Eden Burning (36 page)

In three-quarter darkness the cruiser rounded proudly to port, lights glittering and gleaming from stem to stern. It seemed to fill the harbor with its authority.

“So,” Lionel said, “that settles that. It’s been a long night on both counts.”

“Yes, both counts. Mother and baby,” said Dr. Strand, who was literal.

“I meant,” Lionel corrected him, “I meant the birth
and
our small revolt. In a few more hours, now that the troops are here, we’ll have peace and order again, thank God.”

“No, my friend, you haven’t seen the end of this by any means,” the doctor cautioned.

“You think not?”

“Oh, yes, for now, but this was only a skirmish. I’m looking ahead a few years. Yes, I’m looking ahead.”

But Lionel was concerned with the immediate. “You’re not starting home yet, Francis? Things can’t be calmed down this soon.”

“I want to get home and sleep. I could sleep for a week.”

“Well, just be careful. It’s been a long night, that’s sure. Just be careful.”

   The morning was almost still. In the mild breeze small ash puffs rose from a bed of cinders where the new wing had been. Only a few feet from the central portion of the house a miraculous and mighty rain had halted the fire.

“If only it had come sooner!” Osborne lamented. “We tried using the well, but the pump was too weak. And we couldn’t stretch the hose from the river. We fought with buckets, we tried everything, Mr. Luther. My wife came out,
and the maids and everybody. We almost killed ourselves trying.”

“You did what you could,” Francis said quietly.

“That fire went wild! I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself. Of course, the wind was against us. That and the fresh paint. Thank God, though, the rain came, or we’d have lost the whole house.”

Nothing, nothing was left of the new wing but some twists of metal—andirons or candelabra, perhaps.

“Terrible,” Osborne said. “Terrible.” He spoke with awe.

All that morning and all the day before people had been talking at Francis. Thinking to give comfort, they seemed compelled to talk.

“By God, I wish I knew how this happened, Mr. Luther! It was the only house on the island to be fired! Oh, some cane fields here and there went up, but that’s to be expected at a time like this. We haven’t seen a house burned, though, not since I was born and probably a time before that.”

“No,” Francis said. He had a pain in his chest. He wondered whether anyone as young as he could have a heart attack from grief. He couldn’t afford to have a heart attack, leaving Marjorie with an infant in this chaos.

Osborne lowered his voice. “I keep asking myself, to be frank with you, whether it wasn’t on account of the bananas. We got one load through the gates before the crowd could stop us. They were pretty mad, let me tell you! Still, I’d swear it wasn’t any of our own people. Sure, they’d overturn a truck, but they wouldn’t do a thing like this. There were a lot of gangs in town setting fires, you know, kids no more than fourteen years old, they tell me. Wild kids, slippery as eels. They’ll never catch them.”

For the first time in hours thought took shape in Francis’ numbed brain.

“Not kids from town. Why would they come way out here to pick just my house? It doesn’t make sense! No, it has to have been the strikers, Osborne, maybe not Eleuthera people,
but hotheads from other villages. My uncle told me they’d been steamed up to pillage and burn. Why, there was a radical meeting right here in this parish, not two miles from our gates! I didn’t believe him when he told me, but I do now. Because—here’s the result.”

Osborne did not comment. Instead, he held out his hand to catch a flurry of drops that had suddenly fallen out of the calm, bright sky. “Sun-shower,” he said.

A rag had blown from the fire onto the grass. Scorched at the edges, the center still disclosed an arabesque of buds. Recognizing the fabric that Marjorie had had sent from New York, Francis bent to pick it up. How she had labored over her choices! The decoration of these new rooms had been the gladdest thing in her life here until her pregnancy.

He rubbed the cloth between his fingers. His father had died while that cloth flamed. A living torch, he had been extinguished among red and white Chinese peonies. Gone now were all the gaiety and kindness, the generosity and the foolish weakness; no one need fret or worry about him ever again. Bound and bandaged, his mother lay stunned into silence as if she had not yet assimilated the disaster, or as if she were remembering her own reluctance to come back here. It was only because of me that she came, Francis thought, over and over.

The sun-shower sprinkled his shoulders. For a long time he stood there crying in the warm, quiet rain.

