After the Fire

by Jane Rule

  “Over the past while. We’re going to call on Miss James. She’s better, but she still can’t go out, and she’s bored.”

  “I can’t do that,” Henrietta protested. “I don’t have the voice for Miss James.”

  “She’s expecting you,” Red said.

  “I’m not to be expected!” Henrietta replied crossly.

  “Just let her talk,” Red suggested, and grinned.

  “What’s so amusing?”

  “I’m just glad to see you haven’t forgotten how to be mad,” Red said.

  What Henrietta couldn’t explain was that any emotion was a threat to her. Only by being still, by cultivating apathy, had she gradually been able to sink below the horror of Hart’s death. If she let herself rise up again, it might be there waiting for her. Yet the burden her own body was becoming to her was not her will. It was beginning to suffer in a way she hadn’t anticipated or intended. She needed Red’s help to dress. And she needed Red’s arm to lean on if she was going to try to walk to the car.

  “I really can’t do it,” Henrietta said in some consternation as she sank into the passenger seat of her car. “I’m as weak as a kitten.”

  Blackie, held away by Red’s order until Henrietta had sat down, now crowded into her knees.

  “Blackie!” Red said firmly.

  The dog cried but backed off, her tail wagging frantically.

  “Shall I tie her up?” Red asked, “or can we take her along?”

  “Take her,” Henrietta said.

  By the time Red had settled Blackie into the back seat, Henrietta had managed to swing her legs into the car. She closed her eyes and felt the sweet breath of the young dog at her ear.

  “Blackie, sit!”

  The dog sank back onto the floor behind their seats. Henrietta wondered vaguely at the confidence with which Red started the car and backed out of the garage. Earlier she might have felt a pang at someone else’s taking on Red’s education, but it was nothing but a relief to her now that Red had given herself over to another teacher. The movement of the car lulled her.

  “Open your eyes!” Red ordered.

  They were so heavy Henrietta wasn’t sure she could. The reward, a view of her own fern- and fir-lined drive, was another small jolt of fear. The old fern fronds had not been cut back, and already the pale brown fists of new growth had begun to push their way through. She didn’t want to risk even the ferns’ need of her.

  “I’ll help you cut those back if you like,” Red offered. “There’s quite a bit around the place that needs doing.”

  Henrietta didn’t answer. They were now out on the island road. Even here where she had no responsibilities, the living world seemed to clamor for her attention, from the pale greens of new growth on the evergreens to the blossoming berries. And there in a clearing by the side of the road were two does pausing to look before they bounded off into the bush.

  As Red turned into Miss James’ drive, Henrietta felt her bones settle. She was at the bottom of the sea.

  “I truly can’t,” she managed to say.

  “I know,” Red said. “I’m just going to go in and tell her we’ll come another day when you’re stronger.”

  Henrietta didn’t want strength, but she wanted to be free to choose against it. She was weighted here by her bones, really unable.

  “Stay,” Red said to Blackie.

  The dog cried a little at Henrietta’s ear before she settled back, resigned to her wait. And again Henrietta closed her eyes against the sight of Miss James’ wild little garden, beyond which the maples had leafed out to block her view of the sea. But she did remember that one day this would be Red’s cottage, and she opened her eyes again because a child would one day play among these moss-covered rocks and scatterings of flowers.

  Chapter XII

  KAREN’S FATHER HAD PHONED from Vancouver and was arriving on the evening boat. She had swapped shifts with another ferry worker so that she could wait on the dock like any ordinary islander expecting company.

  The dock was not as crowded as it would be in high summer, but the weather in late spring was already tempting visitors not tied to school schedules. The first vehicles off the ferry were campers inevitably driven by grey-haired or balding men whose wives sat beside them with laps full of knitting. Then came cars of young couples with one or two toddlers strapped into regulation car seats behind them. Very few people arrived alone unless they were islanders coming back from a day in town. And none of those wore a suit and tie and sat behind the wheel of an expensive rented car.

