Town Burning (2 page)

“Cheaper than the town feeding me!” Billy yelled, and let his head fall back to laugh, a piercing clatter. Then he shook his head, pretending to be out of breath. “How come you ain’t been up to see me, Johnny? You used to like my brand of cider, as I remember.”

“I’ve been away.”

“Now, that’s right! Seems I heard that. How long you been away, now?”

“Two years.”

“Two years! What’d you do, Johnny, go back in the Army?”

“No, I’ve been traveling around, going to school some.”

“Seems you’re a little old to be going to school, ain’t you?”

“I know it, Billy. I’m too lazy to go to work.”

“You and me both! I don’t suppose you been home yet,” Billy said, looking at John’s clothes. When he turned around to listen to something in the woods, his overalls followed just a little behind, and then fell swinging to catch up. “Nothing,” he said. “How about having a snort—won’t keep you long, Johnny. I got a new house now. Come up and see it.”

He waited for John to decide, and as he waited his face, that seemed to have been beaten and weathered by the same forces that had acted upon a gnarled pine bole behind him, grew nervous to the point of fright. Billy Muldrow, on the edge of Leah’s containing, demanding grasp of everyone who lived in Leah’s valley, had always, and with reason, feared the answer to any question. Impatience was entirely unconvincing in him; now he tried to be sternly disapproving, and achieved a poor parody of Leah’s common attitude toward himself. “Seems to me you been away for two years you can wait fifteen more minutes.”

“All right, Billy.” John had his own reasons for waiting. He might have gone straight home from the station instead of taking this procrastinating long walk—a scouting trip—up Pike Hill and around in back of Leah, where he could see everything at once, and from a safe distance.

He turned his back upon Leah and followed Billy through the pines to a small clapboard building, surprisingly neat, painted bright yellow. On the side, stenciled in black, were the words N
EW
H
AMPSHIRE
H
IGHWAY
D
EPARTMENT
.

“How do you like my new house?” Billy asked.

“Fine. Do they know you’ve got it?”

“Sure do. It’s one of them traveling offices, like. Washed into the river this spring and I paid twenty dollars for it, put her back together and hauled her up here behind my truck. Now I got two houses.”

The other house lay on its side in the brush where Billy had rolled it, silvery boards nail-shot and bent, large red hens hopping in and out of it.

Billy, with a proud and proprietary flair, pulled out his key ring and selected, from a pound of brass keys strung like a sunburst upon it, the right one for the little door’s padlock.

“My new house!” he said, and showed John in. In the dusty brownness, in the old-clothes stink—an odor hardly human and therefore not too sharply unpleasant, as if Billy Muldrow were as inoffensive in his filth as a hooved animal—he pulled out his only chair for John, tucked his shotgun into the spindly, dust-icicled rafters and lit an oil lamp. The two windows, under the dark pines, let in very little of the dying light.

As the warm lamplight grew in the glass, Billy’s furniture, moved from the slightly bigger and draftier shack John remembered, came to view: black woodstove, oilcloth-covered table covered again from edge to edge with nuts, bolts, pipes, dishes, wrenches, interesting steel, brass and copper things that were angled, bent, joined, worn—Billy’s collection to be gleefully explained: “That’s a sliding spline and a Spicer U-joint from a GMC 1950 three-ton truck. That’s a needle valve from a thirty-gallon water heater.” Billy’s truck was smaller and older, and he hadn’t running water, but he knew the names and uses of all his metal pieces. “Sometimes they come in handy.” They never did. No handier than the treasures of a lepidopterist, they were no less accurately and lovingly designated.

In the corners of the shack, stacked and hung, were the supplies and tools of the woods—rifles, cant dog, a pyramid of turnips, a five-gallon can of kerosene, the immense links of a rust-brown logging chain, great rubber boots polka-dotted with cold-patches.

Billy turned to John and spread his arms. “A mite smaller than my old house, Johnny, but it’s tight’s a drum, and cozy. Don’t take nothing to heat.” He sat on his brown hammocky bed and lit his pipe, his long face thinning to a V as he sucked. Then he jumped up. “Jesus!” he shouted, feeling his pants, “I forgot them pa’tridges!” The wild laugh clattered as his body bent backward—a banshee fit, scattered tears and explosive hisses, screams beyond mirth. Then it all stopped short. He leaned toward John, who watched calmly, remembering that no response was necessary, and blew his cheeks into chipmunk balloons; a moment of silence to commemorate the fantastic humor of forgetfulness.

