Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) (22 page)

She pulled up in front of the house and sat in the car with the engine idling, while in the distance the columns of smoke moved across the horizon with the wind. She and Ethan had made love in this house and taken vows in this house. She knew she'd open the door and see him smiling at her, his hat on a chair and his hands around hers over the table with their coffee cups between them. She'd hear his footsteps coming up the porch and his deep, reassuring voice, reminding her how she'd be safe with him.

The bed was still there. Everything was as she had left it. She averted her eyes and dragged her heavy heart up the stairs to the attic.

She'd clear out her mother's things; after that the place could burn to the ground.

Chapter 22

Ethan had been asleep only a few hours when the phone woke him up. It was the county sheriff. He said they had a bad situation on their hands, that the wind had come up unexpectedly and carried embers from smoldering cow chips into dry winter pasture that hadn't been burned. The fire line was moving east, away from the town, into the hills, but livestock were threatened and he couldn't be sure the wind wouldn't change again.

When Ethan got off the phone Katie Anne was already up and digging her jeans out from a pile of clothing.

"I heard," she mumbled groggily. "What's the wind speed?"

"Around twenty-two," he said.

"That's not good."

When Ethan had dressed, he found her in the kitchen filling a thermos full of hot coffee.

"Your dad's gonna take the Cessna up at dawn," he said. "We'll need a firebreak somewhere north of here. He wants you to get the disc tractor from the Obermuellers and bring it up the road. Stay on the radio. He'll tell you where to plow."

Ethan could smell it as he sat on the porch pulling on his boots. The woodsy smell of burning leaves in autumn. It grew stronger as he drove along the road with the window down. Pungent. Hard on his nostrils. Black ashes floated in the air. He passed the road to the old Reilly house and had a sudden urge to turn onto it. He hadn't returned since the evening he'd spent there with Annette. Memories flooded his thoughts: the feel of the woman's skin next to his, her warmth, the taste of her tongue in his mouth, stirring him in a way no woman had ever done before. Profoundly. He accelerated and sped quickly north toward the fire. Let it burn, he thought. Let it burn to the ground.

You watched the land and it looked like the wind was painting the earth with fire. Fueled by the dry winter grass, it moved with startling speed—roaring walls of ferocious heat and fury. An alert was sent out to all the neighboring counties. Sirens wailed. Ranchers awakened from their sleep. Trucks and tractors were recruited to carry water from ponds and set backfires. But the backfires, goaded by the renegade wind, turned on them with a vengeance. Men drove alongside the fire, spraying it with water from the tanks mounted on their trucks. But then the wind would suddenly shift and the fire would come at them. The fire outran the fire trucks; it trapped cattle and foxes and deer in rings of fire. It dwarfed the men and their red and green machines with its towering columns of smoke that rose into the pale morning sky. It swallowed up their spinning red and blue lights. And each time, as the wind shifted, the fire turned, separated, and a new fire line was born.

* * *

Katie Anne had Jacob's Mound in her sight. A few more miles and the firebreak on Ethan's land would be finished. For the past hour she had listened to her father's voice on the two-way radio as he spoke to the fire chief, deciding strategy and plans of attack, using methods he had learned from his father and grandfather, men who had known fire as an implacable enemy. In a few minutes he would be taking up his plane and they would have a better assessment of the scope of the fire. But they all knew one thing: it was moving fast.

Katie Anne had spoken to Ethan only once over the radio and then he was out of reach. He had taken a crew west of the fire line to start a backfire. She turned around to look at the mark she had made on the earth. The disc had torn up a fifteen-foot-wide stretch of prairie, plowing under the dried winter grass, bringing to the surface cool, moist earth that defied fire. When she reached Jacob's Mound she would turn around and come back right alongside this line, widening the break another fifteen feet, making it impossible for the fire, even with its grotesque gymnastics, to breach their land. She could see the fire now in the north, a thin line of orange flame with a smoking tail, sweeping over the hills. The air was cluttered with flying ashes, and the sun, which had risen only moments earlier, was a huge muted orange orb barely visible through the smoky haze. It suddenly occurred to her that the old Reilly house that Ethan had bought was right in the path of the fire. The old Reilly place. Where Ethan had betrayed her. Let it burn.

She looked back at Jacob's Mound and felt a sudden jolt of fear. A patch of fire had appeared at the top only a few hundred feet in front of her. Quickly, it came down the slope of the mound and advanced toward her. She threw the controls to lift the disc. Once the lumbering machine was free of the earth she turned it around and gave it full throttle. The heavy tractor, its mammoth engine whining, rumbled across the prairie, throwing up a curtain of dust and dirt, and the fire rushed steadily after her. The wind blew the smoke forward, ahead of the fire line. It caught up with her and rolled over her, and she disappeared in a cloud of ash.

* * *

Annette was sitting on a chair in the dark attic with her flashlight and a box of letters in her lap, oblivious to the heat, the passage of time and the quiet arrival of dawn. She was totally perplexed by what she had found. Perhaps her mother had simply forgotten the letters were here. But Annette suspected it was to keep them hidden from her father, and she wondered if her mother had intended her to find them.

