Those Who Favor Fire (29 page)

“What I meant was, why are you here in Belle Haven?” she said, rolling way from him, gaining her feet.

When he lunged for her again, she stepped out of reach. It was difficult to look at him, at his smile, without returning it.

“Come with me for a minute,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her toward the trees. “I want to show you something.”

“I’ll bet you do,” she said, resisting, half laughing.

“No, nothing like that. God, what a mind you have.”

Reluctantly, she let him lead her into the woods. But before they’d gone far, she asked, again, “What are you doing here? Really.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Rachel. Not this again.”

“Well, if you’d ever give me a straight answer, I wouldn’t keep asking.”

“How straight do I have to get? I’m here because I want to be here. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.”

“But I still don’t understand why you didn’t go back to school.”

“Why
I
didn’t go back to school? Why didn’t
you
?” He paused to bend an unruly branch out of her way.

“If you’re suggesting that our answers are the same,” she said, stepping past him, “you’re wrong.”

“I am not wrong. We’re both content to be where we are. We both have better reasons to stay than we do to leave.”

“But I
live
here,” she said. “I’ve always lived here. This is my home.”

“Mine too.”

“But that’s what I’m talking about. Why have you made
this
town your home?”

“Look, Rachel. I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” He grabbed her by the arm to slow her, took up his place beside her on the narrow trail. “Why can’t you accept my decision to stay?”

“Oh, come on, Joe. You’re a rich boy who belongs here about as much as I belong in Manhattan.”

“That’s not fair,” he said, and she could tell that she had hurt him. “Who are you to say who belongs here and who doesn’t? Besides, you’re not exactly poor yourself.”

“Which has absolutely nothing to do with this. There’s no question that
I
belong here.”

“So you’ve said, over and over and over again. Which makes me think you need to hear it more than I do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. He stepped quickly in front of her, took her by the arms. “Why can’t you take things for what they are?”

“What are they?”

“They are …” he said, shrugging, twisting with frustration, “what they are. And if you would simply admit that I do belong here too—”

“But you don’t. You never have. Not really. You came here unintentionally, to some extent against your will, and I think maybe you would have gone home by now if your father had asked you to.”

“Not true,” he said, leading her slowly along the rabbit trail again, up through the sloping woods. “I’ve stayed here because I’ve wanted to.”

“But that’s what I’m asking you. Why? Why have you wanted to stay in this particular place? When you could go anywhere, do anything you want to do?”

“Why don’t you ask yourself the same question?” he said, but before she had a chance to reply he stopped suddenly and turned again to face her. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

Ahead of them stood a huge old black walnut tree with a trunk as big around as a barrel. It spread its great, heavy branches out in all directions as if it wanted a partner.

“I’d like your permission to build Rusty a house in this tree,” he said.

Impatient with this diversion, she barely looked at the tree. “Way up here? Why not closer to the Kitchen?”

“There aren’t any trees like this down there. None that I could build in, anyway. This is a nice patch of woods. And besides,” he said, “this place is far enough from home to give the kid a thrill but close enough to you to be safe. What do you say?”

“I say ‘Of course,’ of course.” She looked at the walnut tree carefully for the first time, looked at Joe looking at the walnut tree, saw him planning the house he would build for Rusty, and thought she had her answer. She was thrilled by it. To be thinking of tree houses, of building something that would last, he had to mean what he’d said. Belle Haven had become his home in the best sense of the word.

But she was wounded by this answer, too. Undone. For if she had anything to do with his decision, so did Rusty, and Angela, and Ian, and, for all she knew, the taste of Belle Haven’s corn, the music of its birds. Much as she valued her self-reliance, Rachel wanted to be at the center of someone’s world. At the center of Joe’s world. But she was not yet ready to make Joe the center of hers.

She did not know that he, too, was torn. That he prized his hard-won independence as much as he yearned for a bond that would not erode it. That he was wary of trusting too much. In these things, they were alike. But while Rachel was still somewhat cautious about Joe, he was reluctant to put all his faith in a town that could one day be swallowed by flames. He had made it his home, and he was prepared to invest in it his labor and his love, but he would not expect too much of the future.

