Town Burning (32 page)

The electric clock in the shape of a teapot buzzed, and the little square eye in it blinked black and white. Jane drank her wine as she waited, the grapy fume of it familiar and nostalgic—everything gone for good was missed in some way. She knew herself to be the kind who never visited just to visit, or even visited out of vague duty. If it hadn’t been for the fire she wouldn’t have come to the Spinellis’ again until one of them died, and she was afraid it would be Cesare Spinelli who died first. The quick and the caring ones died first, not the confused, pottering old women. She would probably be one of the latter herself.

But it was a kind of talent not to be daunted—really daunted—by anything, to do the usual, necessary things day after day in spite of any tragedy; to just plain live. Mrs. Spinelli would not leave her kitchen, she said. But she would if she had to, and her husband would pay for it. He would suffer the grand, satisfying (to the woman) fuss, and after it was over the woman would come back screaming and crying and get a big meal for everyone in sight. Refreshed by it all, she would continue to live on her husband’s energy.

Well, if living itself were a kind of simple talent, she herself had better learn to settle down to it. She wondered what would happen to her. Did John Cotter figure in any plan at all? Perhaps she would live on like the old, old people of Cascom Corners, who were so careful that they just dried up and died only when the last little bit of moisture had evaporated out of them. She might live on and on at her grandfather’s farm until he died and Mrs. Pettibone died, until Aubrey died and Adolf learned enough English to go to the city, until the farm went all back to wildcats and foxes and woods.

It was eleven o’clock when the steam whistle on the firehouse started screaming again. Mrs. Spinelli didn’t seem to hear it. If she did, her only reaction was to nod her head. She was primed and ready for disaster. “They ain’t going to take me away,” she said calmly.

Jane had been hoping that Cesare Spinelli, or even the priest, would come back before the old woman changed her mind about being calm, but it was Sam Stevens who crunched the porch boards and pushed open the kitchen door.

“How do, Mrs. Spinelli,” he said, standing solidly inside the door. “Your husband’s on his way over, so don’t git worried. I don’t guess you’ll have to move for a while now. Janie? How you doing?”

“I just heard the whistle again,” she said.

“Oh, I guess we’re going to lose the whole of Poverty Street, both sides. But the wind’s changed, and we got to git back to Cascom. They’s a fire coming round the other side of Cascom Lake. They got the State Police, National Guard, Salvation Army, Red Cross and God knows what-all heading out to save Cascom and Leah from the other side, now. Goddam wind won’t make up her mind which way she’s going to blow. State Police are taking over so Atmon can’t mess things up too bad.” He sighed and sat down on a spindly kitchen chair. A glance at Mrs. Spinelli had evidently convinced him that she would not object.

“Did anybody get hurt in the fire?” Jane asked.

“Feller got his leg crushed when a stove fell on him. They kind of think an old couple name of Bouchard—French—never got out. Can’t find ’em anywheres. Let’s see, now—Keith Joubert got hurt some, too.”

“Keith? What happened to him?” She couldn’t understand why her grandfather smiled.

“Seems he got into a argument with your boy friend”—he looked quickly at Mrs. Spinelli, saw that she hadn’t been listening, and went on—”Johnny Cotter. I never seen nobody took care of in such short order.”

“Who got taken care of?”

“Why, Keith Joubert, strange to say. I never would of predicted that. I’ll tell you something. You don’t want to fool around with John Cotter in a fight. I never seen such a cool feller in a fight.”

“John Cotter?”

“Correct. He never even
hit
the other feller. Shot him down the see-ment and tore his pants, kicked him flat on his bee-hind and sent him home quicker’n you can say ‘scat.’ Damnedest thing I ever did see.”

“They had a
fight?”

“Warn’t much of a fight. Keith Joubert run home with his pants tore and his elbows all scraped.”

“Why was John fighting?”

“Well, now, Janie, you got me there! Oh, well, thank you, Mrs. Spinelli!” The old woman had brought him a glass of wine.

“This here’s what you call ‘dago red,’ ain’t it? I never had none before.” He held the glass up between two huge fingers, looked through it at the light and drank it in one gulp. “Damn’ good. Kind of sour, though, ain’t it?”

Mrs. Spinelli smiled and filled his glass again. “Watch out!” he said, “you’re going to git me drunk!”

