She straightened up, slid down on the other side of the fence and ran up the gravel slope to the road, her head thrown back, listening for any strange sound coming out of the night. Most sounds she knew. A startled bird, a weasel or a rat slipping through the brush, the low cry of the pigmy owls, the wind rustling through the ripening corn. She ran along the edge of the road trying to stay in the grass so her clumsy shoes would not grate on the dry dirt. About a hundred yards along the road that curved round the base of the hill, a lane cut off through Nathan Currier’s cornfield to the farm road that ran down to his workshop on the branch, where she had seen the lantern hanging in the door. She knew they were waiting down there for someone, her grandfather and Doss and Old Doss, and maybe the other men, the ones she had never seen.