Bright's Passage: A Novel Read Online Free

ridden into the depths of the woods without a struggle. For all its earlier shows of panic, it now seemed deaf to the buzzing alarm that was spreading through the forest canopy. For the next few miles it clomped along with the maddening contentedness of an old dray taking the pumpkins to town. Once or twice it tried to chomp at the clumps of grass along its path, but Bright pulled back sharply on the reins each time, cursing the angel under his breath.
    “Last time I let a goddamn angel help me start a goddamn fire,” he said. “He makes fun of me, tells me I can’t start a fire without a angel, and then that very angel goes and burns the whole goddamn forest down.” He rode along in silence for apiece more. “Goddamn it,” he added. A voluptuous purple-headed thistle drew the horse off to the right, but Bright jerked it back.
    “It was you who started the fire, Henry Bright, not me.”
    “It’s gonna burn the whole goddamn forest! Ain’t you gonna do something?”
    “What can I do?”
    “It was you told me to set it. Now you don’t know what to do with it?”
    “I didn’t tell you to set the whole forest on fire, only the cabin,” the horse sighed as it ambled along. “Sadly, there’s no stopping it now. But have heart, Henry Bright.”
    “But ain’t the Colonel going to see the smoke? You know he will.”
    “I know he will.”
    Bright pulled back on the reins and the horse came to a stop. “You do?”
    “Of course I do. I know everything, Henry Bright.”
    “But we don’t want him to see the smoke, I thought. ’Cause he’ll know something’s on fire and he’ll come over the mountain, him and his boys.”
    “And what will they find?”
    Bright looked down at his own son, who had stopped crying for the moment. “He won’t find nothing, because the whole goddamn forest is gonna be burned down,” he said.
    “And what will the Colonel and his sons think then?”
    “That we’re dead. Both me and Rachel,” he said. “Burned up in the fire.”
    “And your son?”
    “Him too. They’ll think he’s dead too.” He bit his fist. “Do you think they’ll really think that? That we all just got burned up in the fire?”
    “The fire started in the early morning while you and yourwife were still asleep. By the time the conflagration had passed over, there was nothing to show that you or she and her unborn child had ever existed. It was a tragedy.”
    “And you think they’ll believe that? The Colonel is gonna believe that?”
    “Why would he not?”
    “Well, for one thing, he’s had Corwin and Duncan watching us.”
    “How do you know?”
    “ ’Cause I saw them. Up on the ridge in the winter, when there was no leaves on the trees. They were just sitting there looking at me one time. And then even last week I saw Duncan. He was on his belly there in the shadows underneath the ferns by the side of the road. I think the Colonel was waiting for my boy to be born. I think he wants to take my boy away from me.”
    The angel said nothing to this and Bright mused a while in the saddle, rolling the terrible notion in his mind. The horse made another foray, this time into a stand of nettles, and Bright, lost in his reverie, permitted it.
    They rode on for several more hours, the light shifting and dappling, the humidity settling around them like a warm, wet sigh, until at length they came to a rill and followed it down a long hillside to where it emptied itself into a fast-running stream. Here they stopped and he removed the baby from the sling around his chest and placed it on the ground. He stripped off his shirt, and, dipping both shirt and sling in the cool water, he rubbed the fabrics together until the mess the boy had made was gone. The baby wailed as he dunked its hindquarters in the flow, but it quieted some after he laid it upon the woolen blanket. By the time he had milked the goat, the last portion of sunlight was being sopped up by the low moon, and the stars were beginning to show on