Those Who Favor Fire (26 page)

“If it’s one thing having a child has taught me,” she said, “it’s not to judge other parents. I used to see people in the grocery store or on the street with their children, and I’d think, ‘I’ll never act that way when I have kids.’ But now I lay off. Nobody else can know how a child can change you. Turn your life inside out. Thank God, I’m one of the lucky ones. From the time that boy was a knob in my belly I’ve loved him as much as I can love. And when he is an old man, if I am still alive to see that, I will still love my boy with every bit of my flesh and every particle of my spirit. And I know Buddy loved him
too. He
had
to. But to him Rusty was like a magnet, or a lightning rod. Every regret that Buddy had ever had, every doubt, every complaint, every kind of anger was unleashed on our baby. It was a horrible thing to watch. And I know that is why Buddy left. He would have learned some control, Rusty would have outgrown his pain and that incredible selfishness that infants have, but Buddy would never have been able to look at his son without knowing what he was capable of doing. Without remembering those bad early days. Without longing for a different sort of life.” She picked up her glass of tea and drained it.

“Rusty thinks that it was me his father left. And that, too, is the truth.”

When Joe put his arms around Angela, he had to fight not to pull immediately away. It shocked him deeply to feel how thin she was, how hard her muscles, and how strong the shudder that ran the length of her. But then he felt her relax, her head grew heavy on his shoulder, and he found that he was gently rocking her, and she him, and that he, too, was comforted.

By the time Rusty came home with the trout, Joe and Angela were laughing, and neither of them ever mentioned the absent Buddy again.

“You have a good knife?” Rusty asked Joe as they picked their way through Ian’s pumpkin patch the day before Joe’s first Halloween in Belle Haven.

“I guess,” Joe said, turning over a nice pumpkin, looking for rot. “Want to carve it at the Schooner?”

“Sure,” said the boy. “It’ll be easier to cart home that way. We can carve one up for you, too.”

But it turned out that Joe did not have a proper knife. Nothing quite sharp enough or small enough for pumpkin teeth or fragile pumpkin brows.

“Here,” said Rusty, pulling a whittling knife from his pocket. It was very sharp. “My grandma taught me how to carve walking sticks out of sumach when I was a kid. Sumach looks like deer antler, has real velvety sort of bark, comes off smooth as you like. The stick’s no good for anything but a day’s walk. After that it dries up. Warps. But it’s a pleasure to carve.”

Joe sat and looked at the boy, found it hard to believe he was just ten. It must have been the talk of knives and carving. Men talked of such things. Yet these things were foreign to Joe. The knife was heavy in his large palm. He snapped it open on its capable hinge. There were no notches in its blade. It was a good knife.

They spent an hour on the pumpkins, scooping out their pulpy meat, saving their seeds for the oven, and making elaborate faces in their rinds until the light began to fail.

“That’s a good knife,” Joe said, wiping the blade on his pant leg and snapping it home. He held it out to Rusty.

The boy looked at the knife. He looked at Joe’s face. Perhaps he was remembering how little Joe had brought along with him from wherever he’d been.

“You keep it,” Rusty said, wedging his pumpkin into the basket of his bike.

“Don’t be silly,” Joe said, holding out the knife. “I can get another one.”

“I’m not being silly. I know you can get another one. Have this one,” Rusty said, turning his bike so it faced the lane and home.

Joe remembered the small apartment above the Kitchen, Rusty’s tiny room, how neat it was. (“I thought kids’ rooms were supposed to be messy,” he had said the first time he’d gone upstairs. It was only later that he realized Rusty did not own enough things to make a mess, or to neglect them.)

“Thanks,” Joe said, slipping the knife into his pocket. It was the first thing Rusty gave to Joe and perhaps the most important gift he would ever receive.

“Whittle something and you’ll see for yourself how nice it is,” Rusty said as he left. “It makes you nice and sleepy if you do it on a doorstep. Especially if the lightning bugs are out.” And Joe breathed in relief to hear Rusty speak like the boy he was and ought to be for some time to come.

