Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (21 page)

"I mean Annette."

"No." Jer blew on his coffee. "You didn't expect her, did you?"

"Katie Anne sent her an invitation."

"Yeah, well, that's Katie Anne for ya."

Ethan sipped the coffee. "Thanks for comin'."

"I was worried, buddy. I've never seen you like this before."

"I've never been like this before."

Jer glanced at his watch.

"What time is it?"

"We've got three minutes. Then you gotta walk down the aisle."

Ethan nodded and took a long gulp of the coffee.

"You gonna make it?"

"Yeah, I'll be okay."

Ethan gave Jer a level gaze, suddenly looking very sober. "When's she leaving?"

"Friday."

Ethan nodded. "She got her ticket changed."

"Not as soon as she wanted."

"Yeah."

"Things'll be better when she's gone."

At that moment, Ethan was on the verge of telling him everything. That and how he'd picked up the phone countless times to call her; how he'd driven by her house, early in the morning and late at night, lurking like a stalker in the dark, hoping to see a glimpse of her in a lighted window. But he knew what he would see in her eyes, those awful things that would demand recognition, things he was so loath to confront. As time went on it seemed so much easier to withdraw behind a wall of silence and let the others wrestle with truth and their own heartache.

Ethan picked up his bow tie from the counter. It was damp from the beer. He snapped it on and picked up his jacket.

"Let's go, buddy," he said to Jer.

* * *

From that moment on, Ethan did what was expected of him. At the altar he stood solemn and groom-like before the Presbyterian minister Katie Anne had chosen to marry them, a soft-jowled man with an earnest smile, an old friend of the Mackey family whom Ethan had never met. He said his vows clearly and credibly. He pledged to love and honor her in sickness and in health, and to forsake all others. And he meant it. He thought how pretty she looked and how hope and relief and adoration poured from her eyes. He felt his own dry heart sitting underneath his starched shirt and wondered how it had come to pass that he had lost it to someone else instead of this smiling, love-struck girl.

* * *

It was one hell of a way to spend a honeymoon, as more than one friend or neighbor commented to Ethan, but the wind was right, and they'd had enough rain, and these were the things that dictated the spring burn, not honeymoons. The spring burn was deadly serious business. There were backfires to plan, cattle to be moved to safer ground, neighbors and authorities to notify, heavy equipment to commandeer and troops to enlist. For years Ethan had helped his neighbors with their burn. He'd driven trucks mounted with water tanks, pulled huge sprayers behind his tractor or wielded fire sticks alongside other ranchers. They worked in parallel lines, stringing fire across the prairie, men and women on foot, on the backs of feed trucks, on four-wheelers, igniting the brown winter grass with friendly napalm dripping from ten-foot pipes. He'd worked the mop-up crew, beating out little fingers of unruly fire with paddles and rakes. When they were done he always looked out at the blackened hills and marveled at the potency of fire and the phoenix-like regenerative power of nature, at how life and death were so mysteriously one. For in less than a week the new bluestem would appear underneath the blackened crust, tiny green sprouts bursting with nutrients. Then they'd turn the cattle loose again, and the beasts would nudge aside the charred earth with their soft, broad muzzles and nibble on the green, juicy blades that tasted better than anything else in the world. The bluestem would grow quickly and so would the cattle. So would the pockets of the ranchers who owned them.

Now it was Ethan's turn to burn. With Tom's help he had carefully assessed the weather and the wind and planned the burn with military precision. This was his land. Its conservation was his salvation.

Ethan stood on the bed of his truck and surveyed the burning hills. It was a spectacular sight with the red flames outlining the hills against the night sky. The burn had gone well, and the county firefighting crew that had been in a state of readiness throughout the day was now preparing to move on. His attention was torn away from the hills by the blue-and-red strobing light of the sheriff's patrol car as it cruised down the dirt road toward them. It stopped next to Ethan's truck and the fire chief got out of the passenger side and came up to Ethan.

"How're we doing?" Ethan asked as he jumped down.

"Looks good," the fire chief said. "Fire's out by the tree line up north. It was touch and go there for a while. Sure felt like that wind was changin' on us."

"We're about finished with the mop-up down here."

The fire chief told him he was leaving a truck next to the firebreak where they still had some flames, and that he was sending the other units back to the station.

Ethan said that was fine by him, and he thanked the fire chief and said he was grateful to his crew.

* * *

When Ethan stepped under the shower that night and felt the cool water stream over his face and through his hair, he realized he hadn't thought of Annette all day. The burn had distracted his body and mind. He was very tired and it felt good. For the first time in months it felt as though chaos no longer threatened the orderliness of his world.

Chapter 21

Annette sat at the old yellow Formica kitchen table staring out the dark window waiting for dawn. It was the same table where she'd eaten as a girl, and she remembered the times she had stared out another window, not unlike this one, at the flat wheat fields of western Kansas buzzing with crickets in the hot summer sun and wished herself away. This morning the only sound was the wind. Usually the winds calmed before dawn, but not today. It was her send-off. Her enemy come to bid her good-bye.

