Those Who Favor Fire (31 page)

It was plain to see that Joe had learned a lot in the months he’d spent working with his hands. Helping farmers and neighbors with the heavy work of building barns, of fixing things broken by weather or age, had taught Joe how to earn a living. But as he had come to
know about wood and tools and sweat, he had also come to know things about himself. He liked what he had learned, and he knew that he would always love this tree house as much as any other dwelling on earth.

“Earl gave me all kinds of stuff I needed,” Joe offered. “Nails, lots of hardware, lumber for the frame, lent me his drill, a couple of saws. He also helped me with the hard parts. So it’s really his birthday present, too,” he said to Rusty. “Don’t forget to thank him.”

“I won’t, Joe.” He looked around the house one more time, turning on his feet like a boy in a music box, and then put his arms around Joe and laid his head against his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”

“You won’t need to,” Joe said, his hands in Rusty’s sleek hair. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he put the boy away from him. “Listen, Rusty,” he said slowly. “I know that you might have preferred something a little less … refined. You know: a rope ladder, apple crates. Don’t think you have to keep it this way just to please me. It’s your house. Do whatever you want with it. I just couldn’t help making it this way. For some reason I just can’t help thinking of you as much older than eleven.”

Rusty looked as if he would explode. “It’s perfect,” he said.

“One more thing you haven’t seen,” said Joe, leading him out onto the deck and lifting his chin up toward the pinnacle of the tree.

“A crow’s nest!” Rusty cried, scrambling farther up the walnut’s massive trunk, rung by rung, to where it was encircled by a sturdy, narrow walk. From his perch Rusty could look through the walnut’s upper branches, over the tops of its smaller neighbor trees, and down the gradual slope of the hill. In one direction he could see the top of Rachel’s house and, beyond that, a distant field, moving with wheat and a mare’s tail of smoke drifting in the breeze. When he looked quickly away toward the town he could see more, for the hill sloped sharply down to Raccoon Creek. As the walnut’s upper branches soughed gently the boy caught glimpses of his own rooftop.

“You can send me messages, Mom,” he called down. “We can learn Morse code and use flashlights.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, looking up, her feet making continuous small adjustments like an outfielder gauging descent. She held the back of her head in both hands, her fingers buried in her sandy hair. “Just watch yourself on the way back down, Rusty.”

By now it was well and truly sundown, and somewhere below them a choir of frogs began its fervent evensong.

They all climbed down from the old black walnut. Rusty kissed his smiling mother, Rachel took Joe’s callused hand, and the four of them walked along the well-worn path and out of the woods. At the edge of the trees they were silenced by a sunset as gaudy as a parrot’s wing and felt themselves slipping from long practice into uneasy admiration of the fine, polluted light that swept slowly toward Belle Haven.

        That night, in a field not far from town, not even as far as Ian Spalding’s campground, alongside an old stone wall that had mostly tumbled down, a doe stopped grazing and lifted her head. Her companions, loitering in the near distance, paused to watch her. The ones closest to her began to tremble. The doe gathered herself to flee. For one silent, enormous moment, she knew nothing but terror and the exhilarating notion that she could save herself. But even as her hooves braced themselves against the ground, it melted away like sand touched by tide. Where the deer had stood was nothing but a dissipating spout of smoke.

A few more stones had fallen from the mossy old wall. The site of the deer’s abduction was oddly bare. But there were, otherwise, no signs to caution passersby that this was a place best avoided. Just as flags were lacking in a dozen other scattered places waiting for unlucky strays.

        It was the middle of August, and Joe had not been up to the second floor of Rachel’s house since Easter.

“I’m redecorating,” she’d said in the spring. “No going upstairs until I’m done.” And Joe had been aware, all summer long, of panel trucks parked by Rachel’s house, trails of sawdust on her front porch, the sound of hammers coming down the hill as he biked into town.

With her house in such disarray, Rachel sometimes drove out to the Schooner to spend a short summer night, cook with Joe, play crazy eights, maybe dance in the clearing. And on nights when the moon was big or the days so hot that the streets melted, Joe often showed up at Rachel’s door and led her to the moss in the woods or, if Rusty was in his tree, lay with her on her cool kitchen floor.