  Karen swung into the seat beside her father quickly not to hold up the traffic. He glanced sideways at her, a look she returned only when his eyes had shifted back to the line of traffic. His extreme good looks always came as a shock to her. He had sent her a black-and-white photograph of himself, taken when he’d become president of his university, and in it his eyes were opened unnaturally wide, and his normally mobile mouth was clamped shut, macho Canadian through and through, no inscrutable Jap here. In person his skin was golden, his eyes dark honey and half-hidden, his mouth vulnerable to his moods.

  “You look better,” he said without glancing over at her again.

  “I am,” she answered.

  The cottage did not please him but for the same reason Karen was beginning to grow impatient with it; there was neither room nor reason to make it her own.

  “I have to move out for the month of August when the owners use it,” she explained, “but that makes the rent very reasonable.”

  “Won’t you have had enough of this life by then?” he asked.

  “Of this cottage, maybe. I like the island.”

  “What exactly is it that you’re doing?”

  Karen didn’t want to confess her jobs as a sin. She didn’t want the little confidence they had given her wiped out by the purse of her father’s lips.

  “I’m learning to live alone and take care of myself. I never have before.”

  “Does it suit you?”

  She wanted to take a step back from him, away from his height of which he was so proud.

  “It’s beginning to,” she said.

  “You’re a grown woman,” he said, sighing as he sat down on the couch made suddenly more shabby as the setting for his expensive suit.

  Karen did look carefully at him then because he was staring out at the view which was restless with water birds. She could not possibly be the cause of the strained sorrow in his face.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  “Your mother’s dead,” he said, still focused on the sea. “I’ve just come back from … I brought back a few of her things. I thought you might like … want …”

  “When?”

  “A week ago. She was always such a frail little thing.”

  “Of what?”

  “Boredom? Terror? Exhaustion?”

  “Those aren’t things you die of,” Karen said.

  “Your mother killed herself.”

  All Karen heard in herself was Might I?

  “I just sent her a handbag, for her birthday.”

  “I know,” he said. “It was there. She hadn’t opened it.”

  “I didn’t mean anything to her,” Karen said bleakly.

  “Nobody did,” her father said without comfort.

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe she just didn’t have the energy.”

  They sat in awkward silence, Karen waiting to feel something out of which she might find something to say.

  “We weren’t divorced,” her father said finally in a deliberate way. “She didn’t want a divorce.”

  “Did you?”

  “I haven’t been celibate.”

  Why had he made it sound like a confession? Surely he didn’t think she was unaware of his young women. He hadn’t ever brought them home while Karen still lived there, but he made no secret of them.

  “I’ve never thought she … was your fault.”

  “Did she?” he asked, offering another of his sid
eways glances.

  “Oh, I don’t know. We never talked about it. We never talked about anything.”

  “I married her because she reminded me of my mother,” he said, and then he laughed.

  Karen heard no bitterness in it, just a sense of the absurd. How could her tiny, blue-eyed mother remind him of his own? Karen had never met his mother. Both his parents had died in the camp. She assumed her mother’s parents were either permanently estranged from their daughter or dead.

  Her father stood again and turned to her, giving her the first direct look of his visit. He had never kissed her except with his eyes.

  “I’ve eaten. Have you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Shall we take a look at this pub of yours?”

  Karen had, ever since her mother had left them, been both afraid for and proud of her father. Losing his wife, he seemed to have lost his ticket to the social world he was determined to feel comfortable in, and Karen was no help, both too young and not white enough. But tonight she could offer him the friendliness of her world.

  Homer and Jane were just finishing a supper of fish and chips. Homer stood up to shake hands and say what a good job Karen did as a volunteer fireman, not back there at the hall making sandwiches but right out there with the men. Karen was embarrassed at what her father might think of such unladylike behavior, but she was also glad she’d found the courage to keep going to fire practices.

