Town Burning (11 page)

John looked back, once the doorframe was past and Bruce’s room was at least a room he had left, as if it were in another dimension. He saw Bruce’s steady profile against the white window, one hand bringing a cigarette slowly up to the face. It was the face of the gut-shot hawk he had killed in the woods—cold, violent and brave.

The next morning they were summoned, with a certain amount of apology, to the hospital, where three neurosurgeons explained that the cancerous tissue in Bruce’s brain was too widespread to be removed completely. The patient lived, and might recover consciousness for a while. They would just have to wait and see.

Gladys Cotter had to be helped from the room, from the hospital, and into the car. She didn’t scream or cry, and after spending the day alone, in bed, she went back to the hospital to sit by Bruce’s bed.

Michael Spinelli had been dead a week. Because of the long dry spell his grave had not begun to heal; the replaced blanket of sod was brown around the cut, and the flowers in pots were wilted and dying. Jane went twice to the Catholic cemetery with the Spinellis, Mrs. Spinelli humped and older in shiny black dress and veil, Cesare Spinelli dried up and silent as the faded flowers.

Jane knew she would now see the Spinellis only by chance, in Leah. She had moved to the farm the few things ten years of marriage had brought her; wedding presents such as unused silver and dishes, linen and a little radio. Mike’s motorcycle leaned against the wall in one of the farm sheds where Junior had put it after hauling it back from the accident.

Mrs. Pettibone, Sam Steven’s housekeeper, washed dishes. Jane wiped, taking the thick white plates from Mrs. Pettibone’s rough hand. Her grandfather and the two hired men were out behind the barn butchering an old horse for dog meat. She had heard the shot, an hour before, but had gone on wiping, glad that she had not seen the old gray gelding die. She had known the horse most of her life, had ridden the broad, warm back when he had been led out of his traces to his stable; a gentle, phlegmatic giant of an animal with great dignity and not too many brains. He had worked hard all his life pulling stoneboat and pulpwood, and in early spring the maple-sap sledge. But most things on the farm, animals included, were used completely—used in some way until nothing was left. Only dogs and people could die and have done with their usefulness.

Mrs. Pettibone scrubbed the dishes slowly, carefully, with the steady concentration she gave to all her work. In her small round face black eyes looked out of deep brown cavities. The color of her skin was pale ivory on forehead and cheekbones, turning to dark brown in all hollows and creases. Even the shallow concavities of her temples shaded perceptibly into unhealthy brown. Her few teeth were her own, but were widely separated and pointed almost straight out of her mouth. Although Jane could not remember a time when Mrs. Pettibone had been sick, she looked terribly unhealthy. Her black hair hung limply to her neck, and her back was slightly bent all the time. And yet she looked at her dishes now as she looked at all things and all people, with an eager, cheerful expression. She was always ready to say the pleasant, conciliatory words; to try to cure any pain, to end any disagreement. As she handed a gravy boat to Jane she smiled, keeping her mouth closed against the alarming flash of her malocclusion.

“Poor old Gray,” Jane said.

“He was gitting old and lame,” Mrs. Pettibone said. “He used to kind of sigh to himself all the time, for the pain.”

“He always was so gentle. Wasn’t he strong, though?” Jane said.

“He could pull!” Mrs. Pettibone said, her hands motionless in the dishwater for a second. Her face lighted up—proud for the horse. “He was a worker.” She nodded and went on washing. “But he had to go, Janie. He was gitting awful old for a horse.”

“But it seems a shame to go for dog food. A great big horse like Gray.”

“Hm-mm?” Mrs. Pettibone said, sloshing water around.

“Well, it’s too bad.”

“He’s happier now,” Mrs. Pettibone said.

Jane went to the windows facing down the hill toward Lake Cascom. Between plastic curtains made to look like lace, plants in pots on saucers, the wide slopes of Cascom Mountain’s foothills went down to the valley. Behind the farm and its back pasture the dark mountain rose wooded to the top, but could not be seen from the house because of a long series of sheds and outbuildings that had grown up between the house and barn. Down at the end of the farm hill’s gravel road she saw the small black ribbon of the main road here and there between brush and trees. The hills to the east were blue-black in the shadow of evergreen, lighter green in the hardwood. The sky was deep and cloudless to the final hills.

“All done, Janie. I’ll do them pots and frypans,” Mrs. Pettibone said.

