Panes of glass, uneven in thickness and slightly distorted, panes of glass that had cracked and grown opaque with cobwebs, now glowed orange as the wood around the panes blackened. The plank floor at the back half of the barn, separating the upper and lower levels, had been cut from maple trees that had sprouted from seeds on this land more than two hundred years ago. Long before white men felled these trees, the Potawatomi had bled them for maple sap, and traded the syrup to the white settlers, who seemed as crazy for the taste of maple sugar as the Potawatomi were for corn liquor.
The swallows of 1999 were already gone from these rafters, headed south for a gentler winter. Though everyone knew the swallows came and went seasonally, nobody had considered that while they were settling in and producing their broods each spring, these birds had been quietly documenting the passage of time. If, instead of lighting that cigarette, David Retakker had climbed into the corners of the barn and crumbled the old swallows’ nests in his hands, he might have found some surprising items, such as two ancient silver trinkets: one a disk that said MONTREAL, and the other an inch-long section of a silver chain whose links had been pounded flat. Or a patch of buckskin, gummed to softness, cut away from a shirt Corn Girl’s mother might have made for Corn Girl’s father, this old skin so fragile that it would probably have crumbled when touched. Or a ragged end from a leather thong, left on the site of a wigwam, now woven together with strands of Mary O’Kearsy’s hair. Or velvety fur from a muskrat jowl cut away from a jaw by Margo Crane, or even a bit of foil paper from a candy wrapper that a swallow had added to its nest lining this spring after it fell out of David Retakker’s pocket.
There was no reason to think that the fire, or the swallows, for that matter, when they returned to sail through empty air where their homes had been, would give a damn about the flesh and bones of one boy, small for his age, even if that boy could have worked this place for a good part of the next century with the devotion that only love can instill, even if the boy had been the person who, along with George Harland and Rachel Crane, could have kept at bay for another generation the builders and real estate agents who wanted to divide this wide fertile tract into unproductive rectangles and smother it with foundations for homes, concrete driveways, and choking lawns. To suppose that a fire, especially one burning as hotly as this one, would bother to spare rather than devour David would be plain foolishness.
27
TOM PARKS WATCHED GEORGE WATCH THE FIRE. STANDING there so quietly, George seemed thinner and taller than usual, and his face was almost gray. His attention seemed, to Parks, to be focused around the fire rather than on it, as though birds or angels perched at the edges of the flames, delivering the bad news. Parks sympathized with George losing his old barn, but he also couldn’t help thinking George was fortunate for having so much to lose. This slice of the planet belonged to George, and if the barn went up in flames, he still owned the charred land beneath. Surely George would find a way to absorb this loss, and Rachel would inherit the farm, with or without this building.
Nobody other than George looked disturbed. Certainly not the firefighters, for they were just doing their jobs, after all. They had known worse disasters than a barn fire and worse ways and places to spend an October day. Four ladder trucks had arrived, one all the way from Kalamazoo, and the firefighters were probably happy to be here and not at some downtown apartment building where a guy with a cigarette in his mouth would screech to a halt in front of the building and run up shouting, “My baby is in there! I only left her alone for a few minutes,” and beg one of the firefighters to run through burning doorways, up disintegrating stairs, into a scorched, smoke-filled room where a baby lay asphyxiated. A few minutes ago, George had asked the firefighters about David Retakker, and they said it was unlikely he’d remained in the barn with the door wide open, though by the time they’d gotten there, it had been too late to go inside and check.
“So you figure David got out?” George asked Parks, without turning to look at him.
“A twelve-year-old boy doesn’t let himself get burned up in a fire,” Parks said. “He’s probably hiding somewhere, ashamed of what he’s done, and he’ll show up full of regret in a few hours.”
“You’re probably right,” George said.
Parks said. “How do you think his ma is going to take this?”
George moved his head slowly side to side. There weren’t many of these old barns left, and there was no way a fellow could rebuild one. Recently George had been entertaining the idea that he could get good money selling a one- or two-acre plot beside this barn. Some city person would have paid a premium to build a new house in view of such a monument. The several times he’d mentioned selling property, Rachel had crossed her arms and damned him to hell, said she’d gladly go without food or electricity rather than lose any land. But even she wasn’t strong enough to resist the inevitable indefinitely. Today even Rachel would have to see that no matter how tightly you held on to a place, it would eventually slip away. How could it be otherwise, if structures you knew as well as your oldest friends were in reality no more permanent than wigwams? He told himself that they’d had a good run, his family. They’d kept their land as long as anyone, and George’d had a year and a half with Rachel, which was surely more than he deserved.
