Town Burning (12 page)

“You say that you got hit on the head with a crate of oranges?”

“Sometimes I say that I had a duel with a Japanese soldier—one of those suicide types who wouldn’t surrender. That’s the usual story with people in the Pacific who didn’t get there in time for the war. But this old man was a Filipino and he was scared to death.”

“But he shot you,” she said.

“Yes. I didn’t notice that he had for an hour afterward. An old cartridge. The bullet hit me right in the knee, and I can still limp pretty good if I try.”

“You shot him.”

“Yes, I killed him.”

“Do you want some more coffee?” she asked.

“When we came in, I wasn’t even going to say hello to you, for Christ’s sakel” he said. “Can you imagine that? That’s what Leah does to me.”

“You’d think your home town would be where you knew what to do,” she said.

“It’s the only place in the world where I don’t know what to do.”

“So you’ve been going to school all these years?” she said. She watched him, and thought she saw some embarrassment, or guilt, and wondered why this school-going needed an excuse. Evidently it did. Amazing, because in her family going to school had always been a reward deserved because of brilliance or talent. Everyone thought that she should have gone on to college because she was the valedictorian of her high-school class. Yes, such a wonderful address she gave: “Robert Frost and R. P. T. Coffin: Poets of Our Granite Land.” Somehow it seemed a ridiculous title now, but she wasn’t sure quite why.

“I heard that you wrote poetry,” she said.

“I wrote every goddam thing,” he said, “but believe me, Jane, I never used that as an excuse for goldbricking on the G.I. bill. I didn’t.”

“You’re just another person from Leah who thinks he has to earn ten dollars a day,” she said.

He laughed. “You’re right! Only I don’t earn ten dollars a day. I just don’t excuse my lack of industry.”

She saw him become immobile again, and waited, thinking of her experience in this. Although short, it was spread over many years: he was getting ready to say something difficult.

“Why did you marry Mike Spinelli?” he finally asked.

She thought: That’s a good question. Because John Cotter wasn’t in Leah when I needed him? No. At least that is not what I should say. Because I had no time and settled for what was here and looked possible? No. Like all young girls at the glorious end of a hysteria that convinced all of my country, I was sucker to movies and to that dream of warriors. She should ask him: Did you see
The Best Years of Our Lives?
You see, Mike was a legitimate hero. His submarine went into Tokyo Bay and waited for a carrier.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Bob Paquette came in on them, trim and taut in his boots and Levis.

“I saw it, Janie,” he said, and then to John: “Come on out and see it.” John meekly followed Bob out through the sheds.

It seemed as if the last ten years had never passed, except for a heaviness, a weight in the mind that meant time had passed as if she’d been asleep and woke up to know that time had passed. Coming back to the farm, leaving the Spinellis and their house—it was like having been in another room for a while and then coming back. She knew time had passed, ten years of time, but it could just as well have been three years, one year or just six months for all the change it made. The biggest change on the farm in all that time had been the death of old Gray, and that happened just today.

It must have been that way with John Cotter, too. He hadn’t really done anything since the war. Other people had married and had kids and changed into parents and homeowners—at least they looked and acted older. John could have come home from the war yesterday—he looked no different. Perhaps he looked even younger. After the war all the boys had been so careful to look like veterans, but all that was over now. And so did she look the same, as far as she could tell. It was as if she had been in storage: loved but not
used.

She went into the kitchen to help Mrs. Pettibone, but by then the table was all set. Mrs. Pettibone sat close to the radio, listening to polkas and tapping her feet. She looked up, smiled, and moved her feet around as if she were dancing. Jane sat in a straight chair by the window, not quite listening to the music but aware of the frantic electric guitar and the shuffling of Mrs. Pettibone’s old black shoes on the new linoleum rug.

Adolf came in with a bushelbasket full of thick chunks of red meat, grinned and did a little dance on the mat, in time with the music, then crossed toward the cellar stairs. The old man, Aubrey, followed him, his undone overshoe buckles tinkling.

“All over my floor!” Mrs. Pettibone called cheerfully. Aubrey turned and shrugged his shoulders, perhaps smiling, perhaps not, then clumped down the cellar stairs after Adolf.

