Lady (20 page)

I lay back against the drift, and, glancing over at the Piersons' house, I felt a sharply rising thrill: smoke was pouring out from behind one of the living-room storm windows. The house was on fire!

I dashed back up Lady's walk, grabbed at the doorknob, and the door swung wide, my momentum carrying me into the hall. I ran to the telephone table, shouting for Jesse and Elthea at the same time. When Elthea came through the kitchen door, I handed her the phone, told her to call the fire department, and ran out again.

The smoke was billowing out more heavily around the storm window, and there were no signs of life at the house. Not bothering with the walks, I plunged over a high drift, laboriously pushing my way across the stretch of snow between the two houses. When I got to the Piersons' front walk, I rushed up onto the porch. I rang the doorbell, pounding with my fist on the glass at the same time. I turned the handle, flung the door open, and ran in. The hall was filled with smoke, which was creeping through the heavy oak doors that met on a track, closing off the living room. "Mrs. Pierson, Mrs. Pierson!" I called, looking wildly in all directions. Then, through the haze, I saw her come to the banister above, clutching her kimono across her chest.

"Oh, my God, the damn house is on fire!" I blinked as Blue Ferguson appeared. "Jesus Christ," I heard him say; then he leaped behind Mrs. Pierson, but not before I saw that he was stark naked.

A moment later Jesse came through the front door followed by Elthea. I ran and slid the living-room doors partly open, then slammed them again as I became engulfed in smoke, through which I glimpsed a sullen orange glow and heard the crackling of flames. Jesse was moving Elthea out onto the front stoop and in the distance I could hear the whistle blowing at the firehouse. Without thinking, I started up the stairs two at a time, grabbing Mrs, Pierson's arm as she continued leaning over the banister in silent horror; Blue Ferguson was nowhere to be seen. I pulled Mrs. Pierson around the newel post and down the stairs. Seeing Elthea just outside the door, she drew back and tried to free her arm, but I clung fast and got her through the doorway where Elthea took her down the steps.

Running to the kitchen to look for a pail, I found one on the back steps, an empty Pilgrim Market basket beside it. Filling the pail at the sink, I heard a sliding sound from above; chunks of snow were dislodged from the eaves, and something dark flashed by the window. I stood on tiptoe and saw Blue floundering in the deep drift by the drainpipe, trying to make it to the driveway where his truck was parked.

I was reasonably certain no one had noticed the truck slip out of the driveway, for the fire engine was coming in the opposite direction, and there was a great deal of commotion as hoses were screwed to hydrants and run into the house. There was no need now for my pail of water, so I set it down, and when no one was looking I returned to the back steps. I took the market basket out behind the garage and buried it in the deepest drift I could find. When I got back to the front again a fireman was carrying out the parrot's-cage, with the asphyxiated bird at the bottom, while two other men came with the smoldering davenport, and dumped it into the snow. The heat it still contained made a large melting ring around it, which gradually turned black.

Fire, and then -- a judgment from on high? -- flood, though I doubted that there were any so foolish as to call the devastation which lay in store for us that spring a mark from heaven. March had come in like the proverbial lion and as proverbially bade fair to go out like a lamb, but between these two extremes there befell our town a disaster whose effects were as far-reaching as they were famous: the Great Flood of 1936.

But before this major event occurred, all of us children had been afforded ample time to dwell on that last appearance of the red-haired man. We had given ourselves over to endless hours of speculation regarding his mysterious visit at Halloween, to the point that by degrees it had become a dead horse which even I was no longer inclined to flog. Yet I held my own reservations about the matter, and these I had steadfastly confided in no one. Despite our having seen a man get onto the trolley, the thought had entered my head, and it stayed there, buzzing around my brain like a bee. I was sure that murder had been committed; that, in fact, Lady Harleigh had shot Mr. Ott, and that Jesse had disposed of the
corpus delicti
somewhere on the premises, though what happens to
corpus delicti's
in a state of decomposition hardly came to my mind. There was one particular circumstance which only served to bolster my feelings in this regard.

