The Secrets of a Fire King (23 page)

Jubilee. Here to meet me. I wondered if the fl ames frightened or compelled her now, if she’d have the courage to push past them to safety, or if they’d hold her still and mesmerized, as I had done.

I pushed against a surge of the crowd to try to find her, but I got knocked off my feet, trampled and kicked until I was pushed into a narrow stream of fire. My palms hit the flames and pain shot up my arms. I smelled the sickening scent of burning fl esh. Remembering my mentor’s words, I curled myself into a ball and rolled.

In this way I escaped the flames, reaching the sawdust on the pe-rimeter, which had already burned to ash. I thought of Eli as I started crawling, my hands burning on the still-hot earth, and like him I kept going despite the pain. Behind me, through veils of fire, I saw the surging shadows of the crowd, but I did not stop, not until I felt the air change suddenly, not until the grass grew damp and cold beneath my hands, not until I was a dozen yards from danger.

The tent burned for nearly two more hours, eating through the edges first, then flaring up, fluttering like a burning scarf, before it settled to the ground. A great crowd had gathered to watch this happen, and after a while I stood and joined them, my own
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hands throbbing as I watched them staring at the fl ames. There was a beauty to this fire, to all fire, a strange pleasure to be taken in danger and destruction. I was a Fire King and this pleasure was the source of all my power, but on that night I lost forever my taste for confl agration.

Seventy-nine people perished, and Jubilee’s name was listed among the dead. Eli had escaped, I heard, though no one could find him. All that night, as my hands blistered and swelled, awash in waves of heat, I thought of her, of Eli, and the life that I had lost.

Ended now, and as the preacher had foretold: in fi re.

The fl ames are irresistible to those who see them, and if I found my destiny in conflagration, then it was, finally, Eli’s fate to succumb to the preacher’s missionary fever. The disaster he called forth must have shaped him absolutely, for many years later he came to the town where I was living, traveling with his own revival tent and an entourage of devotees. His face jumped out at me from a poster hung up on the pole outside my shop. I was by then a blacksmith, a trade where skill with fire is useful and delicate sensation in the hands is not essential. I feel things, certainly, their dull outlines, their density and weight. But I could not tell a feather from a razor on my palm, and even after all these years the slightest heat—a shaft of sun, the swell of living flesh—will radiate a deep aching in my hands.

The people of this town conjecture. I dropped hints, early on, and now they attribute my reticence, my strange scars, to my having fallen from a train on which I was a fi reman. No doubt many of them believe that I was, and am, a drunk. No matter.

They leave me alone. My life is simple, on the surface good, but for these last many years I have lived it around the image of Jubilee, sitting high up in the bleachers, her feet balanced on her old valise.

I went to the revival, though I had not set foot at a religious service since I traveled with the preacher. I heard the whispers, felt the looks of surprise as I walked into that tent, the smell of hot canvas and too many sweating bodies raising the memories of my dead life. Two women got onstage and swore they had
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been crippled once, and healed by Father Eli. A ringer in the audience began to speak in tongues. I saw the crowd swaying, saw how deeply they wanted to believe. By the time Eli came onstage he had them hooked and thrashing, desperate to rise up and let the air of their ordinary lives burn them clean.

He was older, of course, heavier, and he had grown some too.

His voice had changed as well, thickened and roughened, as if the smoke he must have inhaled that night had seared his vocal chords. But he talked better than the preacher ever had, better than I had myself, filling the revival tent with a fervent cadence.

He’d grown rich with the things of this world; his clothes were elegant, beautifully cut. I kept one hand securely on my wallet, but the other wandered to my chest, where the heat of my own flesh radiated an aching in my smooth palm. I thought of Jubilee, her skin warm beneath this same hand as we stood together by the mirror. Eli stood up on the stage, his face so like hers, his eyes so like the blue of a fading sky, that my throat went dry with memory, with desire.