In a little while the two men came up from the cellar with their empty bushel baskets, and Adolf asked again for the sharpening stones. Aubrey waited stolidly, looking at the wall, and then followed Adolf out. The polka program was over and the radio turned off.

“Where’s Aubrey from?” Jane asked. Mrs. Pettibone thought for a minute.

“Why, Aubrey’s from Cascom. Least he’s always been around Cascom, long’s I remember. I believe Aubrey’s father had a farm over toward Switches Corners. It’s all gone, now. He’s just one of them come out of the woods, Janie. He never had no home of his own, I know of.”

“He must be awfully old,” Jane said.

“Well, now. Aubrey ain’t so terrible old. Not as old as your grandfather, but Aubrey acts pretty old for his age.”

“Is he all alone?”

“No, Aubrey’s got one married sister, anyways, in Leah. He never sees her, though.”

“Never?”

“Nope, never.” Mrs. Pettibone had the broom, sweeping up after the men, and as she swept the last of their dirt out the door she turned, ready to go on with the story.

“I don’t know exactly why, but Aubrey just never goes to Leah. He just eats, works, sleeps and smokes his pipe and chews tobacco, that’s all Aubrey does. Aubrey hasn’t been, now, ten years, anyways, further off than Cascom Corners. I figure he and his sister must of had a argument.”

When Bob Paquette and John came back from the motorcycle, Bob was too shy to ask about buying it. He wanted it badly, and she could see him wanting it almost the way Mike had, but she said nothing. She meant to. She never wanted to see the thing again. She felt about the machine as if it were somehow female, her competitor—his mistress.
La Belle Machine Sans Merci.
Perhaps it should be shot and dismembered as old Gray had been. Then it wouldn’t lead Bob Paquette into some deadly mailbox.

Bob stood around trying, but he finally decided he couldn’t bring it up and edged toward the door. She felt there must be something obscene, or perhaps just in bad taste, about her being a widow, and she was suddenly angry with him. Before she could say anything John touched her on the arm, so lightly she might not have known if she hadn’t seen his hand there.

“I’d like to come and see you, Janie,” he said, impassive as an Indian. He, of course, had seen her anger. His hand hovered upon her arm, motionless and yet there.

“All right, John.”

“I will. I mean it. I’ve got Bruce’s car to use now. We can go to a movie. Would you want to?”

“Yes, I would,” she said, thinking, Isn’t that pretty brave of you? And he could not at that moment say when, or say anything more, for that matter. She understood that. They said goodbye to Mrs. Pettibone, and left.

She watched them drive down the the long hill and go out of sight on the main road, then went into the living room and picked up the coffee cups.

“I guess I better git to serving,” Mrs. Pettibone said. “Them hungry men are coming in.”

This time the three men stamped to the door and took off their boots and rubbers before coming into the kitchen to eat. They had washed at the spigot by the watering trough, but finished off with soap at the big slate sink in the kitchen.

“Nearly done,” Sam Stevens said as he sat down at his place at the head of the table. There was still some blood caked under his big fingernails. The men ate pot roast, boiled potatoes, pickles, cheese and macaroni, and drank coffee. No one talked until Sam leaned back and pulled out his pipe. Jane and Mrs. Pettibone walked back and forth, serving.

“I hear in Leah they’re going to close the woods,” Sam said.

Aubrey nodded, his full and toothless mouth folding around his food like a cow chewing cud. “Heard the raddio say so,” he said finally.

“Hull state. I guess they know what they’re doing,” Sam said. Adolf nodded his head, too.

“No more of them cigarettes in the woods, Adolf,” Sam said, raising his voice to make Adolf understand, as if Adolf were deaf.

“O.K.,” Adolf said, grinning.

They took about fifteen minutes to eat and to drink their coffee. Sam put his pipe out and stood up, the other two getting up with him.

“Too hot to let that meat alone,” Sam said. “It’d best be froze up quick. Come on, boys.”

They adjusted suspenders, tucked in flannel shirts and went out to put on their boots and rubbers. Mrs. Pettibone started to clear off the dishes again, as she had in the morning.

