Town Burning (42 page)

“Who was there?”

“Oh, everybody. All the Riders. Then there was Atmon, Beaupre, Eightball, Keith Joubert, some firemen, Billy Muldrow—Christ-all! With the fire died down a little, Bemis moved over to his own office. We set around out in the lobby. Junior went in and then after a minute he come running out, and there you have it. That’s all I know. Who else could of done it?”

“Somebody could have come in through Mrs. Box’s office.”

“Well, I guess so, John. But it don’t seem likely, after Junior’s fight with Bemis and all. I mean, Junior was still highly pissed-off.”

“Jane doesn’t think he did it.”

Bob shrugged, meaning: Of course, she’s his sister.

“Did you see Junior go into the office? I mean, did you see him open the door?”

“Nobody did. We was having fun with Eightball or something. We see him come out, though.”

“Maybe the place was already burning. What was it, waste-baskets?”

“Ayuh. Beside the desk. Burned up papers, burned the telephone a little, burned Charlie Bemis’ arm. That was before we got over the excitement and thought to put out the fire. Atmon see Junior come running out and tried to grab him. We could see the fire inside. Well, Junior kicked Atmon in the family jewels and goddam, he dropped like a wet turd! Junior run right over him and got away. Joe Beaupre had his gun out this time but he dasn’t shoot. Old Billy Muldrow come in a-yelling ‘Shoot the bastard!’ but they was too many standing around with their faces hanging out.”

“What about the telephone? Was Bemis talking to anybody?”

“That’s the funny part—I mean it was all funny as hell, but Mabel Hinckley was on the line! Honest to God! Bemis just picked up the phone, I suppose, to call somebody up. Mabel says she heard this dull, sickening thud. That’s what she said. Said she knew who done it!” Bob said this and waited, his eyebrows raised, holding back a smile.

“All right, Bob.”

“State police went over to the telephone office to see her, they having got the very same ideas as you. She says Charlie Bemis said, ‘Daisy?’ like that, just before she heard this dull, sickening thud. She says Daisy done it. Daisy made that there dull, sickening thud! Only thing is, the only Daisy we could think of, anybody, was Daisy Colchester. Nobody called her Daisy since 1898! No matter. Mabel Hinckley says Daisy done it!”

But it was not the ridiculous image of Miss Colchester, blunt instrument in hand, that John saw. It was Billy Muldrow, under the prod of inspiration, trying to kill two birds with one stone. “Shoot the bastard!” It really wasn’t too stupid a suggestion, and in that situation the woodsman could act quickly. Billy Muldrow was far from stupid.
Daisy done it!
A Daisy Bob Paquette had known well. He saw that he would not even be allowed the slightest reasonable doubt; that Leah in her grasping of John Cotter could ask for further union. Now it seemed quite possible that he must sacrifice his friend for Leah’s truth.

He sat on the granite cornerstone of the little Huckins graveyard, his father’s bottle of bourbon between his legs, and turned the bottle grittily on the stone. “Go ahead and have a drink,” he said out loud. “That’s what you brought it for, your father’s guilty bourbon.” But he couldn’t drink.

The tall pines did not move; the maples raised palisades of green leaves that were as immobile as rock. Nothing moved in the amber air of noon. Through smoke the leaves touched by the dull sun were green, yet old, as if they were the leaves of generations past.

He had left Bruce’s car at the bottom of Pike Hill, and now waited for a sign, or catastrophe, or his luck to solve the problem of the coming interview.

He hadn’t had to come. A few words to Bob Paquette, and wouldn’t the town of Leah have gladly snapped poor Billy up! “Daisy was a dog, remember?” And happy logic—the conclusion beautiful for all of Leah—would be quick. He wouldn’t have had to go to the police, to the sheriff, or to the selectmen. Just one little bee in Bob Paquette’s bonnet, and it would have been out of John Cotter’s hands. It would have finished Atmon and Beaupre, too, and he would have been free of that legal worry.

He didn’t say the words to Bob, and when they came down-street, Bob leading on his motorcycle, Mrs. Box came running breastily out of the Town Hall to tell Bob that the Paquette barn was on fire, and he’d better go home. Bob turned without answering, his footrest scraping, and burned rubber as he raised his front wheel off the ground and the hot engine roared. He took the wrong way around the one-way traffic circle, headlong back toward Cascom Corners.

