The Secrets of a Fire King (36 page)

I was five years old that day. I remember it, the heat and the crowd, my mother’s pale blue dress, and the way she held me tightly when the preacher started speaking. “Amen,” my mother said. “Amen, oh yes, AMEN.” I remember the expression on her face, the way her eyes closed shut and her lips parted. I remember how we moved so suddenly toward the steps where the preacher
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stood with his microphone, leading everyone in prayer. Another moment and we were up there with him. My mother put me down and turned to the crowd. When she took the microphone from the startled preacher and began to speak, something happened. She called my name and touched my hair, and then she said,
I am a sinner, I have come here today to tell you about my sin.
People sighed, then, they drew in closer. Their faces filled with rapture.

I know my memory on these points is pure, not a story that was told to me, or one that I saw much later on a film. We have a copy of the newsreel now, down in the archives, and it is still a shock each time I watch it and see how many things I missed. I felt so safe, standing up there with my mother, but I was too young to really understand. I didn’t see the anger on the preacher’s face as my mother wooed his congregation. I don’t remember how the crowd changed beneath her voice and followed her, forming a circle before the clinic doors and lying down. I did not even notice when the police arrived and began hauling them away. But on the film, it happens. My mother and the preacher pray while the circle around them is steadily eroded. I see myself, as the circle shrinks, lifted up and handed blindly into the crowd, to a woman with a patchwork skirt who smelled very clean, like lemons. And then, I see on fi lm the most important thing I missed that day. I see the way my mother rose to power. She stands right by the preacher, praying hard, until just he and she are left. That handsome preacher glances at my mother, this interloper, this surprise. It’s clear he’s thinking that she will be taken first. He expects her to be humble, to concede the stage to him. My mother sees his look and her voice lifts. She closes her eyes and takes a step back. Just a small step, but it’s enough. The police reach the preacher fi rst. He stops praying, startled, when they touch his arm, and suddenly it is just my mother speaking, her eyes open now, sustaining the crowd with the power of her voice alone.

People rise up sometimes, start their lives anew. That day it happened to my mother. She burned pure and rose high above the others, like ash borne lightly on a flame. When they came for her she did not cease her prayers. When they touched her she went limp and heavy in their arms. Her dress swept the ground and her
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sweet voice lifted, and on the news that night she seemed almost angelic. They carried her away still praying, and the crowd parted like a sea to let her pass.

People rise up, but they fall down too. That preacher, for instance, fell so far that he disappeared completely. Others are famous one month, gone the next. They hesitate when boldness is required, they grow vain and self-important and go too far. Sometimes, they sin. In those days before she rose herself, my mother watched them, and she learned. She is smart, careful, and courageous, and her story gives her power when she steps before a crowd. Still, she says, it is a brutal business we are in. There are always those who would like to see her slip. She trusts no one, except for me.

Which is why, when I hear raised voices in her office one afternoon, I pause in the hallway to listen as they talk.

“No, it’s too much,” Gary Peterson, her chief assistant says. He is a young man with a thin mustache and a great ambition, a man who is a constant worry to my mother. “If we go that far we’ll alienate half the country.”

I glimpse my mother, standing behind the desk with her arms folded, frowning. “You saw what happened in Florida,” she insists.

“A clinic closed, and not a soul arrested.” A cleared throat then, a low and unfamiliar voice I can’t quite hear. I know what they are talking about, however. I watched it with my mother on TV. In Florida they piped butyric acid through holes in the clinic walls. Soon everyone spilled out, doctors and nurses, secretaries and patients, vomiting and choking, the building ruined with that smell of sewer gas and rancid meat. My mother watched this happen, amazed and also envious. “That’s bold,” she said, turning off the TV and pacing across the offi ce.

“That’s
innovative.
We’re losing ground, I’m afraid, with the same old approach. We have to do something stunning before we fade away entirely.”

And so I wonder, standing there, what idea she has asked them to consider now.

