The Third Hill North of Town (35 page)

Outside, Rufus was rising slowly to his feet. He looked hideous, hunched over with pain and bloody from head to foot, but he was still alive. He pointed his rifle at the back of Michael’s head.

Eben brought the revolver up and fired, again and again, weeping uncontrollably and trying his damnedest to kill the man who was responsible for destroying his family. There were only three bullets left, however, and he missed all three times.

 

Julianna was on the other side of the burning house, in the driveway, when she heard another gunshot and Michael’s screams. Her hands did not pause in what they were doing, however, even as her tears blinded her. She knew from the screams that Michael was probably dying now, too, soon to join Seth and Ben and very likely Emma; she didn’t know where her father was, but she knew that if Eben were still alive she only had seconds to save him before Rufus took his life, as well.

“I’m coming, Daddy,” she whispered. “I’ll be right there.”

The fire in the house had taken over the entire first floor. Through the windows of the kitchen and living room, all vomiting smoke, she could see flames on the walls and the ceilings; her home, too, was dying, crying out in the night just like Michael.

I’m coming, Michael,
Julianna promised in silence, almost ready to return to the battlefront on the other side of her home, and praying with her whole soul that the only weapon she had at her disposal would be a match for Rufus Tarwater and his rifle.

This time her prayer would be answered.

 

Rufus was preparing to put a bullet through Michael Larson’s blond head when somebody began shooting at him again from the second-floor window. Forgetting all about the boy, Rufus gawped up at the window after the first shot and tripped over his own feet as he tried to dodge the two shots that followed the first in quick succession. Whoever was shooting at him this time, however, was clearly nowhere near as proficient with a revolver as the son of a bitch who had managed to hit him three times in a row earlier; the revolver fell silent once more and Rufus was blessedly no more damaged than he already had been.

The one who got me before musta been Larson, but now it’s his goddamn wife,
he thought.

“NICE SHOOTIN’, SWEETIE-PIE!” he bellowed in mockery. “HOW ABOUT I SHOW YOU HOW IT’S DONE?”

He pointed his rifle at the window and saw that he’d been wrong about the order of shooters; it was Eben Larson himself—making no attempt to duck or save himself—who was gazing down at him with hatred and anguish. Rufus smiled and took careful aim, pleased at this opportunity to kill the man face-to-face, but before he could squeeze the trigger the distinctive, nasal bleat of a car horn sounded on the lawn directly behind him. He spun around just in time to make out the grille of a Model T Ford less than ten feet away.

Rufus made a desperate lunge to get out of the way, but the Larson family had not been the least bit kind to his body that night, and he could no longer move fast enough to save himself. Eben Larson’s Model T Ford gobbled up the last inch of lawn between itself and its prey, and the body of Rufus Tarwater sailed through the air like a rolled-up newspaper and landed close to Emma Larson’s rose bushes, thirteen feet away. Rufus was still marginally alive when he finally stopped moving, but the Model T soon took care of that, bounding across the lawn and running over him twice more.

Julianna Larson was not in a forgiving mood.

 

“Tarwater’s dead,” Eben told Emma as he struggled to raise her from the floor. The smoke in Julianna’s bedroom was so thick he could hardly breathe, and there were flames on the staircase outside the door. “Julianna just ran over the son of a bitch with the car.”

Julianna’s still alive!
Emma thought, feeling tears of joy well up in her eyes. During her own gunfight with Rufus, she’d thought she’d seen her daughter on the back lawn, but she hadn’t been sure at all that Julianna would survive. Emma was unable to speak because of all the fluid in her lungs, but she squeezed Eben’s shoulder hard and gazed up into his face with a look that was more clear than speech.
What about Seth and Michael?

Eben’s throat closed completely. He shook his head, and she closed her eyes.

My boys,
Emma mourned. Nothing in her life had ever hurt as much, nor ever would again.
Oh, my sweet boys.

Eben somehow got her to her feet, but all her weight was on him. Her face was against his naked chest and his arms were wrapped around her middle, and he staggered toward the door, eyeing the fire as it crept into the room. He was hurrying as much as he could, but it was taking all his strength just to keep them both upright and balanced.