No one was home at the Cotter house, thank God. A note on the kitchen worktable:
Johnny we have gone to the hospital Bruce worse love Dad.

Bruce worse love Dad. Worse love, Dad—Bruce. Now he sat with the bourbon warm between his legs and couldn’t drink it. The word for father and son; the synthesis of that painful love seemed to him to lie in the repetition of that word: “Worse, worse, worse, worse,” but the child’s trick of lost meaning wouldn’t work. Neither time nor repetition could always kill a lively pain.

In Manila he had killed a man in a situation that was so classic an example of self-defense that no investigation was felt necessary. He had even received in his knee the best of evidence, a spent bullet. And yet that guiltless crime had never let him be for very long. Red meat grew in the mouth; to think of the fragile brain—the semiliquid complexity of brain—was taboo.

Whether Billy Muldrow went to jail or to the old New Hampshire noose, it would be the same. His woods-quick brain could not comprehend a cage. Neither could it comprehend a padded cell in Concord. “Tight’s a drum, and cozy,” Billy had said of his new little house, but that coziness presupposed an icy wind from the clean, deep woods; it was the coziness of a bear’s den in a ledge. The question was, would Billy understand the nature of his move against Leah? As final as would have been the “adambomb” he wanted to roll down Pike Hill, his extermination of Charlie Bemis meant that if he lost, he died. This choice might, or might not, be a conscious part of the gamble he had taken. John did know that Billy could run amok, and that might be the last defense of any cornered animal.

So he was going to tell Billy of Billy’s death. When, in Manila, he had crept down toward the bullet-holed door, he didn’t know. Now he did. There was no choice, in either case, but to go on and see the destruction at the end. No choice now, because he knew the weight of omission could be greater than the sight of his friend caught and struggling: he could not sneak, his problems solved, and live himself. The only action signifying what love, what dignity there was between friends, must occur in the confrontation to come, whether it was the pity asked for by a child or the hatred in the eyes of a wounded hawk.

He turned to look down upon the town. It, too, looked old through the brown lens of the smoke. The sun was gentle, and shone through the smoke as if through ancient glass, as if through bourbon in a bottle. He held the bottle up to his eyes: Leah preserved.

Before him the graveyard on its tilted ground had been planned for more permanent human occupancy than Leah. The big center-stone dominated the little square, a point of order in a wilderness of advancing trees. The deertrail and the boneless fingers of the birch-bark hand suggested the pleasing asymmetry of the rivers of Leah. Zacharia Calvin Huckins had preferred a tiny stone—one he could have tossed easily upon a wall. Florrie Stonebridge Huckins lay below a slate thin as a knife:

Her load was heavy.
Her back was slim.
Her heart was merry.
Rest her with Him.

And here were the dead children, all the dead children who had missed, among the stones, the living tit of Leah. “Rough,” he said, trying to smile. Perhaps he did smile—he felt his mouth. “Not being blind,” he said as he got up from his stone, “I know not when I smile.” He put the bottle behind Florrie’s slate.

Billy’s truck was parked beside the yellow shack that had N
EW
H
AMPSHIRE
H
IGHWAY
D
EPARTMENT
stenciled on the side. Red hens hopped in and out of the old wood-silver shack that lay on its side next to the new one. Billy, with his great strength, had simply tipped it off the cellarhole and rolled the new one on. Hens teetered on beer cans and hens scratched with horny yellow claws the pressed earth of Billy’s dooryard. Half wild, they ran silently for cover as John approached.

He deliberately suppressed his inclination to stalk the yellow shack. Movement was visibility, with animal or man, and the need for invisibility was almost unbearable in him. He made himself walk straight to the door. “Billy!” he called. One did not knock on the door of a house in the wilderness.

No answer. He called again before going to the tiny window. All he could see in the darkness was the tiny window opposite, the dark glass looped with dust-strung cobwebs. Around at the front, the door’s padlock was open on the open latch, and he opened the door the maximum tactful inch and called, “Hey, Billy?”

The shack felt occupied. Warmth, or perhaps the slight humidity of breath, moved past his face. The animal smell of Billy, though not unpleasant, was lively in the moving air.

“Billy?”

Cot springs squeaked, and the voice pretended to come, surprised, from sleep: “Ayuh. Who’s there?” Pretending not to know.

“John Cotter.” Your friend, John thought, Come to tell you the news.

“Hi, John!” Billy said. “Come on in and set down.”

