Town Burning (3 page)

“I will. And I’ll find out why Atmon shut you off.”

“Yeah, sure, Johnny.” He didn’t seem too interested in that. “But you be sure to come and see me, now. You do that.”

John was at the door, and opened it.

“Misery loves company, you know,” Billy said. “You can find the way.”

John left Billy standing in the little door against the lamplight, filling the door and stooping over in it, chinks of yellow light coming out around him.

And still he didn’t want to go home. He should never have stopped, should have let the momentum of the thousands of miles take him straight into Leah. He walked forward, letting his feet in the thin city shoes slip on the pine needles, toward the Huckins graveyard. The west still had color; the sky was bright as day, but the ground was dark. The stones in the little square graveyard tilted darkly against high pale grass, and the birchbark hand lay phosphorescent against the swallowing ground. Florrie Stonebridge Huckins lay in her moldering bed, her bury-hole.
My
back is strong, he thought, but how do I know it?

When he was a little boy and first saw the stones, they meant graveyard, to stay out of, to be afraid of, and later on he could read the verses and the dates. Then it didn’t seem too bad that Florrie Stonebridge had died at the old age of twenty-five. But she had grown younger every year. Now he had lived five years longer than Florrie, and she had died too young.
Her heart was merry
—they loved her.
Her back was slim
—they pitied her—old Zacharia did, anyway, with his stiff spine and horny hands and a sea of stones to carry from the fields, the dwarfish apple trees to keep alive.

The pine boughs sighed. Nearer, a single dry leaf clicked. Suddenly it seemed possible that Florrie Stonebridge, whose slim back wasted among the stones and roots, might come swaying up as a ghost, like thin cloth pulled under water. Or a moldered hand might reach out and feel his ankle. He walked stiffly to the wall, deliberately slow, stiffly moving each foot as if cold bones would touch him if he ran.

He could see the neglected road he must go down, vague among the advancing birch, and at the bottom houses, visible as warm yellow windows among trees. Maple Street, a tunnel under elms, led to his home.

As he walked slowly down Pike Hill, the town came up to meet him. He could not escape its enfolding arms and a warmth that seemed to flow out of the houses and touch his skin. Lamps shone from windows onto lawns and lilac bushes. Thick tree trunks led up into the dark over his head, arching out to form the ceiling of a cave. A smudge of random August leaves smoldered in the gutter—leaves from the maples and one great beech he remembered as if it were a resident person on this street. He could tell the odor of the beech leaves from all the others. Beside the smudge, a wooden wheelbarrow and a wooden rake caught the light as the red hole in the middle of the pile grew bright and faded. He knew the names of the people who lived in the houses, even remembered the bulges and cracks in the sidewalk where roots passed beneath, could name the tranquil faces inside in the light of bridge lamps, in rooms he had been in himself. He remembered evenings after supper on Maple Street, and could hear, eerily as if through an old radio, the cries of children—
Aing going in aing tell maing mama! ‘Fraidy cat! You
don’t play fair, you don’t play fair!
And the last cry was probably his own as he once again found out how unfair things could be. And yet the town held him close, folded itself around him. He remembered this tunnel of a street in all seasons, in all weather—spring days of warm air above melting snow, the first odor of thawing earth; sweet, entirely new and strange after winter, late fall and a horizontal sun at four o’clock; red against the red clapboards of an old square house, the dusty umbrella of a tall elm in bonfire smoke, the same elm upside down in a summer rain puddle; down, down as it climbed to a summer sky and white clouds, lilacs around the kitchen doors, springy and sweet, dog days, mosquito days, the hours after supper when it was getting dark and blue and the children ran smack through the hedges to get away, calling to each other around the corners that were new and dangerous in the dark. The tunnel shut softly behind him. He was home, and sober as a child. He passed the Baptist Church, all dark. The town hall bell rang eight o’clock, each
dang
of the bell wavering on the wind.

