The Scotto Grotto (org)

Lil Brushy draft 3

They’ll tell you Little Brushy Mountain don’t sleep. Never has. You can hear it in the way the trees shift when the air is still, and in the way the ground feels soft underfoot where it ought to be solid. Old folks say mountains got bellies same as any living thing, and when they feed, they keep what they’ve taken. Blood, fire, sorrow. Nothing goes back.

When that plane came down in ’71, some say the fog wasn’t weather at all but the mountain drawing breath. Pulled the craft low, cracked its wings, swallowed the men whole. Audie Murphy among them, a man who’d walked out of battlefields bristling with iron and lead but couldn’t walk out of the ridge’s hunger. The stone they set up there is just a marker. The true memorial is the hush that comes over the clearing.

Holler folk whisper different pieces of it. One tale says a hunter heard the sputter of a plane when no sky was moving, then saw sparks drift through the trees though the night was clear. Another claims a woman saw soldiers in the fog, marching single file across the slope, vanishing where the brush grew thick. Children dared each other to spend a night up by the stone, but none ever did. They say the ground up there is too restless to sleep on.

There’s an old saying in these parts: “A sudden death makes a shadow that never fades.” Little Brushy Mountain has more than one, and Murphy’s is the heaviest. Some hikers leave coins, some leave toys, some whisper a prayer. It ain’t for him so much as for themselves, a bargain to pass through without stirring whatever watches.

I set my coin at the base of the granite, the way you might set bread at the door for a wandering spirit, and turned back before night proper came on. I did not hear footsteps, but I felt them. I did not see soldiers, but I walked as though I were being counted among them. Down in the valley, porch lights glowed like watchfires. Up on the ridge, the mountain had its dead, and the mountain kept its feast.