Little Brushy Mountain is not merely a rise of stone and tree, but a thing alive and watching. The Audie Murphy Memorial rests upon its ridge like a wound stitched shut but never healed. The plaque tells the story of a soldier who walked through fire in Europe, lived to carry medals heavy as curses, then fell from the sky in 1971 when his plane struck the ridge in fog and flame. None left that day but smoke, and the mountain drank it all.

The old people say mountains remember. Some claim they are older than time, older than the rivers they cradle, and that when blood or fire touches their skin, they keep it forever. Brush Mountain is one of those. The air near the monument is heavy, thick as molasses, and the silence comes sudden and sharp, the way it does before a storm. Birds fall quiet, cicadas hush, even the trees seem to stop their creak. It is then the mountain listens.

Hikers tell of bootsteps pacing just behind them, though the trail lies empty. A figure in uniform sometimes appears at the treeline, cap low, face unreadable. Others whisper of the sound of an engine coughing above the canopy, followed by a splintering crash that never comes, the moment of death repeating again and again as the mountain replays what it swallowed.

I stood by the stone at dusk, and the woods pressed in. The leaves rattled though there was no wind, and the taste of iron filled my mouth. For a moment I thought I saw him—no, not him exactly, but a shadow of him—resting one hand on the granite, eyes distant as if peering through me. The mountain shifted then, a long groan from its roots, and he was gone.

It is said in the hollers that when a man dies violent, his spirit does not pass on quick. It sinks down into the soil, joining the memory of the place that claimed him. Brush Mountain has its share of such ghosts, and now it holds Murphy too, not as a man, but as a story it tells when the air grows still.

I left a coin at the base of the marker, the way you do when you bargain with the hills, and I turned back down the trail. Even then, I knew the mountain was awake behind me, watching with the eyes of all it has kept, whispering that what it takes, it never gives back.