Those Who Favor Fire (36 page)

“But you did,” she said quietly.

“Excuse me?”

“You did,” she repeated. “
You
died. Holly’s father tracked her down, told her that you had died in a car wreck the day after she left home.”

“He told her …”

“That you had died. He told her you had died.”

“And he told me that she had,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” Mrs. Corrigan whispered fearfully.

“My own father. My own goddamned father,” he said, standing up in the middle of the small kitchen.

“Oh, you poor, poor children,” Mrs. Corrigan said, and he heard her begin to cry.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Corrigan,” he assured her. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”

And in a safe corner of her own, warm kitchen, Rachel felt the marrow of her bones grow cold.

Almost immediately after calling Mrs. Corrigan, Joe fell asleep on Rachel’s couch with Pal at his feet.

As she had on another night, long ago, when Joe had called his father and learned of Holly’s death, Rachel sat nearby and watched Joe sleeping. He had changed since that earlier time. Grown thinner. Stronger. His hair was longer, brindled with sun. His hands showed signs of work. And the arrogance that had once hardened his face had been replaced with sensibility, so that even in sleep he appeared to be aware of the world.

Before she returned to her bed, Rachel stopped in front of the mirror at the foot of the stairs and looked at herself. She did not seem to have changed nearly so much.

In the morning Rachel gave Joe breakfast and listened when he told her again, in fits and starts, what his father had done. Through all of it he was preoccupied, dazed. She watched him carefully the way a mother watches an ailing child. She waited for him to touch her, and when he did not, she closed her hands into fists and crossed her aching arms.

After breakfast she waited outside while he called his sister. She waited for a long time. Then she drove him out to the Schooner so he could pack a small bag, took him back to town afterward, to her bank for the money he’d need to get to San Francisco.

“What am I supposed to call you now?” she asked him as they waited for the Greyhound in front of Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go.

When he turned to her, she saw the sudden warming of his eyes. “Call me what you’ve always called me,” he said, putting his arms around her. “Joe. Just Joe. I love that name.” But even as he kissed her she felt him again retreating. And at the sound of the approaching bus, the light again receded from his eyes.

When they could no longer see the bus, Rachel and Pal walked slowly down the street to Angela’s Kitchen. She was not hungry, wanted no food, but was not quite ready yet to be alone.

“Joe’s gone to see his sister for a week or so,” Rachel said. She had decided to spend the afternoon helping Angela make peach cobbler and corn bread while Dolly took care of the tables. It was a hot July afternoon, and the few customers who straggled in off the shimmering street ate cold sandwiches, drank their lemonade from weeping glasses, and wandered off in search of shade.

“His what?” Angela asked, her mouth full of peach.

So Rachel told her what Joe’s father had done.

“That son of a bitch,” Angela said. “He ought to be shot.”

“Well, maybe.” Rachel nodded. “He won’t see his children again. Or grandchildren, if he ever has any.” Rachel chose a peach from the basket at Angela’s elbow. “He’s a director of several large corporations. He’s a trustee at some posh university. One of the Ivies. And he’s a consultant for the government. Joe’s going to collect his trust fund and put it somewhere safe, and then he’s going to write a few letters. Let those places know what kind of a man his father really is.”

“Might work,” Angela said, her hands glazed with peach juice. “Might not. You know how the world works.”

“Maybe it’ll make Joe feel better,” Rachel said, shrugging.

“You all right?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Angela just shook her head, wiped her hands on her apron.

By the time the supper crowd began to arrive, Angela’s face was white, glistening, with red patches mottling her cheeks. She poured a tumbler full of cool water and drank down another tablet of salt.

“Why the hell are we baking corn bread on a day like this?” Rachel muttered. Her thick hair was tied high off her neck, but enough had escaped to cling wherever it touched her hot skin. “Get away from that damned oven, Angie, before you fall in.”

“Quit yelling at me,” Angela growled. But she closed the oven door, dropped her mitts, and ducked under the counter. “Move over.” Rachel made room for her under the ceiling fan. “My kingdom for an air conditioner,” Angela groaned.

The next day, a Sears delivery truck pulled up in front of Angela’s Kitchen. The driver opened the back doors, pulled down a ramp, hopped inside the truck, and soon reappeared with a big box on a dolly. On top of the box he set a toolbox and a coil of thick yellow extension cord.

