Town Burning (44 page)

She was staying at the hospital nurses’ residence, and hadn’t lost her things, anyway. “We had insurance. I don’t know what we’ll lose—you always do—but it’s not so bad except we always lived in that old house. Pa’ll build another, only it won’t have to be so big. We had three bedrooms we never used except for company. Ma always wanted a new house—they’re so easy to keep clean—and an electric stove. I don’t blame her, I guess. With all of us working except Timmy and Jean, we’ll have enough money. It’s not so bad, Janie. You don’t have to feel sorry at all. Not with your troubles.”

“I liked you all in that big house,” Jane said.

“So did I. But we never seem to do very well by ourselves. It isn’t the same outside.”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

“Sometimes…I guess I do, Janie. Dick’s going to, and he’s the first one to get away—I don’t mean that—but to make his own family. Maybe we were all too happy and loving together. It was more fun than going to the movies.”

When Charlotte had to go back on duty Jane went outside, intending to drive back to the farm, and sat, exhausted, in Junior’s scraped and dented old car. She didn’t know if she should wait for him to wake up or not. He would want her to be there to say goodbye for the night in a formal way, so that his life could at least have the order of visiting hours imposed upon it. That might help a little.

She pressed the button on the dash compartment panel, not really intending to open it, and the thing fell open with a crash. A flashlight rolled out and fell to the floor. As she put it back her eyes automatically went over the contents of the compartment: a greasy road map, several folders of paper matches, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, one cigarette half empty of tobacco, a box of condoms. Yes, of course, a box of condoms; the child was a man in that sense, and no doubt used the rubber things here on the grimy seats, wrastling with one of Leah’s available women. Poor Junior! In that love she felt that there could be nothing but indifference, even dislike, except for the hot flash of orgasm. No love for Junior in this slum of a car, drunk and giggly, his brutish hands in willing rape of a woman possibly more brutish than himself. Perhaps she was unfair—yet she knew that to certain men sex could be defined by the four-letter-word and contained in the four-letter-word, and that word was synonymous with disgust and related to filth. Therefore the shield, the antiseptic, the garbage bag.

When Junior came running into the room and found her with John, even though he ran from the police, he stopped to disapprove. How deep had his disapproval been? Maybe so deep he courted that beating. Maybe that was why he didn’t even raise his hands to protect his face.

She would go no further. She was most likely wrong, anyway. She would give her brother the pity he demanded and the love she had for him. Let him be the keeper of his depths and causes.

She closed the dash compartment upon its odds and ends, walked back across the lawn to the hospital and sat on the iron bench outside the main door. She didn’t want to meet the composed faces of the other visitors, to have to guess the secrets of faces made sickly by the consciousness of pain.

On the dried grass of the lawn a woman walked hand in hand with a little girl who limped, who dragged her travesty of a right shoe, a shiny black block. Leaning over the little girl, who pointed at the trees and at the sky, the woman walked slowly. Attentive, kind, yet by a quick movement of her head toward the little girl’s sky, by a too long look into that uncluttered space above the trees, she made her boredom plain.

Even here in Northlee the air was sweet with smoke. At least the wind hadn’t started up again. If only it would rain! It had been so long since rain she had grown used to the blank sky, and expected no more of each day but an orange, smoky sun. Nothing new in heaven, but here on earth things happened with a quick and disconcerting rhythm. She had been in love—was still in love—but now she was tired. It was as if her exhaustion destroyed both memory and desire, and neither could stir her senses back alive again. Now she must go into the hospital to comfort her wounded brother.

They were home. The big Buick stood in the driveway like a fat sentinel, telling him that his family was home and unhappy. Franklin met him in the kitchen.

“John!” Franklin said. He seemed nothing but pleased and happy to see him home again. “Did you fight the fire?”

“Sure did, Frank.” Fire, police and the destructive fever of my ego, he thought, and I’ve just played messenger for that bitter hugger, Mortality. Some fun.

He took the little boy by the upper arms, lifted him up and looked straight into his eyes. Pleased, Franklin smiled shyly and looked down. The top of his head was knit into a million tight black curlicues. When he looked up, grinning, his broad teeth dazed the eye; his amusement jollied the soul.

