A herd of pigs ran squealing from the ruins of the barn. The bodies of the beasts trapped inside—cows and oxen by the look of it, a sheep or two—were still smoldering, but that hardly seemed a deterrent to the rooting swine. I wrote down the deaths in the margins of my sketchbook. No sign of a horse.
No cart, no horse, and, as yet, no human remains. The outline of a story began to form in my mind.
Flesh burns with a cloying sweetness, and even in the crispness of the day, the air felt sticky and ghoulish as I retraced my steps to the farmhouse. Walking across what had been a small porch and into the space that had held the kitchen, I noticed no footprints in the ash inside the house—a fact I found odd at first given the usual neighborly scavenging that goes on. Upon further reflection, however, I began to wonder if the Kimballs had been a family nobody wanted to get close to, for pariahs give off the scent of their misery just as foul air harbors disease, and persistent misfortune cannot help encouraging fear of the curse at its origin. I bent down to pick up the crude blade of a charred kitchen knife. However lowly and isolated their existence, this family lived in a world of their own and my work would be made all the easier for it.
Away from the animals, cold air helped to mask the worst of the fire’s atmospheric effects. Indeed, granted say in the matter, I would choose every time to suffer the frozen-fingered toll of inspecting a winter blaze. The putridity of a summer burn often lasts for weeks, muddling the senses of anyone forced to linger. Standing among these ruins, I felt blessed to be able to think with some clarity. That is when I noticed a rifle lying on the ground to the right of what had once been the threshold. No doubt it had previously hung above the entryway, but its inclusion in the wreckage indicated that there had been someone present at the start of the fire. Why? Because assuming he has had time to plan his exit, a man rarely leaves home without his weapon. Even a farmer sowing corn in a distant field knows that there is a chance he might shoot a meaty hare for his supper. In my experience, a gun laid upon its hooks signals that the man in charge is at home.
I bent down to study the fallen rifle more closely. An arsonist would purposefully leave it to burn if he thought it might reinforce his story: that the fire roared up so quickly and with such force he’d had no time to salvage even his trusty Springfield. Why then had I not found the farmer Kimball waiting for me when I arrived, wringing his hands and shaking his head over his apparent lightning strike of bad luck? His talk would have been of claims-to-be-filed and his manner—though convincingly exhausted—that of an eager assistant to my investigation. This was a vignette I’d witnessed before. But there was no sign of him.
I turned away from the gun and began my inspection of the kitchen. Kimball still cooked over a hearth in old pots and pans, which lay neatly piled near the stones. He had no stove. But none of the cooking vessels was tipped haphazardly on its side as though it might have spilled a greasy stew that fed the fire as effectively as, no doubt, it inflamed the gut. Only a single cauldron stood apart, a blackened glaze baked within. In a corner, the outline in ash of a table lay across the ground like a carpet. Broken plates and forks were scattered round its edges. I picked up a shard of china. It was decorated with a pretty pattern, one that somehow seemed too fine as compared with the rest of the objects I could see. Where had it come from?
The table had been set for a number of people. And with such a complete if primitive kitchen, it seemed clear that Kimball had had a wife. Children, too—though as babies will sit on their mother’s laps at mealtime, how many I could not tell. Where were they? A convincing fire-setter would have had his family in tow when I arrived, the better to impress upon me their abject misery and need. I scribbled these details along with a quick sketch, noting that the incendiary might well have taken place in the evening, perhaps in the midst of preparing what had so charred the inside of the lone used pot. Several heavy brown bottles lay shattered about the room. That I did not find them all together told me that they had been secreted away in nooks and crannies, a suspicion that suggested the presence of someone who needed a drink more often than others might have wanted him to have it. Again, like the false distress of an arsonist, I had seen this pattern before, and usually it pointed to darker facts.