He had long deferred to Rachel’s wish that they—neither of them—spoil their lovemaking with concerns about the future. It wasn’t that he no longer cared whether or not Rachel became pregnant, but the thought of a child no longer alarmed him as it once had. If Rachel didn’t worry about it, neither would he. They were already a family of sorts, married or not. More, in some ways, than the one he’d lost.

These notions of family had made Joe miss the house on the hill, where everything was both a source and an extension of Rachel, and he was glad when she invited him to see what she had done with it.

Rachel was unlike anyone else he’d ever known, but Joe somehow expected to climb the stairs into the upper regions of her house and there encounter something predictably feminine. Pretty. Charming. Full of mirrors and scent. He felt strangely gratified to be joining the
fraternity of mated men who are presented with such emasculating bowers and are expected, unconditionally, to applaud.

As they climbed the winding stairs together, Joe felt a great tenderness for Rachel. She had seen his work unveiled. He readied his smile and his kindest words as he climbed toward hers.

“Well,” she said, watching his face. “What do you think?”

At one time there had been, at the top of the stairs, a hallway joining two bedrooms, a study, and a sewing room. All of that was gone. There was, instead, one large open space. The main supporting beams remained, as did a portion of the ceiling that had before entirely hidden the attic and roof above. The bare wood floor, too, had been exposed but had then been sanded and finished to a gleam. The windows, drapeless, sparkled. They were filled with the blue of the sky and the myriad greens of the trees, as if they were changeable paintings.

One end of the room held a polished brass bed, its immaculate white spread stitched with a wreath of roses. Next to the bed, a simple wooden table held a lamp made from a bottle of red glass and a painted shade. There was a small wicker wardrobe, a braided rug, a jug of clover on the windowsill.

On the other side of the room, in one large corner, was a hodgepodge of bookcases, all filled with books. Each case was topped with motley stuff: colored bottles shot with sunlight; a spiny blowfish; a coffee mug full of birds’ feathers; a large conch shell; a fan of coral; a childish purple crock. On the floor was a plain blue rug. On the rug was an old rocking chair. On the chair was an open book.

The rest of the room was filled with odds and ends, piles of colorful pillows, good prints, a huge desk heaped with books and papers, and, against one wall, a deep fireplace of red brick with a simple wooden mantelpiece. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a young man and woman with their arms around each other.

“That was my one extravagance,” she said. “I had it painted from a picture I found in my mother’s scrapbook. The rest of this stuff I bought at flea markets or rummage sales.”

“It’s really something,” Joe said, wandering around the room. Above them, in the part of the room that had no ceiling, the peaked roof of the house seemed high. “You won’t be too cold in the winter?”

“I had them insulate between the rafters before they paneled the inside. I think it’ll be okay.”

“What’s the loft for?” In one half of the room the wooden ceiling
and attic remained but had been finished off with a triangular wall. “And how in the world do you get up there?”

Rachel pointed toward a slender, rod-shaped handle that hung down from the ceiling. When Joe pulled on it, it brought a portion of the ceiling about as big as a door slowly downward on a set of hinges. As this hatch tilted open, a set of stairs, built on rollers and fixed to runners on the upper face of the hatch, slid gently down until the bottom step came to rest on the floor below. “Ingenious,” said Joe.

“It’s just for storage,” Rachel said. “I keep the other seasons up there.”

“Other seasons?”

“This is summer,” she said, looking around the great room.

In October Rachel traded the wicker, the white spread, the blow-fish and the seashells, the colored glass and pillows for a big wooden blanket box, cream-colored drapes, a patchwork bedspread, an overstuffed chair, and the dozen wooden creatures that Joe had carved for her during the summer, among them a sandpiper and a miniature cat.

Rachel was curled up in the fat chair, reading a book and half sleeping one Saturday morning in October when she heard a knock at her door, the sound of it opening, and a voice, down below, yelling, “Hey, Rachel. It’s me, Angela. Come on out and play.”

