At the End of the Road (9 page)

comprehend any sense of punishment, of right and wrong. He knew only that this thing they had done must be hidden. That they must disassociate themselves from it. Deny everything. Kyle scattered the ring of stones he’d built up and used a stick to stir up the ground. He took Grace’s hand and ran toward the house, their bodies silhouetted against the conflagration.

They slipped in through the seldom-used front door (he had to use the key under the mat because that door always stayed locked). Mama was still in the kitchen, canning. Kyle could hear the pressure cooker groaning, the glass jars rattling inside it.

They made their way back to the bathroom. Kyle decided that the first step would be to wash the smoke smell off of them. He soaped them both down quick as he could and wiped it off with a damp rag. The rag turned brown, but it was hard to tell if it was from dirt or soot. He looked Grace over. He dabbed some alcohol on the mosquito bites on her forehead—in his mind they were mosquito bites, they had always been mosquito bites. (Kyle already instinctively understood that the key to successful lying was to truly believe your own lies.)

He inspected himself in the mirror. Other than his chicken pox chest and the burned place on top of his foot, he was clear. He shoved their clothes into the hamper. The clothes would hold more of the smoke smell than their skin would. Kyle thought of the fire spreading outside, the world in flames. How long before his mother took notice? He had to hurry, but he took the time to find them both some clothes that came as close as possible to matching what they had put on that morning. If Mama noticed they had changed clothes, that was it. That was all it would take. She was a smart woman.

Kyle opened the bedroom closet and pulled out the Popsicle stick fort that, as he built up stocks of Popsicle sticks, he’d been constructing off and on that summer. He scattered a handful of the flat wood sticks around it on the floor. Kyle took the bottle of Elmer’s School Glue and emptied it quick in the toilet. Then he took some toilet paper (it had yellow and blue daisies on it) and swabbed out the inside of the glue bottle as far down as his fingers could reach. He flushed the whole mess away.

Kyle sat Grace down on the floor in her bedroom and shoved a coloring book and a box of crayons in front of her.

“Stay here. Don’t come out. No matter what. No matter what.”

“I won’t, Kyle.”

“Nothing happened. Do you understand that?”

“You mean the fire?” she whispered.

“It didn’t happen. We didn’t have nothin’ to do with it.”

“Okay.”

“Nothin’.”

She nodded, glad her part in this was finished. She had already started coloring a picture of Deputy Dawg before Kyle left the room. God bless her. She had already started to believe that nothing had happened.

Kyle made his way down the hall to the kitchen, composing himself. The attic fan rumbled above him, and he thought he could smell smoke it was already pulling into the house. He had to establish himself to Mama. He had to put himself, his normal self, in front of her. Set himself in her mind as something that existed outside the world of fire. Like the kitchen clock, the ceramic rooster on the counter, the paring knife in her hand—he wanted to put himself in her mind as one of those things that surrounded her right now, right this second, that had no association with the fire.

fingers as she rinsed her hands in the kitchen sink. She had lost thirty pounds since December, when she had finally made up her mind once and for all that she was going to leave Boyd. There was no way she could strike out on her own and raise four children, so she had decided that she would leave Jason and Wade with their father. They were older now and didn’t need a mother as much. But Grace and Kyle would come with her. They were only seven and ten, and needed a mother.

Louise had been putting up string beans all afternoon, and she looked at the rows of jars that she had completed. She looked at the bushel of okra she had for pickling, sighed, and placed empty jars in the pressure cooker for scalding. She reached overhead and pulled down her tin of alum. This would just kill Boyd. He just wouldn’t be able to understand. They were living like old folks. All he ever wanted to do was read his books or his newspaper or mess around in the basement by himself. And after the kids got to bed, he didn’t even want the TV on. It got so quiet that all you could hear was the clock ticking. That clock would just make that single sound over and over and it wouldn’t stop and she just wanted to scream sometimes. This was not the life she wanted. She cared for Boyd, loved him even, but she could not live her life like this anymore.

