Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (23 page)

Punishments. I thought of myself walking on Howard Troy's eyes. Driving spikes into his eyes. The spikes would be on the soles of my shoes, they would be long and sharp. His eyeballs would bulge out, unprotected, as big as overturned basins, and I would walk on them, puncturing, flattening, bloodying, at a calm pace. It wasn't anything clean and magical I dreamed of, no saying the right word in my head and shriveling him in an instant. I would have liked his head torn from his body, flesh pulpy and dripping like watermelon, limbs wrenched away; axes, saws, knives and hammers applied to him. If I could surprise him with that knife, making not a slit in him but a round hole such as they make in maple trees for sap, I would jab in deep and then all kinds of pus, venomous substances, would spurt and flow, everything would leak away.

The fire filled the house the way blood fills a boil. It seemed every minute ready to burst, but the skin still held. The skin was the roof, the walls, of Stump Troy's house. Wood could seem as thin as that.

“The roof'll go next!” people were saying, and, “Lucky there's no wind!”

I did not understand why it was lucky, or what could be lucky, now. The house which I had never quite dared or wanted to look at turned out to be as simple as a house in a drawing—the door in the middle and a narrow window on either side, a dormer window over the door. Both downstairs windows had been smashed, by Howard Troy trying to get
inside. Men had pulled him back. Now he was sitting on the ground in front of the burning house. He was reduced, apparently powerless, just as he had been in school.

The town fire truck had come, but by the time they got there there was nothing for the firemen to do but praise the lack of wind. They took the ladders off but did not put them anywhere. They managed after some time to get water from the last hydrant—this was of course beyond the town limits—and they sprayed some falling-down outbuildings, the fence, and the toilet. They played water on the flames too, but that seemed just silliness and vainglory. “You might as well all stand back and spit on it!” yelled Robina, who was in a great state of excitement. She trembled and crackled, she was like a burning beam herself. She stood by the gate, where a big neglected forsythia bush had sprung into bloom, early bloom, with the snow hardly gone. She kept me beside her. My mother, who had driven us down, sat in the car a little way up the road. She was watching, presumably, but did not care to mingle.

I was the one who had first seen the fire from my upstairs window, seen something beautiful, a flush in a corner of the night landscape, separate from the glow of the town lights, a warm spreading pool. That was the house giving off such light, through its cracks and windows.

The trouble with Robina, I thought, was that she could not do anything about this fire. She could not boss the firemen. She tried, but they went on morosely doing what they were doing, none of them in any hurry. She could correct the information people were exchanging; that was something.

“Lucky there's nobody in there,” some latecomer said.

And Robina said sternly, “Don't you know this house?”

Apparently there were people who did not.

“Don't you know who lives in this house? It's Stump Troy.”

There was not sufficient comprehension, so she went on.

“It's Stump Troy that hasn't got any legs! He's not going to walk out of there, is he? He's in there yet.”

“Jesus,” a man said reverently. “Jesus, he'll be fried!”

The sound the fire made was surprising. It was like something scraping, like boards, or a lawn mower being dragged over concrete. I had never thought a fire would sound like that. A harsh, busy noise, the sort people call a racket. Inside this racket was Stump Troy yelling, was he calling out for help? If he was, the fire was too loud for him, nobody could hear.

It was not yet midnight, so most people had not gone to bed, or had been ready to get up again. The road was clogged with cars now. Many people were just sitting in the cars, watching, but there were plenty of them out, too, wandering after the firemen or standing against the fence, their faces lighted up. Even children did not run around, the fire took too much of their attention. I saw Robina's young brothers and sisters, some of them at least. They must have seen the fire from their place—by this time there would be a proclamatory light in the sky—and walked all this way to it, through the bush at night. Robina saw them too and called to them at once.

“Florence! Carter! Findley! You stay back out of this!”

They were staying back anyway, they were not as near as we were.

She did not ask where Jimmy and Duval were, who would surely not have wanted to miss a sight like this. I yelled it for her.

“Florence! Where are Jimmy and Duval?”

Robina with a swing of her one full arm caught me across the face, across the mouth, the hardest blow I had ever felt, or was likely to feel. It was so sudden I thought it had something to do with the fire (for people all along had
been saying, “Watch out, the whole thing's going to give way, boards'll fly!”) or that Robina's arm had shot out to keep something else from hitting me. At the same moment, it seemed, the roof at last did give way, and people ran, backing off. Flames tore through at the sky. There was also, and almost at the same time, a shout from another part of the yard, though I did not understand till later what this shout was for. I even thought, in my confusion, that it had to do with Robina hitting me. It was really for Howard Troy, who had made a dash from where he had been sitting right into the flaming, collapsing doorway, far too late to save anybody, if that was his intention, too late to be saved himself.

