Town Burning (8 page)

“My boy,” he said. His forehead hit the horn, which went
beep.
Jane let him cry but could not help him. Finally she went around to the other side of the car and helped him move over, then drove him home to Leah. By the time they turned into the driveway he had recovered. “I’ll tell her, Janie,” he said.

They found Mrs. Spinelli in the kitchen, and when she saw their faces she began to scream. Jane walked on through it, and it felt as it had once as a child when her brother put a whistle to her ear and blew as hard as he could—a nearby physical blow against the bones of her head. In her room the closed door did not stop the sound. It rose and fell, sometimes like a siren and sometimes watery, like surf.

Later the sound diminished. Neighbors and relatives talked in the kitchen in low voices, and only once in a while the siren rose and stopped, or a breaker crashed among the insistent murmurs of sympathy.

Her window was a hot white square upon the side of the cool room. She went to the window and looked at the street, up and down, bright and clear as childhood in the sun. She had rarely come to this street as a child. The school bus hadn’t passed this street, although the red-brick parochial grammar school, an alien, nun-haunted building, stood on the corner. Mike went to the parochial school, and because of this she hadn’t really known him until high school. She had never been interested in him, except that the continual excitement he caused in school kept him in the news—the girls’ washroom news, the scandalous, whispered news. If someone turned his back on Mike at the wrong time, someone got goosed. It was Mike who started the bent-pin business with the rubber bands, and that ended with another one of his expulsions from school. He shot Miss Colchester, and the pin stuck into her leg. That was when they found out she wore men’s garters with white bandages under them. The teachers always knew when Mike was guilty. How many times had he been expelled? And each time Mr. Spinelli brought him back again and talked to the principal. Nobody disliked Mike. Not the way they disliked Junior, who was nearly as bad, but lacked Mike’s good looks and utter cheerfulness. Mike had never been sneaky—he was always caught. But now he’d been caught and expelled from life, and Mr. Spinelli couldn’t bring him back, apologize and make impossible promises.

Mike was the first in his class to go into service. All the boys wanted to go, or nearly all, and when they graduated in June, 1944, all but two or three did go. Most came back in 1946. Four were killed, but more came back just to say goodbye to Leah before going West, where most of Leah’s sons went when they were old enough. Some stayed, but they were the ones whose parents owned businesses, or they were the ones who stayed because all they wanted to do was to go into the mill or whatever—the post office, a store, the tannery—and work and marry and get it regular, as Mike said once.

She had chosen one of these, although it hadn’t been obvious at the time. Mike seemed to have so much energy left over, and she believed that the war had done something to him beyond making him put on the common grim act of the veteran, which sooner or later became old-fashioned as terminal leave pay ran out and time payments became more threatening than the memory of war. But she knew that she tended to plan sketchily, in visions and scenes: to her the constant excitement and energy of Michael Spinelli would somehow, through some maturing process, in time produce the home she saw vividly, as if she were looking in the window to see herself in a lovely scene of firelight and children.

But there had been ten years and another war since then, and another crop of young men come home only to say goodbye. The town seemed always to send away its best. The population of Leah hadn’t changed in one hundred years, her grandfather said, and he once told her of the farms and hills that in his lifetime had turned from field and pasture back into woods. Even the woolen mill in the town had become obsolete. Last year it shut down for two months, and everybody was afraid that it would be for good. It was then that Mike started going with Junior and the Riders and cashed in his defense bonds to buy the new motorcycle. “It’s a Harley-Davidson!” he kept saying, as if it were impossible that his father and mother and wife were not infected by the magic of the words. “Look at the spark plugs!” He made them look at the two cylinders, the big saddle of genuine cowhide, the big balloon-like fenders. He insisted that they come and look, as if the bright, dangerous meaning of the machine might convince them of his need of it. And when he saw their disapproval he answered with the boom of his engine at night, burned rubber on the driveway, lifted his front wheel in the air as a horse rears and turns before it gallops away.

She woke up in the middle of the afternoon, hearing a knock on her door. Mr. Spinelli looked in.

“Your grandfather is here, Janie. I thought maybe you want to wake up.”