The room I passed into next had been some sort of parlor, and the charred remains of its contents were of a different nature entirely from those I had found in the kitchen. Indeed, as I mentally reconstructed the room, it seemed to be as out of place as had the fancy china in the kitchen. Small, ornamented brass locks suggested keepsake boxes; an ash-pile of shelf upon shelf of books was apparent. A brass compass—glass shattered and face melted away—appeared to have come from some faraway land, for it was inscribed with symbols oriental in nature. This room had been kept in perfect order—I could tell by the arrangement of fallen objects peeking out from the dust. To the untrained eye they represented tragic disarray, but to me they exemplified the ordered chaos of a wealthy man’s study. It was strange, I thought, as I made a list of my findings. Books, but no chair in which to sit nor lamp by which to read them. Not so much as a candleholder either, the likes of which I had noticed in the detritus near the hearth.
In the hallway, I could barely make my way through the wreckage. A second story had come down, and by the looks of the ash, it had been full of the kind of material that burns quickest in a fire. Cloth, straw bedding, and—what was this? Books again? Their presence made little sense to me. Other than the strange set piece I had seen in the parlor, this farmhouse did not strike me as an abode full of people with time to edify their minds by reading books. It felt like a poor and lonely place, with fences left to mend and barely enough livestock to get a small family through the winter.
I made my notes and moved into the last room—the space in which the man and woman of the house must have slept. A barren chamber it was, more in keeping with the kitchen than it was with the strange parlor. I sketched the outlines of the wardrobe and wrote that it had held very little, for the mark left in the ashes did not indicate that it had burned as hot as it might have had it been stuffed with finery of one sort or another. The ash print of a bed signaled the only other piece of furniture that had occupied the room. All was as I would imagine save for two things: the charred ground beneath my feet sloping ever so slightly near where the bed had stood, and the unmistakable sound of grinding glass beneath my boots.
This is where the fire had burned longest. I could tell by the extent to which the floorboards had been eaten away. This is where it had begun. But how? And why did the shards upon which I stood appear to derive from two different vessels? The glass of one was coarse and broke only under heavy tread. The other was fine and took barely any weight at all to crush into slivers. I bent down and picked up the mouth of a cider jug—the only part of a drinking vessel you will find intact in the wreckage of a fire, for the glass or potter’s clay is thickest at the neck. The finer shards were more difficult to identify. Delicate as the pearlescent inlay of a shell, they did not fit with the sparse nature of the room in which they lay. I stared round, leaning down to pick up a heavy chunk of wood. It alone had survived the heat of flames no other wood could withstand. Dense in nature—a solid block of burled fruitwood, perhaps—it was the sort of material from which fine possessions are carved. I turned it in my hands until its purpose revealed itself: the base of a handsome lamp, a lamp whose delicate glass shade lay in pieces beneath my feet, a lamp with no business illuminating so bleak a chamber.
Walking outside once more—of course it was all outside now—I stopped to inspect the well. The pump handle had been pushed down even though most people know to leave it up after they’ve drawn water, thus making it easier to loosen should the arm of the mechanism become stiff with rust during a period of disuse. I also noted that the ground around the well appeared less charred than elsewhere, indicating that someone had tried, however uselessly, to draw water at some point before or during the fire. Where, I wondered, was the bucket? I searched the blac
kened grass closest to the house and found nothing. Strange. Then, expanding the sweep of my gaze outward towards the edges of the cornfield, I saw the pail lying on its side.
I had not noticed initially that the stalks were newly trampled where the bucket had been dropped. Someone had moved carelessly through them. I walked back towards the house tracing a faint line of indentations in the ash-covered grass and surmised that whoever had run from the fire had stopped next to the well, perhaps found the metal handle too hot to work properly and continued on, tossing the bucket aside just as they reached the field. Disturbingly, the tips of the dried leaves on the cornstalks were singed. I quickened my step, following the trail of scorched vegetation towards the cattle pond at the field’s edge.