She glanced at her watch. Not yet five o'clock. The coffeemaker sputtered and hissed, and she rose, poured herself a cup and raised the window. A blast of warm air blew the curtains into her face. It would be a hot day, but she'd be gone before the end of it. For two days she'd been ready. Suitcases packed, tickets and passports on top of the dresser. She hadn't been able to sleep or eat, so anxious was she that a freak incident might hold up her departure. Charlie's heart or Eliana coming down with a fever. Something to prolong the misery.

Thanks to Ethan's friendship she'd survived six months of her father's ill-tempered selfishness. Sometimes during one of his rages he'd threaten to throw her out, and she'd endured his abuse and sucked down her indignation and put on a happy face to her daughter, and then she'd carried it to Ethan and he'd listened and loved her. Having no one to turn to for the past month had left her in complete emotional isolation and desperate to flee. Her father had sulked for days when she told him she was leaving early, but he never asked why. She wondered how much he knew. How much everyone knew. She had no way of knowing and no friends to ask. Only Jer. And Jer was silent like a rock.

She had waited for Ethan that night until the snow covered her old Buick in a wispy white blanket, and then she had cautiously driven home through the blizzard with her heart heavy with something she refused to name. Even after his call the next morning she couldn't wrap her thoughts around losing him. Every morning she'd drive to the house hoping to find him waiting for her. She'd sit at the table and write long letters to him and then burn them in the fireplace. Then she'd pick up her violin and play the sad melodies of Mahler and Gorecki, her sadness echoing across the hills, carried on the warm breezes, until even the songbirds paused to listen. The bed Ethan had purchased still sat in the living room, its twenty-year warranty blazoned on a satin banner across the corner. She couldn't bear to look at it, and after a while she quit going to the house.

Every Friday when she left Matthew Winegarner's home she walked quickly to her car with her eyes straight ahead, determined not to look up and perhaps find his face framed in the office window—or, worse, not find it there at all. And every Thursday, when she drove to Jer's to pick up Eliana after her riding lesson, a terrible sensation invaded her stomach, and her knees and arms grew weak for fear that she might find him there or, even worse, not find him there at all. Jer looked at her differently now. There was an element of reticence in his already quiet demeanor that Annette found troubling. He seemed to want to avoid conversation with her, so Annette quit coming early to observe as she had done in the past, and the last few weeks she took to waiting in her car.

Most difficult of all was attending mass without Ethan at her side. One weekday afternoon she drove to Strong City and knelt in a back pew and remained there for a long time, her mind emptied of thought, until she felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice whisper, "Annie."

She looked up to see Father Liddy standing in the aisle. She saw on his kind face a compassionate recognition of her heartache, and it struck Annette that perhaps sainthood was not the absence of sin in a man but rather a boundless compassion, a fearlessness of human suffering, a willingness to take it on and make it one's own.

She told him that she'd be leaving soon for Paris, and she asked him to hear her confession. He looked at her in his quiet manner and sat down on the pew in front of her.

"You're doing the right thing."

"I suppose I am."

"It will get easier."

"I only pray for strength."

"God will grant it to you."

"You've been very kind, Father."

"I'll miss you, Annette."

"I'll miss you too, Father."

"I envy you," the old Irishman said. "To be going home."

* * *

Those words infused light into Annette's lonely heart, and the strength he had promised her began to grow from that moment on. Only once did it waver, one evening when she was out to dinner at Hannah's with Eliana and her father, and Ethan had come into the café. It was unfortunate that she had looked up just as his eyes found her, because she read on his face an emotion quite different from any she imagined him to feel. Not guilt, and not fear. Nor embarrassment. Rather, in that brief moment, his eyes revealed that he was floundering in a depth of agony just like her own. That his heart had taken him somewhere far away from his beloved hills and his soul was stranded there, and he didn't know how to bring it back. He held her gaze, and then Patti came up and spoke to him. He tipped his hat to her without a reply, and turned and walked out.

It was that look that held her there until after the wedding, nursing a thin hope that he wouldn't go through with it. She could have gone earlier, but she found enough reasons to stay. She planned a recital for her students and scheduled it for the day after Ethan's wedding. All her students and their parents and many friends attended. Matthew Winegarner performed in his wheelchair to a hushed audience, and Mrs. Winegarner, who had volunteered her large home for the event, prepared cookies and punch for a reception. When everyone had gone and Annette was washing the punch bowl, Mrs. Winegarner broke down in tears. The two women sat together at the kitchen table and cried while Eliana pushed Matthew in his wheelchair around the backyard.

* * *

One last last thing remained to be done: to go through the few boxes her mother had left in the attic of the Reilly house. For months she'd procrastinated, then at the end she'd put it off because she couldn't bear to return to the old house. Ethan had said they were things her mother had intended for a garage sale. But perhaps there was something overlooked. Something that still had meaning for a daughter.

She finished her coffee and wrote a note telling her father where she was going, and that she would be back shortly. Then she took the keys to the Buick and went out.

The eastern horizon had lightened to a deep purple when she backed out of the driveway, and by the time the farmhouse came into view the sky had washed to a pale blue. To the north, giant pillars of smoke rose from the fields. The night before as they were driving back from Strong City, she had been alarmed to see long ribbons of fire consuming the prairie. But her father explained that they did it every year. A planned burn, he called it.