Once a month they took the kids out for dinner and they would go to the McDonald’s in Douglasville. That was the big exciting night out for the month. Usually, they didn’t even go inside, but went through the new drive-through and sat and ate in the parking lot. One time after begging and begging, Boyd took them out to see a double feature at the Lithia Drive-In Theater up on Highway 78. They put the kids in their pajamas, loaded them up in the car, and saw a movie she couldn’t even remember the name of now. Something old that the rest of the world had seen the year before. Burt Reynolds was in it. She fell asleep before the second feature started.

They got married right out of high school. She had been pregnant, but she was pretty sure no one ever knew because she’d caught it early and they’d married within a week. That was just the right thing to do. Nobody in either of their families had ever gotten divorced, but this was 1976 and people got divorced all the time now. But people in Douglas County didn’t get divorced all the time. It was a scandal. And people whispered about it for months. This was a Christian county and divorce was not something Christian people did. There were even songs about it on the radio. And people would say that she was splitting up her family. Divorce hurts the children, they said. Jason had been firstborn, and at first she had made up her mind not to have any more, because she didn’t believe she could ever love another one as much as she loved Jason. But Wade came along, and of course she loved him equally. And finally she decided she wanted a baby girl and tried again, but she’d gotten another boy, Kyle. And he was the sweetest baby of them all. Just as sweet as he could be. But still, she wanted a daughter to raise, and Grace came along. Louise didn’t know if she could find a job making enough money to raise Kyle and Grace on her own. Boyd would have to pay child support. In her heart, she felt that she was being selfish to contemplate this. She was putting her own happiness over her children’s. But nobody would ever know how much—

Louise looked up and saw Kyle staring at her from the living room side of the kitchen counter. He looked strange. The look on his face bothered her. She felt that Kyle was somehow able to read her mind. That he had been standing here this whole time listening to her thoughts, listening to her plan out how she was going to break up this family.

“Sugar, are you okay?”

The boy nodded.

“What are you up to? Do you need something?”

Kyle nodded again and held out the empty glue bottle.

“Already? That stuff costs money.”

“Been working on it all day. I’m almost finished now. I let Grace help a little bit.”

“That’s sweet.” Louise turned and walked to the laundry room. She rummaged there for just a moment and came back with a new bottle of Elmer’s for Kyle.

“Kyle, are you happy? I mean, do you like it here? Living here?”

Kyle nodded, but from the look on his face, Louise could tell that he had no idea what his mother was getting at. “Do you want to wash the okry for me?”

Kyle nodded and dumped the okra in the sink. Louise watched her Mason jars, making sure they got hot enough.

Louise thought she smelled smoke, but sometimes when the wind was blowing right, it brought up the char odor from the burning barrel down the yard. Boyd would blame it all on Jeannie from work. Once Grace got started good in school, Louise didn’t have anything to fill up her day. She pleaded with Boyd to let her get a job, but he thought a wife was supposed to stay at home. She guessed it was his pride too. That maybe he thought people would suppose he didn’t make enough money to support his family without his wife having to work too. Boyd had finally consented, and Louise thought maybe he had seen something in her eyes when she pleaded with him. She thought he might have had some little insight to the desperation she was feeling. That maybe he sensed she was changing somehow. He saw that she was closing up, dying a little bit. And maybe he loved her too and didn’t want to see that happen. Some men would. Some men would enjoy seeing their wife’s spirit die a little bit. But Louise knew that her changing was a big concern too. That if she took a job it would change her somehow. And Boyd had been right about that. Louise had taken a parttime job at Harris Real Estate in downtown Austell. Her job was just to help the secretary, Jeannie Simmons, to catch up on the filing. Louise had learned a lot from Jeannie. Before she had met Jeannie, Louise did not know that it was possible to have sex without using Vaseline. Boyd just pushed her down on the bed, greased her up like some kind of piece of rusty machinery, and it was all over in about two minutes. Sometimes she would think about what she needed the next day from the store while he was doing it to her.

