Touch (30 page)

“Jeannot.” Franklin’s voice cracked weakly. He stumbled forward, a strange bundle in his arms. “Jeannot.” He thrust his arms out, and my grandfather instinctively took the package. It was not until he was already holding it that he realized it was a baby, my father. The child was quiet and sleeping.

“Where’s Martine?”

Franklin shook his head. “She didn’t …” He gulped air and my grandfather saw that Franklin was crying.

Rebecca touched Jeannot on the shoulder. Her voice was strangely calm. “She threw the baby just now. To Franklin.”

My grandfather shoved my father back into Franklin’s arms and turned to the house. He had taken only a few steps when Pearl brought him to the ground.

It took Pearl and three other men to hold him, Jeannot punching and screaming and writhing under their weight. The flames threw themselves into the house with a stunning fury to match Jeannot’s, the fire shooting into the sky like it wanted to ravage the stars. Even the men who stretched in a line to the river, passing bucket after bucket, moved back from the blaze.

Twice Pearl and the men relaxed their grips on my grandfather, and twice my grandfather tried to rush into the house despite its devastation. They held on to him until even Jeannot gave up hope that Martine might still be alive. The bucket line had long turned toward dousing the neighboring buildings to
keep them from being taken under by fire as well. Franklin hectored several men into helping him wet down the store, though it was far enough away to clearly be out of danger.

Once the men released him, Jeannot stepped as close to the edge of the house as he could stand. He saw his ax lying on the border of dirt and ash, a burning piece of wood lying across the handle. He reached for it and grabbed the blade in his hand, not thinking of its proximity to the fire, and my grandfather held the metal for a moment after he felt the searing pain of the heat. The top of the blade struck a rock as it fell from his hand, ringing into the night. He shook his burned hand, and with his other hand he carefully touched the handle of the ax. Though it was hot and scarred, he was able to pick it up from the ground and carry it over to the steps of the brothel.

The madam cleaned and bandaged my grandfather’s burns. Inside, she told him, some of the women were busy tending to Xiaobo. They had thought the Chinaman would die: he had been pulled from the edges of the destruction, badly burned over half his body. The fire had neatly bisected him, carving a straight line up the center of his body, burning the right side, but leaving the left side untouched, the skin smooth and undamaged. His right side was devastated, however, his hair burned to his scalp, his breath coming ragged like his mouth was held underwater.

BY DAWN, MY GRANDPARENTS’ HOUSE
was only embers. A cabin next door was partially burned, a few logs eaten through by flames so that the curious could peer through to see the
owner—a saloonkeeper who had spent the night hauling buckets of water—sleeping inside. On the banks of the river, Pearl and a few of Jeannot’s men worked to sort through the lumber. In the standing eddies and where the gravel met the river, soot and ash stained the water. The men’s clothing was blackened and in some cases sparked with holes. Many of them had beards or hair that had been eaten away by the flames like Pearl’s.

Rebecca came to the brothel, neatly dressed and wearing a silk faille dress trimmed with white velveteen and blue satin, as if nothing had happened, as if she were headed to a party, though she had a child in either arm. She stood above my grandfather, who was slumped in a low chair, and in the gentlest voice she could manage, my great-aunt said, “Franklin and I will watch Pierre as long as you need, Jeannot. You know that.” Jeannot looked up wordlessly and simply stared at the woman before him, looking from Julia to Pierre, like he did not know which was which, until the madam stood up and shooed Rebecca away.

Father Hugo, wearing his boots and thick gloves to protect him from the lingering, buried heat in the ashes, sifted through the wreck of the house with a shovel. He occasionally stopped to remove something from the fire—a partially melted clock, an oddly untouched painting of a bowl of fruit, a full place setting that rested on the ground—but seemed to be searching for something more specific. After a while, he stopped, left his shovel on the edge of the lot, and went down to the river. He returned with Pearl, both men carrying planks, and together they hammered together a small, neat box. Father Hugo returned to the fire, and with Pearl’s help brought out
what was left of my grandmother’s blackened, heat-split body, still smoking from its ravages, dropping it into the box with a sickening finality. They carried the box over to the building owned by the rat-eyed farrier who passed for an undertaker.

THEY DID NOT HOLD
the funeral that day or the next, or even the third day after, because they could not find my grandfather. He had left his ax on the steps of the brothel, but no other sign of him remained. Finally, on the fourth day, Father Hugo decided that they would wait for Jeannot no longer, and he presided over the interment of the sealed box.