In the living room she found her grandfather sitting uneasily on the edge of a wooden chair, a huge old man in clean workshirt and overalls. His great head solid on his short pillar of neck, he sat and mauled his visored cap between fingers that looked like the arms and legs of brawny wrestlers. His face was ruddy, shiny in little squares between fine cracks and wrinkles that were nearly as regular as the grid lines on a map. Curly white hair came down over his collar in back and on the sides halfway over his ears. A faint, pleasant smell of horses drifted across the room. He stood up and watched her, his feet wide apart as if he thought the fragile house might fall apart beneath him—but if it did he would still land in the basement right side up and on his two feet amid the fragments.

“Hi, Grandpa,” Jane said. As he came toward her the floor creaked under his feet. His expression seldom changed, and it didn’t now. His eyes were bright and wide open; so blue it seemed that she looked right through his head into the sky. His eyebrows were raised as if he were slightly surprised and amused. He put one hand on her shoulder, lightly, yet she felt that if she were to fall the hand would hold her up as easily as if the old man held a rifle at arm’s length to weigh it.

“I figured maybe you’d want to come home for a while,” he said. His voice was soft and breathy, yet everything he said sounded at first too aggressive, almost accusing. The surprised, sweet expression on his face belied the tone of his voice, and one result of this difference between voice and meaning was that everyone felt compelled to look him straight in the eye.

“I could stay over tonight,” she said.

Cesare Spinelli came into the room, harried and damp from his running through the house.

“Mr. Stevens, I heard,” he said. “I think maybe that’s good for Janie. She’d be happier out of this house for now. I think you got a good idea.”

Sam Stevens nodded. “I’m terribly sorry about your son,” he said. “I hope your wife feels better.”

“Oh, I worry about Janie,” the little man said. He looked at her closely. “She don’t seem to be taking it too good.”

She hadn’t cried. If she cried, she was afraid she would be crying for Jane Stevens Spinelli and ten wasted years, not for a poor fool who had killed himself. She would not cry at all.

When she came downstairs with her suitcase—a wedding present she had never used before—the two men stood as she had left them: the huge farmer and the little father. Mr. Spinelli took her hand and said, “It’s all right, Janie. You’ll feel better after a while, now. You just wait and see.”

Her grandfather backed the pickup truck carefully out into the street, then started slowly, as he always did, going deliberately through each gear, watching and not trusting other cars. They went around the Town Square and took the road to Cascom and the farm. When they turned off the asphalt onto the steep gravel road up the mountain, he spoke for the first time.

“He’s a mighty funny feller, Spinelli.” Jane didn’t answer, and she saw him glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Seems to me he’s a good man,” he said, “although you never can tell about them people.”

John sat in his room in his old leather chair, a can of beer in his hand and four empties on the floor. His father had gone to the yard and his mother to a neighbor’s. The old house was empty around him, brittle and too clean. He thought of his miserable cave of a room in Paris; mold, mice, cockroaches and all, and he wished himself back there again. There were roses on the walls of that room, too, in the places where the paper hadn’t been turned back into brownish pulp by rot, the plaster absorbing, as if it were a sponge, the sweat of the ancient stone walls.

He sat staring at the sun-glittering leaves of the rock maple, then got up and took his .30-.30 carbine from the gunrack. He balanced the short rifle in his left hand and flicked down the lever.
Click
clack;
the crisp sounds were lovely and satisfying. The square bolt slid back and then forward to lock, leaving the large hammer cocked. He let the hammer down slowly and worked the action again: after two years the rifle had regained, as beautiful objects do, a measure of its original freshness and wonder. He didn’t want to put it to his shoulder just yet—he wanted to save that view of it—but he turned it over in his hands, discovering again the little planes and curves of it, from the slightly curved butt plate to the deep rifling visible at the muzzle.

Then, with the rifle in one hand, he took his beer and went out into the hall. Bruce’s door was shut. He stood in front of it, convincing himself that Bruce was not there, could not be there, put his empty can on the banister post and turned the knob.

