After the Fire (19 page)

“I’ve missed you,” Karen said as Red and Blackie got into the car.

“It’s just this week Mrs. Hawkins has started to drive again,” Red said.

“She’s really better?”

“Getting there.”

“And Miss James?”

“Fed up she isn’t dead.”

Karen laughed.

“She doesn’t think it’s decent for someone her age to live through pneumonia.”

As Karen turned up the road to the bluff, they fell silent. It was no more than a dirt track which took them up into the deep woods, cool on the warmest day of summer, sometimes impassable in winter when its deep potholes were filled with water, the ditches overflowing. The car lumbered along like a clumsy tank, and Karen wished they were walking instead, part of the silence around them. Emily Carr’s woods these were, and Karen had known them first in her paintings in the Vancouver Art Gallery. Emily Carr had probably wanted to be an Indian, the way she ventured into the forests and sought out the great totems. Maybe everyone here was a displaced person. You would be even if you were an Indian.

“Do you ever feel like a displaced person?” Karen asked.

“You’d have to have a place to come from to feel like that,” Red said.

“Nobody really comes from here,” Karen said.

“Dickie did,” Red said. “I can tell my kid his father and his grandfather both came from here.”

Was Red assuming she’d have a boy? Did she want a boy? Karen hesitated to ask such a question. She didn’t want to sound like a lesbian separatist, even though she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want a boy. They grew up too alien and hard-surfaced.

They got out of the car and Red stopped to put Blackie on a leash. By now the dog came obediently when called but Blackie still couldn’t resist a flushed deer, and she was young enough to be careless of her way on paths dangerously close to the cliff edge.

Karen couldn’t wait. She strode over to the side of the rough parking lot and looked out over the pass, across to the clusters of other islands. Today it was clear enough to see the snow-defined Olympic range in the States. When Red and Blackie came up beside her, she turned to the path that led them to a high meadow where they could have their lunch. All along their way, tiny lavender and yellow and white wild-flowers poked up among the grasses.

“I never learn their names,” Karen said.

“Miss James says names aren’t any use because you just forget them. The only thing worth remembering is poetry.”

“Do you ever read poetry?” Karen asked.

“She teaches me. I memorize poems for her.”

“I don’t think I’ve read a poem since I left school,” Karen said.

“Kids like poems,” Red said.

“I’ll get the baby a book of poems, shall I?” Karen suggested.

“If you can find one at the thrift shop.”

“Oh Red, we don’t always have to be so spartan.”

Karen spread a beach towel a few yards away from the cliff edge so that their view, when they sat down, was mostly sky, alive with gulls at eye level, an occasional plane high above on its way to or from Alaska. In the middle air the sun caught the white of the heads and tails of coasting eagles.

Red lay on her back looking up, her mound of belly like a little hill. As she watched, she began to recite:

“If you would keep your soul

From spotted sight or sound,

Live like a velvet mole;

Go burrow underground.”

“That’s a bit grim, isn’t it?” Karen asked, suddenly very aware that Red carried a dead man’s child without remorse.

“I make a better mole than an eagle,” Red said, grinning. “Ah, see him kick!”

Karen could see the jumping flesh of Red’s stomach, little mole inside his hill.

“Put your hand just there,” Red said.

Karen hesitated, but the invitation was so impersonal that she reached out and laid her hand on Red, feeling the force of that tiny life beneath the thin layers of cloth and skin.

Below them a ferry sounded at the west entrance of the pass.

“Do you ever think about your mother?” Karen asked.

“Not much,” Red said. “I don’t buy her birthday presents.”

Karen pictured the ugly handbag, heavy with useless jewelry.

“Well, I do think about her more now,” Red admitted. “She was only fourteen when I was born.”

“Where is she now?”

“In jail. She killed a man,” Red answered flatly.

“Oh Red!” Karen cried.

“She wanted me to say she did it to protect me, and I wouldn’t do it,” Red said. “I ran away.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen,” Red said.

“Why did she do it?” Karen asked.

“Because she felt like it, I guess,” Red said. “I used to dream about it and worry about it at first. I don’t any more. I can just remember
her
sometimes now. But in my head my mother’s dead.”

