Those Who Favor Fire (46 page)

“I’m sorry I got you all up so early,” Joe said when everyone had arrived, “but I didn’t really want anyone else to know about this. I couldn’t invite everyone to come along, and I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. There’s enough bickering going on in this town already.” He gave a short, sharp dog whistle, and Rusty, hanging from the jungle gym, turned toward him, ears cocked. “Time to go,” he yelled, and Rusty came running.

At Joe’s request and with Joe’s money, Earl had rented a van in Randall big enough to carry all nine of them. They climbed in and settled themselves, saying little, twitchy with curiosity. Even so, no one had tried very hard to find out where they were going, and Joe was amazed by this. He wondered what they were thinking, whether they had guessed his intentions, if not their destination. He thought that Rachel might have some idea, for she had chosen to sit at the back of the van with Angela and refused to meet his eye.

He saw that Mrs. Sapinsley was quietly smiling. Perhaps she was simply glad to be going somewhere, knowing that she could still return. She had told him often how much she loved to live alone, far from the nearest city, and how much she feared what her life would be like once she was stranded in Cleveland, a burden to her son and a stranger to everyone else.

As Joe drove out of town, Rusty, in the seat beside him, pressed his face against the window, staring out at the passing houses or at the foundations of those that were gone, as if he were looking at unfamiliar country. He guessed the names of the small rivers they crossed on their way north, away from Belle Haven, and exclaimed over the faces of deer among the trees. And then he grew silent, and Joe wondered if he had already begun to miss Belle Haven, so recently put behind them.

After a while, Rusty turned suddenly and asked, “Where we going, Joe?”

“Almost there. You’ll see soon enough.”

Rusty touched Joe on the arm so that he turned to look at him. “I want to go home,” he said.

Joe saw in Rusty’s face an unbearable blend of relentless hope and unfocused fear. Looking back to the road ahead, he remembered how it had looked through the Schooner’s big, dusty windshield.

“When I was a boy,” Joe said, “but much younger than you are now, my mother died. One day she was there with me—I can still remember how it felt to sit with my head against her chest—and the
next day she was gone. There wasn’t a single part of a single room in our house that didn’t remind me of her. She had cut some flowers and put them in a vase in my sister’s room the day before she died, and when the flowers wilted someone threw them away and I thought I would go out of my mind. I didn’t ever want to leave that house. But then I changed and my life changed, and it wasn’t until I got to Belle Haven that my mother’s face came back to me, and the smell of her, and the sound of her voice, and the feel of her chest against the back of my head.” Joe turned to look at Rusty, whose eyes were closed. “There are some things that stay with you forever,” he said. “Even after they’re gone.”

They went on without speaking. Rusty leaned his head against the window, his eyes closed. He might have been asleep but for the flexing of his fingers.

Twenty miles from Belle Haven, Joe glanced in the mirror at his silent passengers. “We’re here,” he said.

Rusty opened his eyes and sat forward and was the first to see the gates, which were old and stood wide open. Joe eased the van through them, drove slowly along the dipping, uneven lane, and proceeded alongside a field of clover to the edge of some woods. “I don’t think I’d better go any farther,” he said. “It’s pretty muddy along here right now, and I don’t want to get stuck.”

He shut off the engine and turned in his seat to face the others. Quite suddenly, he was afraid.

“I don’t know if maybe I’ve done the wrong thing here,” he said haltingly, astounding Rachel by blushing. “I thought, when I was visiting my sister in San Francisco last summer, that the time would come when you would all have to leave Belle Haven. Or at least ought to. So, since I had plenty of money, I decided to do something to help. I figured that it … that what I’ve built wouldn’t go to waste, even if you stayed in Belle Haven. I thought that I could always find a use for this place, one way or the other. Or sell it. So don’t anybody feel that you have to, you know, humor me or anything. If you like what you see, wonderful. If not, no harm done.” He cleared his throat and ran a hand over his face. “We’re about three miles south of Cookstown. There’s a good school there. There’s a hospital about five miles east of here, in Fairlawn. Fire stations, police, plenty of stores both places. This,” he said, holding an open hand out toward the land beyond the windows, “used to be part of a small horse farm.
I bought the place on my way back to Belle Haven last August. There are several pastures with woods around them. And—”