“We’ve only got one good leg between us, now, Em,” he gasped in her ear. “I’m afraid those stairs aren’t going to be any fun at all.”

She didn’t answer.

 

Julianna dropped to her knees beside Michael on the lawn and put his head in her lap. He had stopped screaming at last but he was now humming under his breath and didn’t seem to notice her.

“Michael, can you hear me?” Julianna begged, frantic to get to the house and save their parents but unwilling to leave her brother alone. “I’ve got to get Momma and Daddy, okay? But I’ll be right back and we’ll get you fixed up good as new.”

He stopped humming. “Julianna.” His eyes, green and huge just like hers, sought her face and he smiled up at her. “Baby girl,” he murmured.

She tried to smile back at him through her tears. “That’s me.”

He coughed up a mouthful of blood on his chest and swiped weakly at it with the heel of his hand. “I think I must be coming down”—he grimaced as another violent spasm wracked his body—“with a cold or something.”

She choked on her tears and glanced at the house, knowing Michael probably only had seconds to live but also knowing that she was going to need every one of those seconds to rescue Eben and Emma. The top-floor windows were now filled with flames, and the roof was on fire, too.

“I’ll be right back,” she promised, her voice breaking as she lowered his head to the ground.

Michael reached up as she tried to rise and touched her face. “Is he dead?” he whispered.

“Rufus? Yes.”

He shook his head. “Seth.”

Julianna flinched and involuntarily looked over at Seth’s body.

Michael’s face contorted and tears spilled from his eyes. “Ben too?”

Julianna put her finger on his lips. “I’ll be right back, Michael,” she sobbed, leaping to her feet and sprinting for the back door.

 

Eben knew Emma was dead before he started down the steps with her body, but he wasn’t going to leave his wife to burn in the house, and that was that. The stairs were on fire, but he thought if he hurried he might still be able to get safely down them; there seemed to be a narrow path on one side that would allow him to reach the kitchen. The heat was making breathing difficult; his lungs felt as if they were full of cinders.

“DADDY? MOMMA?”

Eben faintly heard Julianna’s screams, but he couldn’t tell where they were coming from; the din from the fire made it impossible to guess.

“DON’T COME INSIDE, JULIANNA!” Eben bawled as loudly as he could, praying she wasn’t already in the house. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

He knew his daughter would ignore this order completely, of course, even if she had heard him, so he plunged down the stairs at a mad clip for a lame man, more to forestall Julianna’s entry into the inferno their home had become than to get out himself with Emma’s body. His bare feet started to blister immediately as he hopped from one sizzling, steaming step to the next without pause, and he cried out in excruciating pain as he nearly lost his balance on the fourth step down. Emma flopped against him lifelessly, her head lolling from side to side as if shaking her head at the folly of such an enterprise.

“DADDY?”

Julianna’s voice was louder this time; it sounded as if she were in the kitchen. Eben didn’t know how such a thing could be possible, though; what he could see of the kitchen at the bottom of the steps was an image from hell itself; floor-to-ceiling flames of red, orange, blue, yellow, and white, flames so high and bright they could cook the soul out of a person in less time than it took to incinerate an ant in a wood stove.

“GET OUT, SWEETHEART!” Eben shrieked, not knowing where Julianna was, but knowing she was going to die if she were still in the house. “GET OUT NOW!”

Emma’s night slip caught fire, and then Eben’s pants. Eben howled in terror but continued hopping down the steps, having no alternative but to keep going. He made it down three more stairs before tumbling down the rest of the staircase; he landed on top of Emma on the kitchen floor and the wood beneath their bodies groaned as they slammed into it.

“DADDY!”

The last thing Eben saw before his hair caught fire and he lost all awareness of his surroundings was his daughter, standing on the outside steps of the back porch and clawing wildly at the red-hot door screen that was preventing her from reaching him. She had never made it inside the house; the pennies Rufus Tarwater had so artfully jammed into the door frame were now serving to safeguard the sole surviving Larson, who otherwise would have joined the rest of her family in their fate that night.

Eben Larson did not know of Rufus’s pennies, nor was he capable of any thought whatsoever by this point. He was more fire than man now, and the only feeling left to him before his consciousness fled was pain. Pain past bearing, pain without limits. Yet before the end he
had
seen his daughter, alive and safely outside the house; he
had
known she loved him and was doing all she could to save him. Whatever torments of the damned he suffered afterward, surely he was at least granted that much in the way of comfort before everything became meaningless to him.

