Firehorse (9781442403352) (22 page)

The part about the fires did prove eerily true. The alarm began jangling two and sometimes three times a week. James spent more and more hours at the station, and even though he wasn't of age, he was being allowed to accompany the firemen, if needed, on some calls. If he saw my lamp still burning when he arrived home at night, he often tiptoed up the stairs to share the goings-on at the station.

“There's a firebug out there for certain,” he announced one evening. His eyes signaled a mix of excitement and worry.

My stomach twisted. “How do you know?”

“We've been called out to an unusual number of small fires recently, all of them suspicious—a bakery, a locksmith, even the feed store—but we couldn't find clear proof of arson at any one of them. Today, though, when we got to the scene of a fire behind some dressmakers' shops, we found a half-empty kerosene container. Can you believe it? As plain as day, someone had poured kerosene all over a broken-down delivery wagon left in the alley, hoping the flames would spread. Luckily we knocked it out before it reached the rooftops or it could have taken the whole block.” He shook his head. “Philip's going to tell Captain Gilmore—he wasn't there today—what we found. Maybe he'll have a plan.”

I hoped so. I couldn't bear the thought of another livery fire and more horses being burned. Only the devil could possess someone to cause such misery.

Father used the increasingly frequent fires to fan his argument for more and better preparation. He wrote in his columns of impending doom, of a conflagration to rival the Great Chicago Fire. He named names and made accusations: misappropriation of funds, conspiracy, arson. “Where are we supposed to acquire the money to purchase new firefighting equipment?” his opponents argued. “Take it from the orphans' homes? Stop treating the sick?” Only their arguments weren't printed in the
Argus
. Father wouldn't allow it. “Let them print their own paper, if they've a mind to, and then they can say whatever they please.” But he made certain he read all the other papers, and he slapped his hand across the crackling newsprint and muttered between his teeth, and his pipe glowed a fierce orange.

One sticky evening in the middle of August, when clouds smothered the stars and everyone except Grandmother was sitting in the parlor—Mother was reading aloud from
Nicholas Nickleby
—a brick came crashing through our window. It took one of Mother's potted ivies with it and plunked onto the braided rug amid a spray of dirt and glass. An inflow of hot night air carried the sound of escaping footsteps, and though James and I lunged for the window, the streetlamp's circle of light shone empty. Mother looked past me to Father, laying the blame squarely in his lap, before calmly marking her place and rising. As Father scooped up the paper-wrapped brick, she knelt on
the floor, tucked the ivy's root-ball back into its pot, and began methodically pressing the dirt back into place.

James joined Father at the table, and like a pair of blundering deacons they mouthed the threat scrawled on the crumpled paper. Phrases such as “back to the prairies where you belong” and “surely suffer the consequences” poked through my consciousness as I lowered myself into my chair. A chilling sense that a reckoning hour was fast approaching—and that at least two of us had played a part in it—sent me ramrod stiff. Even with the summer air drifting through the room, I shivered.

The doctor returned the next day, as he'd done weekly, to change my bandages. The burns had scarred over, and the bandages' primary purpose now was to keep the salve in place and to aid the healing. He'd come to expect my questions, so the first thing he said after opening his satchel was, “No talking, please. I have to concentrate.” This time when my puckered, reddened skin—shiny in places, leathery in others—was exposed, he nodded in moderate satisfaction. “Time alone, I think, will complete whatever healing remains. I'll apply clean bandages this one last time and return in another fifteen days. Then we'll assess the progress.”

I was more concerned with the Girl's progress. Something inside me warned that she had to be made whole again, that we were running out of time. Whether it was Grandmother's prophecies or my twitching knees, I didn't know. But before the doctor was even out the door, the fire alarm jangled. He and Mother and I stood on the top step and watched anxiously as the galloping horses pulled the steam engine toward another fire.

TWENTY

T
HE MONTH ENDED WITH A PLAGUE OF MOSQUITOES THAT
had to have rivaled Moses's locusts. Father stamped about the house for days, howling blue murder, after the Massachusetts Republican Party agreed to support women's right to vote. He broke away from his firefighting columns long enough to pen a particularly vehement one predicting doily laws and spittoon abolishment as well as the imminent downfall of the civilization men had fought for and therefore had the right to rule. Grandmother's health had improved enough that one night after dinner she was able to give him a spirited argument. Mother monitored their language with dark looks and the occasional “Now, really!” while I paged through
Scribner's Monthly
and pretended to read. Overcome by heat and each other's company, we retired to our beds earlier than usual.

Sometime in the stillest part of that night I was awakened by the rise and fall of distant voices. I lifted my head off the pillow. The faint conversation—and was that a
laugh?—wasn't coming from Grandmother's room; these sounds were farther off. Intruders? I sat up, my heart banging. Had someone gone beyond brick-throwing and actually broken into our house?

Questioning my foolhardiness, I tiptoed down the stairs and along the dark hallway, now cool and damp. The three bedroom doors were closed, as usual, and I heard Father snoring. A peek into the yard below showed nothing moving amid the blackness. I slipped past the butterflies, feeling my way over each stair. At the newel post I paused. The voices—women's voices, I could tell now—were coming from the kitchen. That door was closed too, which
wasn't
usual. Maybe I should wake James. Yet even while I was thinking that, I was sidling closer to the door, holding my breath and prickling with almost numbing fear. I laid an ear to the wood panel.

Mother. And Grandmother. Chatting and giggling-giggling!—as though they were at a noon picnic. When I'd long since heard the clock chime midnight!

