Burn Season novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Cairn

Rory draws a line at the cairn below the tower; Walker admits the one night and refuses to hand her an excuse, and leaves her resoled boots; that evening lightning starts a fire in the south drainage.

I did not hang up.

I held the radio in both hands and said nothing, and the static hissed between us.

"I'm at the cairn," Walker said. "The pile of rocks at the last switchback. I'm not coming any farther."

"It's midnight."

"I left the trailhead at dusk."

"That's eleven miles."

"It was a clear night."

I almost laughed, and I hated that I almost did.

"There's nothing to say to you," I said.

"I know. I'm not asking you to say anything. I just didn't want you up there thinking nobody was down here."

I turned the radio off.

I didn't sleep.

At first light I climbed down the stairs, past Verna's dark window, and took the trail down to the switchback.

The cairn stood where the path bent around a slab of granite, a waist-high pile of grey stones.

Walker sat on the far side of it with his back against the rock and his pack beside him.

He stood up when he saw me.

His face was grey with no sleep, and his jacket was damp with dew.

I stopped ten feet away, on the uphill side.

"Rory."

"Stay where you are."

"I'm staying."

"This is the line." I put my boot against the bottom stone of the cairn. "You can carry things up this far. Water, wood, whatever Verna needs. You don't come past it."

"Okay."

"Not one step. Not to explain, not to apologize."

"Okay."

He agreed too quickly, and it made me angrier.

"You want to say something," I said. "Say it."

He took a breath.

"It's finished, and I'm not going to touch her again." His voice stayed flat. "That's all that's true, and I'm not going to dress it up."

"That's all?"

"Yes."

"You don't want to tell me why?"

"I can give you a reason," he said. "It wouldn't be a good one. You'd hear it as me trying to hand you some of the blame, and I'm not going to do that."

I stared at him.

I had expected tears, or a speech, or him saying I had been distant.

I had planned for every one of those.

I had not planned for him standing there with his hands open, taking it.

"I called you from a ridge in Idaho," I said, "just to hear your voice."

"I remember."

"And you went home with her."

"I didn't go home with her. I went to a parking lot." He closed his eyes for a second. "That doesn't make it better."

"No. It doesn't."

The wind moved over the granite.

Somewhere down the slope, a bird started up and quit again.

"Three years," I said.

"Three years."

"Did you think about that? In the lot?"

"I thought about it every second after," he said. "Not during. After. That's the truth, and it's worse."

I couldn't make my chest stop shaking, so I looked at the ground.

On the flat rock beside his pack sat a thermos and a pair of boots.

They were my old ones, the brown leather pair I'd worn through three seasons.

They had new soles.

"I picked them up from the cobbler on Thursday," he said. "You said they were done. I thought you could still use them."

"Don't."

"I'm not asking for anything."

"Then take them back."

"They're yours. I'll leave them here. If you don't want them, throw them off the cliff."

He picked up his pack.

"There's coffee," he said. "It's still hot."

I did not take the boots and I did not take the thermos.

I stood on my side of the stones until he had walked all the way down the first switchback, and until I couldn't hear his steps.

Then I picked them both up.

I told myself the boots were just boots, and I carried them up the mountain.

That afternoon I took my place in the cab for the four o'clock radio check, and the sky was white and heavy and the air smelled of dust.

By five, the clouds in the west were stacked as high as the peak.

At six-ten a dry bolt dropped into the south drainage, thunder cracking almost on top of it.

I raised the binoculars and watched the trees where it had landed.

A thin white thread rose out of them, and then another.

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