But Earl, who hadn’t said much of anything since finding the cross painted on the door of his beloved hardware store, suddenly shook his head, rose partway out of his seat, and held both hands over his head as if Joe had a gun on him. “Whoa, boy,” he said, silencing Joe and forestalling Rachel, who had been gearing up to make a protest of her own. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. This is not Hollywood, Joe.” He sat back down in his seat and put his hands on his knees. “This is not
Wheel of Fortune
. You are not Pat Sajak. And I am not some lady from Topeka with big hair and a pair of stretch pants.”

Mag looked wide-eyed at her husband. “Earl!” she said, glad to hear him talking again but not much liking what she heard. “You want to lie down or something?”

“No, I do not want to lie down or something.” He shrugged her hand off his arm. “Nor do I want charity, which is what I think I’m being measured for, am I right, Joe?”

Joe made a face. “That’s not what this is, Earl.”

“Then what? You pack us all in here and haul us outta town to look at something. What? Put a name to it, Joe. I don’t like mysteries.”

Joe knew Earl was not angry at him. Not specifically. But Earl was angry, and rightly so, and could not very well take it out on the fire itself. Joe didn’t mind being a surrogate. Not where Earl was concerned.

“I don’t have a name for it,” Joe said. “And if it’s all right, I’d just as soon show you as tell you what all this is about.” He turned back around in his seat and stepped out of the van, came around to the other side and slid back the big side door. “Come and see for yourself. Then you can all go home.” He sounded defeated, which made Earl mad at himself, too, and brought him out of the van without any further protest, Mag still watching him out of the corner of her eye.

The rest of them climbed out without a word, except when Mrs. Sapinsley thanked Joe for the hand he offered her, and Dolly said, “Watch your head, Angela,” which was more than she usually said. The sound of Dolly’s voice startled Joe, as it always did. But he never forgot that she was there, for he carried with him the image of her standing guard at the nursery door while her baby grandson lay on the other side and his father raged nearby.

Rachel didn’t say a word. Angela looked like she was simultaneously experiencing every emotion known to man, from anticipation
to regret, and was not enjoying herself much. Rusty, who loved being in the woods, seemed content to take things one step at a time: he was ready to look at what Joe had to show him but in the meantime was happy with the sight of the trees.

Joe led them all down the lane into the woods. Rusty walked alongside him. The others followed, picking their way carefully among the tire ruts and tree roots, keeping the pace slow so that Mrs. Sapinsley would not feel rushed.

The lane had been sculpted by the passage of large trucks, and the undergrowth that bordered it was dusty. It was clear that something had been going on in these woods, but it was not until they were nearly upon it that they saw, at the end of a narrow dirt laneway that led off into the trees, the first of the houses.

It was unmistakably new; there were still stickers on its windowpanes, there was a swath of unplanted ground around it, and the rooms inside looked bare. But, solitary, tucked in among the trees, it did not have the raw look of houses assembled on the muddy, forsaken fields of retreating farmers. It had a wraparound porch with a beautifully carved railing, lots of windows, a big brick chimney, a roof shingled with precious cedar. There were shutters and window boxes at the windows, gables, a big oak door.

When everyone had stopped to have a look, Joe turned to Earl and Mag. He reached into his pocket and took out a ring of keys, sorted through them, and slipped one free. “Here,” he said, holding it out to them. They stared at the key, Joe, the house.

“What’s this?” Earl said.

“It’s the key to that house,” Joe said, trying to smile. “Why don’t you go have a look.”

“But whose house is it?” Mag asked, although the look on her face betrayed her. Feeling none of Joe’s uncertainty, she did nothing to hide her own smile.

“Yours, if you want it,” Joe said.

“What do you mean, theirs?” Angela, looking on, still doubted what was happening. She had been so badly disappointed in her life that she no longer assumed anything much would come her way.

Joe turned to her and shrugged. “Theirs,” he repeated.

“Here we go again.” Earl sighed. “If this isn’t charity, then I don’t know what the hell is.”