“It’s too risky,” another voice insists.

“Is it?” she asks. “When we consider the children who would be rescued?”

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“Or lost,” Gary Peterson interjects. “If we fail.” They go on. I lean against the wall, listening to their voices, and press my hand against my lips. It smells of Sam, a clean salty smell of skin, the old vinyl of his car. In another week or so my mother goes to Kansas City, and Sam has put it to me clearly: He wants to come and stay with me while she’s away. He’s going crazy, that’s what he says, he can’t wait any longer. He says it’s now or never. I told him I would think about it, let him know.

“Anyway,” I hear Gary Peterson say. “Your plan involves Nichola, who isn’t exactly reliable these days.” The men laugh and I go still, feeling myself flush bright with anger. They are talking about a year ago in Albany, about the day Gary Peterson made children block the clinic driveway. “Go on,” he said to me, though I was sixteen, older than the others. He put his arm around me. Gary Peterson, tall and strong and slender, with his green eyes and steady smile. I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“Go on, Nichola, please, these little boys and girls need someone like you to be a leader.” The pavement was hot and dusty, scattered with trash, and the cars barely slowed when they swept in from the street. I was scared. But Gary Peterson was so handsome, so good, and he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Go on, Nichola,” he said. “Be a leader.” And he kissed me on the cheek.

I was drawn in then. I remember thinking that my mother was a leader, and I would be one too. Plus I could feel his lips on my skin long after he had stepped away. I looked to where my mother was speaking on the steps. The protest was going very badly, just a few stragglers with signs, and I knew she needed help.

And so I did it. I spread myself out on the asphalt in a line with all the others. The sun beat down. Some of the little ones started crying, so I led them in a song. We sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was the only song I could remember all the words to. Everyone got excited, and someone called in the TV crews. I could see them arriving from the corner of my eyes, circling us with their black cameras. That film is in the archives now, thirty of us lying there, singing. All those sweet small voices.

The camera crew was well established by the time the fi rst doctor got back from lunch. She cruised into the driveway, determined
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to speed past the growing group of protestors, and almost ran over the smallest child, who was lying at the end of the row. Her car squealed to a stop near that girl’s left arm. She got out of her car, livid and trembling, and went right up to my mother, grabbed her arm. I stopped singing so I could listen. That doctor was so angry.

“What in the name of heaven,” she said, “do you think you are doing? If you believe in life, as you claim, then you do not put innocent lives at risk. You do not!”

My mother was calm, in a white dress, angelic. “Close your doors,” she said. “Repent. The Lord will forgive even you, a murderess.”

“And if I had hit that child?” the doctor demanded. She was a small woman, delicate, with smooth gray hair to her shoulders, and yet she shook my mother’s arm with a power born of fury. “If my brakes had failed? Who would have been a murderess then?” Lying there on the hot asphalt, I saw her point. The others were too little to understand, but I was sixteen, and suddenly I saw the danger very clearly. Other cars were pulling up, and there we were, a pavement of soft flesh. Their tires could flatten us in a second. Gary Peterson was hovering near the cameras, talking to the reporters. More crews had come, and the crowd was growing, and I could see that he was very pleased. If one of us were hit, I thought, we would make the national, maybe the international news. I was suddenly very frightened. I waited for my mother to recognize this, to understand the danger, but she was intent on making her point in front of the doctor and a dozen TV cameras.

“Repent,” my mother yelled. “Repent and save the children!” As she spoke another car drove up, too fast and unsuspecting, and bumped the back of the first. The doctor’s car jerked forward a foot, so that the last little girl was lying with her arm against the doctor’s tire, the bumper hanging over her face. She was crying hard, but without making a sound, she was so scared. That was when I stood up. “Hey, Nichola.” Gary Peterson was shouting, and then he was standing next to me, grabbing my arm. “Get back down,” he hissed at me, still smiling. “No one’s going to get hurt.” But already I could feel him fixing bruises on my arm. “No,” I said,

“I won’t.” And when he tried to force me, I screamed. That’s all it
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took—the cameras were on us. He let me go, he had to, and stood there while I helped those children up, one by one, brushed them off, and led them out of danger. We made the national news that night after all. My mother was upset for days, but Gary Peterson, who made the front page of several papers, was quite pleased.