The room was as bare as it had always been when it was forbidden to him on pain of—On pain of what? he asked himself as the details of the room sorted themselves out: single bed, highboy, two windows, closet door, bedside lamp. He thought of death. On pain of death. On pain of something like that—something awful and frightening, compounded of more than physical hurt alone. The pain of his brother’s screaming rage; the pain of his brother’s hate.

The room had the cold, clean look of a guest room. Of course his mother had been through it, straightening and cleaning, but his mother could never have created such frigid order. In the closet a similar order governed the neatly hung clothes, the shoes lined up toes to the baseboard. Bruce’s automatic shotgun leaned against the wall, a heavy, bruising, unlovely gun John didn’t bother to examine. By the smell, it was well oiled and clean. As he closed the closet door a nearly unbearable twinge of guilt, of being caught, came over him. The feeling went away quickly, but not until a twisting, nervous shake traveled from his legs to his head. He brought his rifle up to his hip and stepped out into the empty hall, collected the empty beer can and went back to his room. Ten o’clock. In three hours he must be back in Bruce’s room in the hospital.

His mother had given him the keys to Bruce’s black Ford, and it was not necessary for them to make an agreement not to mention this to Bruce. A general rule in the family for many years—a symptom of their fear—was that what Bruce did not know and act upon hurt no one.

John parked in front of the Town Hall, the half colonial, half Victorian building on the square. The rear half was older, built of pale small brick, with severely geometrical high windows. The front half, the aesthetic addition of 1880, was built of darker brick, with heavily arched, Greco-Roman windows. He thought of the Town Hall as a pair of Siamese twins horribly fused at the navel, one cool and chaste, the other round and ripe.

Mr. Bemis, the town clerk, a little balding Yankee, stood behind his tall counter, his tight-skinned, almost miniature skull set with blue eyes. He peered straight and humorously at John over the maple counter.

“Well, well, if it ain’t the town prodigal come back from the far and fancy places.”

“Hi, Mr. B.,” John said. At the moment he felt an expansive affection for the little man. “Mr. Bemis, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me since I got back.”

The town clerk’s eyes wrinkled around the edges, but he held off smiling.

“You come in, I suppose, to pay your head and poll tax? No, you don’t have to pay poll tax, seeing as you’re a Democrat and it don’t matter how you vote anyways.” He let out a high laugh that brought his secretary to the door. “It’s all right, Edna,” he said, waving her back.

“You don’t mean to tell me you’re still a Republican?” John said.

“John Cotter. I swear! If some people heard you say that I’d lose my job come town meetin’!”

“It’s enough to make a man turn Communist,” John said. Mr. Bemis reared back and screeched his high laugh again. Edna put her head in the door.

“Now, it’s all right, Edna,” Mr. Bemis said, but she came on in.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said.

“Hello, Mrs. Box. What do you hear from Walter?”

Her motherly instincts aroused, she rippled a little about the breasts. Walter was her successful son. “Why, Walter asked about you, Johnny. They have a new baby.”

“How many is that, now?”

“Three. Two boys and a sweet little girl and he said in his letter, ‘What’s with old Johnny Cotter?’ just like that. They live in Cleveland, you know. Walter sent me an airplane ticket and I’m to come out and visit, take the airplane from Concord and change in Boston and go right to Cleveland. It scares me so, but I’ve just got to see that baby! I’ve just got to get my hands on that baby!”

“Johnny’s going to be a bachelor like me,” Mr. Bemis said. “He ain’t interested in babies, are you, Johnny?”

“Now, that’s just what Walter said in his letter. He said, ‘Old Johnny Cotter’s the wise one,’ just like that. I don’t think so, though.” She went out to answer the telephone.

“Now, John, what can the Town of Leah do for you?”

He had to pay a five-dollar head tax before he could send for a driving license. Being a veteran—”Isn’t everybody?” John asked—he didn’t have to pay a poll tax.

“It’s that dang head tax ain’t fair, Johnny,” Mr. Bemis said. “Why, I just shudder to think what will happen some poor fella comes in with two heads and I have to charge him ten dollars!” He screeched and pounded the counter, then stopped suddenly and looked seriously at John. “Say, John, how is Bruce coming along up to Northlee?”