Requiem by Fire: A Novel - Hardcover

Caldwell, Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400063442 ISBN 13: 9781400063444

Publisher: Random House, 2010

Synopsis

Charles Frazier called Cataloochee, Wayne Caldwell’s acclaimed debut, “a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America.” Now, in Requiem by Fire, Caldwell returns to the same fertile Appalachian ground that provided the setting for his first novel, recalling a singular time in American history when the greater good may not have been best for everyone.

    In the late 1920s, Cataloochee, North Carolina, a settlement tucked deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, is home to nearly eleven hundred souls—many of them prosperous farmers whose ancestors broke the first furrows a century earlier. Now attorney Oliver Babcock, Jr., has been given the difficult task of presenting the locals with two options: sell their land to the federal government for the creation of a national park or remain behind at their own financial peril. 

    While some of the area’s inhabitants seem ready to embrace a new and modern life, others, deeply embedded in their rural ways, are resistant. Silas Wright’s cantankerous unwillingness to sell or to follow the new rules leads to some knotty and often amusing predicaments. Jim Hawkins, hired by the Parks commission, has relocated his reluctant wife, Nell, and their children to Cataloochee, but Nell’s unhappiness forces Jim to make a dire choice between his roots and his family. And a sinister force is at work in the form of the deranged Willie McPeters, who threatens those who have decided to stay put.

    Requiem by Fire is a moving, timeless tale of survival and change. With humor and pathos, this magnificent novel transports readers to another time and place—and celebrates Southern storytelling at its finest.
 
 

About this title

About the Author:

Wayne Caldwell was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Appalachian State University, and Duke University. The author of Cataloochee, he began writing fiction in the late 1990s. He has published four short stories and a poem, and won two short story prizes. Caldwell lives near Asheville with his wife, Mary.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One
A Sign of the Times

Silas Wright, dreaming.

He told his compatriots, "Hardest part'll be digging up the nerve to do it." They shook hands in the dark as if to seal an infernal bargain, then bent to their work, feeling instead of seeing, pushing tinder under the

little building. Silas heard the muffled click of kitchen matches in his overalls bib and the slosh of whiskey in his hip pocket. He was not

unsteady-he could hold his liquor-but a twinge of either remorse or nausea struck the instant he bent his head to poke under the edge of the building. Straightening his back, he looked at the sky.

In flatlands he would have seen a fingernail moon about to set, but Cataloochee was ringed with high mountains that always hid such a rind of light. Thin clouds obscured all but first-magnitude stars and Saturn hung high in the western sky. Brothers Hiram and John Carter, his neighbors, worked on the other side, boots scraping the ground. Silas was glad no dogs barked. It would be a bitch to explain if they were caught.

None of the men had burned a school before, but they figured if they used wooden matches and no coal oil, people would not be suspicious. This time of year the teacher banked the fire in the potbellied stove against the night chill, so there would be ample coals to start a blaze should some errant bear knock over the heater, which Silas meant to do before they lit the circumference.

Fire laid, they met at the front door. Silas, a head taller than Hiram and John, and an angular man, was rarely seen without his briar pipe. He plucked it from his bib pocket and looked at his friends. "You boys ready?"

They nodded as one, but suddenly Hiram's balding head turned, owl- like, as he whispered, "What was that?" Three intakes of breath preceded perfect silence. Hiram exhaled. "Thought I heard something."

"Don't spook a man like that," said Silas. "I ain't ready to see Jesus just yet." They listened for a half minute. "Okay, boys, let's get to it," he said, and opened the door to the smell of warm cast iron and generations of chalk dust. A dull red glow outlined the seams in the stove. Donning a pair of gloves fetched from his back pocket, he breathed deeply and muttered, "Well, son, here we go."

A good shove broke the stovepipe away from the heater. Downdraft made fire leap immediately from the nipple. He pitched the stove the rest of the way over, scattering burning coals on the puncheon floor. Outside, on their knees, John and Hiram fanned tinder.

Within a minute they had a decent fire. They were maybe twenty yards from the school's bell, which was elevated on a post on the other side of the recess field, and Silas meant to ring it when the fire was advanced enough to ensure no possibility of saving the building.

As Silas lit his pipe, a sudden wind swept the valley, rushing, like word from crazed mountaintop prophets or perhaps a gale from the mouth of God Almighty, who had seen their crime and made fair to blow them all to kingdom come. The fire devoured the schoolhouse like a living beast, leaping from yellow to orange, roaring in a noticeable rhythm, content to feed upon itself long past the existence of the puny structure it consumed.

Silas had not figured a small building to sound so sinister in its dying. Where did them damn Carters get off to? He had to think fast. Ride home and pretend he'd been asleep? Ring the bell like they had planned? Get the hell out for a few days?

He started running toward the bell, but the post seemed to get no closer. His chest felt like he had run uphill two miles. Gasping, he stopped and grabbed for his pipe. Gone. Fallen out somewhere, damn it all, perfect evidence he had burned a schoolhouse. Cursing and wheeling toward the fire, he began to run. He again made no progress, but . . .

