The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  Joan glances at the clock. “Matt will come home early to get you to the church. You must be worried about your husband.”

  “I am,” says Grace as she places finger food in front of Tom. Claire insists on using a grown-up fork, which, in her eager hands, acts as a catapult, sending bits of eggs onto the wall and floor. Grace cleans them off as best she can. “You know, I feel fine, but my life ahead seems overwhelming.”

  “We’re here to help, and I think when you get to the church, you’ll find lots of people willing to help, too. All the organizations have mobilized: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Grange, any church that didn’t burn.”

  Grace stares through the kitchen window at the unremitting black. So this is what it means to survive a disaster.

  —

  The bulletin board is surrounded by a handful of people. Grace, in her blue suit, makes her way to the wall and, when she can, shifts so that she can read the notices.

  Henri, I am at Arnaud’s. Come at once.

  Lost: dark terrier. Answers to Scruff. Leave note here if found.

  Mother, we are at Bishop’s parents’ house in Kennebunk. Anne.

  Please leave any word of David Smith or David Smith Jr., father and son, last seen in the vicinity of Hunts Beach.

  Any sheep found with red marking on right hind leg belongs to Piscassic Farm, Route 1, Sanford, Maine.

  Grace studies each message. To be doubly sure, she scans the board again. Nothing. Below the board is a table with scraps of paper and a pencil. She writes her own message.

  Looking for Eugene Holland, Marjorie Tate, and Rosie MacFarland. Write to Grace Holland, in care of Matthew and Joan York of Cape Porpoise.

  She finds a small bare patch in a lower corner. There she pins her query.

  —

  Grace finds Matthew, who reports no luck, and together they leave the cacophony of the sanctuary for the door. Grace hears heavy footsteps behind her. She turns to see a haggard Reverend Phillips.

  “Grace,” he says, out of breath. “This came for you, directly to the church. I didn’t want to put it up on the board.”

  Grace waits an eternity for Reverend Phillips to hand the envelope over. If he expects her to open it in front of him, he’ll be disappointed. Grace folds the envelope and sticks it into a purse borrowed from Joan. “This is Matthew York. He and his wife are helping me and my children.”

  “Bless you, son,” says the minister. “This is a catastrophe. More and more arrive every minute.”

  —

  Matthew drives for nearly an hour and parks in front of the Pepperell Mill. “I don’t know a lot about fabric and such, so I’ll wait in the truck and read the paper.”

  “Thanks,” Grace says.

  When she opens the mill door, she sees that the rooms are being used as temporary shelters. She scans faces but doesn’t recognize anyone. She studies the bulletin board with no result. Through the large window of the mill, Grace can see Matthew reading a newspaper in the truck. She slips closer to the window for better light. She opens the letter.

  Dear Grace,

  Rosie was never much good at letter writing, so I am writing you instead. But she’s sitting at my elbow telling me what to write, if you can imagine her there. First, I have to thank you for saving her life and the lives of our children. From what Rosie has told me, if it hadn’t been for your instructions, she almost certainly would have been caught up in the fire. I cannot even think about that.

  Rosie doesn’t know where you are, and she asks that you write to the address on this envelope. You might notice that it’s a Nova Scotia address. We aren’t there yet, we are still driving down east, but we are headed to the town where my parents live. There we’ll settle for a bit, see if I can find work. There is nothing for us in Hunts Beach. The house is gone with no insurance. The auto mechanic shop burned. As soon as you get this, please write where you are staying. Rosie misses you so much. She feels as though she abandoned you, but she had no choice when the fire department came and made her get into the truck. They promised her they would go right back for you.