“Mine is, too,” Karen said, admitting and not admitting, not sure why killing yourself seemed more shameful than murder.

“There are choices,” Red said, sitting up. “Anybody can make choices.”

Karen did not feel that confident. Struggling against her passivity, she had been trying to make choices, but she wasn’t at all sure they were the right ones. In Red’s circumstance she would have been suicidal, if not from the terror of giving birth and taking total responsibility for another human being, then from the disapproval and hostility that surrounded Red. Karen could not have ignored it.

“Eat?” Red asked.

“Of course,” Karen said, getting out the sandwiches. “I even remembered Blackie.”

She tossed a couple of biscuits to the young but increasingly patient dog. “You’ve done a good job with her,” Karen said.

Red smiled and reached out to her dog. It was her own confidence she was building for the more important and complex business of raising a child, and Karen envied that sense of purpose in Red. She wondered. if she would have to live her own life without it.

Henrietta was still a bit shaky, but she had put off her visit to Miss James long enough. They’d had several conversations on the phone, and though Miss James made no demands, Henrietta knew she was still housebound and lonely.

“Oh, Hen, I have missed you,” the old woman confessed.

Henrietta was as tactful as Miss James, not mentioning the change for the worse in each of them. In each setback now, there was some permanent damage. Miss James’ skull glowed through her nearly transparent skin.

“I don’t know which has been more distressing, your being sick or my being alive.”

It surprised Henrietta to realize she herself had never wished to die, even through the worst of it.

“I can’t just wander off like an old Eskimo, not in early June, but what is that child going to do if I’m not dead by August?”

“She’ll manage perfectly well,” Henrietta replied.

“Will she?” Miss James demanded. “It’s a very willful thing she’s doing. I said to her, ‘You do know they grow up and leave home, don’t you?’”

“There’s satisfaction in that, you know,” Henrietta said.

“And what’s Sadie making of it, do you know?”

“I haven’t seen Sadie in months,” Henrietta admitted.

“Red refuses to talk about the father. She’s behaving as if it’s going to be a virgin birth.”

“Would Dickie have had anything to do with it if he’d lived?”

Miss James sighed. “I have too much time to think, when the only useful thing I could possibly do is die. I wondered for a while if I was making a mistake, leaving the house to her, thinking after all she didn’t have the gumption to live alone. She doesn’t think it’s gumption, mind you. But, of course, she’ll need the house all the more when the child comes. But will she want it?

“I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson, a mistake at my age, I think. She’s very unsettling.”

Miss James reached over for a book on the table by her chair.

“Listen to this:

I had been hungry all the years;

My noon had come to dine;

I, trembling, drew the table near,

And touched the curious wine.

’Twas this on tables I had seen,

When turning, hungry, lone,

I looked in windows, for the wealth

I could not hope to own.

I did not know the ample bread;

’Twas so unlike the crumb

The birds and I had often shared

In Nature’s dining room.

The plenty hurt me, ’twas so new,

Myself felt ill and odd

As berry of the mountain bush

Transplanted to the road.

Nor was I hungry; so I found

That hunger was a way

Of persons outside windows,

The entering takes away.”

Though Miss James’ voice was loud and flat, she brought such intent intelligence to the poem that Henrietta was moved by it, and yes, unsettled.

“I was proud of being disinherited,” Miss James said. “I don’t want to hurt her pride. It’s about all she’s got.”

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t make her proud,” Henrietta said, but she felt uncertain, human emotions being darker and more complex than she had realized until recently.

“It’s for me after all,” Miss James concluded. “A last little vanity of having something to leave behind. I want her to be grateful to me.”

“That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Henrietta protested.

“Isn’t it?”

“Don’t change your will,” Henrietta said, surprised at her own firmness.

“No, I don’t suppose I will,” Miss James said, smiling. “I’ve been hermit-hearted enough.”