A bony hand grabbed his shoulder. Carl, his niece Ethel's husband, yelled in his ear. "Get up, Silas. The damn chimbley's on fire!" Silas shook himself awake. Behind his bedroom mantel something malevolent rushed and retreated, each cycle in deeper breaths, and Silas looked out the window to see if the yard might have caught fire. He and Carl raced downstairs, Carl in flannel nightshirt and Silas in long johns, like two half-naked refugees from an asylum. Harrogate passed them carrying two blankets dripping with creek water.

Bud Harrogate had boarded with Silas for some time. His habit was to stay a year or two, then go on what he called a pilgrimage, and Silas called damned foolishness, for six months or more. Then he would return, happy as a vagabond hound. Despite his ways, he was good help, and in Silas's kindly moods he thought of Bud as the son he and his dead wife, Rhetta, had never had.

Harrogate's plaid coat sleeves were soaked, and he wore wet leather gloves to shield arms and hands from the fire while he stuffed the blankets into the chimney throat to make a damper. Within ten seconds the fire in the shaft starved, and the coals still in the fireplace smoldered.

Harrogate joined Carl and Silas in the yard to watch the chimney fire's death in a succession of yellow, orange, and ruby sparks that finally turned into ashes descending over the roof peak and floating down onto the cedar shakes.

"Guess the house ain't going to burn," said Silas. His father, Jonathan, had built a cabin beside the creek in 1861, which Silas had framed nineteen years later, and then he'd added a two-story central- chimney wing. The building's footprint was a T whose top faced east. The men stood underneath a tall cedar, pointing to the roof and shaking their heads in the graying dawn. "A man needs a chimney fire ever now and then, but only when he sets it hisself," said Silas. "Let's make some coffee."

Carl nodded and went inside to poke up the kitchen fire. Harrogate and Silas walked the perimeter of the house to make sure no stray embers lurked among skittering dry leaves. They watched Carl-his light brown hair nearly gone on top-fuss with the kitchen stove. Harrogate shucked his gloves and jacket. "Silas, that was close."

"Yep, have to admit, my legs are still shaking. That'll scare any man. Specially one dreaming about a fire to begin with." He pronounced "fire" to rhyme with "car."

"What fire was that?"

He grinned and looked at the ground. "It was an awful long time ago." He scratched his head. "First tend to that front room fire, then maybe we can have breakfast. Then I reckon I can tell it."

Harrogate's flat face and high cheekbones led some to speculate he had Melungeon blood, others Cherokee. He was the only unmarried male in Cataloochee who wore a ring, and he absently turned it on his left pinky as he went inside to remove the blankets and throw them into the yard. He opened windows and poked the fireplace coals with hope of slow revival. Carl breezed through the front room on his way upstairs for clothes. "I'll have breakfast on in a minute," he said. Silas followed him upstairs for his own overalls and shirt.

Ethel was visiting her sister in South Carolina, so once breakfast was on the table, the three men dispensed with manners, slurping and sopping and grunting their way through coffee, bacon and eggs, biscuits and gravy, and applesauce, followed by molasses and butter. "Nothing like damn near dying to get a man's appetite going," Harrogate said. They left the wreckage in the kitchen and padded slowly to the front room, as if not to wake the giant in the chimney.

Harrogate shut the windows. "Going to be a nice day," he said. "Bids fair despite this frost." He sat in Rhetta's old chair, a privilege Silas allowed no one but him.

"Well, Bud," said Silas as they sat before the fire, "you wanted to know what I was dreaming about when I got woke up." He lit his pipe, a small smile at the other corner of his mouth. "Neither of you remembers the old schoolhouse."

"Where was it?" asked Harrogate.

"Across the creek from the one we got now, just off the valley road, where Indian Creek comes into Cataloochee Creek. I remember when we called it the new school, because the first one was down past Lucky Bottom on the left. It was built way before the Civil War. That first one was took apart for firewood, best I remember, when the second school, the old schoolhouse in my dream, got built. That was about 1875, after the war anyhow.

"This schoolhouse-where your wife went to school, Carl, wasn't but one room-was fine for twenty-five or thirty young'uns, but by the turn of the century they had fifty or more in there, setting on top of each other. It's a wonder any teacher worked there more'n a week, or a pupil ever learned a fool thing.

"You all remember Hiram Carter. A fine man, even though he did sometimes think he was a little better'n the rest of us. See, he'd been off, with his hauling business. Traveled real regular into South Carolina. Didn't have any better education than the rest of us, but he read books besides the Bible and magazines besides seed catalogs, and I admit he could hold his own talking with anybody, even Preacher Smith or Doc Bennett.

"Anyhow, Hiram took this schoolhouse problem on hisself. He wrote to the commissioners to ask for a new building. They didn't answer. So he kept at it, and finally they wrote and said they wasn't any money. You know, boys, it still smells right smoky in here. You reckon we could stand it on the porch?"

They opened all the windows, picked up their jackets, and went outside. Harrogate and Carl sat on the porch rail like kids at a ball game, while Silas settled in the rocker and relit his pipe. "Well, sir, that word from Waynesville just fried Hiram's eggs. I reckon he fumed for a month, saying how every time we turned around they stuck their hands out for taxes, and still said they didn't have no money."

As Silas rocked, he rubbed the back of his neck. "Shoot, he should have lived long enough to see the tax collector in Haywood. You know, Carl, that Sutton with a steel hook in place of a right hand. It's a sign of the times, let me ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1400063442
• ISBN 13: 9781400063444
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352