Killing Down the Roman Line (34 page)

But Jim didn’t stop until his arm went numb. The screaming voices no more than bees in his fevered head. Heaving like a dog, he looked up at his family. Wife and child begging him to stop, their dishpan faces struck in ways he’d never seen before. Revulsion, nausea, fear?

No. It was horror. Writ loud and plain in their eyes.

The pipe slipped and clattered across the floor. His arm hung dead like it would unlatch and fall from the socket.

Their faces became hazy and opaque and Jim thought he was going blind. Had buckshot snagged his eye? He blinked and blinked until he realized it was smoke, the flames eating their way into the basement.

32

RAIN CAN KILL, as well as, save a farmer. If the ground hadn’t been soaked by the rain, the fire would have spread to the fields and the barn and devoured everything. As it was, only the house was ablaze. The barn and outbuildings were safe, the horse hazed out to the paddock. Of the goats there was no sign.

The fire was immense and powerful, its orange flames rippling a hundred feet up to heaven. The timbers popped and the asphalt shingles curled up into noxious lumps of tar. The sheer heat of it all held everyone back.

The fire trucks had taken forty-five minutes to respond, their second call that night. With no water mains to tap into out here and their tanks run dry, there was nothing to do but watch the house burn. Hook and drag away the burning timbers that fell too close to the barn.

Emma sat on the tailgate of the ambulance with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Unable to take her eyes off the fire. Her heart had clenched and boiled a hundred times over until she couldn’t cope and simply shut down. Watching the flames with dull eyes like it was cookout, waiting for someone to pierce a marshmallow onto the end of her stick. She didn’t even notice the paramedic slipping the oxygen mask over her nose.

Travis slouched inside the bus, misting the plastic mask on his face. His hair was singed and still smoking. Prodded and bandaged up. Shellshock glassed in his eyes and his jaw banged into a mute stupor. Unsure of what the hell had just happened but pretty damn sure he didn’t want to remember.

“You okay, son?” The EMT shone a penlight into Travis’s pupils, waved his hand. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

Travis looked back at him at the uniformed man like he was simple. Everything hurt. Couldn’t he see that? “Is my mom okay?”

“A little smoke in her lungs like you.” The EMT slipped the penlight back into a shirt pocket. “But she’s all right. Your dad too.”

Travis wiped his gaze to where his dad stood in the grass and looked away. He hadn’t asked about him.

The witchgrass was sopping with rainfall but all Jim wanted to do was lie down in it and not move. Not think, not feel. Everything hurt and the paramedic wrapping his bloodied ear just kept at him with questions he could barely hear, let alone comprehend. He shooed the man and his nonstop questions away. The EMT grumbled something about just doing his job and moved on.

It hurt to even walk. He crossed the grass stiff-legged like Frankenstein and eased down onto the bumper next to Emma and they watched the house burn. His eyes had nothing left to show, blank as burned-out bulbs. Foggily aware that he needed to say something. Something was required of him as he and his wife stood mute witness to the razing of their home. Five generations of Hawkshaws had thrived under its protection there but still it went up in a flash, incinerated to a carbon husk like a hobo’s shack.

What was there to say?

Nothing.

Still.

“It’s gonna be okay now.” The effort of a few words was exhausting. It took all he had left just to reach out and touch her hand. “We’re gonna be fine.”

Emma didn’t move. She had nothing to say and no strength left to speak if she did. Her eyes fell to the weight of his hand on hers. It was filthy, caked in dried blood. Blackened to a dark jelly over the knuckles. Flecked all the way to his elbows in gore. It flaked and fell from the skin like dark ash.

“Just a house,” he said. “Wood and brick. We’ll build a new one.”

She pulled her hand away and folded it into her lap.

A silhouette stepped into her sightline, blocking the fire. A dark uniform with a distinct blue stripe down the trouser leg. OPP Constable Ray Bauer looked down at them. He took off his cap and wiped his brow and fitted the cap back on. He squared it up and levelled his eyes to Jim.

“Guess we need to talk, huh?”