The moment over, he undid his overall straps, reached into his pants and pulled out the partridges. “One’s pretty fat,” he said, and squeezed it delicately with huge thumb and forefinger. “Pretty little bastards, ain’t they?” The birds lay ruffled upon the nuts and bolts, brown and black, plump breasts and skinny necks.

“A lot of good meat there.” John made the required, remembered comment upon edible game.

Billy suddenly braced, mock-serious, his stare barely belied by a smile withheld, and tore his cap from his head as if he were going to throw it like a gage into John’s face. “Cider!” he shouted. “Hard stuff!”

“You did mention it,” John said.

“I did mention it, by God, Johnny. I did! Well!” He kicked a floorboard, and it jumped up far enough so that he could get his hand under it and pull it up, and with it came a trapdoor. He climbed down out of sight.

The lamp gave a silent, smooth light. In the cellar a jug clinked and a wooden spigot squeaked.

He was nearly home, and as if Billy Muldrow’s place—on the very edge of Leah—were a kind of compression chamber, he waited for the possibly suffocating plunge into the greater pressure of town and family below; into the involvement he had evaded for so long. Leah, this little nub of activity among the low New Hampshire mountains, in spite of all experience was to him the hard center of the world. The center, even though it had always seemed to him that one of the main reasons for growing older had been to escape—and he was not the only one who had tried and been unsuccessful. He had been to all the cities of the common dream of freedom and found them unreal—therefore delightful. He did not want to come home. Leah, however, was the place where life began, where death called and struck. His brother was in the hospital, and it was serious, and they had called him back to the place where everything began.

He heard a furtive, immediately inhuman scratching in the dark beneath the table, and reacted with uncharacteristic nervousness. He jumped up and away as shyly as a girl, then received the scornful glance of a large raccoon who swaggered out into the light, coughed warningly and picked his nose with a black, spidery hand. The dark eyes, secure and knowing, planted like jewels in the fine mask of his face, took care to examine his possible enemy before he turned to climb upon the table. He found no reason for fear, evidently, and let his glossy fur settle down again along his shoulders. He then sat down upon a plate, picked up the fatter partridge by the neck, and looked into the bird’s dead and gummy eyes.

“Hey, Billy,” John called softly.

“Yo! Just a minute, boy, I’m filling a jug!”

The raccoon looked accusingly at John, and his fur rose a bit.

“There’s a raccoon on the table.”

A gallon jug of amber cider appeared upon the floor, and Billy followed. “Oh, that’s old Jake,” Billy said. “He’s all right.”

The raccoon watched with great interest as Billy filled two tumblers. His nose was twitchy, his little tongue furtive upon his furry chops.

The cider was light, slightly bitter, with something of the aftertaste of old yellow cheese about it. John thought of the cellars of old houses—white clapboard houses and black earth basements, late fall and the odors of old wooden rain barrels: that wind in the nose was cool and damp.

“Have some more,” Billy said, and tapped the jug with his palm.

John reached for the jug, but the raccoon’s sharp teeth got in the way, white and grinding.

“Ain’t he the cussedest animal?” Billy said, then turned and, without pause or transition from his calm, conversational tone, raged: “God damn it, Jake! This is my house and that’s my cider and I’ll do what I want with it!” The raccoon held his ground, and snarled back. When Billy raised a threatening hand the raccoon backed off a few inches, but with little loss of face. “Here, Johnny, I’ll pour it myself,” Billy said. He scowled at Jake and filled John’s glass full to the brim. “Ain’t no goddam critter going to tell me what to do!”

Jake sat on the table and watched them drink.

“Enough people in this town trying to tell me what to do as it is. You know, Johnny, they got me black-listed in Leah.”

“They got you what?”

“They got me on the black list. I can’t buy no beer in no grocery store. I can’t ‘enter’ the goddam liquor store. How do you like that?”

“Is that legal? What did you do, Billy? You haven’t got any dependents.”

“I don’t know if it’s legal, but Chief Atmon wrote it out on this paper and stuck it up in all the stores. Says ‘blacklist’ on it and my name right next Susie Tercotte and Eightball, Sam Wells, Wallace Widdicomb—all them drunks and a couple old bags live down on River Street. Enough to make a man git mad.”

“You’re no drunk, Billy.”