He would simply stay as long as he could, for all the reasons he had given Rachel, and others, too. One of which lay concealed in a pocket of trees on the far side of Ian’s fields, where the fire had made its indelible mark and Joe, just as clearly, was carving his.

        By the time he discovered his sister’s gold, Joe had spent nearly a year in Belle Haven, riding the bicycle Rachel had lent him or hitchhiking to a dozen farms out of the fire’s range, harvesting whatever the ground yielded: strawberries, corn, cauliflower, beans, apples, pumpkins, fresh, fragrant Christmas trees. When snow flew, he shoveled it. When the breeze warmed, he pruned a thousand apple trees and cleared the brush from unkempt orchards, acre by acre. With time, his speech became more like that of his employers: soft, mumbled, loosely strung with a subtle, northern twang. And with the money he didn’t spend on his food and keep, he bought from Earl a sheaf of sandpaper in various grades and a small collection of carving tools, including a hatchet and a tiny plane.

The Schooner had taught Joe how to take care of the things he owned. The tools taught Joe how to cherish those few possessions that bridge the gap between the thinking mind, the prismatic idea, and creation: tools like the pen, brush, harp, camera, forge, or blade. His most valuable tool was the knife Rusty had given him for whittling. Joe had spent the winter and the spring carving litter from the woods—small branches, broken sticks, even logs—until he began to realize, like Michelangelo, that a sculptor or a carver discovers as much as he creates.

On the day that Joe had fled from Holly’s gold through the fields and into the forest, he had come across a graveyard the likes of which he had never seen. Here the fire had arched upward, scratched the
surface with a blackened fin, and left behind not a crater but a small plot of dead trees like tombstones among the ferns. There were perhaps a dozen of them, quite perfect without their leaves, dead from the roots up, bloodless, not yet brittle. A single dead tree might have gone unnoticed, but a dozen, surrounded by their verdant neighbors, caught Joe’s attention. When he stumbled upon them on the day that he opened the box of gold, he saw, in those trees, what he might never have seen before Rusty’s knife had made him into a carver.

From the moment Joe had read Holly’s letter, his memory of her face had become as clean and clear as a reflection. And when he saw the murdered trees splintering the sunlight with their black shadows, he once again saw her face reflected. As he approached the trees, he took Rusty’s knife from his pocket and opened its blade as if he were breaking bread. He walked past the first of the trees, and past the second, stopped at the third, and with scarcely a pause, lifted his blade.

It was not nearly as easy as he needed it to be. He needed it to be quick and faultless, and when it wasn’t he had to struggle not to hack at the wood and ruin both the tree and the knife. He forced himself to go slowly and not to mind the delay. He convinced himself to stop often and catch his breath, blow on his blistering palm, and walk the blood into his legs. When it became dark, he wiped his knife on his pants, closed it, put it back in his pocket, and left the woods.

Early the next morning he got out of bed wearing the clothes he’d gone to sleep in, gathered up his carving tools, and walked through the soaking fields to the woods. The light was different now, and for a moment he could not see Holly in the monument of dead wood. But then yes, there she was, waiting. And he took up exactly where he’d left off the day before.

By the third day, Joe had lost his job as a bag boy at the A&P. Rachel, when she came looking for him, found Ian instead, sitting under the Schooner’s awning, smoking his pipe.

“There’s something the matter with him, Rachel,” he said. “He keeps going off into the woods, and he won’t talk to me.”

“Maybe he’s having second thoughts about all this,” she said, her belly lined with dread.

“I don’t think that’s it,” Ian said. “I think maybe he’s staking some sort of claim.”

She thought about this for a bit and then said, “Tell him that I was by, Ian. He’ll talk about it if he wants to.”

At the end of the third day, Joe came out of the woods and found his way home, slept the night through, and then went back out into the world to work.

He spent the first days of May in dirt of one sort or another, his boots heavy with mud, his fingernails so packed with earth that they ached. He helped a farmer plant potatoes in the rain and hang a new barn door. He turned over a vegetable garden for Mrs. Sapinsley, who lived next to the elementary school and had sciatica so bad she could no longer wield a shovel. He dug a new grave in the Baptist churchyard and then filled it back in the next day. And every evening, after he had fed himself and washed the dirt from his eyelashes, he gathered up his tools and hurried across the fields, scattering birds and big-eyed mice as he ran.