~

Emma and Travis were taken away in the ambulance. The taillights shrank to red dots as the bus turned out onto the road. No flashing lights, no siren.

Constable Bauer spared Jim the indignity of sitting in the back of the patrol car. They leaned against the cruiser’s quarter panel watching the ambulance roll away. When it was gone, their eyes drifted back to the fire.

The inferno’s fury had drained off, the flames no longer reaching to heaven. Most of the roof had fallen in, taking with it the north and west walls. A lattice work of blackened beams angled in a tepee over the embers, all of it crowned by a mushroom cloud of black smoke.

“We found Brian Puddycombe and Bill Berryhill where you said they’d be,” Constable Bauer said. “Doug Hitchens we found at the house. The other body, well that will have to be identified but we’ll just assume it’s Kyle Parker.”

Jim nodded then broke into a coughing jag that doubled him over. The taste of ash seared down his throat and no amount of water would wash it away.

Constable Bauer twisted open another bottle of water and held it out to Jim. “I don’t mind telling you, I have never seen anything like that.” He let off a low whistle and shook his head. “I mean, Jesus, what happened?”

Jim stayed bent at the waist, hands on his knees, spitting into the grass. He took the water from the police officer and rinsed and spit again. Not purposely avoiding the question, it simply hurt to talk.

“Looks like Mr. Corrigan went crazy on you.” The constable said. “Is that what happened?”

“We went there to kill him.”

“And then what?”

“He killed us.”

The officer made no reaction. He folded his arms over his belly and waited for the rest of it.

“I need to make a confession, Ray. A big one.” Jim kicked at something in the grass. “About what happened tonight and what happened a hundred years ago.”

“Looks like it’s dying down.” Bauer nodded at the fire. “Hell of a thing, losing your home like that.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

The constable turned and looked at him. “You’ve been through a hell of a shock, Jim. Things like this, well, people get the details mixed up. Don’t remember everything exactly.” He swatted at a mosquito on his neck and looked at his palm. “Everybody knows Corrigan was a loony tune. From what I can tell, it looks like you guys went up there to talk some sense into him and Mr. Corrigan just went crazy. Attacked you for no good reason. From where I’m standing, this was clearly self-defence on your part.”

Jim blinked. Nothing made sense anymore. He felt three paces behind, trying to catch up.

“Jim, look at me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It knocked around in his head for a while before Jim could decipher what was being offered to him. A choice, yes or no. That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? The winners write the history. No one hears the loser’s story. That gets buried too.

This is how it is. How it always is.

Jim leaned in to spit but his mouth was dry. “Just like last time.”

“Last time?”

A sharp pop from the fire, timbers falling in on themselves. Sparks roiled up and spun crazily, pinpricks of orange that blushed briefly and then winked out.

They went back to watching the fire and neither man spoke for a long time.

~

Days came and went, Emma barely distinguishing one morning from the next. She’d shifted down a gear just to cope. There would be so much to do. ‘Sufficient unto the day’, another of her grandmother’s sayings. Impossible to think beyond that. She and Travis had stayed in the hospital that first night. An OPP constable named Hipkiss came and took statements from both her and Travis and later typed it up and left it in Ray Bauer’s inbox. In the morning, Emma’s sister came and brought them home to her house in Exford.

She panicked when she thought of Smokey. The horse left in the paddock, forgotten in the melee. She phoned Norm Meyerside, their neighbour, to ask him to check on Smokey. He’d already taken care of it. Like everyone else along the road, he’d been startled by the sirens and got into the car to see what the trouble was. He had seen the horse but the firecrew wouldn’t let him come onto the property. He’d gone back in the morning and led the horse into the barn. He told her not to worry, he’d look after the animal until she knew what she was going to do.

Emma thanked Norm and hung up the phone. She didn’t have a clue what she was going to do.

~

The remains of six people were taken to the coroner’s office in London. Following the examinations by a four member team, the Regional Coroner’s Office sent the remains back to Pennyluck. The Ripley Funeral Home was the only undertaker in town, a family run business in operation since 1881. Gene Ripley rallied his son, daughter and daughter in-law and told them they’d have to work overnight to deal with the arrival of so many deceased. Don Moretti of Moretti Funeral Services in Garrisontown drove in and offered his services, for which Ripley was grateful. That’s what community was all about, he told his son as they wheeled the gurneys out of the coroner’s van. Helping one another in a crisis.