“You’re a damned good boy,” John said. “If one can call you a boy. I think you’re a midget in boy’s skin. Not only are you a midget, you’re a wizard midget, and your sister is an even midgeter wizardess.”

Franklin laughed delightedly, surprised into a high, bubbling giggle that brought Jenny Lou running. She stopped short, her eyes wide—the white-circled target eyes of caricature.

“Jenny Lou!” Franklin said. “You’re a midgeter wizardess!”

“I’m not either!”

John put Franklin on his feet and picked up Jenny Lou in the same way.

“It’s good!” Franklin said. “It’s good to be one!”

Jenny Lou then consented to smile. “O.K., John,” she said, “I am one, then.”

He kissed her on the forehead. “Really,” he said, “you should be doing that to me.” She did. “Now you have wizardessed me. You are the wizardess of Fresh Air, which is a good thing.” He put her down. “Now, where are my mother and father?”

Franklin frowned. “They went upstairs to lay down for a minute, John. They were both kind of sick when we got home from the hospital.”

“But Bruce is still the same. I just called the hospital.”

“They had an argument,” Franklin whispered.

“William wouldn’t go inside,” Jenny Lou whispered, “and Gladys
cried.”

“In that case will you kids stay down here and amuse yourselves for a while? I’m sorry you had to see the argument. I’m sure it wasn’t much fun.”

Franklin shook his head in agreement.

“That wasn’t
anything
compared to yesterday,” Jenny Lou said proudly.

The door was closed. He stopped in the hall outside and listened, hearing the low mumbles of the famous and most fearsome room in hell; better some honest yells of pain. As he opened the door they were silent and the room was dark. The shades were drawn down to the sills. The long bodies of his mother and father lay tensely parallel upon the double bed.

As he walked straight to the window it seemed that this walk had started when he first approached Billy Muldrow’s house, that he hadn’t yet stopped, or even been sidetracked, from a purposeful journey. He raised the shades on the golden light of late afternoon. They watched him, surely amazed that he would deliberately enter a room in which emotion was so tangible.

“I think I know what happened,” he said, “you went to Northlee for different purposes. What did you want, Mother?”

“Oh, Johnny!” she cried, and showed him her tears.

He turned to his father, “Did she lie to you? Did she try to scheme you in to Bruce?”

“I couldn’t go in, Johnny. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t, that’s all. This time I couldn’t.” William Cotter pleaded his weakness for pardon. His handsome, oversized head was propped, as if he were a dying king, against the headboard of the big bed.

“I stopped downstreet and called the hospital. There’s been no change in Bruce. Mother, Mother,” John said sadly, “did you want them together so badly you had to invent Bruce’s death?”

“Anh, hanh,” she cried, her hands at her neck, her sharp elbows winging out. She seemed to be choking herself, and he went to her and pulled her hands away. She reached for him and he let her hug him; even knelt down so that she could better loop him in with her long and bony arms. Her hair was wiry against his face, her skin was oversoft and toneless. With surprise and pity he found that she was smaller and weaker than he had thought her to be, and that the energy of her embrace was nowhere near as violent, as aggressive, as false memory had made it out to be.

Had he been afraid of this? For as long as he could remember he had been unable to give her such simple comfort as the pressure of his cheek. She had taken, demanded, the cool kiss of parting and of return. But she had received no gifts. She had bought (and paid for) the ceremonial touch of lips, and that was all. He kissed her on the forehead and tried to stand up, but of course she wouldn’t let him.

“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” she cried softly, her hand moving to the back of his head as if she steadied the limp spine of an infant: as an infant he had last given, had last willingly received.

Then she did let him go—another surprise. Perhaps she might know what to do with a gift, no matter how she squandered her demanded signs. How could he know, who had never given?

He chose not to stand, although her arms signaled his release, if he wanted it. “Mother, do you really want us to see Bruce?”

“Yes!”

“He can’t see us or hear us,” he said, knowing that she did not mean Bruce to hear or see. She had given him painful medicine before, “For your own good.”

“Dad,” he said, the word easy in emergency.

“I can’t, Johnny. I don’t want to!”

“I don’t want to either,” John said, and his mother pushed him up: he should get busy. She watched, bright-eyed.