The men were coming through the connecting sheds, stamping and kicking the gore from their boots. Sam Stevens pushed the door open with an elbow, and gestured with a bloody hand.

“Git me that little hone, and the other one.”

Mrs. Pettibone went to a drawer and got the stones. Behind Sam, Adolf and the old man, Aubrey, waited patiently, bloody knives in their hands.

“Don’t want to blood up your floor,” Sam said. They went back to the carcass of the horse.

In a few minutes Adolf came back, grinning and holding out one of the stones. He spoke little English but seemed to understand anything that had to do with the farm, having come from one, via war and prison, in Poland. Sam Stevens had hired him from a displaced-persons agency after the war. Jane never managed to find out exactly what his nationality was. He insisted that he was not Polish, and claimed that he could speak German, Polish, Russian and some other languages. Usually he grinned and made signs, as he did now with the stones. Jane rinsed them off and put them back in the drawer, while Adolf grinned and nodded. He was in his thirties, thin and wiry. He seemed awkward, yet never had accidents, never dropped anything. He wore his black hair combed straight back and long, and when he bent over, the whole top layer of it would fall down over his face to his chin. Then he would snap his head in such a way—an expert, unconscious motion—that the hair would whip up and exactly back into place. He must have done this fifty times a day.

“Are they through yet?” Jane asked.

“Huh?”

“Are they done?”

“Ah!
Done!”
Adolf said, grinning wider. “Done? No! Nol Big horse I Meat!” He held his arms out as if over a big pile. Jane turned away. “Goodbye!” Adolf said, laughing, and shut the door behind him.

Mrs. Pettibone was already peeling potatoes for lunch. She looked shyly at Jane. “I think Adolf’s got a crush on you, Janie.”

“A crush?”

“That’s what I think.” Mrs. Pettibone grinned at her potatoes.

“Well, I haven’t got a crush on him,” Jane said, smiling at the excited Mrs. Pettibone, who dipped a potato several more times than was necessary in her pan of water. Her shoulders moved up and down as she worked, as if her back were stiff.

“I guess nothing much ever happens on the farm,” Jane said, putting her hand gently on Mrs. Pettibone’s moving shoulder. The shoulder kept twitching, and Mrs. Pettibone smiled without trying to hide her teeth.

“Why do you do that—that twitching?” Jane asked.

“I don’t know, Janie. It don’t hurt none. I don’t know why I do it.” Then she began to hum a song, occasionally singing the words when she remembered them. “Mm-mm—hra-mm—‘my Honolulu bay-bee.’”

A black Ford, dust following, climbed the farm road and turned into the worn space by the dooryard. Mrs. Pettibone ran to the window, holding her wet hands and a potato in the air.

“Who could it be?” she said eagerly, hiding behind a potted fern and peering out from under its feathery branches.

The door of the car opened slowly; then the worried face of Bob Paquette turned to the blind windows. Jane knew why he had come—he wanted to buy Mike’s motorcycle. Charlotte told her that, and also that Bob couldn’t make himself say the words concerning money to her—it seemed too soon after Mike’s death to mention price; to haggle (he would never do that, she knew) over the extent of the damages to the machine. It was hardly damaged at all, but it was not new and the paint was scraped. “He says he can’t buy anything from a woman,” Charlotte had told her, “but he’ll be scouting around, mumbling and looking.” Jane decided to be as helpful as she could, but knew she must preserve the appearance of mourning.

Then she was really surprised to see John Cotter get out of the other side of the car.

“Why, it’s John Cotter!” Mrs. Pettibone said.

“Do you remember him?” Jane asked.

“Of course I do. He came for you!”

For a moment Jane was startled. He came for me? she thought, and then remembered how oddly selective and independent of time Mrs. Pettibone’s memory was.

“Yes. The DeMolay dance. But that was over ten years ago. Fourteen years ago…”

“Such a nice boy. He looked so nice,” Mrs. Pettibone said.

Did time never pass in Leah? Fifteen years, ten years, how many wars and seasons passed without dimming the memory of one event?

“He wore a bow tie with polka dots. He wore a fingertip coat. Wasn’t that a funny kind of coat? You were so pretty, Janie!”

Yes; 1944, and she was sixteen, and she was pretty. Her hand shook when he took it on the dance floor, her hand was wet and she was afraid her breath smelled bad from nervousness. Yes.

