byChrisWhite – 2025

Another flash-fiction southern gothic piece set in east Tennessee in 1890, a young family loses their mother and must make a long journey up the mountain to bury her in her family’s burial grounds. The brutality of poor rural Appalachian life, such as we’ve never experienced, those hardships no more dramatic than what a family must do in the summer heat when a loved one dies.

They come up the last mile slow, the wagon wheels cutting into the hardpan ruts of the station road, the mule team lathered and swaying against the traces, their hides streaked with foam and dust. The coffin rides high on the bed, under a canvas darkened with death’s seepage, the stink of it outpacing the wagon, lashed under a tarpaulin that does little to quiet the smell. Thirty-six miles from Black Bluff, Tennessee, all of it uphill, through switchbacks where shale rolls underfoot and the timber crowds the road in close. By the time they crest into Jefferson Station the light is thin and the wind carries the last of the day’s heat off Opossum Mountain.

No one speaks. The boy, thirteen and near wild-eyed from the strain of the trip, rides behind on the tailboard, his boots knocking on the axle and his hands locked white on the boards to keep from pitching into the road. The break is still fresh, but he will not be left out of the work. His brother walks alongside, one hand on the coffin’s side, as if to steady it against the heave of the wagon though the ropes are tight as drum cord. Their sister sits forward on the bench beside their father, her eyes fixed on the road’s vanishing point, as if she might will it to be shorter.

The station is no more than a warehouse, a sidetrack, and two stores fronting a bare patch of ground where wagons turn. When they draw up before the dry goods store, the crowd is already out. Men from the warehouse, women with aprons dusted from their kitchens, children pulled back by the arm. No one speaks. The smell works its way into their faces, into the cloth at their throats. The father climbs down slow and tells them to bring her out.

The coffin is lifted down and set in the dirt. The boy feels all eyes on them and keeps his head low. The father wipes his brow and tells the sister to tend her brother. She does not move.

Inside the warehouse, the eldest brother is seated on a straightback chair with his trouser leg cut away, his bare shin swollen and black in places. The break is plain. A man in a leather apron crouches over it with a pail of water and a sack of cement. He works without comment, mixing the powder in a shallow pan, the dust rising in the late light.

“You ain’t got a proper splint?” the father asks.

The man in the apron never looks up. “This’ll hold.”

The eldest says nothing, only grips the edge of the chair as the man applies the wet mixture over his leg, shaping it quick before it hardens. The father watches until the work is done, his jaw set. Outside, the coffin rests under the tarpaulin, and the crowd has not moved off.

The smell deepens as the sun slides down. Someone spits in the dust. A woman murmurs to a child and draws him away. The boy sees the sister still fixed in her seat on the wagon, her hands folded tight in her lap, her face without expression, ignoring the rancid odor out of respect for her mother.

When the eldest hobbles out on a makeshift crutch, the cement already whitening in the air, he takes his place beside the coffin without being told. The father stands with him. For a moment there is no sound but the creak of leather and the ticking of the cooling wagon wheels.

The boy hobbles to the wagon bed, jaw set against the flare of pain. The eldest takes one end, the father the other, and the boy wedges himself between, under the weight. His crutch lies in the dust. They lift the coffin again and shoulder it toward the rise beyond the station where the family burying ground lies. The box is heavier than he expected, the load bearing down on the bone gone crooked inside the cast. He grits his teeth, his breath hard through his nose.

They carry her past the still faces, up the narrow track to the rise behind the station where the burying ground waits. The grass there is high, the fence leaning, the stones tilted with age. The boy’s arms burn, the broken leg trembling under him, each step an act of will. The stench rises warm from the blackened boards, flies steadily feasting at the sodden boards, transferring the evidence of their feast to young faces and arms and clothes.

The path is narrow, the grass high and bent in the evening wind. At the top of the hill a small fence rings the stones, most of them leaning, names and dates worn shallow. At the open hole they stop. No words are spoken. The father rests his hand on the lid, his thumb tracing the grain where the canvas has been peeled back. Then they lower her down, the rope rasping in their hands. The boy leans forward on the edge of the grave, watching the box sink into shadow until it is no longer visible, only the smell remaining.

No preacher stands by, no mourners save those who brought her here.

The father takes up the shovel. The first dirt falls in a muted thud, the sound carried off in the wind. The boy stands on his good leg, the bad one aching in its stone shell, and grips the fence rail to steady himself. He knows that by morning there will be no sign of her beyond the mound, the packed earth, and the weight of what they carried up that hill.