There were explanations offered for this later. One was that he meant to run the other way, away from the fire, but in his temporary craziness ran instead straight into it. Another was that he heard his father yelling for him and still thought he could get him out. Or thought he heard him yell. Stump Troy would have been in no condition to yell, by then. This explanation would have made Howard Troy heroic, and it was not popular, though a few surprising people hung onto it, among them my mother.

Another explanation was that Howard Troy had set the fire himself, perhaps after an argument with his father, perhaps for no particular reason, but to demonstrate what he could do, had been all this time preparing and waiting to do, while people rightly mistrusted him. There was backing for this opinion, because of an empty gasoline can. Those who believed that the fire had been set argued sometimes that Stump himself might have set it, or ordered it, a trick to get the insurance. He had meant to be outside or had counted on Howard to get him out, and Howard through cowardice or ill-timing had failed him. On account of remorse, then, or fear of facing the authorities, Howard had run into the fire.

At the time, however, there were no explanations. All that people could do was hurry and tell other people, who
might not have seen. I was not surprised. The fire itself, and the blow across my face, had cut me off from further surprise. I held my hands to my mouth, but for a wonder my teeth were not loosened; the only blood came from a small cut on the inside of my lip, where the edge of a tooth had caught it.

Robina seemed all at once to be sick of the fire. She pulled me with her out the gateway and along the road. My mother's car was not to be seen.

“She's gone home ahead of us,” Robina said. “I don't blame her. Those fools can stand there all night if they want to. I know what they're waiting on. They're waiting to see them take out the body. Bodies,” she corrected herself. “They can wait.”

I did not answer, or look back at the fire once. I walked ahead. Robina pushed me once, to keep me from going into the ditch. When she touched me I jumped.

“You're going like a person walking in its sleep. I only grabbed you to keep you from going headlong into that ditch.”

When we got past the cars, and there was room, Robina came up to walk beside me. I had the feeling that if she could have moved all around me, been in front and behind and on both sides at once, that was what she would do. She would close me off, she would peer into me until she found whatever she wanted, and got it rearranged. Meanwhile she said, “If you let one bad thing like this bother you there's going to be a lot of trouble for you in this world.”

I was not trying in any way to punish Robina or worry her. I did mean to answer. Some of the time I believed that I had answered, just as in a light sleep you will keep telling yourself you must do something—shut a window, turn off a light—and so convince yourself, in your sleep, that you have actually done it. And after such a sleep you can never be sure at all what has really happened, what has really been said, and what you have dreamed. I never did know afterwards
if Robina had really spoken to me from time to time as I thought she had, in an uncharacteristically soft and bothered voice, threatening or promising something, scaring and reassuring.

Or if she had ever said, “Listen. I'll show you my arm.”

If she did, I never answered that either.

When I was in high school, or home from college for the weekend, I sometimes saw Robina walking along the main street, with her flopping sleeve, her one whole swinging arm, her long steps that always seemed to be taking her downhill. She had not worked for us for a long time. When my father came home for good, with a nurse who wanted her own way in the kitchen, there was no place left for her, and no money either. When I saw her I had to be reminded of my childhood, which seemed so long ago, and full of panic and disgrace. For I had changed, things had changed for me, I believed that with luck and good management I could turn out to seem like anybody else. And this is in fact what I have done.

She looked odd to me, Robina did; absurd, obsessed, not very clean. Nevertheless I would have spoken to her, I was prepared. But she would turn her head away and never speak, showing me that I had become one of those people who had committed an offense against her.

She may be dead now, Robina. Jimmy and Duval may be dead too, though that is hard to imagine. I am still a few years away from retiring. I am a widow, a civil servant, I live on the eighteenth floor of an apartment building. I don't mind being alone. In the evenings I read, I watch television. No, that is not always true. Sometimes I sit in the dark,
drinking whiskey and water, thinking uselessly and helplessly, almost comfortably, about things like this that I had forgotten, or could not bear to think about for a long time.

When everybody is dead who could have remembered it, then I suppose the fire will be finished with, it will be just as if nobody had ever run through that door.

Marrakesh