After the Fire

by Jane Rule

  Milly, refilling the silver coffee pot, looked, over and said, “What on earth is that?”

  “Sushi,” Karen said defensively.

  “It’s great stuff,” young Adam said, taking a piece of the seaweed-bound delicacy and saving Henrietta from having to make that gesture herself with less genuine enthusiasm.

  “Foreign,” Milly said.

  “My great-grandfather is buried in this graveyard,” Karen suddenly announced. “People have been eating sushi here for generations.”

  “That grave’s your great-grandfather’s, no kidding?” Adam asked.

  But Karen had put the plate down and left the kitchen.

  “How could that be?” Milly demanded.

  “A lot of this island was owned by Japanese before they were rounded up and sent to the Kootenays during the war,” Homer said.

  “You wonder why she’d want to come back,” Milly said, “why she’d want to admit it.”

  “Well, it’s nothing to be ashamed of after all, Milly,” Henrietta said more sharply than she’d intended, but really sometimes Milly behaved as if she didn’t have good sense.

  “We’re the ones who should be ashamed,” Homer said quietly, but he helped himself to a leg of fried chicken.

  The food was being eaten solemnly but steadily in all the crowded rooms, even in the den where Dickie’s charred bones lay under their light burden of roses. The talk in that room was about Dickie. Even an occasional remark was addressed to him. And the fire burned cheerfully.

  Finally Rat said to Henrietta, “Do you think it’s about time?”

  She looked at the clock on the mantel. It was one-thirty.

  “Yes, Rat, if you please.”

  Rat took a spoon and tapped a glass until the crowd in the living room fell silent except for those shushing the people in the den and kitchen.

  Adam, who had been sitting next to Sadie, got to his feet. He shifted shoulders too broad for the suit jacket he was wearing.

  “Hen thought we ought to take a few minutes now for anybody to say anything they’d like to. I’m no good at making speeches so I just want to say that Dickie was my best friend, maybe because he was my worst competition with women and darts. I’m going to miss him. Life may be easier, but it’s going to be a lot less fun.”

  One by one the young men took their turns, and Henrietta was glad to be reminded that Dickie was a man other men had genuinely liked. Though Sadie was now weeping, surely to hear her son spoken of so warmly would give her some comfort.

  Riley was the last of them to speak. Smaller-bodied, slighter than Adam, he spoke with more natural confidence and he ended his remarks by thanking Henrietta for giving them the opportunity to say good-bye to Dickie, everyone together.

  The room had fallen silent as Henrietta opened the front door to the undertakers. Rat and Adam and Riley moved to help them lift the coffin. As they carried it back through the living room, Miss James in her flat, loud voice began to recite:

  The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high

  Today, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder high we bring you home,

  And set you at your threshold down,

  Townsman of a stiller town.

  The coffin was gone from the room and in the hearse before Miss James spoke the final lines:

  And round that early-laurelled head

  Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead

  And find unwithered on its curls

  The garland briefer than a girl’s.

  Then Sadie cried out, “I can’t go. I just can’t!”

  “You don’t have to, dear,” Henrietta said to her, an arm around her shoulder. “You can stay right here and have that gin.”

  “Can I catch a ride with you?” Rat asked Karen. “My wife’s going to stay to help clean up and then take the baby home.”

  “Sure,” Karen said.

  “Where do you suppose Red was?” Rat asked as they waited in Karen’s car to take their place in line behind the hearse.

  “I don’t know,” Karen said.

  “Miss James was something, wasn’t she? I’m sure glad at least one woman said something.”

  “I didn’t know him at all well,” Karen said defensively.

  “I guess the ones who did wouldn’t have had much to say about him either, but he just hadn’t settled down yet, that’s all.”

  “I thought you all did a really good job,” Karen said.

  “Yeah, well, Dickie was a good buddy. Anybody’d have to say that about him. But it makes you think, doesn’t it, about how much anybody could say about any of us?”

  Karen wanted to protest, but she herself couldn’t have counted on anyone to stand up and say anything about her. It wasn’t simply that she was new to this community; she’d forgotten how to make friends. She’d left none behind her in the city. All the people she had known were Peggy’s friends.

  She swung her car into line behind Homer’s, turning on her lights at his example. They drove at about fifteen miles an hour over the narrow, twisting island road. In the grey day the only brightness was a patch of shallow snow here and there under the trees where the rain hadn’t reached to melt it. They drove right by Dickie’s turnoff, but neither she nor Rat glanced up through the trees to see where the chimney still stood.

  Though there were no more than a dozen cars, there wasn’t, room for them all to park in the roundabout at the gate of the graveyard. They parked on the upper road and walked down, just a small band now. Karen was the only woman, but she and the men were accustomed to that. Not only at fire practice but often near closing time at the pub she was alone with them.

  They all stood quietly while the undertakers lowered the coffin by means of pulleys into the freshly dug grave, the mourners’ interest in the mechanism distracting them from what it was achieving. High above in the branches of a huge dead tree, a bald eagle observed them, and out in the pass sea lions sported and barked. In the grass at their feet, a few snowdrops bloomed.