George lifted his work boot to look at its cracked sole and saw the smashed, furred bodies of two woolly bears. George didn’t have any reason not to believe Parks and the firefighters about David, and because anything else was too painful to consider, he believed David got out of the barn. Still, George hated himself for even considering throwing the boy and his mother out of the house on P Road, and he especially regretted not bringing David home for breakfast this morning. Because George still believed in the ultimate justice of the world, he figured the destruction of his barn must be punishment for one of his sins, if not for his considering sending David and Sally away, then for his crime of loving Rachel, for his going into the barn with her the first time, for learning the river smell of her, for feeling her warm muscles against the coolness of loose straw. There were plenty of crimes George might have to pay for around here, but surely none of them merited killing a perfectly decent kid. David was fine, wherever he was. A support beam dropped through the flames and showers of sparks flew up from the back of the barn. Through the doorway, George could almost make out the ancient hay wagon aflame and he thought he smelled rubber tires melting. His thoughts stopped before he completed a picture of David sitting where he had left him, atop the now-flaming stack of hay, for such tragedies did not happen. Except that standing right beside him was Tom Parks, whose brother was killed by a train, whose father died by smashing his tractor against a tree, whose children were a thousand miles away. He had a surge of feeling for Tom Parks, who had lost so much.
George said, “I’m glad you came back from Texas, Tom. It’s nice to have you here.”
Parks said, “I’m going to miss this barn of yours.”
“Me too.”
When Rachel appeared on the other side of the nearest fire truck, she looked dark in comparison to the flames, wild-eyed, angry-eyed, so beautiful it made George’s own eyes water. At the sight of her standing with her arms crossed, glaring at the fire, George’s heart became larger and more liquid, filling more of his chest. Rachel had been more or less pissed off from the day he met her, and today her anger finally made sense.
George watched Rachel uncross her arms and then disappear around the side of the barn. When he saw a bird flit from the building and pursue her, as quick and blue as a barn swallow, he knew it must have been a titmouse or a puff of smoke, for the swallows were long gone and wouldn’t return to this place until spring. George would get enough money from the insurance company to construct a pole barn with the same floor area, but by no means with the same capacity for storing hay and straw. It would make no sense to build way out here in isolation anyway, so far from his own house, and wherever he put up a pole barn there wouldn’t be cracks betw
een boards or at the roof line, through which the birds could enter and build nests. Next spring, birds would circle above this burned-out foundation with nowhere to land. Such a pathetic creature was the barn swallow, that it required the preservation of a human ruin on the verge of crumbling or bursting into flame. George pitied any creature who relied so heavily on human beings for its survival. Any creature who relied on things to stay the same was hopeless.
28
BEFORE RACHEL LEFT THE HOUSE TO RUN TO THE FIRE, she’d grabbed her rifle from the mudroom and slung it over her shoulder. In her hurried carelessness she kicked the head off a pur-ply ornamental cabbage that had risen out of the ground near the fence line on a spiny alien neck. She bent to slip through the strands of barbed wire and raced south through the pasture, paralleling Queer Road, and before she’d gotten a hundred yards, Martini the pony, the ex-wife’s llama, and the donkey were thundering toward her and then slowing to run alongside. The donkey bumped Rachel with his forehead, and she swatted his wobbly ears but kept on going. Martini screamed excitedly and threw his head up. The blaze seemed to gain fury as she and the animals approached the south fence. Rachel climbed through the barbed wire to get out of the pasture and felt a loss at leaving the animals clustered behind her; she felt the cold at her back the way she had upon leaving George the first night they’d spent together in the dusty room with the maps of the Indian gardens. Such stray and ragged feelings nipped at her as she approached the fire, on her path between rows of drying cornstalks, in a field beneath which somebody’s dead undoubtedly were buried.
When she reached the end of the cornfield, the fire that appeared before her was huge, hungry, too powerful to believe. She stopped and stared, the way everybody else was staring, but she failed to get any sense of it. She moved around the barn to glimpse the barnyard below, to see the cows milling and snorting restlessly at the creek, as far from the blaze as they could get within the fence she’d repaired with bedsprings. One female jumped on the other, as though the fire had triggered her to go into heat. Rachel sympathized with those dumb animals—she would like to run to George, jump on him, demand to know what the hell had happened, but George was on the other side of the barn, talking to Parks and to a yellow-and-black-clad firefighter. What Rachel knew for certain was that this barn she had always known was disappearing, turning to dust before her eyes, and she wished that she’d paid attention to the way the beams had supported the weight of the structure. She wished that, as she’d lain in the barn all those mornings, she’d noticed how the foundation had settled and shifted. Rachel had watched her mother kill a man in this barn, but she’d never bothered to wonder how the walls resisted blowing apart in high winds, or why the roof had not given way beneath year after year of lake effect snows.
Rachel walked away from the cows, back up the incline. On the other side of the fire, Parks looked solid and ruddy, but standing next to him, George seemed delicate. Until recently Rachel had only rarely looked at George, perhaps because he was so often looking at her, or around her, taking her into his vision along with the weather. Lately, though, she’d felt curious about him, and she’d taken to hiding in her garden at dusk to watch him split wood. As George watched the fire now, she knew he must be thinking about all the work he had to do, figuring that, whatever happened today, he still had to finish the oats and straw and fix his machinery, and he had to be ready by Friday to begin harvesting. Maybe it was because they talked so little that Rachel remembered every single thing George said, even the things she pretended not to hear. Parks kept moving his body as though he was motioning George to look away from the fire, but George would not. The structure began to hiss as though deflating. Rachel closed her eyes and tried to remember how the barn had surrounded her while she slept, but instead she felt weighed down. Maybe the fire was altering local gravity or maybe Johnny’s ghost had flown out of the barn and was perched on her shoulders. Johnny had stood behind her that night, and Rachel hadn’t known there were better men, and she had ignored the rough-hewn beams supporting the planks above her, the beams covered with chop marks from the adze, each mark in the wood a separate effort expended by some ancestor.