The letters were from a childhood friend of her mother's who had moved to Los Angeles to study painting. From her small studio in the Hollywood Hills, the friend had written letter after letter, pleading with Emma Reilly to take her baby and flee her emotionally abusive husband. Here in letters that spanned decades, Annette finally understood her mother's regrets, her sense of entrapment, and how she had justified the difficult choice she had made. She saw how much her mother truly loved her father, despite his flaws; how submission had become easier with time and how she had buried her guilt and indignation in the name of marital devotion.

Within months after marrying, her mother had recognized her mistake. Beneath Charles Ferguson's good looks and persuasive charm lay a narrow-minded and rigidly authoritarian man who demanded absolute submission to his will. He became fiercely jealous of her friendships and coldly disapproved of any pleasures or interests she didn't share with him. She would be devoted to Charlie and his world. Pleasing him first and foremost was the role she would play throughout her life.

She lived in constant fear of his suspicions and rage. One day after lunch while Charlie was secluded in his study working on the church budget, a neighbor dropped by. Emma invited her into the kitchen and put on some fresh coffee while she finished tidying up. At one point she closed the door to sweep behind it, and at that moment Charlie came down from his study and found the two women shut in the kitchen chatting and laughing. He waited until the neighbor had gone and then burst in on his wife, accusing her of ridiculing him to the neighbors. The following day was her birthday, and they had planned to drive to Emporia for dinner at her favorite restaurant. But Charlie didn't return until ten o'clock that night, and then he slept in the guest room; three days passed before he spoke to her again.

After their daughter was born he became even more demanding. He scorned his wife's decision to breast-feed the baby, persuaded that she would pervert the child. When Annette was only two months old he became ill and kept to his bed for ten days. Whenever the baby cried or when Emma was feeding her, or bathing her, or rocking her, Charlie would find a reason to ring the bell at his bedside table to summon his wife; he was hungry and wanted soup, or bored and wanted something new to read. The ice in his ginger ale had melted, or he was too warm or cold, or he wanted aspirin or his nail clippers, or a back rub. His wife would put the baby in her crib, and she would hurry to her husband with a smile and wait on him, and the baby's cries would go unheeded. Her heart, like her breasts, swelled, ached and then grew dry. The next week she gave up breast-feeding. Eventually she learned how to love her daughter silently, without passion.

Losing her mother caught up with Annette again, weighed on her heart all fresh with heartache, and she held the letters to her heart and cried a daughter's grief for a mother who had always been there. A mother she'd never had.

Annie.

She started and looked around to trace the voice.

"Mama?"

It wasn't in her head. She'd distinctly heard it. But no, couldn't be.
There are no ghosts here.

Odd, how dark it seemed, as though the day had gone into hiding. She switched off her flashlight and began to gather the letters. Must hurry. She'd taken far too long. And the smell of smoke worried her. It was more pervasive than before. God forbid she'd get stuck in this damned planned burn. Road blocked by the smoke and she'd miss her flight. Wouldn't that be a nasty twist of fate? She dropped the letters into her bag and closed the boxes. Stood and looked around at the old place, which she'd never known as a child but her mother had so proudly bequeathed to her. A mother's heartfelt legacy to a child.

I only wanted you, Mama.

She slung her purse over her shoulder and crossed to a window, pulled aside the yellowed curtains. For a moment she thought she was seeing fog, then the cloud cleared and she caught sight of flames in the field beyond the house, licking up the brown grasses.

She was rushing and should have been more cautious going down the steep, shallow attic steps; she tripped and flew forward all the way to the bottom, landing heavily with her shoulder against the door. She pulled herself up, her shoulder torched with pain, and she was afraid she'd broken it. She found her shoe, which had fallen off, slung her bag over the other shoulder and opened the door to the upstairs hall.

She found the bathroom and dropped her bag on the floor and tried to take off her sweater, but the shoulder pain was too great so she unzipped her skirt and worked it off with one hand. She wadded it up and stuffed it in the bathroom sink and turned on the water. The pipes whined and shuddered but only a trickle of rusty water came forth. She hurled a cry of rage and damned the house and told it this was not the way she was going to die. Not here.
Not with my baby waiting for me to come home.

With her skirt over her mouth and nose, she started down the stairs. On the third step, her foot slipped on the worn wood. There was a sharp crack and wrenching pain as her ankle bent underneath her, and as she flew downward through the air to the bottom of the stairs, she felt a heightened sense of awareness of the moment, and her thoughts were piercingly clear, lending to that one last second of her life a deliriously real sense of eternity.

* * *

She lay in an awkward sprawl at the foot of the stairs, her eyes wide open and her hair cascaded around her head and across her mouth. The strap of her open handbag twisted around her wrist and the letters strung across floor. One bare leg stretched behind her and the other bent double as if she were climbing a wall.

The flames crept across the lawn, up the porch and took out the rotted wood door. It made its way across the room and found the trail of letters. Her hair ignited quickly. For a brief moment she burned beautifully, like a bird of fire.

Chapter 23