“Take a lot of wine, get a big man like you drunk,” she said, and was laughing as Cesare Spinelli came in. Cesare immediately began to laugh too.

“What’s funny?” he asked, smiling and chuckling.

“I swear your wife’s trying to git me drunk on this here grape-juice,” Sam said.

“That’s good! That’s good! I’ll have a glass myself!” Cesare pulled a chair up to the table and sat smiling at everybody. “I never seen such a fire, Mama,” he said hopefully.

“Going to lose the whole of Poverty Street, I reckon,” Sam said. This seemed to have a bad effect on Mrs. Spinelli. She began to look around for her pillow.

“She’s kind of shook up by it all,” Cesare said.

“Can’t say as I blame her none. It ain’t easy what she’s been through.”

“I know it,” Cesare said, clenching his hands.

Yes, Jane thought. It’s the man here who suffers most. But why shouldn’t she identify more with the woman, the mother who had been bereaved? She felt that perhaps it was because she herself had never suffered very much in her life. She should at least have had to take her woman’s chances with death, the death of someone she really loved.

But the office wasn’t empty. Madbury and William Cotter crouched on the floor above a six-foot square of old fiberboard, their bloody hands working amid the ruins, the silvery, twitching ruins, of hundreds of mutilated bullfrogs. Rows of pearly, skinned legs grew on one side and piles of limp skin, like kid gloves turned inside out, grew damply on the other. The pierced frogs quivered legless in a box; the bag of uncleaned frogs oozed and palpitated, its neck held shut by a cinderbrick.

John was too shocked by the first glare of red gore to speak. His father looked up guiltily.

“Frogs’ legs, Johnny!” he said.

“Hundreds!” Madbury said, his childish old face screwed up tightly as he tried to kill a frog by repeatedly shoving his knifepoint into its head. The frog croaked a little but didn’t seem to mind too much.

“Nearly done,” William Cotter said, his arm gory to the elbow as he pulled it out of the burlap bag.

“Poverty Street’s on fire again. They’re going to lose both sides of it,” John said.

“Wind’s changed, though,” Madbury said without looking up. He couldn’t kill the frog so he cut off the legs anyway and threw the front part into the box. “Cats’ll take care of the mess. We just stick the box out in the shed and we’ll have every dang cat in Leah down here.”

“There’s going to be a lot of hungry cats around, from Poverty Street,” John said.

“Lots of hungry people, too,” William Cotter said.

“They’re mostly all taken care of. They opened the National Guard armory, for one thing. The town’s taking them all in somewhere or other. They’ve even got the Salvation Army up from Boston.”

“Well, that’s nice,” William Cotter said.

“Salvation Army’s all right,” Madbury said. “Don’t care for the Red Cross much.”

“That’s because he doesn’t care much for Mrs. Rutherford,” William Cotter said, winking at John.

“Goddam old busybody,” Madbury mumbled.

“Red Cross. Fresh Air. She keeps busy, does her best,” William Cotter said, grinning.

“So don’t everybody. Old bitch.”

“Done! Throw the bag away. It stinks,” William Cotter said.

“I could use this here piece of fiberboard,” Madbury said.

“Take it! What a mess!” William Cotter seemed to be a little tired of frogs. He and Madbury divided the legs and wrapped them in advertising flyers. Madbury took the fiberboard, the box of gore and his frogs’ legs, and went home. William Cotter went to the basement washroom to clean up. The office reeked of the half-fishy, half-ammonia odor of frogs. Before his father came back upstairs John opened a couple of sooty windows and let the burned tar stink of the fire mix in with it.

William Cotter came back upstairs rubbing his hands and arms with handfuls of stringy toilet paper. He still looked a little guilty.

“I just had a fight,” John said.

“You did!”

“I won, too,” John said. His father threw the toilet paper away and sat down to listen, lighting a cigarette quickly and expertly with his Zippo. The gesture was very youthful, like that of a college boy who is proud of his expertness with cigarettes. John told him about the fight. “I looked kind of
mean,”
he said.

“You don’t really know how you looked. I mean you just felt that way,” William Cotter said quickly.

“No, I’ve always fought differently. I can generally get a guy down, but I never felt so expert about a fight. This fight
looked
good, you know? I felt sort of professional. It was too easy.”

“Keith Joubert’s a good-sized boy….”

