Bag of Bones (71 page)

The storage area (it was really no more than a glorified crawlspace) had been floored with wooden pallets, just to keep stuff off the ground. Now water ran beneath these in a steady river, and enough of the earth had eroded to make even crawling unsteady work. The smell of perfume was entirely gone. What had replaced it was a nasty riverbottom smell and—unlikely given the conditions, I know, but it was there—the faint, sullen smell of ash and fire.

I saw what I'd come for almost at once. Jo's mailorder owls, the ones she had taken delivery of herself in November of 1993, were in the northeast corner, where there were only about two feet between the sloped pallet flooring and the underside of the studio.
Gorry, but they looked real,
Bill had said, and Gorry if he wasn't right: in the bright glow of the lantern they looked like birds first swaddled, then suffocated in clear plastic. Their eyes were bright wedding rings circling wide black pupils. Their plastic feathers were painted the dark green of pine needles, their bellies a shade of dirty orange-white. I crawled toward them over the squelching, shifting pallets, the glow of the lantern bobbing back and forth between them, trying not to wonder if that boy was behind me, creeping in pursuit. When I got to the owls, I raised my head without thinking and thudded it against the insulation
which ran beneath the studio floor.
Thump once for yes, twice for no, asshole,
I thought.

I hooked my fingers into the plastic which wrapped the owls and pulled them toward me. I wanted to be out of here. The sensation of water running just beneath me was strange and unpleasant. So was the smell of fire, which seemed stronger now in spite of the damp. Suppose the studio was burning? Suppose Sara had somehow set it alight? I'd roast down here even while the storm's muddy runoff was soaking my legs and belly.

One of the owls stood on a plastic base, I saw—the better to set him on your deck or stoop to scare the crows, my dear—but the base the other should have been attached to was missing. I backed toward the trapdoor, holding the lantern in one hand and dragging the plastic sack of owls in the other, wincing each time thunder cannonaded over my head. I'd only gotten a little way when the damp tape holding the plastic gave way. The owl missing its base tilted slowly toward me, its black-gold eyes staring raptly into my own.

A swirl of air. A faint, comforting whiff of Red perfume. I pulled the owl out by the hornlike tufts growing from its forehead and turned it upside down. Where it had once been attached to its plastic base there were now only two pegs with a hollow space between them. Inside the hole was a small tin box that I recognized even before I reached into the owl's belly and chivvied it out. I shone the lantern on its front, knowing what I'd see:
JO'S NOTIONS
, written in old-fashioned gilt script. She had found the box in an antiques barn somewhere.

I looked at it, my heart beating hard. Thunder boomed overhead. The trapdoor stood open, but I had forgotten about going up. I had forgotten about everything but the tin box I held in my hand, a box roughly the size of a cigar box but not quite as deep. I spread my hand over the cover and pulled it off.

There was a strew of folded papers lying on top of a pair of steno books, the wirebound ones I keep around for notes and character lists. These had been rubber-banded together. On top of everything else was a shiny black square. Until I picked it up and held it close to the side of the lantern, I didn't realize it was a photo negative.

Ghostly, reversed and faintly orange, I saw Jo in her gray two-piece bathing suit. She was standing on the swimming float with her hands behind her head.

“Jo,” I said, and then couldn't say anything else. My throat had closed up with tears. I held the negative for a moment, not wanting to lose contact with it, then put it back in the box with the papers and steno books. This stuff was why she had come to Sara in July of 1994; to gather it up and hide it as well as she could. She had taken the owls off the deck (Frank had heard the door out there bang) and had carried them out here. I could almost see her prying the base off one owl and stuffing the tin box up its plastic wazoo, wrapping both of them in plastic, then dragging them down here, all while her brother sat smoking Marlboros and feeling the vibrations. The bad vibrations. I doubted if I would ever know all the reasons why she'd done it, or what her frame of mind
had been . . . but she had almost certainly believed I'd find my own way down here eventually. Why else had she left the negative?

The loose papers were mostly photocopied press clippings from the
Castle Rock Call
and from the
Weekly News,
the paper which had apparently preceded the
Call.
The dates were marked on each in my wife's neat, firm hand. The oldest clipping was from 1865, and was headed
ANOTHER HOME SAFE
. The returnee was one Jared Devore, age thirty-two. Suddenly I understood one of the things that had puzzled me: the generations which didn't seem to match up. A Sara Tidwell song came to mind as I crouched there on the pallets with my lantern shining down on that old-timey type. It was the ditty that went
The old folks do it and the young folks, too / And the old folks show the young folks just what to do . . .

By the time Sara and the Red-Tops showed up in Castle County and settled on what became known as Tidwell's Meadow, Jared Devore would have been sixty-seven or -eight. Old but still hale. A veteran of the Civil War. The sort of older man younger men might look up to. And Sara's song was right—the old folks show the young folks just what to do.

What exactly had they done?

The clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops didn't tell. I only skimmed them, anyway, but the overall tone shook me, just the same. I'd describe it as unfailing genial contempt. The Red-Tops were “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies.” They were “full of dusky good-nature.” Sara herself was “a marvellous figure of a Negro woman with broad nose, full lips, and noble brow” who “fascinated men-folk
and women-folk alike with her animal high spirits, flashing smile, and raucous laugh.”

They were, God keep us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn't mind being called full of dusky good-nature.

I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which “our Southern blackbirds” had left. I found nothing. What I found instead was a clipping from the
Call
marked July 19th (
go down nineteen,
I thought), 1933. The headline read
VETERAN GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER
. According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe. At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself). The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay. Fred's wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke. A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well.