In later years these events would be described by someone with a gift for imaginative language, someone, for instance, like Kate Tarbox, as a series of shock waves come and gone in a handful of days. There was, first, the shock of death, death of the innocent at Eleuthera, and then those killed in confrontations between police and citizens, along with one lone soldier from the cruiser, an ignorant lad shot by a wild bullet on his first trip out of England. But the greatest shock came from realizing the extent of anger, its depth, and the speed with which it could spread.

To be sure, the cruiser stood firm guard in the harbor. Order was restored. Shattered glass was cleared away and people went back to work. Passing on the roads and in the streets they gave greeting again as before; yet one had to wonder what rages and resentments still burned beneath the greeting.

All this passed outside of Francis’ awareness. Beclouded, he moved through required hours and places. From the memorial service—that is to say, the funeral without the body of the dead—he went to the hospital. There Marjorie, half hysterical with fear and horror, alternately trembled, wept, and consoled herself with her new baby. There, down the hall, his mother, winning a valiant struggle for acceptance and control, recovered from burn and shock. Most of the time he sat at home in the cocoon of his library, staring at grief, which seemed to hover just beyond the window like some threatening, faceless dervish in whirling robes, waiting to descend and clutch.

He was sitting there like that when Kate came in.

“Oh, my darling,” she said.

He put his head on her breast. Her fingers moved in his hair.

“Oh, my darling, what can I do for you?”

“Just stay here. Be with me.”

“Yes, yes. I am. I will.”

Opening his eyes, he saw the little rise and fall of her breast. Her neck and upper arms were scarlet.

“You’re sunburned,” he murmured.

“I was weeding. I should have worn a jacket.”

He raised his head, reproaching. “You’re so tired. You don’t take care of yourself.”

“It’s just that I haven’t slept. How could I sleep when all this was happening to you?”

Her eyes were troubled. Darkened, they were almost violet, a morbid color, color of pain.

“You love me,” he said, as if the discovery were new. “You love me.”

She swallowed hard. He could see the small lump move in her throat.

He had never been so near to another human being in all his life, so near that the very blood in their veins seemed to run together. And suddenly desire, which had been the farthest from his mind during these last hours, tore him into its current.

He got up and drew the curtains shut, making a wall of rippling green. The room, now dimmed, assumed an aqueous coolness, a forest coolness.

“Lie down,” he said. “Take your dress off.”

“Now? Inhere?”

“It’s all right. I can lock the door.”

Elsewhere in the house he would not have taken her. Some subtlety of judgment, some refinement of choice, would not allow him to do this thing in any room that had been adorned by Marjorie, in which her presence remained as though she herself were standing in it. He could not have done that to
Marjorie, to Kate—or to himself. But this room belonged to him alone and there was no one here except himself, with Kate.

In her now he found all comfort and all healing.

Afterwards they lay quietly, not speaking. Slowly, the ceiling turned from white to luminous gray.

“It’s getting late,” she said. She sat up and put on her dress, then pulled the curtains back so that light slid across the floor.

Francis looked out the window. The whirling specter was gone; no threat was there, only the afternoon lying placidly among the trees.

“Did you know—could you have known—how I needed you?” he asked.

A smile began as a tender curving at the corners of her mouth and almost as quickly stopped. Her face fell into sadness.

“What is it?” he cried.

Her reply was so low that he barely heard her. “Suddenly I feel guilty. I don’t know why. I’ve not felt that way before. It’s this house, I suppose. Being here like this in her house.”

It angered him that any shame should blight them, yet he didn’t know what to say.

“Do you—don’t you feel what I mean, Francis?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I should. I don’t know.”

He unlocked the door and poured a drink from the bar in the cabinet.

“Have one? It’ll steady you.”

“No, thanks. Tell me about the baby, please.” She had begun to steady herself.

At once laughter tingled in his throat. “She’s pretty…. Funny how I wanted a boy. Maybe men always do? But now I don’t mind at all. Her name’s Megan. It’s Welsh. Her mother’s people were Welsh.”

“I’d like to give her a wonderful present. May I?”