Rachel had not asked him about the silence or the absence he’d maintained for that handful of days. But after Mother’s Day Joe decided that it would cost him nothing to make a pact with her.

“I think I can make you understand why I’ve stayed in Belle Haven, Rachel,” he said to her one day in June. “But it will mean telling you things I’d rather not talk about, so don’t ask me any more questions after this.”

That afternoon Joe led Rachel to the woods on the far side of Ian’s sloping fields. He walked carefully, on the sides of his feet, as if he were stalking deer, compelling her to do the same. She was taut with anticipation and found that she had to make a conscious effort to breathe deeply.
What is all this?
she asked herself, unable to believe that Joe could have any secrets from her when he’d already told her so many.

Through the green galaxy of maple leaves, she thought she glimpsed a face up ahead, watching them, but in a moment it was gone. The light was growing brighter, she realized, and the undergrowth less dense. Someone—Joe, she presumed—had beaten a path through the ferns, which made their travel easy and certain. I’ll be able to find my way back here, she realized.

Then Joe came to a stop, moved to one side, and Rachel saw before her an austere collection of small, dead trees, all the more unlikely for the attendance of their robust neighbors. It was an eerie, quiet spot. The dead trees were very still. Very stark. She wondered why Joe had brought her here.

She looked to him for some clue, but he was standing as quietly as
the trees, looking into their branches. So she turned to them once more, and that was when she saw what he had accomplished.

Given the chance, weather and time would camouflage Joe’s creation so well that a person could walk right by it without ever knowing it was there. But although the wood was dead, it had not yet completely grayed and the places that Joe had carved were a different color from the bark he’d left untouched. It was this different color that drew Rachel’s attention. Once it had, she was so startled that for a moment her heart stopped beating.

She was immediately reminded, when she saw what he had done, of a photograph she’d once seen, of a cliff of red clay tumbling down into the sea. Nothing but mud, chunks of it, boulders of it. And then, when she’d stopped looking at the photograph so hard, she had seen among the rubble a fantastic sculpture of a mermaid sitting on a rock. The tide had taken most of her tail, but her magnificence had been unimpaired. Rachel had not forgotten that photograph, just as she would not forget this.

She had never seen Holly or any likeness of her, but she knew that this was Joe’s sister among the trees. It wasn’t just the imperfection of her face, although that made Rachel certain. It was the way Joe had carved her, so that she was less beautiful than striking, and with a look of such yearning on her face that Rachel crossed her arms over her chest.

Joe had carved the trunk of the small tree so that it merely suggested a woman’s body, but he had given her a face of such acute detail that for a moment Rachel found herself questioning Joe’s part in its creation.

“You did this?” she asked him.

“I can hardly believe it myself,” he said. “I’ve been carving things for months now, but I had no idea I could do anything like this. Nothing at all like this. I feel like a man who goes to bed one night a cripple and wakes up with wings.”

“I don’t know what to say, Joe.” She walked up close to the statue and, glancing at him for permission, ran her finger along its jaw.

“It’s not just carving this that has me so excited, Rachel,” he said. “It’s the idea that if I can do something like this when I never, ever suspected that I could, there might be other things waiting ahead. It’s incredible.” He ran his hands down a dead maple. “What if I had never come to Belle Haven? What if Rusty had never given me that
knife? What if I had never found these trees? What if I’d lived and died without ever knowing how unbelievably satisfying it is to make something like this?”

He sat down and stretched his long legs out in front of him, tipped his head back so that the sun struck his face. “There have been lots of times in my life when I’ve done something beautiful in my head, but I’ve never come close to achieving the same perfection outside of my skull. When I was a kid, I thought up the most wonderful birdhouse, but when I tried to build the thing, I simply made a mess. French. That was another thing. After four years of classes, I could speak it so well in my head, but when I opened my mouth, it came out lousy. Although I suppose those things had more to do with inexperience than anything. But there’s more to most things than experience. If there weren’t, there would be thousands of Mozarts.”