Bone Fire (28 page)

McEban took the flashlight from the boy, turning it on to check the batteries, and gave it back. It was nearly dark.

“Goddamnit, Einar, I wouldn’t be doing some screwball thing like this if I hadn’t known you my whole life.”

“I wouldn’t have asked.”

“You owe me at least a dollar,” Kenneth said.

“All right, then.”

McEban kissed the top of the boy’s head, and they heard him walking away, stopping to look back, and then the sound of the truck pulling out and the rolling approach of thunder.

“You want to light it up?”

“Can I?”

Einar drew a pill bottle of wooden matches from his shirt pocket, shaking them out into the boy’s hand, and he circled the pyre, lighting the kerosene around the perimeter, and came back. It was very still, and they sat listening to the fire gather and spread.

“I better check the other side.” Kenneth picked up the shovel and disappeared behind the pile.

Einar could feel the heat now against his face, and thought that maybe Marin was right and this was only one in a succession of lives, a thousand of them, and then the heat increased and he could distinguish the oranges and reds and yellows, labile and rising into the darkness. “How we doing?” he called to the boy.

“Great.”

He could hear the boy’s laughter.

Lives of deformity, there had to be those, the losing of limbs. He felt the first drops of rain. Lives of brutal commerce, lies, lying with neighbors’ wives. A chanter of hymns. The beater of slaves, his years marked by the chains of slavery. He glimpsed the boy weaving through the figures at the edge of the dark night, at times wildly lit, in and out of shadow, circling, thrusting the wooden
shaft of the shovel ahead of him. Lives of hopelessness, beauty, decency, charity, body after body consumed by fire. Kenneth came back into view again, the figures on that side of the fire seeming to move along with him.

The rain hissed in the flames, the air alive with sparks, and he wondered how many times he’s been an old man sitting at a fire in the night, a horse looking on, in a dark rain. Good men and bad, through the grind of centuries, and then there was Ella, who he imagined he could see dancing in her girl’s body, their son holding her hand, Mitch Bradley and Ansel Magnuson. He heard the accretion of their laughter rising from the flames. The rain fell in sheets, the fire sizzling, snapping.

“Are you out there?” he called.

“I’m over here.”

The boy was passing in front of the wolf-headed figure.

“How about a rooster?” he asked. “Can you get an echo out of one of them?”

The boy sat down beside him. “I only know about ducks.” He smiled, his eyes shining with the last of the flames.

Water ran from their faces.

“You think you can get me and that old horse back to the house?”

“Yes, sir.” He stood and stabbed the shovel into the ground. “I know I can.”