The Smoke Jumper (56 page)

Connor braced himself to find more bodies inside. But he checked both decks and found none, nor in the burnt shell of the truck behind. The young sergeant and two of his men had arrived now to bring him back.

‘We must not stop here,’ the sergeant said.

‘You go on.’

‘No. You must come. It is dangerous here.’

He put a hand on Connor’s shoulder but Connor brushed it off distractedly and told him again to leave. His mind was reeling with images of what might have happened here. As there was only one body, maybe the others had managed to escape unscathed. Maybe they had been picked up by other vehicles.

‘Come,’ the soldier said. ‘There is nothing here for you.’

‘They might be here. Somewhere.’

‘Where? Look, there’s no one.’

Another truck roared by along the road, sounding its mournful horn as it passed. Connor turned away in anguish and looked up at the seamless dark green jungle of the hillside, its top veiled by the lowering cloud. He felt a slow, churning sense of loss and desperation rise within him and he walked in faltering steps into the scrub at the side of the road and howled at the sky.

‘Julia!’

The sound echoed along the valley and he called her name again and again so that the echoes redoubled each time. And when the last echo faded he stood and scoured the hillside for any sign of movement but nothing stirred.

Then the rain began to fall, slowly at first, in heavy drops that slapped upon the ground and upon his face and shoulders and quickly filled the air with the smell of thirsting dust.

‘Come,’ the sergeant said gently.

Connor couldn’t speak. He shook his head.

‘Perhaps you find them in one of the camps.’

Connor nodded and bowed his head. The rain was thicker and faster now and his hair and his shirt were already soaked. The others waiting down the road in the open back of the truck were calling impatiently.

‘Come now,’ the sergeant said. Again he put a hand on Connor’s shoulder and this time he didn’t have the will to remove it and instead let himself be steered in his desolation back toward the truck.

When they were halfway there the calling of the soldiers suddenly seemed different, as if they were no longer chiding him. And the sergeant beside him glanced back toward the bus and then stopped.

‘Look,’ he said.

Connor turned. The rain was so heavy now and his eyes so brimmed with tears that at first he saw nothing. And then the figure standing in the scrub at the side of the road moved and he saw her.

‘Connor?’

Through the rain her voice sounded small and frail and full of disbelief.

‘Connor? Is that really you?’

He started to walk back along the road and his legs felt so weak that he almost stumbled. She was stepping onto the road now and walking toward him through the pale curtain of the rain.

‘Julia?’

They stopped when they were still a little way apart and stood staring at each other as if they were seeing each other’s ghost. Her cotton dress was ripped, her face filthy and her short hair bedraggled. Even in all his years of dreaming she had never looked more beautiful.

‘Why are you . . . ?’ she said. ‘What are you . . . ?’

‘I heard you were here. I had to find you.’

She shook her head slightly and then her face crumpled and he stepped toward her and took hold of her and he could feel her whole body begin to shake. And he tried to say just a little of what was in his heart but he couldn’t find the words nor even the voice to utter them. He held her face to his chest and stroked her head and she slowly lifted her arms and put them around him and clung to him. She tried to say something but couldn’t and just started to sob until he thought she would break.

Over her shoulder he saw the others now, emerging from the trees like wary and disheveled prey. He saw Pringle, the doctor, and Sister Emily holding the hands of two children and others following, ushered by the nuns. And hurrying past them now onto the road and running through the rain toward her mother came Amy, the daughter he hadn’t held since she was a baby and who was now this tall, fine girl with a smudged and worried face and a mass of sodden blond curls.

‘Mommy?’

Julia gathered her in her arms and started to explain who Connor was, but somehow the child already knew and tentatively reached out to him and took his hand. And with the rain beating down upon them and turning the road around them to a river, the three of them stood clinging to one another as if the world and whatever it might bring would never be allowed to part them.

32

I
t was one of those crystalline Montana mornings, when the freshly fallen snow glinted in the sun like sequined satin and the mountains stood so bold against the blue of the sky that you could count every frosted crevice. Julia followed the dogs out onto the pristine planks of the new porch and closed the kitchen door behind her. Even in the cold the sawn-timber floor still smelled of resin. She stood for a moment peering at the mountains through the icicled fringe of the eaves, her breath billowing, while the two young collies squirmed and bounced around her.

‘Hey, you guys. Down now. Get down.’

She came down the steps and stopped again and shielded her eyes from the glare of the snow to see more clearly. The only trace of the horses were the twin tracks that led from the barn and out past the corral and then up and away in a gentle curve across the hillside and into the trees. She guessed that they would probably be coming back their usual way so she turned up her collar and headed down toward the creek.

The house that they had built stood in a low fold of the hills some dozen miles east of the massive limestone wall of the Rocky Mountain Front. The building was low and modest and made of wood and, with the smoke curling from its stone chimney and the sun flecking the pale stems of the aspen behind, it already looked as if it belonged. It had taken them more than a year to build. And with each beam and nail, each rafter and strut, so too the new construction of their lives had slowly taken shape.

 

Their homecoming had been hard.

In those few days that they spent in Kampala before flying home, Julia and Amy had stayed cocooned in their hotel room, shell-shocked and licking their wounds, while Connor rushed around the city organizing things. He wanted to help Sister Emily start looking for a new home for the children of St. Mary’s and then he had to reunite Thomas and Lawrence Nyeko who had both now been adopted by Connor’s friends the Odongs. He even helped arrange the funeral of poor George the gardener who had taken the full blast of the mortar round and by some miracle been the sole casualty of the flight from Karingoa. The result was that Julia and Connor had scarcely had a moment to themselves. Even the airline conspired against them. There weren’t three seats together, so Connor sat separately.