“Look,” John said hesitantly, “you know how I’ve always felt about Leah. You have, too—felt the same way, I mean. I think you have….” He could tell that his father was becoming excited by this intimacy. A little afraid, perhaps, yet eager. It had never happened before, and for a moment he thought he had better veer off, then went on, “I mean we’re both sort of misfits in Leah.” He hoped his father would not admit everything for the sake of the moment, and went on without waiting for an answer, “Only, I can take off when it gets bad, and you can’t.”

“That’s right. We’re both the same!”

Do you believe it?
John wanted to ask. “You’re a misfit too,” he said carefully.

“Don’t I know it!” his father said.

“But do you know what kind? Why?”

“I’m no businessman, Johnny, like Bruce was. Is,” he added.

“I don’t mean that.”

His father looked away, a suggestion of pain on his face. Then, surprisingly , he
said, “Seems to me you’re still feeling a little mean.”

“I could be a businessman.”

“I hope you can. I hope you will,” William Cotter said.

“But I don’t mean that. I mean the way we get along with people. We aren’t really treated right. We aren’t! They think they know everything and they really don’t.”

“Maybe they really do, Johnny.”

“They don’t know anything about
me!
I’m different when I’m not in Leah. I get along fine, like everybody else. In Leah they look down their goddam noses and I can hear them think. That’s why I picked a fight with Keith Joubert—because the son of a bitch has had himself convinced for years that he could lick me. Well, he
can’t
lick me, but I’ll bet he’s home right now convincing himself all over that he can. I could
kill
that bastard and he’d still think he could lick me! What the hell can you do?”

“I thought it was Junior Stevens who used to pick on you, Johnny.”

“Oh, sure. But he
can
lick me.”

“It seems to me,” William Cotter said diffidently, with a hesitant sort of respect, “that most people don’t always figure whether they can lick somebody else or not.”

“They do here; I can see them thinking it. But that isn’t what I mean. I don’t want to be king of the hill or anything like that, I just want to make them stop
judging
me all the time. I want to be a zero, an unknown quantity.”

“You know, Johnny, lots of people go all through their lives without ever having a fight.”

“So I feel persecuted. The only thing is, I never feel persecuted unless I’m in this one particular little town. I swear I get along perfectly everyplace else. Nobody ever gave me a hard time—for long—even in the Army. Why the hell should Leah do it to me?”

“You were born here.”

“I’ve thought of that, too. Did you ever think you could go somewhere else and start over with a clean slate?”

“I used to, Johnny. I even thought I could be a businessman, once. I don’t believe it any more.”

“You believe that saying—that you can’t run away from yourself? You know—you get somewhere new and there you are, exactly the same as you were before you took off. I don’t. I think maybe
you’re
the same, but the place isn’t the same and the people don’t look at you the same, and that’s part of what you are—how the people look at you.” He put his feet up on the desk, noticing that his father liked the gesture. He had been a little surprised at his father’s attitude. Perhaps a little disappointed that his father hadn’t gone along all the way as he thought he would. He hadn’t expected any difference of opinion at all.

“I want you to stay here, Johnny. I know you’re interested in more than a contracting business. I know you went to Paris and to college and all that. I mean, I went to college too, but not the way you did—to learn all that stuff. Now, I know you know a lot more than I do about a lot of things. But I always wanted you to come back here to Leah. I’ll tell you, Johnny. I always liked you better than Bruce. It was hard to like Bruce. I mean I
love
Bruce and all that. You know that, and I’d always do anything I could for you two boys, but what I want to say is that I always got along better with you—not as well as I’d want to, because, as they say, you’re a different generation and all that, but you weren’t so
mean
as Bruce could be. He was like he was always getting
revenge
for something, and God knows I never did anything to Bruce—I don’t know. I gave him a spanking now and then, but I never did it mean. I gave you a few, too, but I was never mean about it, or really mad at you, was I?”

“No. You were always fair.”

“See? I was always fair to you boys! I was always fair! So I can’t figure it out. What was Bruce so mad about? What did I ever do to Bruce to make him so mean? He could die and never say a good word to me. And his mother, the same to her. God knows
she
never gave him—or you, Johnny—anything but pure one-hundred-percent love. Now I don’t give a tinker’s damn about the town, Johnny. That don’t worry me one little bit. Live and let live. I just want to be a father to you two boys and have you two boys feel I’m your father. Is that so much to ask?” He fooled with a cigarette butt, then decided that it was long enough to light. His hands were trembling.