The smell of smoke and burned flesh hovered over the cemetery. Franklin came to the funeral dumb stumbling drunk and mumbling, crying furiously like he was not a man. By the end of the following week, however, Franklin seemed to be the same shopkeeper that he had been before, working furiously to fill orders for the new Havershand lumber company—cobbled together as a patchwork concern, the previous owner disappearing as surely as Jeannot—and fussing over Julia and his nephew and ward, my father. He directed Pearl and the other men asking after the half-burned lumber on the banks of the Sawgamet to leave it alone. He had sold it to the Havershand Company, he said, and they would take it from there.

“AND YOU,” I ASKED
my grandfather when he finished speaking, “where did you go?”

“Where do you think I went, Stephen? You may only be eleven, but even you are old enough to know. I went after Gregory. Man or ghost or monster, I tracked him down and killed him a second time, but this time I kept the bones where they could not get away from me.”

I
CANNOT REMEMBER ANYMORE
if my grandfather told me the story of that long winter and the death and burning that followed before or after he found me on the banks of the river, barely escaped from the monsters in the water. Which came first, I wonder, the qallupilluit dragging me under the ice, my grandmother begging for my life and then telling my grandfather to bring her light, or my grandfather telling me the story of my grandmother’s death? Does it matter?

What I know for sure is that only a few days after my grandmother told Jeannot that she needed him to bring her light he disappeared again. He left Sawgamet sometime during the night and did not return for a month, until only a few days before Christmas. He came back on foot, as he had first come to Sawgamet.

“I’ve what I need,” he told my mother and stepfather the night he returned, over dinner. “And for you,” he said, looking at me and my cousin Virginia, who had joined us, “I have a surprise.”

The next day, while my mother walked an afternoon snack over to my stepfather at the church, Virginia and I sat around the fire with my grandfather.

“But why won’t you tell us why you left again?” Virginia asked, handing my grandfather a cup of tea. Steam poured from the cup into the air, a sign that I should add another log to the fire. I cut the wood for my mother—which might have been why she was so generous with its use—and when she returned from the church she would be disappointed if I had let the house grow too cold. Truth be told, I liked chopping the firewood, enjoyed the chance to handle my father’s ax.

My grandfather’s hands trembled a little as he took the cup and saucer from Virginia. I did not think he was so old—I knew several men who were older than my grandfather who still worked in the cuts, rode the float to Havershand—but something seemed to have been sapped from him in the month he was gone.

“Have I told you of the night you were born?”

Virginia sat down and looked suspiciously at Jeannot. “You weren’t here then. How do you remember that?”

“Ah, perhaps you’re right.” Jeannot grinned. “Why don’t you tell me about the night you were born, then?”

“Really? But how am I supposed to remember the night I was born?” Virginia turned to me. “He’s joking, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is,” I said, though I was never sure with my grandfather.

“Yes, Virginia, I’m teasing at you. How about, instead of talking about why I left, I tell you why I came back?” He grinned. “They are one and the same. Would you like to know what surprise I’ve brought back for you?” He stood quickly and stepped over to the mantel, pulling one of a pair
of lanterns down. He peeled a string of wood from a log and dipped it into the stove and then touched it against the wick of the lantern, watching the flame burn for a moment before setting the lantern down at the end of the table.

“Are you going to play with the shadows, like my mother?” Virginia asked.

“No. Look here,” my grandfather said. He nested his hands into a round and then placed them against the glass of the lantern. “What do you see?”

“A wick,” I said.

“A flame,” Virginia said.

“No,” my grandfather said. “What I’ve brought back is none of those things, though you are close.”

“Jeannot,” my mother said, her voice surprising all of us. Despite the cold air that must have leaked in through the door with her, we had not heard her enter. She stomped her feet and then loosened the shawl that covered her hair. “I thought we agreed that we’d save that for Christmas night.” She turned to Virginia and me. “You can wait four more days, can’t you?”

My grandfather looked abashed and then put out the lantern, trying to turn our attention instead to the story of a moose that hunted wolves, but of course, my mother’s words had only stoked our curiosity.

THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY
, he took us from the house after a late breakfast. He made us bundle ourselves tightly against the snow, told me to take my father’s ax, and asked my mother to prepare a parcel holding lunch for the three of us.