After his astonishing quest to find them, his desolate calling of her name across the jungle, the sight of him standing there so gaunt and filthy and wretched by the burnt-out bus, and then the three of them clinging to one another in the rain, after all this, Julia had assumed that everything was resolved and that, once they got back to Montana, she and Connor would be together and that the three of them would be a blissful fairy-tale family. But it wasn’t to be like that.

While they were away in Africa, the house in Missoula had been rented out to some UM postgrad students. They were friends of friends and had left it clean and tidy and done no damage, but they had rearranged all the furniture and left the place smelling so utterly different that Amy promptly burst into tears. It no longer felt like home, she said.

Once she had found her old toys and books and made contact again with friends, she soon felt better. And whether it faded or they just got used to it, they soon forgot about the smell. But there was something more potent in the air which no amount of freshening or subtle tidying could banish. The memory of Ed was everywhere, not simply in the photographs - many of which Connor had himself taken - but like an almost palpable presence in every room.

Julia knew that Connor must sense it even more sharply than she did. She tried to view it as benign, to convince herself that they had Ed’s blessing, that he would want them to be happy and to move forward, not fester like prisoners of the past, but she couldn’t make the mental leap. She knew that she and Connor should talk about it, but it was too vast a subject and she worried that to raise it would somehow make her seem presumptuous.

He stayed for a couple of days to help them settle in and get themselves organized. But Julia could tell how awkward he felt. After all the trauma, Amy still needed constant comfort and even if she had wanted to, there was no way that Julia was going to let her sleep on her own yet. Connor slept in the little guest room and once Amy had fallen asleep in her arms, Julia lay wondering if she should slip away and go to him. But the risk of Amy waking and finding her gone seemed too great. And, anyhow, although she longed for him, she wasn’t certain that he felt the same. On the third morning he left to go to his mother’s ranch and perhaps she imagined it, but he looked relieved to be going. When he kissed her goodbye, it was on the cheek, like a friend.

It seemed to Julia, in those first desolate days, that the entire geography of their lives had been changed and that by some cruel joke no one had given them a map or a compass to steer by.

In the weeks that followed, Connor phoned every day and came often to see them. And on weekends she and Amy would drive over the divide to stay with him and his mother at the ranch. It was the cusp of spring and Connor would take Amy riding and when the weather grew warmer, the three of them would sometimes go hiking. He gave Amy a camera and showed her how to use it and he took her down to the creek and taught her how to cast a fly.

He had a way with her that was altogether different from Ed’s. Amy’s relationship with Ed had been full of exuberant banter; they were both great talkers and extroverts and being around them was sometimes like listening to a pair of comics competing on a talk show. Connor talked too, but his way was much more gentle and mostly he just listened, fixing her with those pale blue eyes and smiling and nodding.

Watching the two of them grow steadily closer, Julia felt happy for them both. But she couldn’t quite suppress a faintest twinge of envy. For her own relationship with Connor seemed becalmed in a kind of sibling friendship. There were moments, the occasional look or touch, when she felt sure that he wanted her as much she wanted him. But neither of them seemed willing or able to step across the line. In any case, with Amy still so needy and the memory of Ed so vivid and omnipresent, the occasion never seemed to present itself.

One balmy evening in May, Connor dropped by unannounced. Julia had been busy digging neglected flowerbeds all afternoon and was blotched with dirt and sweat. He said he was on his way to Hamilton to meet up with Chuck Hamer and some of his other smoke jumping buddies and since he was passing, he thought he would call by and say hello. He hoped she didn’t mind. Julia said she didn’t and apologized for looking such a wreck. He said he thought she looked just fine. Amy had gone down to the river to see if she could catch supper. She heard Connor’s voice and turned and waved and he waved back.

‘Would you like a beer?’ Julia said.

‘Sure, if you’re going to have one.’

She went inside to fetch them and while she was there tried to smarten herself up in the hallway mirror but decided she was beyond repair. She thought he might have gone down to the river to be with Amy but she found him waiting for her on the deck and they stood there, drinking their beers while the light mellowed around them.

‘I was trying to figure out what was different out here,’ he said. ‘You took down that old rope rail.’

‘Oh, yeah, we did. Well, you know, it wasn’t really needed anymore.’

‘Opens the place up.’

‘It does. Gives us more space.’

He nodded and for a while neither of them said anything. How the conversation might have developed, she would never know, because at that moment, Amy hooked a fish and let out a whoop and they both went running down to the river to join her. She landed it with only a few words of guidance from Connor. It was a rainbow but too small to keep. Connor carefully unhooked the fly and lowered the fish gently into the water and they watched it linger for a moment as if it couldn’t believe it was free, then dart away in a flash of silver.

By early June, Amy seemed to have recovered most of her old zest and confidence. She started to sleep in her own room, though the first few times she came creeping back at the dead of night to Julia’s. At supper one evening she announced that the coming weekend her friend Molly was having a sleepover birthday party.

‘Is it okay if I go?’ she asked tentatively.

‘Is it “okay”? I think that’s terrific.’

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

‘Heck, I might even have a sleepover myself!’

‘With Connor?’

Julia gulped. She laughed too loudly and felt herself blushing.

‘Well, no, honey. That’s not what I meant. I just said it, you know, as a joke.’

‘It’s okay, you know. I don’t mind.’

Julia didn’t know where to look or what to say. Amy went on.

‘I mean, I thought we were all going to, like, live together.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘Of course I do! I love him. He’s not my daddy but he is my father.’

That did it. Julia got up and went to her and they grabbed hold of each other, crying and laughing at the same time. Still hugging her, Amy went on.

‘You love him too. I know you do by the way you look at him.’

‘Do I? I mean, do you?’

‘Yes. And he looks at you the same way.’

‘Does he?’

Amy disengaged from Julia’s arms and sniffed and wiped her tears away.