What Smoke Creek Kept

Most lives end with a whimper, not a bang. Harold Voss’s was ending with the whimper — in his own bed, in his own house, with the morphine coming on schedule and hospice shoes whispering up and down the hall — which is the ending money buys, and Harold had bought the best of it. But in a small town, even a whimper doesn’t die once. A man dies in his bed, one time, the way everybody does, and then he goes on dying for years, a little at a time, in the retelling — at the feed store, in the church parking lot, over dominoes at the VFW — and he gets no say at all in how the retelling goes, because, well, he’s dead.

Harold understood the machinery better than most, having spent forty years as one of Smoke Creek’s chief operators of it. He knew what the town would do with him. One would remember the Christmas he walked into Duke & Ayres and paid off every layaway in the book. One would remember the scholarship with his mother’s name on it. One would remember him carrying Miss Ollie Rains’s groceries up her steps every Wednesday for a decade, rain or shine, and never once letting her thank him twice. The stories were all true. That was the thing about a rich man’s whimper in a town like Smoke Creek — the stories were all true, every one of them, and the legend was still a lie.

Now, a life that ends with a bang — that is a different property altogether. A life that ends with a bang in a small lake town becomes the other kind of legend: half myth, half true, and it belongs to everybody except the one it happened to, who is in no position to correct the record.

The window of the room faced east, toward the water. He’d insisted on that. Thirty-seven years, that window had shown him Snakebite Lake at first light, silver as a new dime, still as held breath. It showed him the lake now. He could no longer always tell if it was morning.

He had four days to live. Nobody in the house knew that yet, least of all Harold. But four days was the number. And before the sun went down on this first one, Harold Voss was going to open his mouth and say out loud, for the first time in twenty years, the thing that Smoke Creek, Texas, had been living on top of the way a town lives on top of a gas line — comfortable, prosperous, and one spark from the moon.