“She’s a right good girl,” Angela said under her breath as she headed for the door.

But Rachel always did the best of her deeds when she felt the devil in her rising.

She knew she should be glad for Joe and Holly both, but instead she felt cranky and spiteful. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and eat everything in her cupboards, jar by jar. She wanted to sleep all day and lie awake in the hammock all night, watching the bats that were a shade blacker than the sky, wondering what the night birds
thought of them. Wondering what papayas tasted like. Wondering anything but what Joe was doing without her.

She wanted to feed Pal with tenderloins and fresh eggs until she stopped sitting by the door, her ears cocked toward the road, waiting for the sound of Joe’s return. She wanted to go about her business, get on with her life, but she felt too listless to bother with much of anything.

In the evenings she sat on her front porch with Pal, listening to her parents’ old records, one after the other, until the stars eased through the fabric of a sky made threadbare by approaching night. The songs left her so sad that she felt almost afraid for herself. She listened to Ed Ames singing “Try to Remember,” Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” Judy Collins singing about sons.

At night she lay in her bed and imagined Joe eating crabs on Fisherman’s Wharf, dancing at a diner in Sausalito, laughing with strangers. She imagined him standing on a beachhead, looking out over the extraordinary Pacific, letting the cold, salty air rush over him, his back firmly toward the east. But most of all she imagined him with Holly.

She couldn’t stop thinking of the two of them, a continent away, linked by blood and adversity, two of the strongest bonds there are. Rachel could not imagine that Joe would spend any of this time away thinking about Belle Haven or about her, unless it was to rehearse how to say he wouldn’t be coming back. The more she thought about this, the more convinced she became that Joe would be seduced by the West, commit himself to the sister he had long thought dead, and put Belle Haven behind him. She was not hurt that he had gone without her, for it had never occurred to her that she too might go. But it hurt that he had gone at all, even though she understood why he had.

For three days she listened for the phone to ring, and when after that Joe had not called, she unplugged her phone, gagged it with its cord, and threw it under a chair.

On the third night since Joe had left Belle Haven, Rachel dreamed that he was lying in her hammock with his hat over his face, his hands behind his head, his long legs crossed. When she sat down beside him, the hammock tipped him over so that he had to grab her around the waist to keep from falling. And when the hat fell to the ground, she looked down, laughing, and saw that it was not Joe lying
there in her hammock but the young man who had fed her ice cream from an unclean bowl, whose sheets she had bloodied, whose face she had all but forgotten. Harry’s face. Harry Gallagher. Whose name tasted like bad meat in her mouth.

On the fourth day since Joe’s departure, Rachel awoke to the sound of birds outside her window. Listening to the sound of them, she remembered the feel of Joe in her arms.

She knew why she had mixed him up with Harry in her dream, but as she lay in her bed she wondered why Harry’s common brand of barbarism had stayed alive in her blood for so long. Perhaps, she thought, what he had done seemed more heinous in the context of her placid adolescence. People had always been kind to her. Belle Haven had been a wonderful place to grow up in. Perhaps, she thought, she had been too lucky. She had certainly been naïve. This town, which had kept her safe, had also kept her from knowing the world. Perhaps, in consequence, Belle Haven had made her a perfect mark.

The birds were still singing. A shaft of sunlight slowly approached her bed. There was a cool breeze coming through the nearest window. “Enough.” She sighed, pushing the sheet down and away, swinging her legs off the bed and rising.

She missed Joe. She was angry with him. She wanted him back. But on that spectacular morning she tied back her hair, cuffed her sleeves, grabbed a wicker basket from the pantry, and slammed the door shut behind her. “Never waste a summer day,” she said out loud and bounded down the steps into the sunshine, stomped down the hill, and headed for Caspar’s Hollow.