The fires had come fast when the wind changed, the paper said—“like marching explosions.” They jumped the only firebreak the men had left in that direction and headed for the far end of the lake. At Halo Bay there were no men to take charge, and apparently no women able or willing to do so. They panicked instead, racing to load their cars with children and camp possessions, clogging the one road out with their vehicles. Eventually one of the old cars or
trucks broke down and as the fires roared closer, running through woods that hadn't seen rain since late April, the women who'd waited found their way out blocked.

The volunteer firefighters came to the rescue in time, but when Fred Dean got to his wife, one of a party of women trying to push a balky stalled Ford coupe out of the road, he made a terrible discovery. Billy lay on the floor in the back of the car, fast asleep, but Carla was missing. Hilda had gotten them both in, all right—they had been on the back seat, holding hands just as they always did. But at some point, after her brother had crawled onto the floor and dozed off and while Hilda was stuffing a few last items into the trunk, Carla must have remembered a toy or a doll and returned to the cottage to get it. While she was doing that, her mother had gotten into their old DeSoto and driven away without rechecking the babies. Carla Dean was either still in the cottage at Halo Bay or making her way up the road on foot. Either way the fires would run her down.

The road was too narrow to get a vehicle turned around and too blocked to get one of those pointed in the right direction through the crush. So Fred Dean, hero that he was, set off on the run toward the smoke-blackened horizon, where bright ribbons of orange had already begun to shine through. The wind-driven fire had crowned and raced to meet him like a lover.

I knelt on the pallets, reading this by the glow of my lantern, and all at once the smell of fire and burning intensified. I coughed . . . and then the cough was
choked off by the iron taste of water in my mouth and throat. Once again, this time kneeling in the storage area beneath my wife's studio, I felt as if I were drowning. Once again I leaned forward and retched up nothing but a little spit.

I turned and saw the lake. The loons were screaming on its hazy surface, making their way toward me in a line, beating their wings against the water as they came. The blue of the sky had been blotted out. The air smelled of charcoal and gunpowder. Ash had begun to sift down from the sky. The eastern verge of Dark Score was in flames, and I could hear occasional muffled reports as hollow trees exploded. They sounded like depth charges.

I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn't be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair. Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright blue ones. She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying. I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved. I saw she was about

Kyra's age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde. Her hair is the shade her brother's will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell. She wears a white dress and red knee-stockings and she holds her arms out to me, calling
Daddy, Daddy.

I start toward her and then there is a blast of organized heat that tears me apart for a moment—I am the ghost here,
I realize, and Fred Dean has just run right through me.
Daddy,
she cries, but to him, not me.
Daddy!
and she hugs him, unmindful of the soot smearing her white silk dress and her chubby face as he kisses her and more soot begins to fall and the loons beat their way in toward shore, seeming to weep in shrill lamentation.

Daddy the fire is coming!
she cries as he scoops her into his arms.

I know, be brave,
he says.
We're gonna be all right, sugarplum, but you have to be brave.

The fire isn't just coming; it has come. The entire east end of Halo Bay is in flames and now they're moving this way, eating one by one the little cabins where the men like to lay up drunk in hunting season and ice-fishing season. Behind Al LeRoux's, the washing Marguerite hung out that morning is in flames, pants and dresses and underwear burning on lines which are themselves strings of fire. Leaves and bark shower down; a burning ember touches Carla's neck and she shrieks with pain. Fred slaps it away as he carries her down the slope of land to the water.

Don't do it!
I scream. I know all this is beyond my power to change, but I scream at him anyway, try to change it anyway.
Fight it! For Christ's sake, fight it!

Daddy, who is that man?
Carla asks, and points at me as the green-shingled roof of the Dean place catches fire.

Fred glances toward where she is pointing, and in his face I see a spasm of guilt. He knows what he's doing, that's the terrible thing—way down deep he knows exactly what he is doing here at Halo Bay where The Street ends. He knows and he's afraid that someone will witness his work. But he sees nothing.

Or does he? There is a momentary doubtful widening of the eyes as if he
does
spy something—a dancing helix of air,
perhaps. Or does he feel me? Is that it? Does he feel a momentary cold draft in all this heat? One that feels like protesting hands, hands that would restrain if they only had substance? Then he looks away; then he is wading into the water beside the Deans' stub of a dock.

Fred!
I scream.
For God's sake, man, look at her! Do you think your wife put her in a white silk dress by accident? Is that anyone's idea of a play-dress?

Daddy, why are we going in the water?
she asks.

To get away from the fire, sugarplum.

Daddy, I can't swim!

You won't have to,
he replies, and what a chill I feel at that! Because it's no lie—she won't have to swim, not now, not ever. And at least Fred's way will be more merciful than Normal Auster's when Normal's turn comes—more merciful than the squalling handpump, the gallons of freezing water.

Her white dress floats around her like a lily. Her red stockings shimmer in the water. She hugs his neck tightly and now they are among the fleeing loons; the loons spank the water with their powerful wings, churning up curds of foam and staring at the man and the girl with their distraught red eyes. The air is heavy with smoke and the sky is gone. I stagger after them, wading—I can feel the cold of the water, although I don't splash and leave no wake. The eastern and northern edges of the lake are both on fire now—there is a burning crescent around us as Fred Dean wades deeper with his daughter, carrying her as if to some baptismal rite. And still he tells himself he is trying to save her, only to save her, just as all her life Hilda will tell herself that the child just wandered back to the cottage to look for a toy, that she was not left behind on purpose, left in her white dress and red stockings to be found by her father, who once did something unspeakable. This is the past, this is the
Land of Ago, and here the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even unto the seventh generation, which is not yet.