“I know it! I
git
drunk, but I ain’t no souse, Johnny. You know that.” Billy took a drink and looked over John’s head into the dark corner where a dusty ham hung on a thong. He cleared his throat. “They just don’t like me. They just don’t like me, that’s all. Shot my dog. Shot Daisy. I lived here all my life and never did no harm to nobody.” He took the jug and poured Jake a drink, first dumping a pile of nuts and bolts out of a soup bowl. The raccoon lowered his delicate black nose into the cider, shivered and began to lap.

“I never did like this town,” John said.

“You and me both. I lived here all my life and I never did like the goddam town of Leah. It can wash on down the Connecticut goddam River like it almost did in Thirty-eight, blow away, burn up—wouldn’t bother me none. Like to have one of them big adam-bombs, I’d roll her down Pike Hill bumpity bang bump right down the center of Maple Street, smoking and hissing and all like that. Wouldn’t them little farts run and jump? BOOM! They can have their lousy store-bought beer.”

“Why did Atmon do it?”

“It ain’t that I’m poor—I got nobody depending on me. I eat good, don’t charge nothing at the store, make good money in the woods when I feel like it. I got a truck. I register it every time and git it inspected like everybody. Don’t none of them people like me, is all—Atmon don’t like nobody ain’t got bucks up the chute. Them old biddies this side of Bank Street—now I don’t mean your maw, Johnny, she ain’t as bad as the rest—but them big society big-ass biddies with their Women’s Club and all. You know what I mean? Sometimes I wish I’d of stayed in the Army; they want a man to kiss their ass like that. They don’t like the way I smell, they don’t have to talk to me. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do. I had enough of that in the Army. Now I got to drive across the river to git a quart of beer.”

John shook his head.

“Now I hear Atmon’s going to try to git me black-listed over in Wentworth Junction, too. Then I’ll have to go clear to Northlee.”

“What started it with Atmon?”

“Johnny, I don’t know. Seems they won’t let a man live his own life any more. I’m my own boss and Atmon ain’t. I don’t feel like working, I lay abed or go fishing. Atmon’s got to suck up to them old biddies run this town, the high bloody muckymuck sixty-nine-degree Masons, Rot’ry Club, Elks, Lions, Owls, Mooses, Gooses, Skunks and all that goddam zoo. They won’t leave me be, is all I know.”

“If you ever want any beer I’ll get it for you,” John said.

“They can keep their beer, Johnny. But I want to thank you, Johnny. You never was one of them people. You never was a lousy Junior Stevens nor Keith Joubert nor one of them used to pick on me.”

“They used to pick on me, too.”

“Latest thing, they sawed out the cross brace on my outhouse seat, hoping I’d fall in. Course I saw it. I seen them going down the hill. I told Junior Stevens next day if I ever caught him in the woods he’d wish to God he never was born.”

“He and my brother used to make me wish that,” John said.

“If you’ll pardon my saying it, Johnny, I never could like your brother Bruce.”

“Neither could I.”

“Not that I ain’t sorry he’s in the hospital. I don’t like to see no man in the hospital, Johnny. I guess that’s why you come home. Ain’t that right?”

John put his glass on the table. “I hate to go down,” he said.

“It ain’t your fault, Johnny. It’s the goddam town of Leah. It’s our misfortune we was born here. It’s funny about a little town can be good or bad. You take Wentworth Junction, for instance. Now, that ain’t a bad town. I always did like Wentworth Junction. Nobody never done me no dirt in Wentworth Junction.”

John poured himself half a glass. “I hate to go back, Billy. I don’t think I ever would’ve come back at all, ever, if it wasn’t for this happening.”

“Where was you, anyway?”

“Paris.”

“Paris, France? Well, by God, Johnny, I don’t blame you none!”

“I mean I’d of had to come back to the States, anyway. No money. But I wouldn’t have stopped by at Leah.”

“Your ma and dad wouldn’t like that, though—not coming to see ’em.” Billy looked him straight in the eye—disapprovingly.

“I know they’d want to see me. But Bruce always got so upset whenever I was around. They said in the telegram he wanted to see me, but they always say that anyway.” He got up and finished his cider standing. “Thanks for the hooch, anyway.”

“That’s right!” Billy said, laughing. “Ain’t that batch strong, though! Jake won’t drink of the other barrel, but by God he loves that one!” He looked around. “Where’d that critter go, now, anyways.” The raccoon was gone, but both partridges were still on the table. “Now, you come up anytime you want, Johnny. Anytime. If you want, bring me a case of beer sometime. I’ll pay you for it.”