Ashes of Morning

They narrated the story every summer. Spanning lemonade under umbrellas or while scraping cracked paint from porch railings, those women of Moss Creek murmured it on the gospel rhythm. The way older women do, half-believing, half-hoping that they still mattered.

With her hair like small iron filings and lipstick bleeding into the grooves of her upper lip, Lottie Greaves told it best. She always started in the same manner:

"She came back one June. Nearly a shadow of the girl that she was. And I told Edna I said it, didn't I? I told them there would be smoke if she stepped into that town again.

Edna Larrabee inclined her head, slow and somber. She was quiet of the two, but her eyes glittered as if she had waited decades to see justice smolder.

The summer was quite hot, as they were saying. The one that makes paint twist and split wood. Heat came up from the sidewalks in waves and clung to the clothes like guilt. The townsfolk mentioned that the weather was the kind of weather that pulled the past like a bloodhound.

She came on a Tuesday. Nobody expected it – not after seventeen years – but she was getting off a Trailways bus in sandals and a faded blue dress. Unencumbered with luggage, she had a satchel and a "rope burn" scar over her collarbone.

Her name was Ruthie Hollow. However, they all remembered her as the one who allowed a house to burn.

At the time, they used to call her the Hollow Flame. A pun that is both cruel and clever, after the fire that consumed her baby sister and left the rest of the Hollow family dead in a pile of ash and ruin. It had been accidental – bad wiring, faulty heater, the usual suspects. But folks talked. And when the talking did not do, they whispered.

"She was the only one outside when the firemen arrived."

"She did not scream until they pulled her daddy's body out."

"Not one burn on her".

Others said that she was in shock. Others claimed that she watched it burn.

Seventeen years later, Ruthie returned to a town that did not soften. She moved to the old caretaker's cabin not far from Split Log Hill – a half-mile from the ashes of the Hollow county estate. Grown over with dog fennel and saplings of pines, it appeared to be a place that attempted to bury itself.

She saw her first, getting peaches at Taggart's Market. She said to Lottie that Ruthie looked… weird. Not older—worn. As if she'd not passed her years but had accumulated in her.

Edna whispered, scandalized, "She said hello to me." "Like nothing ever happened."

Lottie didn't sleep that night. She'd told the story so many times that it no longer had the seeming quality of a thing that could move, breathe, and bleed. But now Ruthie got right in the middle of it like a stitch unraveling, and Lottie was suddenly naked to the world. After all, she had been there on that night.

She thought of the way the sky flame-lit the trees and heard wood cracking like bones. She recalled Ruthie's mother screaming until her throat was out. And she remembered, with sick vividness, her shoes crunching over the glass fragments to haul Ruthie from the yard, where she stood watching the fire.

At that time, Lottie wrapped Ruthie in a blanket. Said to her: "You're safe now, baby."

But there was something about the girl's eyes even then that figured to unsettle her. Flat, dry. As if she had come to terms with the fire.

Now, the whispers started again—little things. Smoke is visible, climbing up the trees near the Hollow ruins. Night birds falling silent. Children who wake up with nosebleeds and dreams of being drowned in the heat.

Then came the first fire.

It was little – a brush blaze on Dunham Ridge. No one was hurt. But it went too quickly, jumped over the street like aiming at something. The volunteer fire chief, Bud Tiller, said it was the wind. However, Lottie remembered the wind as being calm.

Two nights later, an abandoned chicken coop went up behind the Raines' place. Then, they said the old church steeple, a victim of lightning.

But folks knew better.

They began to lock doors that they never locked before. Hung, again crucifixes, buried jars on the corners of their properties. The old ways. Just in case.

Edna swore on the fourth night that she saw Ruthie walking barefoot on Maple Street carrying a small, dark thing in her hands.

"A bundle," she said. "Wrapped in cloth. It might've been a doll. Or a bird. I couldn't tell. She was talking to it, however.

"What kind of talking?"

Edna hesitated. "Soft. Like you do to babies."

The town's fear matured into fury by Sunday.

A meeting was called. Men who hadn't been in a church since Reagan was president turned up in ironed shirts. They did not say Ruthie's name, and everyone knew why they were there.

Lottie sat on the last pew, wringing a handkerchief soaked with perspiration. She saw Pastor Melvin, red-faced and trembling, smashing the pulpit and saying, "It's time to decide whether to stick to the past or what we want to be."

People did not know what that meant.

As with the initial smoke, the morning, the air was filled with smoke again.

Not fire this time—just smoke. It moved around town like a fog, clinging to windows and sliding under doors. It was a smelly smell of lilacs and creosote. Like memory. Like the Hollow estate.

Lottie called Edna, but the line was dead.

She found the house, and she walked towards Edna's empty house. The bed made. No marks of violence, no note. Just a bit of a peach in the sink, a smear of ash on the floor.

By evening, five people were missing.

No fire. No scream. No sign of them leaving.

Only smoke and silence.

The sheriff's office locked up. Thirteen times, the church bells rang. A mockingbird was dead on the courthouse steps, and its wings were singed, but its body intact.

Then Lottie saw Ruthie again.

She was standing on the Hollow land barefoot, dressed pale as bone. The wind stood still, but her hair moved.

I did not want to come back," – she said without turning. "But I wasn't finished."

Lottie drew closer, her heart being a hammer in her throat. "What are you?"

Ruthie turned her back, and her eyes were full of flame, but it wasn't fire. It was a loss. Grief that was so thick and so old that it turned into fuel.

She said, "You all lit the match". "I just gave it air."

That night, Moss Creek burned – not with flame but with forgetting.

The next day, empty fields and silent porches watched the sunrise. Nobody could remember Ruthie Hollow's name. No one remembered the fire. Only the smoke remained.

Drifting.

Watching.

Waiting.