Bright's Passage: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

face was so unlike the faces of the infants Bright had seen frolicking among the painted clouds of a certain church back in France. It was a good, open face, without malevolence or mischief. Bright rolled onto his back and regarded the sweeping trees above. At length he pulled himself to his feet, stripped naked, and hung his clothes up on some low-hanging branches to dry.
    When the father and son returned to camp, the horse took one look at Henry Bright’s pale, stem-thin body and snorted. Bright ignored the animal and set about clearing a patch of ground, arranging the woolen blanket, and laying the child upon it. Next he set the goat loose and watched her forage, by which way she led him to a mulberry bush, a serviceberry bush with a few precious berries that had somehow escaped the notice of the birds, and a gnarled old crab apple tree, loaded down with tight, bitter green fruit. He ate with as little compunction as the goat. He had fishing line, but without matches there would be no campfire. Perhaps that was just as well; another fire, one that might betray their whereabouts to the Colonel and his sons, could be even more disastrous than the fire the angel had made him set in order to burn the cabin down. He ate the unripe crab apples and milked the goat, feeding the boy from the bucket and leaving aside a good portion from which to feed him again in the night when the child awoke hungry.
    As Bright made ready to sleep, the horse’s derisive humor descended into contempt. It stared darkly from out of a purpleand malignant silence as Bright curled his naked form closely around his son. The boy muzzled into Bright’s chest. Bright noticed the angel’s scornfulness, and though he said nothing, he stared back at the horse from the darkness with a like animus.
    He sat up again suddenly. “What did you call me?”
    The horse chuffed the air. “What do you mean?”
    “You called me something.” Bright flicked the ground with his hand. “You wanna call me names, you just say ’em loud enough for me to hear ’em.”
    “You are mistaken, Henry Bright.”
    Bright whipped his jacket over his child’s nakedness and then, with a final deathly stare, he rolled over to face away from the animal. Around them in the forest thrummed the ordinary night sounds, but beneath those came the ossiary click as Henry Bright’s jaws worked to eat the sounds deep down in his throat that might betray his great grief at the death of his wife, his foolhardy destruction of their home, and the wildfire that had ensued. He thought fearfully of being discovered in the night by the Colonel and his cruel sons and, as he bit the knuckles of his fist, the bitterness of the crab apples he had eaten mixed against his tongue with the sour shame of being mocked by his own horse.

6
     
    “You said we were going to be married?” Rachel asked expectantly out of the darkness. She sat in front of him astride the horse as they left the Colonel’s house behind.
    “We will,” Bright said.
    “Oh, good. I hate this thing.” She began to tear at her ragged white dress. A bundle of thread tangled out from the shoulder, where a bow had once blossomed. On the other shoulder the bow was still hanging on, but it drooped lifelessly. “Can’t wait to get it off.” By the motion of her arm he could tell that she was tugging the dirty stretch of silk that ran between her neckline and her breasts.
    “Don’t you tear at that thing,” he said, letting go of the horse’s rein to pull her arm down and her hand away from the garment. “We ain’t married yet and I ain’t got nothing else for you to wear.”
    “So?”
    “So, you can’t get married naked, can you? When was the last time you ever heard of anyone getting married naked?”
    She giggled at this, as if he hadn’t just ridden his horse through the front door of the Colonel’s house and stolen her away. “Are we going to get married real soon?” she asked again.
    “I said we were, didn’t I?