HOW FIRE RUNS
Also by Charles Dodd White
In the House of Wilderness
(Swallow Press)
CHARLES DODD WHITE
HOW FIRE RUNS
A NOVEL
SWALLOW PRESS / OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS, OHIO
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2020 by Charles Dodd White
All rights reserved
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Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press / Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: White, Charles Dodd, 1976- author.
Title: How fire runs : a novel / Charles Dodd White.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, [2020] | Summary: “A chilling, timely reminder of the moral and human costs of racial hatred. What happens when a delusional white supremacist and his army of followers decide to create a racially pure “Little Europe” within a rural Tennessee community? As the town’s residents grapple with their new reality, minor skirmishes escalate and dirty politics, scandals, and a cataclysmic chain of violence follows. In this uncanny reflection of our time, award-winning novelist Charles Dodd White asks whether Americans can save themselves from their worst impulses and considers the consequences when this salvation comes too late”--Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020020326 | ISBN 9780804012287 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780804041157 (pdf)
Classification: LCC PS3623.H57258 H69 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020326
For the Boundary Waters Fellers
The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots.
—Wendell Berry, “Think Little”
I will read ashes for you, if you ask me.
I will look in the fire and tell you from the gray lashes
And out of the red and black tongues and stripes,
I will tell how fire comes
And how fire runs far as the sea.
—Carl Sandburg, “Fire Pages”
SIX MEN arrive at the abandoned asylum on a late March evening. They pull the pair of moving vans into the deep bend of the horseshoe drive beyond the hemlocks, bail out of their cabs, and release the rear trailer doors. The metal shivers, rattles, and slams. Ramps drop from above both bumpers, slap the ground like heavy tongues. If the men communicate at all, it is in some crude agreement of murmur and gesture. Nothing precisely said. Just brusque sound drawn from the throat’s center.
Darkness falls, but the men do not pause in their work. They strap headlamps around their skulls and carry box after box into the halls of the building. Beams of light dance and scrawl over the brick walls, the Doric columns, the pediment. At the men’s bright glances, broken windows glimmer. Yet the dimensions within remained unexplored because even these men fear the stories of those mad who had been quartered there and they will not cross certain lines. The boxes and larger furnishings mount in the front hall until there is nothing more to unload.
When the trucks are emptied, they stand and smoke cigarettes, loiter with their personal kits and sleeping bags. They consider the advantage of indoors, but settle on a fire and the softest ground they can find. Even so, they keep an unofficial watch, sense the dark pull of something they will not admit. The fire never dies. It shapes itself against the living faces. They find their voices, use them as they would something they do not fully trust.
They used to drown them, one says.
Bullshit.
No, I heard the same. They took the wild ones down to the Watauga. Had a bunch of blacks down from Knoxville do their dirty work. Held them under. Was supposed to separate the ones that were truly crazy from the ones that only pretended.
Why the hell would you pretend something like that?
Because they was crazy, I guess.
You understand how little sense you make?
That’s what I’ve heard said, is all.
None sleep, though they do zip themselves into the mummy bags and shut their eyes for a time, let the gray dawn find them. After a breakfast of bacon and toast cooked over a Coleman camp stove, they divide their labor. Half move the boxes and furniture into the separate rooms. The others spell one another with a pair of posthole diggers, root out a place at the end of the drive fronting the gravel road. By midmorning they accomplish their depth and assemble a metal piece twenty feet long and big around as a girl’s wrist. Amid a flutter of curses, they settle the pole into the ground, pour in the sludge of hand-mixed concrete and brace it to settle. They take turns holding the staff and staring up the clean stroke of metal pointing toward the sky.
Once the pole can stand on its own they bring lumber down from the trucks, begin to nail pre-cut boards together and then paint them. After everything dries they carry the assemblage with great care and nail it to the trunk of a poplar tree. They do not hurry. They desire symmetry, precision. They desire impact.
When’s he supposed to get here?
Soon, I think.
Should we put it up then?
Yeah, go ahead and run that sucker to the top.
One takes the flag and snaps it to the halyards. It balls and bunches and cracks free in the crosswind. They all look up and salute, sing their patriotic song. Above them a red-tailed hawk wars with an echelon of crows. A good omen, they decide.
Not