After Jane and Mrs. Pettibone had eaten they did the dishes and peeled potatoes for supper, set the big table again. The remainder of the long afternoon seemed to come into the kitchen and stop everything, as if the hot sun could stop time and all, as in a photograph. Later Jane went up into the attic and found her old leather-tops she had worn on muddy days a long time ago. Because the leather was dry and dusty, she took them down to the kitchen and rubbed Vaseline into them. The woods were dry even in what had been swampy places, but the boots would protect her ankles.

She carefully skirted the place where old Gray had died, just once seeing the men bowed over as she climbed the back pasture toward the mountain. At the top of the pasture she turned to see Lake Cascom in its valley, parts of the little river leading to Leah in the west, and the thousand hills leading her eyes off into a whitish haze on the horizon. The farmhouse and the barn seemed far down and far away, held to the valley by the little hill road that was like a string going down. In back of the barn the men looked like bugs, and in the cropped grass she could barely see parts of the old horse strewn about.

She turned to the mountain on an old trail through maples and then deep in the spruce, climbed to Porcupine Ledges where she could see on this clear day Leah and Northlee and even part of the Connecticut River toward the green hills of Vermont.

As she sat on an angled outcrop of granite, there was a soft explosion of a partridge in the woods beside her. The big bird came sailing on stiff wings, then made whistling short strokes, then glided again across the trail into the thickest brush. She wanted a cigarette, but hadn’t thought to bring any. The woods were too dry, anyway, even if they hadn’t been officially closed yet. Instead she took long breaths of the air, of the constant hot wind so dry and clear it hurt her lungs. She felt that such breaths should hurt a little. It had been a long time since she’d done anything to make her breathe hard—a long time since she’d climbed any hill.

Gladys Cotter came running back into the dining room and stopped short.

“I knew it before the phone stopped ringing,” she said. “I just remembered that instant.” John and William Cotter looked at her, waiting. “It was the Fresh Air lady.” She turned and tapped a painted tray with her fingernail. William Cotter leaned back in his chair, letting his head fall back.

“No!” he said. “No! You said you’d call that off. Well, I hope you told her.”

“I couldn’t. I meant to send a letter when Bruce first—Oh, I don’t know what to do!”

“You’ve got to call back and tell her what the situation is here, and that we can’t take the kids. Next year, maybe, but not now.” He watched his wife carefully as she turned back to the table.

“I never heard anything about this,” John said.

“Your mother said she’d take a boy and a girl for two weeks—from the slums. The New York slums. You know, up here in the fresh air.”

“Fresh air!” John said, wonderingly.

“We can’t have them now,” Gladys Cotter said, but she made no move toward the hall and the telephone.

“It’d be an awful strain right now. You couldn’t do it,” William Cotter said.

“I know it.”

“I don’t think the kids would have much fun in this house now,” John said.

“I know it,” Gladys Cotter said. She had her mind made up. John wondered just how he could get out of it. He’d have to take off. But he couldn’t. He’d promised his father he wouldn’t take off.

“Damn it! I’ll call myself!” William Cotter said.

John tried to back him up. He let his voice rise, and stood up. William Cotter had to stand up, too, because of his threat to call the Fresh Air lady himself.

“Don’t be foolish!” John said, “There’s Bruce over there and we don’t know whether he’s dying or not! And you want to take on two kids you don’t know what they’re like, for God’s sake! They’re probably problem children anyway. Probably unhappy or something. Probably steal everything they get their hands on!”

“I didn’t say I’d take them,” Gladys Cotter said, her face beginning its familiar collapse.

She was getting the martyred, persecuted look. His father saw it and gave up. John sat down.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people!” Gladys Cotter said, crying.

John thought, For God’s sake she’s crying right
at
us, as if she were arguing that way. It was her way of arguing, in fact, not even putting her hands up to her face. And his father, used to being beaten down one way or another, looked away.

“You don’t know what’s wrong with
us,”
John said. “Why don’t you figure what’s wrong with you for a change! Can’t you see what a stupid thing this is?”

She cried harder.

“Johnny,” his father said, admonishing him in a weak voice.

John went into the living room. He looked out to Maple Street as the dusk came over it slowly, softening, bluing everything. His mother sniffed and hiccuped in the dining room. One of them, his father, probably, was pouring more coffee. After that his father would go out to the kitchen and pour some bourbon into it. There he went—the cupboard door squeaked. His father came back through the dining room and stood beside him.