Before the river froze, we had brought up Lew's scow which we used to row to Hermitage Island, and it had been down in our cellar for months, waiting to be caulked and repainted. With spring in the offing, Lew decided it was time we got down to brass tacks and started refurbishing the craft; confronted with the battered hull, we saw that the first thing to be done was to strip off the old paint. I remembered that among Jesse's tools was a blowtorch, and accordingly one afternoon I went over to borrow it.

Lady's bedroom shades were drawn, not at all unusual that winter, and I felt that little tug of pain and sadness, like a kind of homesickness, recalling the endless weeks that had passed without our having beheld the Lady of old -- indeed, without having beheld her at all. I trudged down the drive to the back kitchen door, where Elthea let me in. She seemed happy to see me; Jesse as well, though you never could tell with Jesse. He was at the table in one of his pink-striped shirts, the violet suspenders crossed over his back, his lap protected by his gray apron as he polished the candelabra from the dining-room sideboard. When I explained about the blowtorch, he thought for a second, rose, directing a look to Elthea at the sink, and went to the cellar door, motioning me to follow him down the stairway.

The wooden furniture from Lady's summerhouse was arranged on news-papers near the furnace, where Jesse had been painting them for the spring. Beyond them was the coal pile, with the shovel leaning against the wood siding of the bin. The supply had dwindled considerably since the day we painted the storm windows and the coal had been delivered, and there were long scrape marks across the cement floor where the shovel had been slid at the coal before carrying it to the furnace.

Jesse was filling the blowtorch with kerosene, pouring from a gallon can through a little tin funnel, and I caught his eye as he glanced up from this work, looking first at me, then at the coal pile. His lower lip jutted out in a pitcher-like curl -- the way it did when he was thinking hard or he disapproved of something -- and he began depressing the torch primer in a rapid series of strokes. I noticed how the coal was being used up, not from the front of the pile, as would ordinarily happen, but along the right side almost to the rear of the bin, leaving an unnatural-looking heap on the left side. I found this a curious way of shoveling coal, but it was not until later that the truth of what I was thinking just then struck me. Still, there was enough import in the moment to cause me to start slightly when Jesse put his hand on my shoulder, as if directing my attention away from the bin. He wiped the blowtorch off with a flannel square and handed it to me,

"You know how to work it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Take the kerosene can and funnel in case you run out."

Back in our own cellar, Harry and I scraped with putty knives while Lew used the blowtorch, I turning over in my mind the small pea of doubt that had become lodged there. It was then that I discovered what I had been thinking all the time: the
corpus delicti
was hidden in the back of the bin in Lady Harleigh's cellar, where the coal had been piled so irregularly.

Of this fact I grew more and more certain through the early weeks of March while the snow melted all around the town, and sometimes I would sneak along the side of Lady's house where, crouched down, I could see through the grimy pane of the cellar window over the coal bin, watching the pile recede as the furnace was stoked, wondering what would happen when the coal supply was at last exhausted.

My carefully evolved theory was put to the test several weeks later at the height of the flood. For weeks now, with the sun growing warmer, the snow first turned to slush, then melted altogether, running in roiling channels along the roadside, the eaves and gutters of the houses dripping, the drainspouts rattling tinnily from the overflow. The ice in the river had begun breaking up, and the current carried it south in a steady and speedy flow, and the river day by day rose alarmingly. The boys from the nearest CCC group began working around the clock, sandbagging the dike northeast of the town near the airfield -- at night we could look from Nancy's attic window and see the blue glimmer of their lanterns -- but these labors proved fruitless as the water level continued to increase, threatening the lower town.

For days excitement ran high around the Green with rumors of evacuation, and there was only a skeleton crew at the firehouse, the firemen having joined the CCC boys at the dike. Late one afternoon they drove back to the Center in Joe Paulus's car and emerged wet and tired and disheartened. The dike, they said, would not hold through the night. We raced up to the north end of Main Street and climbed the tall tree in the back of the Town Farm. From this vantage point we watched the last of the CCC trucks pulling away, and behind them the river already spilling down the steep slope of the high-banked earthwork, cutting gullies and channels as the water ate away at the sides.