  I wish I could tell you something about Gene. As you know, five of us went to the edge of town to make a firebreak so that we could stop the blaze from entering Hunts Beach. Before we knew what was happening, the fire came roaring down the hill straight at us. Two of us fled, I and one other man fell flat onto the ground, pushing our faces into the dirt. We were sure we were going to die. But as luck would have it, the fire crowned and leapt over us. When we stood, Gene was no longer with us. One of the men swore he saw Gene walking toward the fire, which was not a completely insane thing to do. If you can bury yourself in the dirt, it can sometimes be but a short moment until the fire passes, and then you’re safe because everything behind the fire has already burned. I cannot and do not want to say that Gene perished in the fire. He was the smartest of all of us. I pray that he escaped unharmed.

  Rosie says she will die of boredom in Nova Scotia, so you must be our first visitor when everything is settled.

  Your good friends,

  Rosie and Tim

  —

  Grace slides down the wall to a bench, holds the letter to her chest, and is doubly pained by the true destruction of Hunts Beach: Everyone will move away. What is there to go back to? A barren land with no house upon it. She can’t even begin to think about rebuilding. Not without Gene. Even with Gene. Where would they find wood that wasn’t charred? How would they come up with the money? How could they, as a family, live alone on a cinderscape?

  —

  After some exploring, Grace finds a side shop that sells remnants. Most pieces are too big or oddly shaped to work for day dresses. But she discovers, beneath a small mountain of fabric, a piece of navy blue cotton, enough to make a dress for her and something for Claire and Tom, too. Joan gave her a dollar bill as she left the house in the morning.

  The cost of the navy blue cotton comes to $1.04.

  “I have only a dollar,” Grace says.

  The cashier hesitates. Is it worth ripping away a fragment of a fragment?

  “Just take it,” she says. “What you have is fine.”

  “Thank you,” says Grace, holding her wrapped parcel.

  —

  “Matthew, I wondered if you would do something for me,” Grace asks when she climbs back into the truck.

  “If I can.”

  “I’d like to go to Hunts Beach to see if anyone I know is still there.”

  “The fire department has been pretty thorough about searching all standing houses, but it never hurts to try.”

  “My father was a lobsterman,” Grace offers.

  “Was he now.”

  “He died when I was fourteen. Went overboard in January.”

  No need to explain to Matthew what happened then.

  “I’m sorry,” Matthew says.

  “It would have been quick,” Grace says, relying on that not-very-comforting old saw. She has too many times pictured the minute her father was in the water before his respiratory system shut down from the shock and the cold.

  “Yes, it would have been.”

  “It took my mother years to get over it. She lives on what the League of Lobstermen can provide. Some years the money is adequate, sometimes not. I went to secretarial school to help out. But then I met Gene.”

  “I’m sure she was happy about that.”

  “Yes, she was.”

  They drive through blocks of yellow and orange foliage and then through passages of black, as if flitting in and out of a train tunnel. In the green, Grace searches for pumpkins or colorful mums, anything that is a sign of normalcy.

  When Matthew turns a corner, she can see from several blocks away that her entire neighborhood is gone. Her mind’s eye can trace every wall of her house, every chair, every kitchen tool, her mother’s favorite tea mug. What is she already forgetting?

  “This is unbearable,” she says.

  “Can’t wait for the first snow,” Matth
ew says. “I’m not sure I ever said that before.”

  “I need to get out.”

  —

  The setting sun gives the water a shade of blue Grace has always loved. She used to think the sea the one blessing of winter: even though the world around her was bleak, the water seldom lost its color. Today, the contrast between the dead black and the rich blue is almost impossible to believe in.

  She removes her shoes and puts her feet into the sand. Two or three inches down, her toes connect with wet. She moves toward the water.

  She sticks a foot into the sea and then snatches it back. She is not tempted to go in—she knows the water chill of November, but she has come on a mission, even as she knows how strange it is. She thanks the ocean, that vast indifferent entity, for saving her and Claire and Tom.