He stopped across the street from his own house, still not wanting to go in. But now the windows were all dark and the garage doors were hooked open. I can’t get in, he thought, knowing at the same time that there were several ways he could get in the house, even if it were locked, and it never was. The dark windows looked down at him, the house solid among thick bushes, framed by two blue spruce, the lawn barely green in the streetlight. Above the broad wooden panels of the front door the fanlight’s narrow triangles of glass winked in the streetlight; shadows of leaves moved up and down across the white boards. The house was clean, the paint spotless flat white that seemed to be slightly fluorescent against the dark shutters and small windowpanes. The house neither pulled him toward it nor rejected him, but sat there on its own ground with a solidity, an everlasting solid reality that made him suddenly shy, nearly afraid. He had no protection, none of the objectivity that he had been able to depend upon in foreign places. He wished for another tumbler of Billy Muldrow’s hard cider, then turned toward the town square, having decided quickly and, he thought, rather clinically that he had better get a drink.

Bruce must have had a car, and since there were no cars at all in the double garage, his father and mother had gone separate ways—most likely his mother to the hospital in Northlee and his father to the office. He would go to the office and see his father, but first to Futzie’s Tavern, if Futzie’s was still there, if anything outside of Maple Street was still there as it used to be.

He came out into the Town Square, store windows and neon shining across the green below the tall elms, and walked along the dark side where the great old houses stood. On two sides of the square were gaunt Victorian blocks with Roman arches for windows:
Tuttle
Block 1901, Masonic Hall 1893, Cascom Savings Bank Bldg 1907.
On the other two sides of the square the houses of the wealthy, the little round library, the Congregational Church and the colonial-style post office (1937) gave the square a settled, cozy New England look. On the business side the ground floors of the red-brick blocks contained F. W. Woolworth, the familiar red and gold sign hung against brick arches, Follansbee’s Hardware, Strand Theater, Fire Station, Trotevale’s Department Store—shoes on the left, dry goods on the right, plumbing and mistakes in the basement. People were just coming out of the first show at the Strand, and he circled the dark side, walking among the trees and vacant wooden benches so that he would meet no one. Lights were on in the tourist information booth beneath the wooden bandstand, and inside he saw one of his high-school teachers, Miss Colchester, stacking folders and sharpening pencils, making things neat, fussing busily as she always did.

He managed to reach the comparative darkness of River Street without speaking to anyone, knowing that he had been seen and noted by three people, knowing also that the three were aware of his having seen them and of his deliberate avoidance of their eyes. He approached Futzie’s carefully, then walked quickly past, trying to see who was in the dim room below the bluish television set. He saw enough—a broad black leather jacket and the back of a familiar head. Junior Stevens, who would most likely not be there without some of his friends. Although no motorcycles leaned against the building, he decided not to take a chance on it, and continued down the crooked little street toward the railroad spur and his father’s office.

The lights were on, and the yard light shone on the familiar black-and-white sign:

Wm. Cotter & Son, Building Contractors
Bldg. Materials, Paint, Lumber
Cement & Cinder Blocks
Lehigh Coal

His father’s Buick was parked beside the low clapboard office. Paint cracked and peeled on the office trim and on the sign; weather had warped and separated some of the clapboards, shooting the nails. Frost and rain had gullied the cinder driveway, and the old storage buildings sagged. But the huge padlock on the main gate was shiny, as were the tracks of the railroad siding that entered the yard beside the gate. All wood touched by hands was smooth and clean on gates. and railings.

Still scouting, although he had nothing to fear from his father, he went to the office window. His father sat at Bruce’s desk in the outer office, his large head cocked sideways in order to keep the smoke from his cigarette out of his eyes, staring with a puzzled, humorous expression at a sheaf of forms. In his brightly checked sport jacket, striped shirt and bow tie, his gray slacks with their thin and elegant folds, he seemed the personification of the adorned male—the pheasant cock, the bright strutter of his glaring virility. He was, John sadly knew, afraid, as any cock would be, of the two sons he must consider, alien as they were to his open nature, dark and silent weasels.

At that moment his father looked up and saw him at the window. An expression of fear quickly crossed his father’s face—so quickly he could barely tell that it had been there before a huge grin shone like a light. The big man stood up and waved John around to the front door.

“Come on in, Johnny, for God’s sake!” His voice was deep and strong. “Jesus H. Christ you gave me a turn! For a minute I thought it was your brother.”

“How is Bruce?” John asked.