Next morning the National Guard was called out, and we awoke to find our back yard knee-deep in water. The dike had gone. The radio told us that the schools were closed and we looked forward to a watery holiday of undetermined duration. By the following afternoon the Green was a proper lake, and water was coming into our cellar. The trolleys had stopped running, and Ma stayed home from the Sunbeam, but neither her remonstrances nor Nancy's could keep us indoors. After putting on our rubber boots, we sloshed our way up to the Center, then down toward the River Road, where -- astonishing sight -- River House was flooded to the first story, and only the second-floor gallery was visible. People were going by in rowboats, women and children and dogs and possessions being taken to dry land. The current was rapid, swirling with mud as it sluiced along its swollen course, carrying with it anything that would float, tree branches, crates and boxes, here a barrel, there a porch chair. It was when we saw the residents of the Town Farm being loaded into a bus that the real drama of the situation struck us. People were being driven from their homes, and if it was bad today on the River Road, what might it be tomorrow on the Green?

We raced to the hardware store, full of customers buying lanterns and fuel, coils of rope, candles, and -- what Lew had said we must get at once -- siphon pumps. We bought the last one. Ma, naturally, was worried when we got home, and we reassured her and Nancy, who was wailing in the kitchen, and then went down cellar to investigate. There was over a foot of water, and the sawhorses on which we had set the scow were already being inundated. We got the boat up through the hatchway and moored it to the trunk of the crab-apple tree in the back yard. We spent the early hours of the night fashioning a drain out of some old pipes our father had left stuck up along the ceiling beams, which we fitted together section by secton, joining the last to the siphon pump. Then we took turns plunging the handle up and down, the suction created emptying the water from the cellar floor and carrying it away through the improvised drainpipe.

It was no use. By next day water surrounded the house, and if the river continued to come up, we would be as homeless as those along the River Road, would in fact be flooded out before nightfall. Lew said we must pack, and get Ma, Ag, Kerney, and Nancy out as quickly as possible. When we came upstairs again, Nancy was sitting at the kitchen table squeezing her knuckles and biting her lower lip. Ma came in bearing an armload of clothing, with Aggie carrying more behind her, and Kerney looking frightened.

The National Guard, Ma explained, was coming to evacuate us, but this might take some time, since the Guard had its hands and boats full elsewhere. At these words Nancy flung her clasped hands toward the ceiling and cried, "Mercy Jesus!" The telephone had gone dead and there was no electricity. All the food from the Frigidaire was in boxes in the back porch, ready to be transported with us. I didn't think the National Guard would be interested in rowing cold pig's hocks and sauerkraut around town, and then realized that if we were being driven out, the Sparrows and Miss Berry and Gert Flagler would most likely also be in peril. Lew and Harry and I ducked out on the back porch and had a hurried conference. Lew, being the tallest, went out the door and down one step, where he was almost up to his boot tops in water, and slogged his way to the tied-up scow. We had brought the oars up as well, and he maneuvered the boat to the steps where we got in, calling inside that we would be back.

We rowed first over to Ruthie Sparrow's -- strange and wonderful to be boating across our own lawn -- and found her sitting in her bay window, her Seiss-Altags sweeping the watery vista. She saw us, and was already in her hat and coat and galoshes when Mr. Sparrow opened the front door, both of them only too happy to be rescued.

Not so Gert Flagler, to whose house we next rowed. Miss Berry was shivering on the stoop, the dogs clustered around her feet and quiet for once. While we transferred Miss Berry and the dogs to the boat, Gert Flagler appeared in high wading boots. No damn National Guard was going to get
her
out, she said, sloshing her way down the drive to rescue her cow.

Manning the oars, Lew and Harry rowed us down the Green toward the Center. There was no sign of life over at Lady's, and I wondered if they had all left, though there seemed to be no reason to; her house was on higher ground and relatively safe from the rising water.

Our passengers were taken from us at the Masonic Hall, which had been turned into a refugee center, and I spelled first Lew and then Harry at the oars on the return trip. Ag and Kerney were on the porch, Ag with a small suitcase with books and other belongings; Kerney clutching the silver candlesticks Pa had bought for Ma when they were first married, and our crystal set and earphones.