She watched the skeleton of the barn’s frame rise out of the disintegrating wooden siding. The fire was translucent and weightless, but more powerful than anything she’d known. The fire trucks were spraying streams of water at the sides of the barn, repeatedly dousing the sugar maples on either end, but the yellow leaves on the larger tree were nonetheless curling and disintegrating against the heat, and Rachel doubted the flesh of the wood could resist much longer. Since her mother left, nobody had tapped those trees for sap, and they must have been ready to burst—perhaps the heat inside those trees had been the source of the fire. Then she noticed, in the doorway, the spokes of a bicycle wheel bathed in flame.
“David!” she shouted, and moved toward the fire, but her voice was drowned by a noise, a whomp, as a vertical post collapsed, dragging the roof of the building down. Sparks flew out, and the bicycle wheel was gone along with the barn’s entryway.
“You’ll have to move away, miss,” a thick fireman shouted above the roar.
“Where is he?” At this range the fire was so loud she could hardly hear herself.
“What did you say, miss?”
“Did anyone see David?” Rachel yelled. “I saw his bicycle.”
“Yes, irreplaceable,” the fireman shouted, as though in agreement, over the noise of flames and engines. “They don’t build this kind of barn, nowadays. You’ll have to step away from the fire.” He stepped back alongside her, and she could hear him more clearly. “Except the Amish, of course.”
“The Amish?” Rachel said. Did the man not want to tell her David was dead?
“The Amish still build these barns,” said the firefighter reassuringly. “Down in Indiana.”
“What happened to the boy who was here?” Rachel said. “His name is David.”
“By the time we got here, it was impossible to go in. Fire marshal seems to think the neighbor boy who set the fire got out.”
“David set the fire?” She asked it as a question, but she already knew it in her bones. Had known it the moment she saw the fire.
“According to Officer Parks, the boy was probably smoking.”
The firefighter shook his head but he seemed to Rachel as much comforted by the fire as disturbed. She supposed that such men lay at home staring at the ceiling hour after hour, waiting for a fire the way Rachel waited for plants to grow. She supposed such men imagined flames like these while they made love with their wives, while they looked into those wives’ cool, watery faces. Of course, the firefighter didn’t know anything about David, knew even less than Parks did, about David’s asthma and his freakish love for George, a love large enough to keep him in the barn trying to extinguish the fire rather than getting himself to safety. The fireman was looking at her.
“David has asthma,” Rachel said. “He probably couldn’t breathe in there.” She wanted to say David was not the kind of person who would run away from responsibility, that he was likely too weak from hunger to fight his way out. Or maybe that son of a bitch Todd came up here with his friends and locked David inside and set it afire. Except of course that the door had clearly been open. The firefighter was staring wholesale into Rachel’s face.
“Stop looking at me!” Rachel said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t look away.
“That’s my barn on fire.”
“So that’s your dad over there?”
“That’s my husband.”
The fireman looked away finally. “We did pick something up, near the entrance. Do you want to see it?” Rachel followed him away from the fire, back to a new four-wheel-drive truck with a long bed and good ground clearance, the kind of truck George ought to own. When they stood behind the open truck door, the noise of the fire was muted. The man held out a plastic bag containing a grubby white inhaler. “This was lying on the ground in fron
t. It doesn’t look like it was there long.”
“It’s David’s,” Rachel said.
Another firefighter, a woman with a walkie-talkie, motioned to the man. Rachel stood back while he replaced the plastic bag and closed the truck door. Could David’s asthma inhaler have started the fire? Rachel wondered. It was a stupid thought, she knew, but she wanted to believe that David hadn’t started the fire with a damn stupid cigarette. She wanted one reason to think he’d safely escaped, but she knew better than even to hope David was alive.
After the fireman moved away, Rachel did not want to stand there in awe of the fire that had just devoured her best friend. Instead she would get David’s inhaler away from the people who had no right to it. Rachel tried the door of the truck but it was locked, as was the passenger-side door, so she climbed into the back of the truck, keeping low, and opened the sliding window to the cab. She reached down to the seat, grabbed the plastic bag, and stuffed the inhaler in her pocket. Rachel would make sure they had no evidence to use against David after he was gone, and that meant she also had to get the cigarettes from Parks. After she slipped out of the truck bed, Rachel moved through the cornstalks, toward the road, to get behind the police cruiser. She crept out of the field on hands and knees, trying to move slowly and invisibly the way her mother had taught her to hunt. Rachel had not mastered the skill well enough to sneak up on an animal, but everyone here was focused on the fire. Parks’s driver-side window was open and she pressed herself against that door and kept her head down as she reached inside. She grabbed the cigarettes off the dashboard and put them in her pocket along with the inhaler, then crawled on hands and knees back into the corn. She crept back around to the west side of the barn to study George, who still watched the fire opposite her.
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