Eli talked on. He got the crowd around me in a fervor. When he spoke of paradise, I held my peace. When he got going on sin and then redemption, it got a little harder. But when he started quoting Revelations, I stood up. I’d heard it all so many times, the beast, the burning lakes of fire. I heard his voice, and the voice of the preacher before him, and I could contain myself no longer.

“Eli,” I called out, stepping into the aisle. “Eli, speak louder now, for surely you know everything there is to know about the brimstone and the fi re.”

He stopped then and looked straight at me. His hands were raised in benediction and I saw the scars I had given him. Slowly, his arms fell. A silence had descended on the audience. I felt the pressure of their eyes. And I waited, just as they did, to see what Eli would do next.

To my surprise, he merely smiled. And as he did so his eyes left mine and moved to the edge of the stage, where a little group of his followers—the gospel singers, the healed—stood gathered.

She was in the midst of them, still unaware of the commotion I
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had caused, laughing up at a tall, bearded man who, just moments earlier, had claimed his sight had been restored. The child on her hip was patting her face, and she reached without looking to catch the little hand, press it with a kiss.

When the wave of silence finally reached her, she looked fi rst to Eli, puzzled, and then, at last, to me.

“Jubilee,” I said, but my throat constricted and it came out in a whisper.

She stared at me. I waited for some sign of recognition. There were murmurs in the crowd by now, but I did not shift my gaze, nor did Eli speak. All these years, the memory of Jubilee had lingered in the flesh of my hands, emblematic, finally, of everything I had squandered once, then lost.
Do you love her?
Eli had asked, and I had burned his hands for my reply.

When she finally moved she did so swiftly, handing her child to the bearded man. She was gone before I could even think to follow. They closed ranks as she went, filling the space she had vacated, and then the crowd shifted and blocked my way as Eli resumed speaking. I knew that no matter how long or hard I searched, I could never reach her now. Still, I went after her. I left the tent and ran until pain stitched my side and I could run no longer, until I fell into the tall grass at the side of the road. Jubilee.

I lay panting, breathing dust and the bitter scent of wormwood, and my two hands burned deeply with the lack of her.
As it was,
I thought, staring at the sky, vast and blue and infi nitely empty.
As
it is. As it ever shall be.

Thirst

The beach is as white and smooth as the curve of a moon. I sit with an empty glass cradled in my hands, watching the waves slide their thin tongues along the shore. Late afternoon light escapes beneath low clouds, shooting through the surface of the water, making the waves glow for an instant before they lick the land and then grow dark, seething through the pale, gritty sand and disappearing.

My three daughters play just at that point of convergence, squatting where the sea and land meet, digging. When the waves recede, they write their names in the wet sand with sharp sticks, then stand and run, chasing each other, laughing, silhouettes against the sun. They grow serious again quite suddenly and concentrate once more on the tower they’ve been building. It’s an intricate and fragile edifice rising out of the sand, taller than the youngest. My daughters, all slender limbs and bright cheeks and flashing hair, decorate their creation with flowers and shells.

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They shape fanciful turrets and bridges. They are far away, but I hear their laughter, their voices calling softly, each to each.

When the boy comes, they are too absorbed to notice him at first, and when he beckons to my oldest, whose schoolmate he is, she looks up, startled. I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. He lives nearby, and they have played together from the time they were very small. He has always been there, as constant as the sea and sun and sand, but now that he has taken on these new qualities he seems suddenly elusive to her. I have watched her watching him, reacting as she does this very minute, holding herself aloof, brushing sand from her palms and tossing her hair, which catches the light like new wheat, green and gold. He has some discovery he wants her to see; he calls her to come with him. Her sisters protest and she looks at them, wanting to stay, wanting as much to leave.

“I’ll be right back,” she promises. “I’ll just be gone a moment.”

