Read Online The Risen by Ron Rash - Free Book Online Page A

a cotillion, posing in the manner of a young woman well aware of her beauty. Then at age twenty-two in a Sylva Herald photograph at a war bond rally. She’s dressed in a skirt and sweater but that same self-awareness is present, for the last time. Not the beauty, for my mother said she retained that into middle age, but the awareness that anyone would notice it, or that she would want them to.
    During my early twenties when I thought that, like Wolfe, I might write my own small-town novel, I’d found a November 1918 article in the Sylva Herald ’s archives. “Raleigh Peddler Arrested After Altercation with Sylva Doctor,” the headline read. More articles had appeared in the following days. The evening after the confrontation, the salesman had disappeared. A fisherman mentioned seeing two men, one in a suit, another not well dressed and much taller, crossing the bridge outside town, but the following day the fisherman confessed to Sheriff Lunsford that he’d been drunk and seen no such thing, and Mr. Tillis, the hardware store owner, recalled the salesman had spoken of a desire to go to California. Although no one had seen him leave on thebus, the sheriff surmised that, like so many men in their twenties, the salesman had headed west with a thumb in the air and a sense of adventure. The salesman’s family demanded a criminal inquiry, insisting that he would have contacted them as well as withdrawing his savings from the bank, but there wasn’t one. Three years later a femur was found on the Tuckaseegee’s banks. The family returned, having heard nothing from the missing man for three years. A more intense search of the woods surrounding the riverbank yielded nothing more.
    I have several clear memories of my grandmother—her hunched body, her voice so soft, even to children, that she was hard to understand. What I remember most is her giving me a palmful of Luden’s cough drops, the closest thing to candy in Grandfather’s house. She’d died eight months after my father, lingering one day in the hospital after a heart attack. My mother had been with her. She was lying in the bed and simply turned her back to me and the nurse. Your grandmother knew she was dying and was ready and who could blame her .
    Of course your grandfather never believed he would die , my mother had concluded. Bill had said the same thing about Grandfather, and so it had seemed prior to thatevening in 1974 when I’d found him in this same brick building. It was during the Christmas holidays. I was home from Wake Forest when Nebo came to the house and motioned for me to go with him. He’d unlocked the office’s back door and motioned me inside, but he did not follow. Grandfather’s neck lay on the leather chair’s headrest. He stared at the ceiling, eyes and mouth open. Astonishment seems so narratively predictable, but I know of no better word to describe the look on his face.
    I’m startled, as if from sleep, when the door opens and a woman comes out with a blue-bowed gift. A boutique, not an office. I pull out of the parking space and turn left onto Church Street and in another block take another left. As I drive back through town, I try to recall all I can about the day and evening Ligeia disappeared. After school I had waited at home for Bill to return. Hours passed. I told myself that maybe he’d taken her to Asheville, or already come back and gone out again. When my mother asked where Bill was, I told her that I didn’t know.
    It was after dark when he came in. I was lying on the bed, the radio playing, the one station I left it on drifting in and out. Bill hadn’t spoken to our mother,who was in the den, but had come up the stairs and straight to his bedroom. The door was locked but I pressed close and asked if everything was okay. Yes, he’d answered, Ligeia’s on the bus to Charlotte. Just go to bed, he’d said. A few minutes later I heard the