  News

  Alone in her room, Grace sits on her bed, propped up by pillows, and reads the several newspapers she discovered in Joan’s kitchen. She learns that fires ravaged Hunts Beach and that 150 of 156 homes in another seaside community burned to the ground. Along with Hunts Beach, five other towns were completely destroyed. She discovers that 3,500 people who were trapped on a pier at Bar Harbor were saved by the Coast Guard. She had no idea the fire had reached so far down east. She reads of a couple who moved all their furniture to the barn, only to have the house saved while the barn burned. Men in planes tried unsuccessfully to make rain with dry ice, fire victims ranged in age from sixteen to eighty, and some farmers would not leave their livestock. Fire damage was estimated at $50 million, home builders planned to build one thousand homes, and Halloween was banned in Maine.

  Newspapers are strewn all about her, the collection telling of the immensity of the fire and its terrible toll. From the articles, she doesn’t have a precise map of the fire, but it seems to have hugged the coast of Maine from Bar Harbor to Kittery.

  The carnage of the fire amazes her yet again. So many homeless, injured, or dead. She shudders at the report of the sixteen-year-old girl who died in an evacuee motor crash. Grace imagines the panic, the speed, and the horror in the realization that in leaving the danger zone, the girl was put in harm’s way. Grace puzzles over the list of the dead and a Mr. Doe from Sanford or Biddeford. Might the body have been named Mr. Doe by a coroner, pending an investigation, while a reporter took the name literally?

  Could the body be that of Gene, who left the four other men and walked into the fire, an act she would consider suicidal were it not for Tim’s letter? She remembers her fear that he might simply walk away from his life.

  Other stories compel her to read them again, such as the one of the man who wouldn’t leave without his horse and as a consequence died of asphyxiation. The reports of the cost of the fires make her feel helpless, all the more so because her loss is but a tiny part of the whole, and it might take years for investigators to reach her. But the report of the committee plan to build one thousand homes cheers her. She writes the name of the organization down.

  Her eye drifts to a story of the couple who were forced to separate after fifty-one years of marriage because the wife could no longer care for the husband. She was to remain in Maine, while the husband was about to board a plane for California, where their son lived. It isn’t a story about the fire, but the human interest of the tale captures her imagination. In the picture that accompanies the piece, the woman, formidable-looking, stands a head taller than her husband, who wears rimless glasses and is rotund. Grace would like to know if the woman is relieved to part from her husband of half a century or is instead heartbroken but stoic in the face of the camera. Grace will never know.

  She refolds the newspapers so that they resemble the neat stack she removed from the kitchen. Tomorrow, she and Matthew will likely go back to the church for another look at the bulletin board. Or ought she go straight to the police and inquire about the Mr. Doe? She has taxed Matthew’s generosity more than she should have and can’t ask for more. But she has to move forward—to locate her husband, to secure a job, and to find a way to rebuild her home.

  —

  Headlights play against the window and then stop. It seems the entire house holds its breath. Grace walks to the head of the stairs, and when the door opens she sees a familiar dark green coat.

  “Mother!” Grace yelps, running down the stairs. It’s not her mother’s way to embrace in public, but Grace can feel the force of her relief. Claire leaps from Joan’s lap with a cry of “Grammy!” Behind her mother is Gladys, who has driven Grace’s mother to the Yorks. Behind Gladys stands her mother’s other friend, Evelyn.

  “On the night of the fire, Gladys and Evelyn came with the car, and we headed toward your end of the beach,” her mother says in a rush, “but the road was blocked, and the heat from the fire so intense, we couldn’t get through. They told us that your part of the beach had been evacuated. Oh, Grace,” her mother adds quietly while looking at Grace’s flat belly.

  It seems that everyone stares at her daughter’s flat belly.

  “Any word of Gene?” Grace asks, as they move toward the kitchen and sit.

  “Not yet, but men are still fighting the fires inland,” offers Evelyn, who then glances down.

  The explanation, which is no explanation, silences the table. No one mentions Mr. Doe. No one mentions the police. Claire, hearing an inaudible cry in the air, slides out of her grandmother’s lap and makes her way under the table to her mother. Grace picks up her girl and holds her in her arms.

  “Lovely cake.”

  “Hmmm. Yummy.”

