Town Burning (46 page)

And then cried in terror, for the hand closed upon his.

—Gently, with the hesitation, almost the tenderness, of consciousness. Would he look up along the scarred arm, up the body to the face, his eyes darting closer to the horror he might find there? If the eyes now opened—were now open—charged with the sudden power of sense, signaling the glee of vegetable turned animal…Perhaps they smiled at him! He snatched his hand away. No, the face was still and closed; the thin tube still proclaimed Bruce lump. But the hand still moved upon the sheet, slowly clenching and unclenching with the idiot disconnectedness of the claw of a dying bird.

He made himself take the hand again, and suffered the weak clenchings of it. It hadn’t hurt him. It hadn’t had the strength. Moved by some stray circuit of the infinite, now disorganized, geometry of sense, the hand in spasm merely flexed. If he could forgive, or be forgiven, the same two hands must do their meeting sent by mind, strong in circuit, aimed by eyes. He could remember when he ran from a Bruce who may not have chased to hurt him. Younger, weaker, he had learned to run and disappear as a mouse evades a hawk. Older, no longer mouse, the pattern was still in force: to break it he must willfully give himself.

No sunburst of love born or hate ended, but in his hand the hand of his brother grew familiar. There was no past time, as there never is, no memory of tentative, shared possibilities. So he must be crying out of pity for the death of pride, out of sadness for love unborn.

He had never heard his father cry before, but now he recognized that tortured noise as the expected progression of his father’s deep and virile voice. As he turned to add the strength of his arms to the weakness of his father in sorrow, he heard his own smooth, involuntary moans. Smooth in the resolution of indifference, in the loss of hate, this music seemed to become the pure and simple mourning of love that heals and cleans like rain.

Jane waited beside the little graveyard, where he had mysteriously told her to wait. The order had been calm and stern—she hadn’t thought to question it. Now she waited with a quiet confidence she could not, although she tried, disturb. God knew there were reasons for anxiety. What had been settled, except that she had admitted need beyond reason or restriction? He had found her in the hospital, and with an inner certainty she could not question said that now he was fit. He’d been to see his brother, and said: “I saw Bruce. He’s sick and dying, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Darkness was coming up Pike Hill, moving up from the valley where Cascom and Connecticut joined as if Leah, as her lights went on, pushed night up into the wild, higher places. In the west the sun had gone out of an orange sky. No wind at all moved the great black pines behind the graveyard, and no animals moved in the new darkness; that shade of night had come when even the red squirrels left talking for fear of silent owls.

Leah smoldered in the east, burned without flame. Only the thin smoke hovered and stayed for warning.

She heard him coming through the trees, his steps soft and precise even in the dry brush. Then he stood quietly beside her. “I didn’t want to tell you sooner,” he said with difficulty. “It wasn’t my move. I didn’t mean to let you worry longer than you had to.” He lit a match and held it over a piece of paper so that she could read:

D
EAR
J
OHN
,

I know you was going to turn me in. I do not blame you John. A man never ought to be punised for what he never done even Junior Stevens. I figured out you would come told me first so I figured you would get this. I have got to close now as I am going out to the woods and I will never be comeing back alive. I hereby deed you my farm and truck approx. 100 acres all there on the deed. Do not let them gip you John G.I. $1000 exempton covers all the taxs. Rember all those good times we have had. You was my only friend John.

Sincerely yours,
W
ILLIAM
H
UCKINS
M
ULDROW

P.S. They will not ever find me, W. H. M.

“He’s gone, of course,” John said. “He means it, I can tell you that. You can call Junior when we get back to the house. I don’t want to show this to the police until tomorrow. Give Billy a chance to get himself set. He likes privacy.”

“I’m sorry, John,” she said.

“I knew it before. I went to see him, and he told me not to worry. His rifle’s gone, too. That’s how he’s going to do it.”

She put her arms around his waist, her head under his chin. Above her head his eyes would be fiercely blue, staring, as she had seen them stare, with the power to burn lines in the air; as if they were electrodes aimed—this time back into the deep, absorbent woods.

After a while he turned her toward Leah, and they looked down upon the busy constellation of windows, signs and lights winked by rising heat, masked gently by Leah’s pillaring trees. “We’ve got to go down,” he said, and as if in warning answer a parched wind moved like dust against their faces. A dull, continuing fear surged against her and was stopped by his strong arm. Burning and the threat of it constantly hovered, sometimes hardly felt: the deaths of friends and husbands, hills black and dead, rooms ashes of wood or of love…

“Will it ever rain?” she asked.

“I suppose it will, Janie, but that’s no excuse for waiting.” He turned her around again and stared into her eyes. She looked straight into his and received a nearly blinding charge of that fierce energy.

“I forgot,” he said, and whirled around. “My father’s guilty bourbon!” He went to a thin gravestone, his hand running gently over the edge of it, then bent and pulled up a bottle. “O bourbon,” he said, “I know a stronger medicine than you!” With that he threw the bottle through the trees, where it was silently received.

“Wasn’t much in it, anyway,” he said.

As they walked down again, toward Leah and the things of life, she knew herself to be, again, a part of that purposeful, complicated moil. As they descended into the neighborhood of lights, into the wide tunnel of maples, it seemed to her that the craggy, fertile arms of Leah—threatening or threatened—arched and touched over their heads.

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