It’s because I am so angry that I step into the doorway.

“Nichola!” my mother says. She must see from my face that I have overheard the conversation. She nods at me seriously and asks me to come in. “There you are, honey. Come say hello to Mr. Amherst and Mr. Strand and of course to Gary. They are here to discuss the upcoming work in Kansas City.” She glances at them then, and smiles, suddenly calm, almost flirtatious, all the tension gone from her face. “We’re having a little disagreement,” she adds.

They smile at this small joke, and look soberly at me. We get all kinds of people here, from the real religious freaks to the bored rich ladies from the suburbs, and I can tell which is which by the way they react whenever I show up. The religious people, they get all emotional. They say,
So that’s your little girl, your baby that was
saved, oh she is sweet.
Some of the ladies even weep to see me, the living embodiment of all their strivings and beliefs. These men, though, are not moved. In fact, they seem uncomfortable, as if I remind them of something they’d rather not know. My mother calls me her secret weapon when dealing with such people. Against these men, with their college degrees, their congregations, their ways of doing things, I am my mother’s strength. Because there is no one who can argue when they see me, the walking, talking evidence of my mother’s great sacrifice for life.

“Nichola,” my mother says softly, glancing at the men. “I wonder if you could help us out.”

“Sure,” I say. “What do you need?”

“These gentlemen would like to know—just as a sort of general inquiry—exactly what you are prepared to do, Nichola? What I mean to say is that there’s some concern, after the incident in Albany, about your level of commitment.”

Our eyes meet. I know that I can help her. And even though I feel a little sick, as if a whiff of butyric acid were puffi ng through the air vents as we speak, I do.

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“I’d do whatever I could to help,” I say. This is not exactly a lie, I decide.

“Anything?” Gary Peterson repeats. He looks at me hard.

“Think about it, Nichola. It’s important. You’d do anything we asked?”

I open my mouth to speak, but the next words won’t come. I keep remembering the hot asphalt against my back, the little voices singing. My mother’s expression is serious now, a frown streaks her forehead. This is a test, and it will hurt her if I fail. I close my eyes, trying to think what to do.

Nichola.
I remember Sam’s touch, the way his words sometimes have double meanings.
Your body is a mystery to me.

And then I open my eyes again and look straight at them, because suddenly I know a way to tell the truth, yet still convince them.

“Look,” I say. “You know I am His instrument on earth.” Gary’s eyes narrow, but my mother smiles and puts her arm around me, a swift triumphant hug, before anyone can speak.

“You see,” she says. She is beaming. “I told you we could count on Nichola.”

Something shifts in the room, then. Something changes. My mother has won some victory, I don’t know what exactly.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Mr. Amherst says as I am leaving. I hurry, relieved to get away. Whatever they are planning doesn’t matter, because I already told my mother I won’t go to Kansas City. “Perhaps it would be best to escalate the action, to make an unforgettable impact, as you suggest.”

I smile, heading up the stairs. I smile because my mother is winning her argument, thanks to me. And more, I smile because today Sam Rush kissed the inside of my elbows and said that he could not live without me, that the blood is always pounding, pounding in his brain these days. Thanks to me.

“You are asking for trouble with that outfit,” my mother says the next day, when Sam drops me off after school.

I flush, wondering if my lips are red, like they feel. Parked in his car, we argued for an hour, and Sam was so angry that I
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started to get scared. He kissed me at the end of it, so hard I couldn’t breathe, and told me to decide tonight, no later.
You love
me,
he insisted, gripping my arm like Gary did.
You know you do.

“Nichola,” my mother insists, “that sweater is too tight, and your skirt is too short. It’s provocative.”