“You were a Rainbow Girl, remember how nice it was?” Mrs. Pettibone gave up her position among the fern fronds and went back to the sink. A knock on the kitchen door.

Like all the Paquettes except Ma, Bob’s face was round and red, and the black hair sprang straight out. Charlotte’s face and hair were just the same, and Jane could never understand how Charlotte could look like her brothers and yet be pretty. Bob came into the kitchen and took a long time to wipe his feet on the mat inside the door. Behind him, John Cotter watched, his eyes strangely unfocused. She knew him to be a man who forgot nothing, as she did not, and carefully began to find what made him so noncommittal. She felt that if she ignored him at this moment he would go with Bob and it would be as if he had never been there, as if they had never known each other at all.

“You want to look at the motorcycle,” she said to Bob. He gratefully acknowledged this, said, “I won’t bother you none, Janie,” brushed by John Cotter and headed for the shed. He had evidently been talking to Junior and knew where the machine was. John Cotter, left unshielded, could not turn his back on her. They stared into each other’s eyes.

“What an ass I am,” he said.

She thought: Yes, you are, and you would have gone off noncommittal, too. But out of your shyness come the unexpected, disconcerting things, and you are always and always the boy who when I was a girl put his hand
there
(in dreams only) and put his mouth
there.
Strange thoughts on a sunny afternoon!

“Are you interested in motorcycles?” she asked.

“No.” If anything about his face had changed, perhaps he had become darker. It had always been this darkness, the black of his hair and the dark glow of his skin that had in her dreams been the perfect opposite to her lightness. Michael Spinelli was dark, too, but dark with a racial darkness that seemed sallow and flat, as if Mike’s handsome darkness came of genes, but John Cotter’s came of some romantic effusion of the mind and castles on mountains.

“It’s awfully dumb,” John said, “but I really couldn’t say that I wanted to see you, not motorcycles. I damn’ near didn’t come at all.”

“You’d just as soon not go look at the motorcycle?”

“Yes, I’d just as soon not,” he said. She remembered that her brother and John had had some unpleasant times. She always thought of Junior as the insecure one, and John Cotter as the one perhaps victimized, but the one somehow superior. Now she saw that she was not the sole cause of John Cotter’s hesitation.

“I want to make some coffee,” she said. “Will you wait? Bob will be looking at the machine for a long time, I suppose. Charlotte told me how much he wants it.”

Mrs. Pettibone said, “Coffee’s made, Janie. Take it into the sitting room.”

They took the coffee and sat in the front room beneath the stuffed heads of deer and bear. One of the deer heads was a rifle rack, its horns holding a rifle across each set of prongs. On the end wall a huge black bearskin was tacked head down. A mounted wildcat grinned from the top of the upright piano.

“I was sorry to hear about Mike,” he said shyly; “I always liked Mike.” He knows, she thought, in spite of his awkwardness, that I am not connected with Mike. And I should ask about his brother, Bruce, and then that whole business will be over.

“How is Bruce, Johnny?” she asked.

“Not very good. He hasn’t come out of it yet. I guess we both have that in common, except that with me…I mean, with you and Mike it’s different….”

No. No difference. Was there supposed to be? She watched him closely, to see if the quality of his embarrassment had changed. He stopped everything about his expression, assumed his familiar stolid motionlessness, then reached for his coffee cup, drank a little, and set it down. She had seen him retire from a situation before, seen him become inhumanly quiet.

“You’ve been in Paris,” she said.

“I’ve been using up the last of the G.I. bill. There’s only so much mileage you can get out of a disability, and I’m afraid I’ve run out of gas.”

“I guess you’ll be going into your father’s business now,” she said.

“My father’s? I guess it will be, now.”

“I know. You know I know. Everyone knows in Leah.”

“I hate this goddam town,” he said.

“Maybe you don’t want to do anything,” she said.

“Maybe.” He smiled at her. “You see, that’s my disability. I don’t want to do anything.”

“I heard—you know—I only know what Leah knows—that you were shot in the war,” she said.

“Yes, but I usually say that I got hit on the head by a crate of oranges, or something like that. Anyway, it wasn’t in the war, it was afterward. I did get shot, yes. An old man shot me with an antique pistol, because he was afraid, and I shot him at the same time. That’s the truth—what really happened.”