Town Burning (21 page)

The two old men leaned toward the radio to hear the state news and the progress of the fires to the west, in Vermont. It was the new, local station in Northlee, and the announcer’s voice was shallowly nasal and amateurish. He explained the great circulating high-pressure front that had settled over northern New England and would not move out to sea. The dry weather would continue and the wind would not change. One thousand acres of forest had burned in Summersville, to the southwest, and the water level was so low in ponds and rivers the fire-fighters could barely pump it out. Creeks had died altogether, and fires had crowned across fairly wide roads and highways. Houses and barns had burned to the ground while people watched helplessly.

“If that wind don’t stop!” Sam said suddenly. Adolf nodded, but Aubrey leaned to the radio and concentrated on the announcer’s voice.

“Tomorrow we’re going to clear grass and brush all around the house and barn,” Sam said, “as far as possible. Dry as tinder. Bad.”

Jane sat still on a kitchen chair, waiting for John Cotter. Her grandfather was really worried, and for the first time she herself felt the danger of the dry weather as fear. In all her life she had never seen Sam Stevens clear the brush for fear of fire. He was not careless—far from it. Before anyone entered the barn he had to leave his pipe on a little rack outside, and that rule was never broken. But the farm spring on the hill above was nearly dry, even though it had been cleaned and cleared of mud. The spring had never failed before.

John Cotter’s headlights flickered against the kitchen windows as his car turned in the dooryard, and in a minute he stood in the open door, looking neat almost to the point of frailty in his good clothes. Sam got up and shook his hand, smiling briefly before returning to the radio.

“There was a grass fire on the river flats today,” John said, and even Aubrey looked up. “They got it out, though. They had about a hundred people out.”

“They put it out?” Mrs. Pettibone said, holding her hands, dirtied with the fox’s scent, up to, but not touching, her face. John nodded.

“They had brooms and shovels. It really flared up, right to the road. I guess the road stopped it. It’s the wind.”

“The God-damned wind!” Sam said. He turned the radio off and they all heard the wind around the windows. “It ain’t natural for a wind to last so long.”

“Hills ought to break it up and slow it down,” Aubrey said, “if it’s the wind you’re cussin’.”

Sam turned to him and spoke in a loud voice, “Aubrey, you recall the yellow day?”

“By God! I do. Ayuh. ‘Way back, now.”

“That was a freak,” Sam said. “Scared the daylights out of everybody. I’ll tell you what it was.” He turned to Jane and John, who couldn’t have known, and out of politeness to Adolf, who wouldn’t understand. “The sky came all over yellow—no dusty yellow, neither—bright canary yellow. Nothing that warn’t yellow: a man’s face, his hands, the leaves on the trees was yellow, and the tree trunks was a darker shade of yellow. It near made a man sick to open his eyes. Nobody knew what it was. Air smelt good, like always, sun was up there, only yellower. I’ll tell you what it was like—like looking through a piece of yellow cellophane. Only
everybody
saw it that way. Now we didn’t have no raddios then. Nobody to tell us what was going on outside, so to speak, nor to git expert advice from Concord nor Boston. There was wind that day, too.”

“Ayuh,” Aubrey said.

“Hadn’t been blowing for a month, like this, but it was the same kind of a wind—a mean, pushing hot wind. Some said it was the breath of hell, and believed it. Considerable thought it was the end of the world, and a hell of a lot more wouldn’t have bet it warn’t. No, sir! I was a young man then, and not given to fancying the end of the world, but I felt considerable better when the next day come clean and clear.” He shook his head.

“What made it like that?” John said.

“We never knew for sure,” Sam said. “Some was so ashamed about what they’d said they never asked, preferring to forgit it altogether. Some say ‘twas yellow smoke, high in the sky, come from forest fires way out in New York State and further off even than that.”

“No stink to it,” Aubrey said.

“Some said ‘twas smoke from a volcano blew its top ‘way out in the Pacific Ocean. Some said ‘twas God’s warning we should mend our sinful ways. Nobody never knew for sure.”

“No raddios in them days,” Aubrey said. “A man had to make up his own mind.” They were all silent for a minute, and then Sam turned on the radio again.