  Through all of this, Matthew drinks a cup of coffee, answering the polite question that comes his way. Grace can’t read him. Perhaps he’s uncomfortable in this group of women. She remembers that he has to get up at four.

  When the small talk dies down, Grace senses a question on the table next to the cake plate and its crumbs.

  By rights, Grace and her children should go with her mother, who is kin. But her mother has lost her house, too, and is living with Gladys. Would Gladys take in Grace and the children? She can’t ask that question now, not with Joan and Matthew in the room. But after a second round of coffees has been poured and sipped, Grace’s mother addresses Joan.

  “I can never thank you enough for rescuing my daughter and her children. We heard of the rescue at the church before we saw the note with your address. And then to have given them food and shelter is above and beyond…”

  “Our pleasure,” says a blushing Joan.

  “But we’ll take them now. My friend, Gladys, has an extra room at the top of her house where we can set up a bed and a crib and a playpen.”

  “I’ll be sorry to see them go.”

  “I’ll second that,” Matthew says. “But of course we all want to see the family settled.”

  “We’ll take them tonight,” Grace’s mother says, and there, it is done.

  —

  Having said their goodbyes and thanked Matthew and Joan, Grace, her mother, the two other women, and the two children are about to pull out of the driveway, when a police car, lights flashing, blocks their exit. The policeman bends down and says to Gladys, who is driving, “I’m looking for Grace Holland. Is she with you?”

  “I’m Grace,” she says from the backseat.

  “Would you step out of the car, please?”

  The policeman walks ten feet away from the car, and Grace follows.

  “You left this note at the church?” He holds aloft the scrap of paper on which she wrote the address of where she was staying.

  “I did, yes.”

  “Has any of these persons returned?”

  “My mother, Marjorie, is in the car, and my friend, Rosie, is on her way to Nova Scotia. I still haven’t heard from my husband.”

  “That would be Eugene Holland?”

  “Yes.”

  He tips his cap higher on his forehead, as a farmer might a felt hat. “We’ve searched the entire area the fires covered and all the hospitals, and we have no one who answers to that name. We a
re officially listing him as a missing person.”

  “Are there many missing persons?” Grace asks.

  “In the beginning, we had twenty-seven, now we have two, including your husband. Do you have a photo of him?”

  She did, but doesn’t now.

  “Can you give me a description?”

  “About five foot, eleven inches, normal weight, sandy hair, dark blue eyes, he’s twenty-nine. A scar on his chin. He was wearing brown pants and a brown jacket. He’d gone to help build a firebreak.”

  “Yes, we know.” The cop removes a card. “When he comes back, you give us a call, so we can take his name off the list. He’s probably had a knock on the head, or someone has taken him in.” He pauses. “Or maybe the shock of the fire has temporarily addled him.”

  The policeman doesn’t say what Grace knows he is thinking, that Gene is dead. Grace is thinking something else: He’s done a runner.

  —

  “The idea,” says Gladys, “is to ease off the clutch slowly and give it a little gas, then steadily increase the fuel until the car starts to move. You keep it in that gear—first gear—for probably three or four seconds, and when you get this sound, a higher revving of the motor, you ease into second by depressing the clutch and going straight down with the shift. And so on until third, the ‘hyphen’ over and up, and fourth, down here. It’s an H if you can picture it. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Gladys, in her purple coat and matching hat, offered at breakfast to teach Grace how to drive. Perhaps she’d seen Grace’s restlessness, her desire to get a job and support herself in Gene’s absence. Four women and two children in one house has at times been trying. Grace is quite sure that Gladys and Evelyn are lesbians, though she never had that thought before living with the two women. It’s in the way they brush the backs of their hands together in the kitchen, the tension in the evening, when they have to part in the hallway. Often both Gladys and Evelyn have their hands on the round ball finial at the end of the stairway railing as they delay leaving each other. Grace’s mother must know, too, though she’s never said a word to Grace. Does she often feel like a third wheel?