John entered, and removed a bowl of nuts and bolts from the chair. “Your breakfast, Billy?” he asked. Billy rolled over, his brown underwear buttoned up to his neck. He dropped his big feet to the floor and felt with his toes for his boots.

“Ain’t had no breakfast, John. I don’t feel too good today.” Billy’s long face, in the semidark, shone on the cheekbones and forehead with the burnished sheen of rubbed and permanent grime. He hadn’t washed since the fire, and his forehead was the color of polished apple wood. He put a black, muscular finger along his brown teeth. “Tastes like a mouse died in my mouth,” he said.

John’s eyes were opening to the dark. Billy bent over to thread the laces of his boots, and as he bent to the usual task, his wide shoulders moving to the small demands of the everyday gesture, his hair black and curly upon his creased and brawny neck, John saw him straight and painfully as the man he was—living, capable of all the common, hurtful fears, alive to the necessity of having his boots tied, his life calm, his nerves in order, his guts not tied by worry: a man, now, not the tool of Principle, not a friend or an enemy.

“Let’s have a little light on the subject,” Billy said, and snapped a wooden match with his thumbnail. He took the kerosene lamp and swished the oil around in it, testing, then pushed the chimney up and lit the wick. The smooth yellow light flowed across the wick and grew in the glass chimney. Billy’s big hand made delicate adjustments with the tiny knob, and the light steadied, yellow and gentle upon the cluttered table and upon Billy’s ugly, lonely face.

“Well, Johnny, what’s the news about the fire?” Billy’s brown eyes moved in their hollows, unshining. They might have been part of his skin except for movement. He selected a pipe from the table, dumped a small brass washer out of the bowl and gouged tobacco from a round can.

“Paquette’s barn is burning. No wind, though. We’ve got the fire held back for a time, anyway.”

“You done a good job out there at Stevens’ farm, John, with that firebreak and all.” Billy turned his head away as he lit his pipe—as if, in the glare of the match, he were struck by sudden modesty.

The man had committed murder with the same hands he used to light his pipe. The same eyes that now implored shy friendship had aimed to murder. Or just to kill…No. Billy Muldrow was not a simple animal; he was of Leah. The social horror of the deed might be stronger in him than in John himself, separated as John had been, for a time, from Leah’s simple values. Thou Shalt Not Kill, having become Thou Shalt Not Hurt, had lost the directness of biblical command—had become ethical and personal and thus weak. There were so many formal systems of behavior to weigh and test—out in the world. Back again, he was caught again: Thou Shalt Avenge the Breaking of Leah’s Rules. Thou Art Executioner.

Billy’s knowledge of his sin would be strong, now that his passion for revenge was spent in action, and Billy, too, must hear those words ringing in the pines. Who would be executioner?

Who had, at the age of thirteen, written
Billy Muldrow eats it
upon the wall of the Town Hall men’s room? Who had stood upon the drippy urinal to write big, giggling out of luscious guilt? He hadn’t been the leader of that campaign of assassination. Even worse, he had followed Junior and Keith Joubert and the rest, trying to pacify them with the wickedness of his ideas:
Billy Muldrow defenestrates
himself.
“What the hell is that?” “That’s what so good about it, see? Nobody’ll know, but it sounds awful.” And for this inspiriation he was unhit, ungoosed, not chased home on a boring summer night. Like all immunity bought with dishonor, it was temporary. He could not tell them that the word had meaning. They would not want it to have a meaning they did not know, and to him it was a further debasement of his honor that, slyly, he did not tell them what it meant.

Guilty or not of Billy Muldrow’s unhappiness, he must make no more deception for the sake of temporary peace. It didn’t work.

Billy Smiled shyly. “Johnny, I’m awful glad you come to see me. You know I’m always glad to see you, Johnny, and I ain’t been feeling good.”

“That’s too bad, Billy.”

“I ain’t et nothing since yesterday forenoon.”

“What’s the matter?”—not wanting to hear the reason. He fought with a nearly overpowering quickness of the brain to find a way out. It seemed that with no effort at all on his part an incredible lucidity, as his mind listed and sifted ways and compromises, illuminated all choices, all questions. Could he prove Junior innocent without pointing to Billy? Would Billy’s guilt force him to confess? Was Junior really guilty? No to all of them. Why not let Junior pay anyway? God knew he deserved some kind of punishment. (What sins against Junior must someone else then pay for?) No, to all of them.