“We better go, Janie,” John said. “It’s getting pretty dark.”

They said good night, and Mrs. Pettibone called to them to have a good time.

As she got into the car with John, it seemed like a dream of ten years ago, and wrong to be getting into a car to go on a date with a boy. But she wasn’t married any more; she was a widow. A widow! It made her think of spiders, or anything black and in corners, chimney corners, spinning webs or knitting socks. She could remember going on dates and not being married to Michael Spinelli, but not very clearly. After they were married, they would get into Mr. Spinelli’s old car and they would drive to Anna’s or the Red and White, get the beer and then to the Drive-in and sit and look at the movie and when it was over without talking about it they would drive home, Mike a little irritable because the beer had given him a headache. At home if it wasn’t too late Mr. and Mrs. Spinelli would be looking at television. Then they would all go to bed, and Mike would be asleep in one minute fiat. The minute he put his head on the pillow he would be asleep. Or maybe if they went to the Legion Hall he would have talked the sleepiness out of himself, and when they got home they would go right upstairs after having come in, Mike laughing and his eyes bright. The old people would watch television longer and keep the volume up, knowing very well what was going on upstairs. Mike never seemed to mind that. “What’s wrong with them knowing?” he would say. “They did it themselves.” “Oh, it’s not that,” she would say. “Mike, I know they know and that’s all right, but don’t you ever want some privacy?” “Nobody’s looking at us,” he’d say. “The shades are pulled and they can’t hear nothing over the television.”

But she wanted to be in her own house where they could do it and nobody would know or have to know how often or when or under the influence of how much beer. “You act so proud of it, as if it were something only you could do,” she would say, “and you want to do it and tell about it. I’ll bet you’d do it out in the town square.” “Nothing wrong with it, is there?” he’d say. Then there would be the business of preparation, because Mike didn’t want to have children. “Let’s wait a while,” he’d say. “Wait till we git our house.” And afterward he would draw away just a little bit when she didn’t want him to and she would say: “No, there’s nothing wrong with it. I love you. Put your arms around me.” And for a while he would put his wiry arms, now weak when they had been so strong a few minutes before, around her and he would go to sleep like a puppy with his head against her neck.

They had driven for quite a while in silence, the headlights just able to compete with the fading brightness of the sky. Along the road beneath the trees it was already dark. In Cascom Center, John stopped in front of the filling station and general store.

“Do you want to get some beer?” he asked.

“If you do, John,” she said.

“I mean, will you have one with me in the movies? I won’t get any if you won’t.” He sat undecided until she said she would, then got out of the car and walked quickly up the wide steps to the store, almost too civilized-looking in his neat sport clothes. It seemed that he couldn’t belong to her—be her date—dressed like that. His short, controlled body, wide shoulders and small feet were so different from the men she had had around her: Mike, Junior and their large friends, or Sam and the hired men. He seemed to be a kind of foreigner. She might call it also a kind of social gracefulness; he walked carefully, evenly, and when he stood still he was entirely still, not stooped and gangly-armed like Junior, for instance, who always cocked his elbows as if he were being crowded, or was about to be crowded. She did remember seeing John Cotter try to act that way, in high school. It never fitted him at all, and now he had evidently given it up. That was good. It was not for toughness she had always liked him. Wanted him? But what was the reason? It was not for weakness. She knew enough about herself to know she could never admire or desire weakness. She had seen too much of it, swaggering or otherwise.

She didn’t consider him weak. Physically he was obviously not weak. In character, perhaps—yet even his ability to fade away and be gone was a kind of strength if it kept his personality intact. He left and he came back and then he left again, and he never seemed to change very much at all. She had never seen him drunk; he never got into trouble, never blew up or fought, just faded away, still clear-eyed and calm, politely saying goodbye.

He came out of the store with the beer, got into the car and reached across to lock the door on her side. His arm brushed hers, his face was close to hers, and suddenly she shivered and had to sneeze.

She began to recall the moves and hesitations of a code of action he had probably never stopped using. At least not for ten years, as she had. Now how must she act? Like a young virgin, the firm callow shell holding a treasure and a fear? Surprisingly enough, that would not be very difficult at all. She was at once uncomfortably and luxuriously aware of her body, of her hips and the smooth muscles along the insides of her thighs. She was aware of the hardness of his body and of his strength.