Rachel had accomplished a great deal in the two years since she’d left school. She had raised funds for special door-to-door bus service for the elderly and the handicapped, fattening the pot with money of her own. She had spent scores of hours in Belle Haven’s single library, scribbling down the titles of essential books she could not find, and had then donated them all, boxes and boxes of them, and new shelves to hold them. She had bought dozens of flowering trees and arranged for them to be planted wherever there was room: along the creek, in the park, outside the post office, throughout the town. She had taken a course in CPR. She had spent a hundred afternoons with the kindergarten class—singing, painting, storytelling. And every Thursday
morning for two years, she had walked down along the old, meandering, leaf-slick cow path that led into Caspar’s Hollow to sit with Mr. Caspar and hold his knotty hand, water his plants, make sure he had enough to eat.

Ross Caspar was too old to do any more farming; his wife had died a long time ago, and his children had moved away. So he lived alone on his hill-bound farm with a passel of dirty black kittens and an attic full of bats. When the batteries in his hearing aid went dead, he simply turned up the sound on the television and made Rachel look straight at him when she talked. When the television went dead, Rachel brought him a book and began to teach him how to read. And when he finished reading his first good story, he laughed and cried and beat his fists on the arms of his old chair until the air became foggy with dust.

“You’re on your own now,” Rachel had said.

“Don’t I know it,” the old man had replied, wiping the tears off his baggy face. “Bring me some more books, Rachel, next time you’re out this way.”

And she had. Every Thursday morning. For two years. Rain or shine.

It had been weeks now since anything unusual had happened in Belle Haven. The grass had grown back over Otto Browning’s grave. The water in the Hutters’ well was fresh and cold. Even at the edge of town, boreholes that had once fairly whistled were often quiet now, and the fumes they vented were mild, the smoke infirm. In the face of all this, Rachel had allowed herself to be seduced by summer: by the scepters of corn that raced upward, creaking and snapping, through the quiet summer nights; by the children stalking crayfish along the shady banks of Raccoon Creek; by the black storms that blew in from the west, lifting the branches of the trees, flashing the white, warning backs of the leaves.

As Rachel headed for the hollow, she thought only good thoughts, put Joe and Harry Gallagher out of her mind and with them, unknowing, the lesson Harry had taught her: that seduction can come with fangs.

On the way through the town, Rachel bought a dozen hot rolls from Angela, a slab of honey ham from the grocery store, and a bottle of homemade grape juice and a quart basket of tomatoes from a farm truck parked at the side of the road. She packed the food into her basket
and lugged it across a wide field and down into Caspar’s Hollow, taking turns with her arms, watching for the copperheads that liked to nap on bits of hot slate.

As she came through the trees at the bottom of the hill, Rachel looked up smiling. She took another step, still smiling. Her eyes saw that something was wrong, but her feet kept moving. Her lips kept smiling. Her heart kept beating. There, on the left, across a small field of clover, was the old barn where the black kittens were always born. There, to the right, was the flower garden that grew to a luscious tangle, seeded itself unaided, offered itself to the honeybees and the birds. The house where Ross had always lived should have been there too. It should have been near the garden. But it was not.

Rachel dropped the basket and ran. She tripped in the clover and raced on again, screaming for Ross. Where his house had been she could now see, amazingly strange, the peak of the roof with its old, mossy tiles poking up through the soil, the top edge of an attic window, unbroken, the brick of a chimney rising up out of the ground as if it offered passage to the center of the hot, revolving world.

Rachel was brought up, panting, by the sight. The bit of roof, the chimney, that was all. The soil was gray all around where the house had been. Rachel took a step onto the strange ground, and her foot disappeared, she began to sink, quickly, her other foot bracing against the lip of firmer ground, her arms flapping in the air, hands wild, mouth working. She threw herself backward, scrabbled at the sparse grass, rolled away from the big grave where Ross Caspar was now buried, turned toward the hills, and ran.

She ran past the basket where she’d dropped it, ran up the path through the woods; ran until her lungs were seared. Then she ran some more, her mouth full of paste and heat, her bare legs scratched, sweating, stuck all over with seeds.

At the top of the hill, in the field of tall grass, Rachel lay down, choking on hot phlegm and the memory of Ross’s rooftop. There was, here, no stink or commotion. The birds around her were content among the seeded stalks of grass. But Rachel was badly afraid. She spread her body out in all directions like someone caught on thin ice. She gripped the ground with her fingernails and dug in her toes. And then, remembering the sight of that chimney rising up out of the corrupted earth, she scrambled to her feet and fled.