Water. The swift-flowing current ran into the pond at one end, then over a small dam at the other. Along with its proximity to the Post Road, the property’s location at the edge of a river would have made it ideal for sale to one of the many mill agents who roam the county in search of land upon which to construct their mills. Here, burbling before me, was the reason for Hurlbut’s interest in the dilapidated farm. No doubt he sought to buy it cheap at auction, then dip into the deep pockets of a mill owner and sell it at a profit. The waterway rattled small stones as it churned. Industry, I thought, is nothing without a source of power to make it chug and clang.
But a more gruesome find awaited me on the banks of the pond, for there lay a blackened body. By the size and shape of the corpse—as well as the charred form of a belt buckle and what was left of a pair of tough leather farming boots—I knew it to have been a man. Indeed, judging from the path I’d followed through the field, I was near certain that it was the farmer Silas Kimball who lay before me, unless he’d had a grown son he’d managed to keep with him on the farm. This changed everything. I could see Kimball running in flames through the field, falling just shy of the water that might have saved his life. He had endured a tortured end, the bones of his hands curled into fists, his head thrown back, his jaw agape—a posture of agony. “Crazy” as he may have been, I could not help feeling for him.
I sat beside the body, noting and sketching the details. I drew a map of his futile scramble and described what was left of him, taking rough measurements with my tape and estimating his size and build. He no longer had an identity beyond what little I could salvage, and I could not help thinking how bare we are in death, how quickly our bones join a field of broken sticks, how life’s end strips us of everything that makes us unique. Our history remains, but even there, the mark we leave is dependent on the impressions of others.
With the last of my notes and drawings complete, I turned my mind to the story I would present in my report. Whatever “official facts” I submit, I always write down what I imagine actually to have happened. My reasons are not the least bit admirable, for one can only tell a believable lie when armed with the truth. If Silas Kimball was dead, then who had set the fire? I thought back to the rifle. It was more likely that a woman running from a blaze would leave the gun behind. With the lives of her children in danger, a mother has no thought of future protection; she concerns herself with the peril of her immediate predicament. The table had been set and the charred substance I assumed had been the family’s supper made it likely that Kimball’s kin had been at home on the evening of the fire. Yet the horse and cart were missing. Someone had successfully run from the scene, never, perhaps, to return. My wager was that it had been Mrs. Kimball and her children. As to the nature of the crime—if it was a crime: It was distinctly feminine. A man would have employed more brutish instruments to set a blaze, while the use of a fancy lamp—my best guess as to the source of the flame—suggested a lady’s touch.
I suppose it is a weakness of which I should be ashamed, but I am never glad when the evidence points to the woman. It’s an irrational bias. After all, the world is replete with cruel and devious females. But hardship plagues the country wife, and in my experience, poverty and drink do not a gentle husband make. I thought back on the shop boy’s comment and the crude brown cider bottles in the kitchen and by the bed. Somehow, though I could not begin to guess at the details, the circumstances surrounding this fire reeked of desperation, not greed.
Polly
SHE WOKE IN a room not her own. Her bedclothes, crisp and white, smelled nothing like the lard soap she had scrubbed over slatted washboards at home, hard enough to bloody the joints in her fingers. Here, the clean sheets were folded under a mattress lumpy with shredded corncobs and tucked so tightly across her feet she could not turn to look about.
At what? Where was she? She lolled her head to the side. She was resting in a narrow bed across the room from someone—the girl who’d led them away from Mama. It was dark out. Night or early morn, she could not tell. But the moon that had lit their way still shone brightly through the panes of the large window between the beds.
Mama! Mama! She heard the screams so loudly in her head. Ben screaming, Mama!
The scene came slowly back to her now. The stern face of the woman who opened the door of a white building and urged them to come out of the cold; the crisp white cap she wore atop her head; her dark dress. A simple woman with a heart big enough to take them in. Polly had reasoned then that Mama directed them to the house only because it sat close to the road and seemed to enjoy a position of prominence in the compound. But it turned out that Mama had known about these people, these “Shakers.” Had she planned to abandon her children here from the moment Polly set the house aflame? Had she realized that they would be separated from her? Tears pricked at Polly’s eyes. Strong as her mother had seemed as she spoke to the woman of leaving her children where they would be safe, Polly could not forgive her this new betrayal. She squeezed her eyes shut. After all they had been through, how could she have left them?
