Saints at the River by Ron Rash

Author:Ron Rash [Rash, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0805074872
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published: 2004-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Part Two

“I’m going up to Lou’s a minute to get some cigarettes,” Daddy had said. “You look after your brother till I get back.” Mama had gone with Aunt Margaret to buy canning jars in Seneca, leaving Ben and me with Daddy, telling him to watch us and the pot of beans she’d left simmering on the stove. But Daddy needed his cigarettes, so he left us there in the front room, Ben on the floor playing with a toy train and me in a chair doing math homework. After a few minutes Ben said, “I’m hungry,” and got up while I added a last column of figures and wrote down the answer. Only a few seconds passed before I followed him into the kitchen, but Ben’s hand was already on the handle, his arm trembling as he pulled the two-gallon pot of beans off the eye, my arm reaching out for the handle but too late as scalding water and beans poured onto Ben’s face and my left arm and leg. For a few moments I didn’t know the water had scalded me as well, because it was like I’d cast every sense and emotion out of myself and across the two-foot space between Ben and me, done this because sight alone wasn’t enough to comprehend what had happened to my brother. How could it be otherwise when only the eyes Ben had closed at the last instant were saved.

Neither of us screamed. Ben just whimpered and then not even that while I didn’t make a sound because it was like watching a movie, no more real than that because Ben’s ruined face couldn’t be real. The room tilted and a wave of blackness rushed in. When the floor leveled again and the room lightened, Ben and I were holding on to each other in the kitchen corner, as if the beans spilled on the floor could still hurt us. Ben’s pain was dimmed by shock, but my arm and leg now burned as though I was on fire, a fire that spread to cover my whole body, invisible flames that never quit burning. “The wicked are their own wick” was how Reverend Tilson described hell the morning he lit a candle in church and had us pass it around as he preached. That was exactly what I felt, what I saw when I closed my eyes—a candlewick inside an unquenchable flame. If older or in less pain I might have been able to clear my head enough to telephone Uncle Mark or Billy’s parents. But that was beyond me. All I could do was watch the clock on the stove, because the red second hand proved that time still moved and that meant Daddy had to come back and Ben and I wouldn’t be huddled in that corner forever. But it was forever. Daddy had been talking with Lou Henson and forgotten about us being alone. I counted out loud each time the second hand passed the twelve, telling myself that before the hand reached that twelve again Daddy would be back.

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