There were no lightning bugs out that night, for they were all mated by now and content. But there were still crickets out flexing their harplike legs, spiking the night with raspy love songs, and no one believed that snow was mere weeks away. Joe sat on the steps of the Schooner with a narrow trunk of sumach and Rusty’s smooth-handled knife. The sun had set but not departed. The sky was nearly green. Birds in flight were black against it. The blazing trees stood
still, barely breathing. One star appeared. Another. The knife’s silver blade stroked the wood. The flesh underneath the bark was soft, cool, and very white. Ribbons of bark fell at his feet like garlands. And the moon came calmly up into the sky. Rusty was right. Joe had never felt more solitary. Or more content.

When the cold finally came to Belle Haven, Joe spent his spare hours wandering through the woods and fields, collecting stones as big as grapefruits. He lugged them home in a satchel, a few at a time, and piled them in the middle of the clearing. When he had enough, he made some mortar and built a fireplace of sorts, big and deep enough to shield a fire from the wind and the snow. He topped it with a chimney, capped that with a vent to keep out the wet, let out the smoke, encourage an upward draft.

On many cold winter nights, Joe built a beautiful blaze in his fireplace and sat bundled before it, whittling and wondering what went on in other places he had been. When it snowed, he stayed indoors, listened to his small transistor, read book after book after book. He did not own a calendar and tried hard not to think about his approaching birthday. Or about Christmas. Or about the twin he would now never know any better than he knew Angela. Not even that well. Not nearly as well as he knew Rachel.

Something had happened to them on the night back in May when he’d called his father. She had sat beside him on his bunk for a long time, stroking his hair, holding his hand for the last hour of darkness and long into the dawn until he finally fell asleep. He had opened his eyes to find her sleeping in a chair beside him, their hands locked, Ian and Angela gone. He had barely moved for an hour or more, afraid of waking her. Had watched her face, studied the way her thick, cinnamon hair coursed down her neck, marveled at the way she curled, catlike, in the unyielding chair. After a while, she had opened her eyes, taken a moment to decide where she was, and looked down at their clinging hands. When she had gained her bearings, she smiled at him uncertainly and yawned.

“Get dressed and follow me,” she’d said after a bit, and he had.

She had taken him back to her house on the hill where there was plenty of hot water, a good shower, and breakfast in her garden. They had not spoken of his father or anything else from his past. And, in
part because of his reluctance to talk about such things, she had not revealed much about herself either. They would discover what was important, in their own good time.

By Labor Day, Rachel and Joe were the kind of friends who unabashedly tell each other when they have something stuck between their teeth. They played late-night Scrabble and outdoor cribbage, did the crossword puzzle every Sunday morning, read each other’s palms, cut each other’s hair.

Joe felt, with Rachel, as if he had been taken apart, bone by bone, and put back together again in a far less imperfect way. She felt, with him, as if she would live forever. They had each had good friends before, but neither of them had ever had this. They didn’t even know what to call it, so they didn’t call it anything at all.

It was Rachel who tried to convince Joe, as they sat on her front porch paring apples for a pie, to call his faculty advisor at Yale, for the fall semester was scheduled to begin in just a few days. He was no longer concerned about revealing his whereabouts: his phone call to his father had already left traces and had, furthermore, convinced him that no one was likely to seek him out. But the thought of calling Yale made him hurt. It made him feel unwell.

“All of that’s over and done with,” he told her. “Besides, I’d hardly qualify for a scholarship.”

“You’re just looking for an excuse,” she insisted. “If you want to go back to school, just take out a loan until your birthday. By then you’ll have money of your own. Loads of it. Good God, man, it would take you ten minutes to get tide-over money. Probably less. I don’t know why you haven’t already gone ahead and done it. You’re not worried about your father tracking you down anymore, so why not call up your banker and get some money?”

He looked at her carefully. “You’re a terrible actor,” he said, taking her hand and putting it to his lips. “You would go mad without me, and you know it.”

“Go take a flying leap,” she said and burst out laughing. “Pig.” She threw an apple peel at him. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m doing just fine on my own,” he assured her. “The money will still be there when I want it. And so will Yale.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I do understand how you might feel that way.”