“Well, Johnny, we don’t know yet. How was Paris, anyway? You could write us a postcard once in a while.” His father’s eyes watched him warily, worried as they always were when he met his son again. “You didn’t rot your gut out with that red wine, did you? Did I send you enough to get home on all right? I guess so. You’re here, aren’t you? I sure am glad to see you back, Johnny. Your mother’s damn’ near crazy with this hospital business.” His voice trailed off at the end. Any expression of doubt or pain was terrible on his father’s face.

“They don’t know what’s wrong with Bruce?”

“There’s something wrong with his head, Johnny. In his head.”

“His head?” John said.

“I mean he’s not mental, or anything like that.” He put his hands up over his ears and shakily pushed them up over his head to form a steeple. Then he took them down quickly. “He’s been having these terrible, God-awful headaches. His eyes get bloodshot, and water. You know him. He wouldn’t go to the doctor nor say anything, but we sat at dinner and watched him. He got mad at first if we mentioned it—you know, like he always did get mad. But he’s been acting funny lately, for him. He was tired, and sometimes he didn’t even get up in the morning. He was—ah—sort of different—to get along with. He was easier to get along with, to tell you the truth, Johnny.”

His father looked down at the sheaf of forms lying on the desk, and let himself down into Bruce’s creaky swivel chair. He picked up the forms and weighed them in both hands, moving his hands up and down, and then tossed them into a corner of the cluttered desk.

“Well, I can’t make head nor tail of those,” he said.

“Is it a brain tumor?” John asked.

“I guess so, Johnny. I guess so. But don’t say that in front of your mother. She don’t like the word. I don’t blame her. Cigarette?”

John took one and sat on the secretary’s desk. His father swiveled around.

“You mean they have to operate?” John asked.

“That’s what Bruce is deciding now. The doctors figure they better, because it got worse so quick. Two months ago he was O.K. It came on all of a sudden.” His father’s face softened into a look of wonder. “Johnny, you wouldn’t have known Bruce in the last couple of months. He was sort of gentle. I mean he’d sit and visit with people. He’d even make jokes—you know what I mean—jokes so people could laugh
with
him. You know what he said when they gave him this test at the hospital? He said he was going to have his brains waved. They were testing his brain waves, or something like that. That’s not
like
Bruce.”

His father poked his cigarette at the butts in the ash tray, turning them over, making a neat little pile in one corner. John could not see Bruce making that joke. For a second he wondered, startled, at the possibility that it might not be true. But his father would never make up such a thing. It might have been one of his mother’s little plots to bring John back into the family, into her lovely dream of a family, like her habit of telling him in letters that Bruce missed him. No, his father had at least learned never to get mixed up in his mother’s little plots. If Bruce
had
changed that much under the weird pressure of his disease, he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t know if he could stand to think about such a thing.

His father had been watching him, and turned away shyly. “It took you a long time to get home, Johnny.” He could hear no trace of blame, no trace of opinion in his father’s voice. “I was worried I didn’t send you enough money for the plane ticket.”

“Things were a little mixed up then,” John said.

“Mixed up how?”

“Well, I owed some money around and I had to use some of the money and take a ship back.”

“Same old Johnny,” his father said, still no trace of blame in his voice. “I guess we better be getting home before your mother gets back from Northlee. You got your bags?”

“Over in the station.”

While his father turned off the office lights and locked the door, John went out and got into the big Buick. It was new, and when his father came he mentioned it, thinking at the time that this was a conscious act of kindness toward his father, who then proudly pushed buttons and said, “See?” as some goo appeared on the windshield and the wipers efficiently wiped it off. The radio tuned itself; the seats whirred and moved up and down; the windows whirred and did the same. The car floated over the bumpy cinders. As they turned out of the yard driveway he saw the mountain of sawdust by the sawmill, partly damming the little Cascom River that had once powered the sawmill and the woolen mill and even the paper mill farther down toward the Connecticut. The double peak of the sawdust mountain had grown considerably in two years. The pile had always seemed huge to him—the dust of a full century of trees. The pile was crusty and hard; big chips, really, torn out by the great circular saw, full of splinters and unpleasant to slide in. There were supposed to be pockets down deep in it—traps for boys—and he had often been pulled, slivery and itching, from the slopes of it, spanked, and sent home, knowing all the time that he would slide on it again even though it was an unpleasant thing to do.