Free Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

watched as the fire caught the dry newspaper and began to devour the records of the goings on in the County three months back, and I wondered if some unimaginative scholar in some unimaginable future would have given his eyeteeth for the very bit of newspaper I had burned. Historians think that way, losing sleep over documents that they deem precious, but which, in the evaluation of people who have reason to know, are most useful as tinder, or mattress stuffing, or papier-mâché. I was burning sacred primary source material; but it was heat that mattered right then, not history.
    He coughed again, and I slid the lid back on the stove to make sure no smoke leaked out. He was asleep, if you could call it sleep; the pain of each breath was written on his face, and it could not have been normal sleep, or the pain would have awakened him. I turned away, lifted the lamp, and examined his shelves. There was nothing much there. He had not canned as much as he usually did. Still, there were mason jars of beans and corn and carrots, two or three of peaches and pears, one of applesauce, a couple of venison. Enough for a stew; I wouldn’t have to climb the slope to get food. I put the lantern down and checked the fire. The flame was catching the larger wood, and the metal of the stove itself was beginning to groan with the agony of uneven expansion. I slid a few larger pieces of pine into the blaze and closed the stove again, adjusted the drafts, then got the two water pails from the packing crate on which they stood, and went out.
    The sky was fully light now, and the woods were silent. I moved through the underbrush, making little noise. He had taught me how to move like that, swiftly and silently, taking me to the pine woods, heading off in what seemed to me a random direction but which never was, eventually leaving me stumbling along trying to keep up and be quiet at the same time and failing miserably at both. Inevitably I would lose him, and would stand in the midst of the forest, dark trees rising on either side, listening to the pounding of my heart as I realized that I was alone on the far side of the Hill. It was then, at those times, that I learned the most. Not woodcraft, really. Or perhaps a true form of woodcraft: to bring my breathing under control; to still my own fear; to be methodical; to accept my limitations and compensate. I could not move quietly, but I could stand quietly and watch and listen, and when he came back for me, as he always did, I could sense him. I learned to reconstruct the man from the subtle whisper of cloth on cloth, the tiny clink of a buckle. And then I would turn in the right direction and find, as often as not, that my eyes had grown used to the dimness, that I could actually see him, and I would say to him, my voice quiet with triumph, “If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake, sneak .”
    That had been early on. In time I had learned how to move in near-silence, although I never attained the total quiet and ghostly grace that accompanied his movements. One day he had looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You hunt jest like your daddy done. Could be, if you was to put the time on it, you could be as good as him.” He paused. “Mebbe better.”
    “Not better,” I said. He looked at me and shrugged. “What the hell. Ain’t no man the best there is at everything, not even Mose, an’ he come as close to bein’ the best at anything worth worryin’ about as any man I ever knowed. There was even some things Mose just couldn’t do. It took Mose a damn long time to figure out how to die, for one thing. He tried to kill hisself in more different ways than any man I ever knowed. He didn’t call it that, he called it havin’ a good time, but tryin’ to kill hisself was what it was. When they come an’ told me he was dead, all I could think was, damn, Mose finely got the hang of it.” He had been gazing off into space, but suddenly he became aware of me. “You mind me talkin’ about