Or so Julianna told herself for years to come, to keep from going mad.

 

The tragedy at the Larson farm was not the only game in town that night.

Fewer than three minutes after Rufus Tarwater tossed a burning torch through Eben Larson’s study window, Dr. Wilbur Colby’s cat, Zeke (short for Ezekiel), knocked a candle and a half-full bottle of whiskey off the nightstand in Colby’s bedroom, while the good doctor—a widower who lived alone—was squatting in the outhouse behind his home in downtown Pawnee. The flame on the candle ignited the spilled whiskey, and the bedspread and mattress quickly caught fire, as did a dog-eared copy of the Bible, open and facedown, that Colby had left beside his pillow. By the time Colby returned from the outhouse, the entire top floor of his residence was ablaze.

Colby’s cramped living quarters were on the floor above his office, right next to the general goods store. The doctor’s initial attempts to extinguish the fire were severely hampered by inebriation; the half-full bottle of whiskey that had been shattered by Zeke (real Scotch whiskey from a grateful Scottish patient who had smuggled a case of the illegal stuff into the country) had been completely full earlier in the evening, and Colby, normally a teetotaler, had declined to share a drop of the precious liquor with anyone. As a result, no one else became aware of the fire until more than a few stray flames had traveled down the side of Colby’s office and scurried over to the general goods store. One of these bright, overeager flames spied a shelf with several gallon jugs of kerosene on it, and—rather more generous than Dr. Colby had been with his Scotch—graciously invited a few of its friends to join it in a toast.

And that was all it took.

Three-quarters of Pawnee’s 137 residents lived on farms outside of town and were in no danger whatsoever, but those closer in were not so lucky. The general goods store was next to the bakery and the smithy; the smithy abutted a shed that held, among other things, a twenty-gallon tank of gasoline. All the buildings in Pawnee were made of wood, and it had been a dry spring in northern Missouri. The post office, the school, the telephone /telegraph office, the bakery, half a dozen private homes—in short, every single structure on Pawnee’s only street—was either leveled or already beyond saving in less than an hour, and all the attempts to prevent the fire from spreading from one place to another proved to be futile, especially because Pawnee had no fire department, and nowhere near the manpower to deal with such a fierce conflagration.

Hence the reason the glow from the Larson farm, a mile and a half to the north, went virtually unnoticed, though some people the next day would recall hearing gunshots in the distance. And while the Larson family and Ben Taylor would certainly be mourned a great deal, they were not the only casualties on that Sunday night in June. Seventeen people died in the Pawnee fire of 1923, more than half of whom were trying to help their friends and neighbors escape the devastation. One of these was Doc Colby, who was crushed by a falling roof beam while attempting to rescue the family of Lars Olson, the blacksmith; another was Tom Putnam (a janitor at Julianna’s school in Hatfield), who tried to save Zeke the cat, and was last seen carrying the terrified creature in his arms and running for the back door of the doctor’s office when the ceiling above them collapsed.

The oddest death of the night, however, belonged to Clyde Rayburn, the next-door neighbor of the Larsons. Clyde—yet another bachelor—awoke at midnight in his bed. A childhood illness had left him mostly deaf, and thus he’d heard nothing of the gunshots over at the Larsons’ house. What had awakened him had been the smell of smoke on the night breeze. He stuck his head out the window to track down the source of the smell, and was shocked to see
two
major fires at work, one to the north and one to the south. He ran as fast as his gouty feet would allow, threw a saddle on his horse, Celeste, and galloped toward the Larsons’ home. He had almost reached the Larsons’ driveway when a fragment of still-burning ash drifted from the sky and extinguished itself in one of Celeste’s eyes, causing the beast to buck wildly. Clyde tumbled from the saddle, catching his foot in the stirrups, and a frenzied Celeste dragged her owner for a quarter of a mile on the gravel road, well past the Larsons’ house and out into their cornfield before at last subsiding. Clyde ended up on his back with his foot still snared in the stirrup; he bled to death in the field, gazing up at the smoke-filled sky.