“Go away,” she yelled back.

“No kidding, Rachel. Get your ass down here.”

Which is when it occurred to Rachel that Angela should have been at the Kitchen, busy with the last of the breakfast crowd.

“What’s wrong?” she said, hopping down the stairs with her shoes half on.

“Everything or nothing, depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“Depending on how you feel about Belle Haven’s dearly departed.” She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

Rachel threw on her coat. “What?”

“Just follow me, pal,” Angela said, her apron hanging out from underneath her coat, nurse’s shoes on her feet. “And bring your keys.”

They took Rachel’s truck down the hill, over the bridge, past the Kitchen, toward the western edge of town, to park outside the church where Rachel’s parents had always taken her. There were already a number of cars along the street, and the church lot was full.

“Come on, Angela. What’s going on?”

“I honestly don’t know for sure, Rachel. Rusty came busting into
the Kitchen a little while ago with some wild story about skeletons surfacing out here, and everybody decided to come and have a look, I guess. Ophelia didn’t even finish her waffles, which is a first as far as I know. Rusty was back on his bike before anybody could get another word out of him. So I finished making pancakes, left my mother in charge, and decided to see what’s up. Not skeletons, I hope.”

Rachel didn’t say a word. She knew how Angela must be feeling, despite the wisecracks. Angela’s father was buried here. So were her grandparents. Rachel’s, too. There was nothing to be laughing about, if what Rusty had said was true.

It was, but the state of things in the graveyard at the edge of town might have remained hidden forever if not for the fact that Sophia Browning missed her husband.

After her house had burned ten months before, Sophia had moved to Randall to live with her son and his family. She had missed everything about Belle Haven, but most of all she had missed her daily walk to the graveyard to visit her darling Otto, talk to him, cry for him, remember him. It was so difficult, now, to come every day from Randall. She could not drive; her son and his wife were too busy to take her more than once a week. And so, even though she had never imagined leaving Belle Haven herself or disturbing her husband’s remains, she had finally talked to the authorities about the laws that governed the handling of the long dead.

What she discovered alarmed her: that the fire far underground—never any worse than a bit of smoke and a bad smell—may already have displaced the remains interred in Belle Haven’s Presbyterian graveyard. “We’ve warned people, the last five years or so, about such a possibility,” she was told. “But people just ignore us, generally.”

“Nobody ever warned me,” Sophia protested.

“When did your husband die?” they asked her.

“January, 1965,” she said.

“Well, there you go,” they said. “The fire hadn’t even started yet back then.”

“But what is there to worry about, anyway? I don’t care if the coffin’s a bit singed, as long as it’s in one piece. As long as it can be moved.” As she talked, she tried to pretend this was not her Otto they were discussing. She tried not to think about him at all.

“Ma’am, we think that maybe some of the remains may have been
displaced
. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

“Displaced! What do you mean, displaced?”

“Gone,” they said.

And so she had made up her mind, right then and there, to move Otto. It might have been difficult anywhere else, but Belle Haven wasn’t like anywhere else. All it took was permission, quickly granted, and hired people who knew how to manage such things. It surprised Sophia that there were such people, and that they were listed in her yellow pages.

“I want to be there when you move him,” she insisted, and so she was. Much to her endless regret.

Otto had not been displaced. Not really. But his coffin was simply gone, reduced to ash and splinters. By the time their shovels reached him, Otto had been for years exposed to the heat of the fire and the brutal invasion of underground things. Not expecting this, one of the diggers had scooped Otto’s skull onto the blade of his shovel. There had been no coffin to slow his stroke, and he had tossed the skull out onto the grass before he’d even realized what he’d unearthed.

Sophia, closer than she should have been, saw the skull roll across the grass, flakes of dirt falling from it as it bumped along. She screamed at the sight and then ran away, around the church and straight into it, screaming all the while.

It took no time for the news to spread, for a crowd to assemble at the hot little graveyard. Angela and Rachel arrived as Sophia emerged from the church, her son and his wife at her side.