Putting a hand to her hair, she felt that it had been pulled tightly from her forehead and fastened at the back. It smelled different—washed, medicinal—and her scalp pulsed with the blue-bruised feeling she remembered from when Mama would take a comb and peck into her tangled tresses, every sharp tooth pulling out nests of hair that blew free into the fields around their house.
Their house. Their house in yellow and black flame. Their house a plume of smoke in the cold night air. She could still feel Ben curled beside her on the cart bench—where was he now? He should be nestled up against her here, on this narrow pallet, under the tight-woven warmth of this blanket. She wanted to cry out, call him in for supper, in from the rocks in the grass where he used to sit, making piles of pebbles and sticks and clover leaves torn from their stems to look like hearts.
But the severe woman had tried to talk him away from her—as though a child could stand to hear what she had to say:
Bid good-bye to your sister, Benjamin, for she is no longer as you have known her. You are a Shaker boy now, and your kin are the children of Holy Mother and Jesus Christ, our Holy Father. One day, your name shall be Brother Benjamin and you shall not be called other. Come now and meet the brethren. You shall know happiness and the contentment that hard work can bring if you labor in the name of Mother. Go now, boy. Go.
Again, Polly heard his screams inside her head, but this time they were for her. Mama had gone, a door closing and the air in the room suddenly wholly different. The girl who now lay across from her had held out a hand strangely decorated with graceful red curls. Somewhere, Polly could hear the echo of Mama’s sobs as she waited for the older woman in a room close by and yet so far away.
The girl with the paisley hands had halted before opening the door to lead them outside. “Shh now,” she said to Ben. “Try not to cry.” And before Polly could move to stop her, she knelt down and held out her arms. Polly felt sure Ben would recoil but he did not. Instead, he hugged her, burying his head into this stranger’s neck and whimpering softly. She held him a moment—how it had ripped at Polly’s heart to see her little brother find comfort in the arms of another—then rose again and led them outside along the pat
hway through a village whose houses were all shaped alike. It had been very neat and trim, very quiet. Even at a later and busier hour, Polly could not imagine children shouting or herders whistling. No clop of horses’ hooves. No harping shop-women, no tuneless drunkard’s song. Only silence.
Where was everyone? She had thought they might be the only people for miles around until a door into one of the buildings opened and a young man in dark clothes and a white shirtwaist stepped out and walked towards them. He nodded. “Good day, Sister Charity.” Charity. What a strange name, Polly thought, for one complicit in such a cruel separation. She watched as the girl refused to meet his gaze; they exchanged no further greeting. It was as if they were afraid of each other.
“This is Brother Andrew,” the girl told Ben. “He will care for you now. There, take his hand.” Ben had looked terrified and spun round to run for Polly, crying her name over and over. She, too, had reached for him, but the girl stepped between and held Polly back as Brother Andrew took the child gently by the hand and pulled him towards the door from whence he had appeared. Once they had gone, Ben’s cries became softer by the step, as though he were vanishing farther and farther into the depths of the building, never to return.
Polly remembered shaking and clutching her arms about her. No, no, no, no, no, no… The word kept filling her mouth, and though she had never before known herself to protest aloud in the moments when her mind spun away, she felt an agony so old and deep, she could not be silent. She had lost sight of Ben once before and he’d nearly been murdered. No, no, no, no, no, no… She had lost sight of him, and the moments her father had held him under water had changed him forever. No, no, no, no, no, no… He was just a sweet, simple boy. What sense could he have made of his abandonment? With Mama gone, Polly was all he had left. She looked around her, falling slowly—so slowly that she wasn’t sure if it was she or the world around her that had slipped away. The ground was cold as she crumpled to the stone path before hitting her head. Then, nothing but blackness.
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