Moving with careful slowness through Miss James’ garden, Henrietta wondered at that long life of proud solitude, cut off from family, without close ties of any sort. Had there been lovers, beloved friends somewhere along the way, left behind or outlived? Henrietta doubted it somehow. If Miss James had experienced ordinary attachments through her life, surely she wouldn’t be as fastidious about her motives as she was now. Or perhaps that was simply one of the hazards of old age, a filling up of empty hours with over-elaborate doubts and judgments, an idle trying on of one moral hat after another. Maybe poetry wasn’t good for people over a certain age, a certain kind of it anyway. Better to take up solitaire or crossword puzzles.

Henrietta smiled at the first bloom in a patch of lilies and wondered if any of her own were out. She wanted enough strength back to garden again. Red was learning quickly, but the look of the garden was only half the pleasure. She wanted the feel of the earth in her hands again, the sense of accomplishment.

At home, though her first outing had tired her, Henrietta walked slowly about her land, calling on her flowers. Hart’s roses needed feeding.

As Milly entered the pub, she noticed with distaste that Sadie was cackling drunk among a circle of young men willing to ply her with gin and then drive her home. Milly flinched at the memory of driving Sadie home after Dickie’s funeral. Dickie. Dickie was the father! Why hadn’t something that obvious occurred to her before?

Milly sat down to that revelation and checked it out mathematically, counting back the months on her fingers. Then she recalled Red the morning after the fire. She hadn’t been vomiting up grief or remorse; she’d been pregnant. And even before Dickie died, Red hadn’t intended to make him marry her. She’d already dropped him. She hadn’t ever wanted Dickie—she’d wanted a child. Such casual use of a man shocked Milly far more than the casual use Dickie had obviously made of Red, mindless of the consequences. But would he have, if he’d known? He’d already built himself a house. Women weren’t the only nest builders. Forbes hadn’t been a diaper changer the way young men were now, but he’d loved his children. Dickie might have loved his. Red hadn’t even gone to the funeral. Like a mating spider she was without an ounce of human feeling. She didn’t even have the decency to feel ashamed.

“Are you ready to order?” Karen asked.

“It’s Dickie’s child!” Milly announced in triumph.

Sadie sailed a laugh out over all the company.

“You’re going to be a grandmother,” Milly called over to her.

“Serves her right,” Sadie said in satisfaction. “Got the last laugh after all, he did.”

Karen had turned away and was disappearing into the kitchen.

“Hey!” Milly called after her. “I want to order.”

Who was Karen to take offense over the facts of life?

“I’ll take your order,” the bartender offered.

“What’s with Miss Half-Jap? Too good for her job, is she?”

“Red’s a friend of hers,” the bartender excused gently.

“She cleans for me,” Milly said, “and I’ve been kind enough to let her keep her job.”

“What will you have?”

“The chowder and a half liter of white wine.”

The young men at Sadie’s table had closed in around her, and, before Milly’s supper arrived, they were walking Sadie to the door. She hesitated by Milly’s table.

“It’ll be none of mine,” Sadie said to Milly.

“Come on, Sadie,” one of the young men urged. “Time to go.”

“But what have you to be so high and mighty about?” Sadie demanded. “Some of us can’t catch a man. Some of us can’t keep one.”

“Oh, go throw up some place else,” Milly said in disgust.

She turned away from Sadie and met Karen’s peculiar blue gaze as she stood waiting to serve Milly.

She ate without appetite, troubled not so much by Sadie’s drunken attempt to put her down as by a new weariness of spirit. She no longer had the energy to enjoy her own spite. She was still convalescent and needed to cosset herself.

“Dessert?” Karen asked.

Milly had lately been indulging in desserts.

“Not tonight,” Milly said, and then added, “Your father’s a very handsome man. You look a bit like him.”

She had meant to say something to indicate how watered down those pure good looks were in Karen’s half-breed face, but she didn’t. She was exhausted.

K
AREN WAS HELPING RAT
coil the hoses at the end of fire practice when Red’s call came into the hall.

“She says there’s no hurry,” Homer reported. “Old Miss James is dead.”

“On a day like this?” Rat asked, dropping his piece of hose.

The July sun shone down on their vigorous, contented bodies as they stood together with nothing to make of the news.