  When the coffin was in place, the men took turns shoveling in the dirt. Karen stood a little apart, and no one offered her a turn. She didn’t care. She was here only because she couldn’t have borne to stay behind at the house with all the women, with that awful Milly Forbes.

  Why, Karen wondered, had she said that about her great-grandfather? She had no idea where he was buried—one of the Gulf Islands was all her father had ever said, aside from telling her not to be an ancestor worshiper. She was to be one hundred and fifty percent Canadian the way he pretended to be. She at least had the advantage of her mother’s blue eyes.

  But she had often walked down here and looked at that Japanese grave, and, though she couldn’t read the characters, it had given her some sense of her roots. If it wasn’t likely to be the grave of her great-grandfather, it could have been. Only claiming it like that had turned into a lie. She’d never look at the grave again without burning embarrassment. She kept her back to it now.

  I’ll never belong here, she thought, or anywhere. And bleak as the thought was, it had an odd comfort in it, perhaps because it was the truth.

  “I’d better take Sadie home while she can still walk,” Milly said to Henrietta.

  Milly wanted the excuse to leave. Cleaning up after a party always depressed her, and this one had already ruined her eye make-up.

  “Hen’s a kind woman,” Sadie said as she sat slumped in Milly’s car, holding the bowl of roses in her lap, never having seen them on the coffin. “A kind, kind woman.”

  If a little smug and self-righteous, Milly thought. Milly had no such aspirations, and therefore she didn’t envy her friend Hen’s hard-earned place in this community. As for herself, she didn’t intend to live by the side of the road and be a friend to man. Henrietta could talk all she liked, but Milly hadn’t seen her eat any of those revolting little raw fish
and seaweed balls. What a thing to bring! They were white people, after all. What was that girl trying to prove? Her great-grandfather buried in the graveyard indeed!

  “I feel bad,” Sadie said.

  “Well, of course you do,” Milly said, trying to keep her irritation out of her voice.

  “I mean sick,” Sadie moaned, and she threw up into the roses.

  “Oh Sadie!”

  “It was the smell of them,” Sadie mumbled.

  Milly frantically wound down her window before she herself gagged on the awful mixture of odors which now filled the car. It was all she could do not to slam on the brakes and order this disgusting creature out of the car.

  “I’m just worn out,” Sadie said and sighed.

  Milly drove at dangerous speeds to keep the fresh air coming in as well as to get this over as quickly as possible. Finally she pulled up on the road outside Sadie’s rundown little cottage and waited for her to get out of the car.

  “I’m just worn out,” Sadie said again, staring out the window.

  Now that the car had stopped, the smell was overpowering.

  “You’re home, Sadie,” Milly said sharply.

  “I know,” Sadie said vaguely. “It’s not like I saw much of him, but at least I knew he was there.”

  Was she unaware that she was sitting in her own stinking vomit? Milly flung open her own door and got out. For a moment, she simply stood, breathing. Then she went around to Sadie’s door and opened it.

  “Come on. You need to get yourself cleaned up, and then you can rest.”

  “Built himself a house and moved out is what he did. Now there’s not even that.”

  “Sadie, come on!”

  “What’s the point of them?” Sadie asked sadly. “What’s the point of them, can you tell me that?”

  “Get out of this car, Sadie, right now!” Milly demanded, taking the roses from her and flinging them, bowl and all, into the ditch. If Hen had been telling the truth, she’d thank Milly for one less bowl.

  “It was the smell of them,” Sadie said again.

  Finally she struggled out of the car and staggered up. her path while Milly stood watching her. Once Sadie managed to make it up her rickety steps and through the door, Milly wound down the passenger window, too, and drove home in freezing wind.

  At her own house, she filled a bucket with hot soapy water and sloshed out the floor of her car.

  Then she went to the phone and dialed. “Hen, you won’t believe this, but that woman vomited all over my car and broke your lovely bowl!”

  Chapter IV

  “IT’S A FUNNY THING,” Henrietta said to Red as they sat together eating leftover clam chowder for their lunch, “all that time I was trying to teach you how to live alone and really take care of yourself, I was teaching myself, too. Do you make sure you have at least one hot meal a day?”

  “Mostly.”

  “I do only because I told you to,” Henrietta confessed. “Even so, I often have to invite someone else over to make myself cook.”

  “Miss James says it’s easier to live alone if you always have,” Red said.

  “I suppose it is. She’s very fond of you, you know.”

  Red didn’t respond.

  “Red, you need to know people care about you. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. This is your community.”

  Red looked at her skeptically.

  “Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

  “You had enough help, didn’t you?” Red asked.

  “Oh, help, yes, but that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Sadie’s telling everyone it was my fault.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Henrietta asked.

  Red shrugged.

  “Sadie’s naturally upset,” Henrietta said, “but that’s nothing to take to heart.”

  “I don’t. It doesn’t matter to me what people say.”

  On the contrary, Henrietta thought. At any suggestion of criticism or interference Red withdrew into her own well-defended territory.

  “I only thought, if you liked Dickie, it would be only natural …”

  “I didn’t like Dickie,” Red replied firmly, and she got up to clear the table.