  Adam, leaning on the bar with his beer, remembered the university her father was president of and asked respectful questions.

  Only when Karen turned and saw Milly sitting alone with a glass of wine did she feel that old familiar panic of her younger years. Would Milly remember about the grave Karen had claimed was her great-grandfather’s?

  “Is that handsome man your father?” Milly called cheerfully.

  He turned and smiled in return, never tired of the flattery of women, even women his own age, which Milly must be. And she was looking somehow softer tonight, her claws well hidden in her fur. Karen introduced them, but she steered her father firmly away and down into a lower, quieter nook of the pub before any conversation could develop.

  “You have a lot of friends here,” he observed when they’d given their orders.

  “I work here most nights,” Karen finally confessed, “and I work on the ferry dock, too.”

  “When you’re not fighting fires?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’ve only been to one real fire. I nearly quit after that.”

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said. “There’s going to be money from your mother, and I’m not exactly hanging around waiting for government compensation. There’s all the help in the world for you to do something with your life.”

  Karen shrugged.

  “I want you to be all right,” he said.

  “Does it ever occur to you that I’d like to say that to you, too?” Karen asked.

  “No,” he answered, looking into his whiskey which was the same color as his eyes.

  That would have been the moment for him to tell her he was going to marry again nearly at once, but he didn’t. He wrote to her a week later.

  Why hadn’t he, who had some use for them, kept her mother’s engagement and wedding rings? Karen put them, along with all the other jewelry her mother had sent, in the handbag he had also returned.

  Karen grieved more for the robin that flew against her window than she did for her mother, and felt unnatural. Her only real emotion was the twinge of fear her blue eyes could give her as she glanced at herself in the mirror. Could I? She told no one of her mother’s death, her father’s remarriage. She thought of Dickie burning himself to death. She hadn’t asked her father how her mother had done it. Now she never would.

  Red put out a garden chair and helped Henrietta out to it where she could sit in the sun and teach Red what to do.

  “I’m fine with vegetables,” Red had confessed to her, “but I don’t know a flower from a weed.”

  “You be careful with yourself now,” Henrietta said.

  “Women can just squat down and have their kids in the fields,” Red said, herself squatting at the neglected ferns.

  “Some may; most don’t,” Henrietta answered, flinching away from the memory of her own miscarriages.

  She had no skin. Nearly everything touched some raw place. In that month of crazed apathy, she had not healed but had further damaged herself. Now she knew she had to eat. She had gradually to teach her neglected muscles to do her bidding. But what to do with the running sore of her psyche she didn’t know.

  Henrietta had not yet agreed to go out in the car again to call on Miss James. She still refused to see Milly. Even when the quiet Karen sometimes took Red’s place, Henrietta felt at the edge of panic until she was alone again. A different sort of panic reasserted itself when she was alone, but at least then she was free to whimper, cry, talk to herself. Only Red’s presence gave Henrietta some respite. Red was firm with Henrietta, but she didn’t pry.

  As Red’s child grew, her own quietness had a different quality to it—not of griefs held back or needs not shared but of placid waiting.

  “I’ll plant bulbs at my place this fall,” Red decided.

  “Daffodils,” Henrietta said. “The deer don’t eat them.”

  Even that much advice cost effort, but it was possible. If she could keep up this slow pace of return, she might gradually be able to face the greater demands of life. But how do you heal shame?

  “You don’t. It heals itself,” Red said.

  “Are you reading my mind?” Henrietta demanded, the panic rising.

  “Things that need to, come out,” Red said quietly. “I thought maybe now you knew what they were.”

  “What things? What things?

  “You haven’t got anything to be ashamed of, Mrs. Hawkins. As you get better, you’ll know that.”

  “How do you know that?” Henrietta demanded.

  “I just know,” Red said.

  “You don’t know anything! You’re an ignorant child. Take me back to the house.”