The movie turned out to be Abbott and Costello.

“I should have looked before we came out,” John said.

“Why don’t we just ride around?”

They took the road along the Cascom River, toward Leah.

“I seem to foul everything up,” he said.

She thought of saying, And what have you ever done to foul up? But this was a strange projection of an idea not her own. She felt that John Cotter had done quite a lot of things, even if “things” were measured only in miles traveled, places seen. It was John who seemed to think that he had never done anything. Or maybe he had decided to give her this impression. No, one funny thing about John Cotter was that he was honest. What he
said
was true. It was the way he acted, the way he preserved himself, his immobility that was dishonest—as if he wanted to prove himself a liar by his gestures—or lack of gestures. He spoke like a man, and yet the man’s voice came from that quiet, animal’s body—a split personality? Perhaps the cleavage between the animal and the man was a little wider in him than in other people. In herself, she could not find the border, if there
was
a definite one, between the animal and the woman. Perhaps such a border was like the coast of Maine: as the crow flies, not so far, but following all indentations—hesitations—it might be a thousand miles long.

They followed the new directions for rotary traffic around the Town Square and crossed the covered bridge into Vermont.

“I feel almost as if I had to make things up to you,” he said, “It’s a long sort of thing. I mean when we were young we didn’t really spend much time together. But to myself, in my mind, I spent a lot of time with you.”

“You did?”

“When I thought about girls, I thought about you. Mostly about you. I used to have daydreams—only they were at night, just before I went to sleep. Funny damn’ things. I remember one I used to think up pretty often. I’d be in a jungle, in a loincloth, and here you’d come along, stark naked, scared. You know. And then I’d be up in a tree above your head and I’d grab a vine and swing down beside you and put my arms around you. I could feel your skin sort of cool and bare. Some dream! Only the thing about the jungle was that it was mine. I invented it and
caused
you to be in it. Sometimes I had other girls kidnaped out of their beds and put into my jungle, but mostly it was you.” He looked at her for a second, and she saw a glint of teeth in the semidarkness. “I had another one, too. In this one you and I were lying in a little hole, on the side of a mountain—sort of a little foxhole, with a small ridge of dirt in front, and I had a rifle. Somebody—Japs, Germans—some enemy of the time—sometimes it was the Ku Klux Klan, was attacking up the hill. I’d shoot them and you’d hand me ammunition. You always had one arm around me. I remember it was very comfortable and warm in the hole, and I’d keep picking off those attackers. It was always you in that one.”

“Always me?”

“Yes. Believe me, it was. This was when I was fourteen or fifteen. But I’ll never forget that feeling when we were in that foxhole. In a way it had everything that I wanted—everything all together and at the same time. Sex, comfort, danger. A little natural sadism mixed with honorable danger. What else is necessary?”

“Sadism? What do you mean, ‘natural sadism’? I thought it wasn’t very natural.”

He drove slowly along the river, slowing down to let cars pass. “Of course it’s natural. How else can you explain it? People are always cruel, and the ones who say they aren’t are the crudest. Did you ever know anybody who was never cruel? Wait a minute. The only people who aren’t really sadistic are the ones who admit it in their natures. You know what I mean?” He turned toward her for a long moment—so long she began to worry about going off the road. She put her hand on the dashboard, and he immediately saw it, turned back to his driving and said, “Sorry.”

“Mike’s father,” she said, and surprisingly a wave of pity came over her and tears came into her eyes. She saw the little man coping with his wife, and the word “gutted” occurred to her. Without his son he seemed as incomplete as a hung deer, and she could hear her grandfather say the words,
gutted and done.

“Mr. Spinelli?” John said. “He has the Silver Star. He didn’t kill twenty-seven Germans in self-defense. Listen. When you get the Silver Star it’s not for doing something you actually
have
to do.”

“Maybe he got rid of it then,” she said, “because he’s a good man.” Tears again, and she distrusted easy tears. “I’ve never seen him do anything cruel. Never.”