  Sometimes it puzzled Henrietta that she could be so concerned for someone as bluntly uncompromising as Red when the whole art of life for Henrietta was graceful compromise. She knew she would have to let an hour or so pass before any conversation could resume.

  On the days she was at home, Henrietta’s habit was to rest after lunch, not an indulgence but a way to store up strength for the days she had to go to the mainland. Usually she read until she was about to doze off and then got up. She had nothing against sleeping during the day except the dreams she had, embarrassing rather than really nightmarish. In them, she seemed to be drunk, unable to cross a room or navigate stairs without falling down, all the while trying to pretend nothing was wrong, and curiously no one else in those dreams ever did seem to notice either her embarrassment or her distress. They behaved, just as she was trying to behave, as if nothing were wrong.

  Today her book didn’t hold her attention. Her own concerns kept intruding on the plot. Sometimes Red could behave as if these last four years of their slow building of understanding simply didn’t exist, as if Henrietta were just another intrusive old woman without any special status in Red’s heart. It wasn’t gratitude Henrietta wanted. In fact, Red even in her most taciturn moments had odd ways of showing not gratitude so much as loyalty, like her wanting to know that Henrietta hadn’t really needed her at Dickie’s funeral. If Henrietta had asked her to be there, Red would have come, whatever her personal feelings. No, what Henrietta wanted from Red was trust. It was exactly at those moments when Henrietta was offering her good will that Red drew back.

  Was Henrietta somehow too ambitious for Red, not in a material way, not in any conventionally social way, but too ambitious for her spirit? Red wasn’t afraid of work and its obligations. She was generous with her time and energy even with people she didn’t particularly like. She wasn’t, however, generous in giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. Didn’t Red have the right to be happier than she was?

  “What’s happy?” she could hear Red ask, in a voice a hundred years older than any of them.

  None of the young people seemed to Henrietta as happy as she had been at their age, or was she just not remembering what it had really been like?

  She put her book down and got up. Red was washing the windows in the living room which looked out over the pass.

  “You know, it doesn’t seem to me you young people have as much fun as we used to at your age. I remember fishing trips and picnics and dances at the hall.”

  “You were on holiday,” Red said. “There must have been people who lived and worked here even then.”

  “Well, of course,” Henrietta said.

  Most of their friends had been on holiday, too. It was only after she and Hart had come to live here that those distinctions began to blur.

  “I wouldn’t want to be a weekender,” Red said. “I’d rather be here or not be here.”

  “Do you ever think about leaving the island?”

  “No,” Red said, “never.”

  “Never’s a long time,” Henrietta said.

  “Maybe.”

  “If you’re going to make anything of your life, you have to think that way, at your age that is.”

  “Well, I just don’t,” Red said.

  “Do you save any of the money you earn, Red?”

  Red glanced over her shoulder at Henrietta.

  “Or is that a question you’d have to lie about?”

  “Oh, I guess not,” Red said, grinning, “only it would sound like I’d been lying before if I said I did.”

  “Not lying. Oversimplifying maybe.”

  “I like to keep things simple.”

  “Have you got a bank account?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like me to take you into town and show you how to open on
e?”

  “No.”

  “Money is safe in a bank account, and it earns interest,” Henrietta urged. “You can make your money work for you.”

  “I don’t need all that much of it,” Red said and moved off to the windows in Hart’s study.

  On the Friday nights Karen had ferry duty, she was also supposed to turn up at the pub between the time the 6:10 p.m. boat left for the mainland and when it returned with its weekend load of passengers at 8:30. If the boat was on time, Karen could help serve dinners for almost an hour and a half. But sometimes she had less than an hour, and she worried that the pub owner might finally decide that her conflict of schedules made her less attractive an employee than several others who were in line for the job.

  Tonight Adam said to her as she hurriedly served him his fish and chips, “You only just got here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m on for the eight-thirty ferry.”

  “Next thing you know, you’ll be driving the oil truck! How many jobs does one person need?”

  Adam had a light in his eye which made it difficult for Karen to read his tone. The only male flirts she knew were gay, which Adam certainly was not. He was criticizing her.

  Later, selling the few tickets to people going to other islands on the night boat, Karen wondered how much she was criticized for getting more than her share of the limited winter work. Most people her age who were not working were collecting unemployment insurance, and it was a way of life for them to work just long enough to qualify for it, live on it until it ran out, and then look for work again. Only single mothers with at least two children could go on welfare. Single people were expected to move on if they couldn’t support themselves here.

  Red was virtually the only other woman Karen knew who didn’t pattern her life in such terms. Karen suspected that Red had a principle about it, though perhaps not the same principle as her own. Karen never wanted to be dependent again, whether on a person or on the government, whose tolerance for boring dependents was also limited.

  She was already down at the ramp when the lighted ferry appeared around the point, its searchlight casting for navigational landmarks, one of which was a cottage at bayside. Karen would not have liked to live with that distinction before each winter dawn, after each winter nightfall, the lingering light finding its own reflection in her exposed windows.