  Henrietta trembled with the effort, and tears tracked down her face as unbidden and betraying as words. It didn’t matter that Red beside her didn’t look at her. Red knew.

  “You’re an indecent, ignorant girl!” Henrietta shouted from the safety of her kitchen chair.

  Red looked at her for a speculative moment and then smiled. “I’ll be back in a while,”

  It isn’t funny! Had she spoken that aloud? Red had turned away and didn’t answer. How could Henrietta have shouted at her like that? I’m behaving like a Milly Forbes, spewing out my shame all over other people. She hadn’t even known she was doing it. I can’t trust myself. She could not bear the idea of being no better than Milly, no better even than Sadie. At least Sadie had had the excuse of being drunk. Were all women, deserted, reduced to this? I didn’t even know I was. But she hadn’t really been alone in those years. She’d had the Hart that old man took to the grave with him. An illusion. That old man was Hart. But she couldn’t have made all those visits if she had accepted that. That old man had been her duty, not her love. And what was the reward of all that duty but the shattering of illusion. I am not a good woman. I didn’t wake him because I didn’t want to wake him. I didn’t know he could kill Hart.

  Henrietta wanted to lie down. She didn’t know if she had the strength to get to her bed, but she must. Slowly she worked her way from chair to doorjamb, from doorjamb to bookcase, from bookcase to bureau, her face soaked with tears, her nose running. Finally she stretched out on her bed. A cool breeze from the window gradually soothed her burning face, and she slept.

  The dream was also gentle. Her husband’s face, not so much as it had been before the strokes as beyond them, smiled at her. I’m all right, Hen dear, I’m all right now.

  “So her ladyship’s finally receiving guests, is she?” Milly asked.

  “She’s had a rough time, Mrs. Forbes,” Red said.


  “I thought she was made of tougher stuff.”

  “So did she.”

  “Well, I’ve missed her,” Milly conceded. “I guess I’ll just drop over there now and get out of your way. What am I going to do, by the way, when that baby arrives?”

  “Let the house get dirty for a week or two,” Red answered.

  “A week or two?”

  “I can bring it with me, can’t I?”

  “Well, I suppose,” Milly said. “I don’t really mind babies until they learn to talk back.”

  Milly went into her bedroom to check her face. She hadn’t been putting in much time on it lately. She looked older, and that somehow seemed appropriate, even a relief. Who was there to kid anyway? Tarting herself up for Hen wouldn’t raise Hen’s spirits. No woman felt better unless another was looking worse.

  Milly was, however, shocked by Henrietta’s appearance. She must have lost fifteen pounds, and she didn’t have them to lose. Her clothes looked as if they belonged to someone else. And her beautiful hair had somehow simply wilted. She was an old, old woman.

  “Hen!” Milly cried in distress. “What’s happened to you?”

  “I hardly know, Milly,” Henrietta sighed. “But I think I’m over it. I just need time now to get my strength back. You’re looking wonderful.”

  “Am I?” Milly asked, surprised.

  “And after what you’ve been through!”

  “It wasn’t so bad,” Milly admitted. “Except for getting tired awfully easily, I feel better than I have in years. I don’t know why I waited so long. I want to go around recommending it to every woman I know.”

  Henrietta smiled her modifying smile and looked for a moment a bit more like herself.

  “My daughter was awfully good to me, Hen. I’d forgotten how much I used to enjoy my kids. She works in a travel agency, you know, and she offered to send me off on a cruise.”

  “‘Where are you going to go?” Henrietta asked.

  “Oh, nowhere,” Milly said. “I haven’t got the right clothes, and anyway I wouldn’t want to travel around alone. Can you see me in a cathedral or a museum? The Grand Canyon would give me vertigo, and the one time I saw Niagara Falls, it was just noise. Do you know what Red said to me? She said, ‘You love this house,’ and the fact is, I do. I’m actually glad to be home.”