“Of course you may! Why do you ask? Why shouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe, in the circumstances, it might not be—”

The laughter left him. “Oh Kate, Kate my love, why can’t things ever be clean and clear and easy? Everything’s such a goddamned tangle!”

“But we’ll manage, won’t we?”

“I’ve done this to you. I’ve complicated your life.”

“No. You’ve brought life into my life. I’m sorry I felt grim there for a minute. I won’t let it happen again. One has to—to take charge.” And, jingling her car keys, she told him, “The first thing I’m going to do is buy Megan’s present. The next thing—oh, I hate to pile another trouble on you, I wasn’t even going to mention it, but I’ve no one else to ask, at least not until Nicholas Mebane gets back, and that won’t be till tomorrow night, and it would be a shame to wait that long—”

“What are you talking about?”

Kate sat down again. “They arrested Patrick this morning.”

Francis’ heart jumped a beat.

“Can you imagine anything so idiotic, so criminal? Some utter ass must have decided to cast a net out for anyone and everyone who’s ever opened his mouth to express an opinion! ‘Incitement to riot!’ Patrick of all people!”

He wet his lips. “What did you want of me?”

“Bail money. I’m awfully short or I’d never come bothering you with all you’ve got on your mind. I just hate to see a man like Patrick spend a night locked up, that’s all.”

He couldn’t believe what hé was hearing. And he tried to speak without betraying outrage.

“For my part they can hang him tonight,” he said in a flat voice.

Kate stared. “You can’t mean that?”

“My father was burned alive in my house, and my mother
escaped by the grace of a miracle; you ask me whether I mean it?”

“It wasn’t Patrick’s doing, Francis! For God’s sake, you don’t think he crept out here that night and put a torch to your house, do you?”

“His were the brains behind the hands that did it. You can’t tell me otherwise.”

“I sure as hell can tell you! And I sure as hell will!” Kate’s indignation crackled.

“He is not the man we thought he was. Open your eyes—”

“Maybe not the man
you
thought, but—”

“He could have helped me save my crop! At least he could have made an attempt. But he refused. And after that went about giving inflammatory speeches right at my doorstep. He knew the temper of the people, but instead of protecting me, his friend, he whipped them up—”

“Inflammatory speeches! He couldn’t give one if he tried! He wouldn’t know how to inflame anyone, he talks way over most people’s heads, like a schoolteacher. If he ever wants to go into politics he’ll have to learn to do better, let me tell you.”

“He did well enough, apparently. Lionel told me—”

“Lionel!” Kate’s scorn was hot. “Oh,
now
I see the connection! So it’s Lionel who put his words in at Covetown, he’s the one who’s responsible! So he’s turned out to be a rotten informer—I really never thought he’d stoop
that
low, no, I didn’t!” She got up, snapping and unsnapping the clasp of her purse. “Francis, listen to me. Listen to me. To me; not Lionel!”

He didn’t hear her. He was hearing, instead, Patrick Courzon’s cool voice: “You’re too feudal for these times.” He was hearing Osborne’s lament: “We did all we could, Mr. Luther.” He was standing in mournful rain looking at cinders where his proud house had been.

“Bastard!” he cried. “Dirty, arrogant, ungrateful bastard! And you actually came here to plead for him! Is that why you
came? Not to be with me, but because you were thinking of him?”

She was dismayed. “You don’t mean that. You know I came for you! But I did think I could also ask you to help one of the best human beings you or I will ever know. I certainly didn’t dream you had any crazy idea like this in your head.”

“Crazy? It’s one thing to have understanding, Kate, to be compassionate, to be”—in the turbulence of his anger he stammered—“to be
liberal,
but you carry it too far; you’ll excuse anything in one of your underdog protégés. Arson. Murder. Anything!”

She put a hand on his arm. “Francis. Please. You’re not talking sense. Don’t fight with me. This is us, Francis and Kate.”

“No, Kate. You can’t get around me that way. I’ve had a blow between the eyes. Life doesn’t hand out many blows like the one I’ve had this week,” he said bitterly.

“Don’t you suppose I know that? But we’re talking about two different things.”

“We’re not. It’s the same thing. You’re making a hero out of someone who’s partially responsible for what I’ve suffered. That hurts me, Kate. I can’t forgive it.”