She runs off, then, leaving them behind, and follows the boy to where a jellyfish is beached, thick and translucent. For a moment she is in two places at once, glancing back at her sisters and the magnificent tower, then turning her attention to the boy with his discovery. But when she leans over to study the jellyfi sh more closely, when she tilts her head and pokes at it, gingerly, with the edge of a shell, a wave from the turning tide lifts from the others a hundred yards out and begins to travel, gaining size and speed.

It hits the shore with force, and it spreads far beyond the lovely castle, undermining its foundation. My smaller daughters cry out as the foam rushes around bridges, fills their moats, fl oods the first story. The eldest turns back in time to see the castle crumbling, and then it’s her own cry on the air, above the waves.

She’s running back, but already their edifi ce—all imagination, sun, and air—has crumpled into dust.

Disappointment crests in her face. They all sigh and kick at
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the ruins. After a few minutes, my oldest glances down the beach to the boy by the jellyfish, but he, too, has disappeared.

My glass is empty. So is the pitcher, and the maid is nowhere in sight. But who can blame her? No one would expect a woman to drink so much so quickly. Even to me this thirst seems excessive and somehow shameful, a secret I should keep. For I have been drinking water all week, all month, all night, and all day, and still this thirst of mine seems only to grow. I wake in the night with my lips cracked and parched, my tongue rough and dry on the roof of my mouth.

The pitcher, blown glass, swings heavy in my hand. At the door I pause. My two younger daughters are rebuilding the castle, but the oldest stands alone at the edge of the sea, her arms folded, studying the waves that rush across her feet. All I can see on her face is yearning. Still, given my own condition, I must wonder if this is what is really happening, or only how it appears to me from my own particular vantage point of thirst.

My husband sees things differently, I know. He is arriving even now, a hand waving in the sun-washed air and a voice cascading, and then his feet in their dark leather shoes, polished to a shine, descending the staircase to the beach. A purposeful man, my husband, an important one. Ask him what he sees below and he would give a calm and straightforward answer: three girls, sand gleaming whitely against their tan and healthy skin, playing happily on the beach. And the boy would be just another playmate, a cheerful friend, the jellyfish a scientific study, the sandcastle built precisely so it might be destroyed, the loss inher-ent in its construction essential to the delight in its creation.

Yes, my husband is pragmatic, a man practiced at calm assessment, at managing disasters, at cutting losses. He’s a prince, my husband, born to take the larger view, to seek the greatest good. When we came here, he anticipated how much I would miss the life that I had left, and he did what he could to assuage longings I had not yet even begun to feel. Two walls of every room he fitted with aquariums, floor to ceiling, and these he filled with the wavering plants I had loved so as a girl, the sea fronds and spiky urchins on a sandy floor, great turtles swim-Thirst

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ming high, revealing the soft pale undersides of their bellies. He did this at some sacrifice, for he loves the sunshine, and as a consequence of his great kindness we live in a watery light, the colors both subdued and made more intense by the darkness of the house. I was grateful to him; I am. For as the years passed and I grew more lonely, these tanks became my solace. I added fi sh, one by one, to cheer myself up. I collected them, such an array of dazzling shapes and colors, their scales so vivid, their puzzled and skittish yellow eyes.

On my way back to the veranda, I pause before the two glass walls, watching the flicker of tails, the sidelong, uncertain glances of these fish. Yes, pleasure—water in a pitcher and glass, smooth and heavy in my hands, and everything connected in a chain.

This pitcher, once sand itself, was fired and so transformed.

These fish, too, have had their lives completely altered. They are puzzled and wary, and they suspect me even now. One sudden movement and they will dart away, seeking refuge in the shadows. But I move slowly, and when I leave it’s a shaft of sunlight that startles them and makes them scatter, bumping the glass walls in their haste to get away.

On the raw beach, my husband has taken off his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers to the knees in order to help with the castle. He squats before it, his handsome toes digging into the cool, wet sand. He approves of this, the purposeful building, the earth clinging to our daughters’ hands. He sits back on his heels, considering, and makes suggestions for a larger, deeper moat, a drawbridge.