But this time Joe was ready. The short walk into the woods had
given him all the time he needed to find another name for what he’d done. “Let me ask you something, Earl,” he said, fingering the raw notches on the key in his hand. “What did you charge me for parking the Schooner in your lot?”

“Nothing. It didn’t cost me anything to let you park there. You comparing that to this? Apples and oranges if I ever saw ’em.”

“And what did you charge me for the supplies and the work you put into Rusty’s tree house?”

“This,” Earl said with a snort, pointing at the house in the woods, “ain’t no tree house.”

“How much?” Joe repeated.

“Nothing.” Earl threw up his hands. “But that was different. It was a good idea, building a tree house for Rusty.” Neither of them said anything about the conversations they’d had, high up in the walnut tree, as they’d wrestled the beams of the tree house into place. Conversations about Rusty’s father, who had not been seen in Belle Haven for over a decade. “It was my pleasure.”

“And this,” Joe said, nodding toward the house among the trees, “is mine.”

Still, Earl did not take the key. He mashed his lips together and blew air out of his nose, like a horse.

“Thank you, Joe,” Mag said, taking the key herself. “Shut up, Earl,” she said, before he’d said another word. “I don’t know what we’ll do about this,” she said to Joe, “but I must say there’s not a thing wrong with your heart. It’s in the right place.” She turned to Earl. “And if you think I’m going to get back in that van without taking a look at that house, you’re outta your mind. I’ve been living above a hardware store for twenty years, Earl, and they were twenty good years,” which took the twist out of his mouth, “but I’m having a look at this house, and that’s all there is to it.”

And with that, she took Earl’s hand and led him into the trees, although he went willingly enough. He’d made it clear he wasn’t looking for a handout. No one could fault him for yielding to a wife who’d asked for very little in her life and would have been happy with less.

“Come on,” Joe said to the rest of them, continuing down the lane, and they followed him in a ragtag sort of way, trying not to look too far ahead, but each for reasons that were entirely their own. Threading like a knotty ribbon through the woods was a string of ancient,
overgrown apple trees. “Those trees still blossom in the spring,” Joe said to no one in particular, but Rusty raised his head, listening.

The next house, on the other side of the lane from the first, was quite small. The garden, which appeared to surround the house, was if anything the bigger of the two. Around both was a low fence, sufficiently high to make rabbits think twice, with a gate and a trellis arching above it, asking for vines. A single step led to a front porch big enough for a rocker. Joe turned to look at Mrs. Sapinsley.

She looked at the house. She knew it was hers, but she did not believe it. “This is not for me,” she said. It did not sound like a question, but it was.

“There aren’t any stairs except that one at the porch,” Joe said, searching for the right key. “And the grocery store will make deliveries. I checked. The garden’s already been turned over, so it’s ready for spring. I had a truck bring in a load of topsoil, but you’ll have to decide what you want in it. Maybe you’d like to bring some of your perennials along with you?”

Mrs. Sapinsley looked at the big, empty garden. She thought of her generous son and wondered how much of him would be hurt, how much relieved, to hear that she would not be joining him in Cleveland.

“But you hardly know me,” she said, feeling that she could not possibly accept such a gift.

Joe remembered the night he had called his father and been told that his sister was dead. He remembered stumbling back to the Schooner where Ian and Rachel and Angela waited inside. He remembered that the three of them, who had barely known him then, had done everything they could to help him find his way.

“I know you well enough,” Joe said. When he took Mrs. Sapinsley by the arm and led her toward the house, she went with him willingly, beginning to be convinced that there was a way to leave Belle Haven without leaving her heart behind.

“I’ll be along in a while to collect you,” Joe said to her as they reached the porch. When he turned back toward the lane, Frank, Angela, Dolly, Rusty, and Rachel all stared at him in complete silence. But he could tell from the looks on their faces that for each of them the silence meant something different.

“Frank,” he said, as he walked up to them. “If you could design your own house, what kind of house would it be?”

Frank, whose hands were still mapped with black from his long association with oil and old metal, grimaced as if he had a bad tooth. “That’s like asking me what I plan to wear to the ball,” he said. “Not something I figured I’d ever be called upon to do.”