The crew from the coroner’s office were unloading the last set of remains when Ripley told them to turn around and load it back into the van. He wasn’t accepting that one.

The driver checked his clipboard and said his orders were to deliver all six remains but the funeral director shook his head and told him to take it back.

The driver scrunched his shoulders up and scanned the inventory list on his clipboard. “What am I supposed to do with Corrigan, W?”

“You can dump it in the river for all I care,” Ripley said. “I won’t take it.”

The remains of William Corrigan were taken back to the Coroner’s office in London and then rerouted to Fairway Funeral services on Westchester Boulevard. Under contract to the city, Fairway serviced the remains of deceased without next of kin. The homeless, the intransigent, the unloved. Corrigan’s remains were wheeled into cold storage and processed. No one came forward to claim them.

In the days following the incident, the town council commandeered the banquet hall at the arena for a temporary office. Patrick McGrath was quickly appointed provisional mayor and the council got to work dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy. Five funerals were combined into one, with a large public service to be held at Saint Mary’s Church. Ideas were discussed about how to honour the tragedy. A plaque in the square or a memorial stone in the fair grounds? No consensus was met and the idea was backburnered while the council dealt with the more pressing matters of rebuilding the town hall and public library.

The property on the Roman Line was folded back into the trust of the town. Renamed Lot 13, concession 5, it was never again referred to as the Corrigan homestead. Bank accounts belonging to William Corrigan, deceased, were also placed in trust to the town. There were two accounts in Pennyluck and one in Halifax, all of the monies held in trust under the oversight of the town council. Before the month was out, funds were already being siphoned off with illegible signatures on banal looking forms stuffed into the back of a filing cabinet. At the rate the monies were being chipped away at, all three accounts would be drained by Christmas.

33

SMOKEY WAS SPOOKED and agitated after the fire. She bristled at the saddle and shied when Emma fitted her toe into the stirrup. Emma spoke softly to the animal, trying everything she could to calm the horse but there was still wariness in Smokey’s eyes. The terror of the fire remained in her bones and wouldn’t shake loose easily.

“I know how you feel.” Emma had barely slept since the incident and startled at any sharp sound. Became anxious whenever Travis was out of her sight. The last two days, it was all she could do to simply get out of bed. Somehow she had managed to move them back onto the farm but the details were all a blur.

And all Emma wanted to do was ride. Riding took everything you had and focused it down to a laser beam. Brains, muscles, senses, all of it consumed with the horse. Finding your seat, letting the horse listen to you while you listened to it. Everything else was left behind at the paddock gates. She needed this.

She led the horse to the field and walked it for a good while, talking quietly to her the whole time. When they reached the creek, Emma tried once more and Smokey shivered but allowed her into the saddle. She walked the horse and got her into a trot but no more.

It was enough for now. Hell, it was a giant leap forward.

Travis poked through the ruins of the house. Stepping over charred timbers and sootblack brick. A tangle of sticks and ash, that’s all it was now. He’d taken the hoe from the barn, using it to pull apart broken studs and curled shingles. Looking for anything familiar, anything useful. Anything of himself that had survived the fire.

There was nothing.

His comic books were gone, along with his music and the hockey equipment and his crappy old computer. It had all incinerated so completely, he figured that none of it could have meant that much in the first place.

The realization of it spun a sickening dizziness in his head. Lost, rootless, orphaned. His stuff was all gone. Was it really so bad? Was his old life so great he should cry over it now? What exactly was he mourning?

Loser. Faggot. Ass bleeder.

Good riddance.

In all the horror movies he had seen, all the monster comics he’d read, the monster was usually destroyed by fire. Stakes through the heart, silver bullets, all that stuff paled in comparison to fire. A one-size-fits-all solution to kill the beast. Why? Because it purified and cleansed. Same way they burn crops to plant new ones.