And that was when Rachel finally told Joe about her parents: their lives, deaths, legacies.

Joe had already heard these things from Ian and Angela but had waited for Rachel to be ready to tell him herself. Like Angela’s story about her husband, and like Rusty’s gift of the carving knife, knowing about Rachel’s loss had so softened Joe’s heart that he now felt newly saddened. As she spoke about her parents, tears in her eyes, his own lips trembled. His own chest ached.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “How did you bear it?”

“I didn’t have any choice,” she said.

He didn’t ask her about the money she’d inherited or what she’d done with it. It wasn’t something he wanted to know about. It wasn’t something he envied. It was almost something he feared.

In the end he decided not to call Yale, not to answer the questions that were bound to be asked. He’d let his father worry about that. So he sent a postcard instead, requesting a last-minute leave of absence, not really caring much whether it was granted.

With his mind made up—not only to stay in Belle Haven but to make it his home—Joe felt himself lighten as if he had shed a heavy winter skin. He began to breathe all the way down to the cradles of his lungs again, for the first time in years. He woke each day with an appetite and a curiosity that was easy to calm with small things—like walking straight out into the morning to sample the weather, following whatever temptation crossed his path, and embracing every chance to pair the days of his past with better ones in this, his new life. There were many such days that fall, and the promise of more to come.

Rachel and Joe spent Christmas together, invited Angela, Rusty, Dolly, and Ian for dinner at Rachel’s house. That night, after the feast, they all went out to the Schooner and built a big fire in Joe’s fireplace. Joe had decorated the pines at the edge of his clearing with tinfoil stars. They flared in the firelight, turning in the cold wind, and the clouds scudded across the dazzling sky. Wrapped in blankets, they sang Christmas songs and drank hot wine. They threw pinecones into the fire and waited for them to pop. They were silent and listened to the wind. Then they staggered to their various beds, sated with joy, and were asleep before the cold, hard, invigorating sheets had warmed.

        In January, one week before Joe’s birthday, an old woman named Sophia Browning, who lived a fair distance from the nearest mine tunnel, was mixing up cookie dough when she found herself short an egg. So she went out into the snow to buy a dozen and a quart of milk to go with the cookies. She planned to eat them hot. She left her little house, its lights throwing golden patches on the snow, and her cat, Moushka, asleep on top of the refrigerator.

Sophia’s late husband, Otto, had been a friendly man who nonetheless valued privacy above most things he could hold in his hands. He made sure that the walkway he built from the road to the front door of their house was wide and welcoming and that the porch light was turned on at dusk, but he also planted a border of spruce trees around the house and tended them with care until they eventually made the loveliest sort of wall. They cast fragrant shade, gave the birds shelter, tempered the cold winter wind. Sophia liked to look at the spruce trees. They reminded her of Otto.

As she walked back from the store with her groceries tucked into the crook of her arm, Sophia admired the spruces from a distance, was captivated by their silhouettes against the pale night sky. They seemed, tonight, in the hard January freeze, to be edged with gold. As if the sun were rising behind them. Quite beautiful. Actually, she decided, quite odd. When she reached the brick walkway that Otto had built between the spruces, Sophia peered uncertainly through the trees and saw that her house was in flames.

Her neighbors, who had by then run from their houses, had to hold the old woman back. She kept calling out to her cat and to her small house while the fire grew with extraordinary speed into a shimmering, shrieking rage.

By the time the fire truck arrived, Sophia’s house was far beyond salvation and the spruces that had for so long graced it were blackened, mostly spoiled, their branches cooked to spars.

In the morning the fire inspector, surprised that the house had burned so quickly, traced its source to Sophia’s basement. Near the furnace.

“There was absolutely nothing wrong with my furnace,” Sophia insisted, her cold hands tucked under her chin. “Nothing whatsoever.”

She looked upon the black and broken hull of her house, the ring of ruined trees, every standing remnant wrapped in dazzling, tumultuous ice, and was unable to see the accidental beauty wrought so suddenly during the night.

A few blocks away, Joe walked into Angela’s Kitchen to find the breakfast crowd talking about the fire.