The moment I laid my hand on the knob, the creaky mechanism squealed alarm and the voices hushed. I eased the door open to find the two of them sitting in chairs they'd pulled close to the orange glow of the open oven. No lamp was lit. Upside down on the floor between them was the big soup kettle, and on its black bottom I dimly made out a scattering of cracked nuts. Grandmother grinned guiltily and chucked an empty shell into the embers, where it made a small shower of sparks before birthing a new flame. More self-conscious, Mother rested her elbows
on her knees, hunching her shoulders. In a subdued voice she asked, “Are you all right, dear?”

Nodding hesitantly, I followed Grandmother's gesture to join them. The atmosphere in the darkened kitchen—unbuttoned, intimate—was so unfamiliar to me that I wondered if I was dreaming. Grandmother, my own grandmother, was sitting spraddle-legged and barefoot. Barefoot! Never in my life had I seen her without shoes, and now I couldn't stop staring at her crooked, rootlike toes. “Did we wake you?” she asked.

I nodded again as Mother wordlessly rose and returned with the stool from the parlor. She set it within their circle and patted the seat. “Here. Sit down.”

I sat.

“Are you all right?” she asked again. “Is anything wrong?”

Bubbling with my own questions, I whispered, “What are you doing down here?”

“Talking.”

“In the middle of the night?” I sounded like the scolding parent.

She blinked passively. “You wouldn't understand, I'm afraid.”

“We were talking about your mother's days as Wesleydale's finest pianist,” Grandmother said. “Has anyone ever told you about them?”

I shook my head. Mother modestly turned toward the oven's glow.

“When she was a child,” Grandmother chatted on, “all your mother ever talked about was the piano—and about Handel and Bach and … and Cho-pin, is that it?”

“Sho
-pan” Mother enunciated.

“Oh,
Cho
pin. Well, your grandfather and I didn't own a piano—he was just a hog farmer, after all—so every spare minute, even when she was supposed to be doing her chores”—Grandmother nodded pointedly—“your mother raced down the road and over to the church to pound on theirs. Got to be quite good at it too. Good enough to get an invitation to study in Chicago, that's how good.”

I think maybe my jaw dropped open, but Grandmother didn't seem to notice and went on happily recounting Mother's youth.

“They hired her to play the church service when she was only fourteen, and I couldn't have been prouder. Wasn't long before people in neighboring towns were leaving their regular churches and traveling to ours just to hear her.” Chuckling, she added, “Though to this day I suspect Reverend Lozier thought it was to hear his sermons.”

A spontaneous laugh escaped Mother, and she clamped her hand over her mouth in surprise. Speaking from behind it, she said, “Weren't those the longest, dullest sermons in all eternity? God forgive me, but do you know, all week long I'd practice something pretty, like ‘Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,' and then Reverend Lozier would take up with one of his ‘begats' sermons—‘Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob' and so
on—and I'd see half the congregation nodding off and have to switch to ‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory' just to stir them awake.”

This had to be a dream. These people were strangers to me.

“And wouldn't that congregation go marching down the aisle, still singing it!” Grandmother slapped her knee. “Why, come Monday morning I'd catch some of them still humming it in Milton's Dry Goods. Churches around here could use a little of that Holy Spirit.”

Mother smiled and folded her hands in her lap.

I looked at her anew. “Why haven't I ever heard you play the piano?”

Something flickered across her face, a shadow perhaps, there and gone before she spoke. “Because that was a long time ago,” she said emotionlessly. “And because I married your father and he had his work.”

“Men!” Grandmother grumbled. And when Mother cocked an eyebrow at her, she responded, “I know, I know, he's my own son-in-law, but he's just like the rest of his kind: He can't see beyond his own nose. And if it doesn't concern his newspaper or his belly, he doesn't care a rap about it.”

The two of them fell into a contemplative silence, and I felt that I'd become the intruder. But I didn't want to leave. The room pulsed with a warm breath, hugging me to my stool. And so I stayed, the three of us staring into the open mouth of the oven, mute audience to its crackles and sighs.

“What's troubling you, Rachel?” Mother asked at last.

I started. “Pardon me?”

“What's troubling you?”

“Might as well be free of it,” Grandmother said, as if she'd been sharing the same thought. “God loves a clean conscience.”

I wasn't sure what God thought of my conscience.

Grandmother ventured a guess. “It has something to do with that horse out there, doesn't it?”

I shot a nervous glance at Mother. “Yes,” I answered, “partly—or mostly. But …” Was this the time to admit to my dreams of becoming a veterinary? The guilt of sneaking around had been weighing ever more heavily on me.

“Are you worried about your hands?” Mother asked gently. “About what they'll look like when the bandages come off for good?”

It was no use. She would never,
ever
understand me. “No,” I replied too harshly, and then, schooling myself, “I mean, yes … somewhat, but …” Looking into the fire, I took a deep breath and tried anyway. “I know you're going to be disappointed in me and I know Father's never going to let me, but … I want to learn to be a veterinary.”

A chunky ember broke apart with a loud hiss. It sounded like laughter, and that's all it took to break the spell. And when neither of them spoke, I blurted an accusation: “I knew you wouldn't understand.”

“Wouldn't understand what it's like to have dreams locked away in a trunk?” Mother replied with some starch.

“Or be packed up and moved halfway across the continent
without so much as an ‘if you please'?” Grandmother added.

Mother laid a hand on my knee. “You see, dear, we're quite familiar with grand plans and broken dreams. But we've learned that we can't always be or get what we want.”

“Why not?”

“Because we're women, and as women we have other roles, other duties. Now before you say anything, I know times are changing; some women are hiring on in offices and others are enrolling in universities, though why they'd want to push their way into places they're not welcome is beyond my understanding.” She shook her head. “I'm not sure it's right. But Rachel, a veterinary? That's men's work.”