John walked around the bed and stood over his father, over the big man who had conceived him upon the same bed in which he now tried to hide. His arms lay at his sides, palms up, in the pose of exaggerated fatigue. He shook his handsome head—a slow, continuous no.

“Come on, Dad,” John said kindly, “we can do this, anyway.”

“No, I can’t. You go on, Johnny.”

“We can do it, all right,” John insisted. His father’s face, canted upon the headboard, was imperious and afraid. NO, NO, NO, NO, the motion said, as if an axis of rotation pierced his head from chin to gray cowlick. His shirt was snowy white. His necktie, in small collegiate stripes, ran straight and narrow to his belt. John took one of the limp hands and had it snatched away.

William Cotter’s voice was hollow, weak with surprise. “Stop it! What the hell do you care? Are you going to be another son-of-a-bitching
Bruce?”

“Oh, oh,” Glady Cotter said, but when John looked she was not crying. She did not mind a tangle of love—it was indifference that had always haunted her. She was alarmed; she was worried about the outcome, but she would thrive upon the scene.

“No, no. I’m not Bruce,” John said. “I want you to come and help me. Don’t you think I feel as bad about Bruce as you do? What do you think you’re guilty of? Don’t you think I feel that way too?” He knew his father’s strength was lost to fear, yet felt a great need not to pity the man. There must be another way.

“I love you,” he said.

His father rolled violently to his feet. He crouched over his son, one hand held as if to strike him, his face fiercely red with anger. His mouth, when he shouted, seemed to crack along wrong and unfamiliar lines:
“You liar! You don’t love me!”

“But I do,” John said, and found that he did. For proof he had a sudden vision of his father dying, his father in Bruce’s place before the operation, facing those terrible odds; his father gone. Who would so gently ply himself with guilty bourbon, who could be so shyly kind? He knew his father could not hit him, and now, out of the painful birth of love, would not demand that his father try it.

Gladys Cotter, with a shrill yelp that was perhaps joyful, threw herself between them. She dramatically hung herself upon William Cotter’s threatening arm—a measure of her fine instinct in matters of passion—and lied for the scene she must celebrate with hosannas: “Don’t hit him, Bill!” she cried.

John admired her very much at that moment. The only useful lies were those never taken, nor given, for truth. Over a shoulder she had tilted with the craft of an actress, he met his father’s eye. It was too serious a moment for the smile they both reserved—for the tolerance they shared.

The big Buick seemed to float on toward Northlee, its interior artfully like a cocktail lounge—overcomfortable and slightly suggestive of intoxication—a startling contrast against the wild hills and the dry-brown fields outside. The intimate gleam of softly bent plastic and silver, the cosy mold of the compartment, flattered and relaxed them. Dials indicated, clock ticked, knobs were ready to be pulled or turned for every pleasure, music in soft overbass hum-bumbled from somewhere. No wonder his father had chosen not to leave this gentle egg for the square room in which Bruce lay dying.

Now, with a tension between them that was affection unexpressed, understanding not quite understood, they drove toward Bruce. His father had suddenly capitulated. With sacrifice he had tried to hide—really tried to hide—he said yes, they must go see Bruce. But now he could not make himself drive fast. They went at exactly the speed limit, and he saw his father watch the dial, and felt him correct their speed.

“You haven’t seen him since before the operation, Johnny,” he said, obviously trying to keep the statement from being an accusation.

“I am now,” John said.

“What got into you, anyway? I mean why do you want to go?”

“I’m doing all the things I don’t want to do.”

“Yes, you kissed your mother.”

“Why didn’t she come too?” John asked wonderingly.

“Maybe it was because we didn’t ask her not to,” William Cotter said.

John wondered again, as he had in the bedroom when she did not hold him with her arms, about the few and trifling gifts she’d ever had from him. Perhaps she was no spendthrift. No, he saw this act begin: she saw her men off on a quest of her own devising. She was a woman, wasn’t she? And somehow women always seemed a little closer to the fact of death. What she had seen in the bedroom had no doubt convinced her that the rest of her family survived and loved: as a woman she might, with swift logic, be even quicker than they to bury the dead. She would wait for the survivors.