Jeannie said that wasn’t no kind of way to live. She had divorced her husband three years ago and never regretted it even one time. Jeannie didn’t have any kids though. Kids made it different. They were the victims. Louise picked up the little basket of hot peppers from the windowsill, but she was too deep in thought to bother to look out the window. Mostly, the peppers were long and skinny and dark green. And hot as fire. Several of them were streaked with yellow, orange, and red. These were the prettiest (and the hottest), and she selected enough of these to drop one into each jar of pickled okra to give it a little extra flavor and make it look pretty should she give any of the finished jars out as gifts. She kept a spool of yellow satin ribbon in the basement that she would use to tie a bow around the ones she did give out as gifts or took over to visit with someone who was sick. Jeannie had never canned string beans, or made bread-and-butter pickles, or put up muscadine preserves, or creamed her own corn, or done any of the things that Louise did so that Boyd could have the kind of wife and family that he wanted. Louise took great pride at her accomplishments in the kitchen, but she could, quite easily, imagine herself living a life in which all of these things were purchased ready-made in the grocery store. Shoot! Why not? And why not marry a man who didn’t have to glop her up with petroleum jelly, but took his time and maybe kissed her sometimes too?

She looked at Kyle again, praying he could not read her thoughts, but he had finished rinsing the okra and gone to the living room. He was sitting in front of the TV watching
Hong Kong Phooey
. The smoke smell was much stronger now. It was making her eyes sting. Something was wrong. Louise rinsed her hands again in the sink and eyed the hissing, rattling pressure cooker with suspicion.

Then she looked out the window and her mouth fell open. The world was on fire.

field right below their house, and Kyle was asking himself how would he be acting if he’d had nothing to do with the fire, and he tried to act that way.

Most of the people who lived on the road had gathered here. Fire brings people out. Patrick and Joel Sewell and Scotty Clonts were there. Patrick was wearing a white piece of gauze taped to his cheek. Kyle wondered if when he drank water it would squirt out of the tiny hole Wade had put there. Nathan Sewell was there too, wearing a dark blue polyester suit that had to be smothering him, but he was never seen wearing anything other than a suit and maybe that was why he never lost an election. Daddy-Bob and his wife were there. Daddy and Mama. Jason and Wade, and Kyle and Grace. The fire chief. The paralyzed man was there too. Kyle had seen him rolling down the road, then rolling down their driveway like some kind of bug that moves slow but never stops. He even rolled his electric chair down the little rocky slope to be in the field with everyone else. Daddy shook his hand and clapped him on the back. Kyle looked at him a lot, but looked away quick if he thought he was going to look his way.

The field was a black hole, a charred out mess. And it smelled bad. It was plain to anybody with eyes that the fire had started right here. A swath of destruction led from this spot and headed northeast to the woods. They could see the trees burning off in the distance like red exclamation points. The fire chief was explaining that his men couldn’t do anything but keep it contained from the south, the road side, and then let it burn itself out at the reservoir. He said that Eden Road to the south and Sweetwater Creek to the north would act as firebreaks. His men would pace the fire and watch for jumps.

“But how did this happen? And why did it start right here in our backyard?”

“Hard to say, ma’am. The fire marshal will be here directly to investigate just that very thing.”

“It don’t make no damn sense,” Daddy said.

“Sir, I’ve seen more fires than I’d care to, and all I can tell you is that you’d be surprised.” The fire chief’s gaze fell directly on Kyle. “Boys are drawn to fire, just natural.”

Mama pulled Kyle and Grace in closer to her. “These two was both with me all afternoon. Right with me. All afternoon.”

The chief shifted his eyes from Kyle to Wade and Jason.

“And Wade and Jason were at the Braves game with their daddy.”

Daddy grunted in confirmation, and the chief’s penetrating stare traveled past his brothers to Patrick, Joel, and Scotty. Patrick turned his head away. Nathan Sewell cleared his throat, seeming to say that if you accuse Patrick Sewell, you’re accusing the county chairman himself.