by Rachel Lee
Mrs. Beemis marched out onto the street, Elijah in her wake…although, were he to be honest about it, he didn’t want to be within ten blocks of this woman. He had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t going to last long in Whisper Creek. Either Mrs. Beemis would get him fired or he would get so fed up with her that he would resign. At the moment, the two possibilities appeared equally inevitable.
But the woman wasn’t done with him. On the sidewalk, she turned to face him, her finger wagging. “I’m disappointed in you, Brother Elijah. Seriously disappointed. How you could ignore sin happening under your very nose is beyond me.”
“Sister…what is your first name?”
“Alma.” She sniffed, as if he were beneath contempt for not knowing that, never mind that he had a whole congregation of names to learn, and never mind that he was fairly certain no one had mentioned her first name to him.
“Sister Alma, I am not spineless. Neither am I a fool. Creating a scene such as you did won’t teach anyone anything except that the members of The Little Church in the Woods are interfering, intolerant, unloving busybodies.”
“I am not a busybody! It was plain as day what those two were doing, and right in front of me. That makes it my business. As for tolerance, we are not supposed to tolerate sin.”
“But we are also called to love our brothers and sisters, and treat them with the same dignity and respect we want for ourselves. Furthermore, Sister Alma, you might consider rereading your Bible. When you are without sin, when you have plucked the beam from your own eye, then you can cast the first stone, or pluck the mote from your brother’s eye.”
“Well, I never!”
“And while you’re at it, may I suggest you reread the Beatitudes? You may wish to recall that we are sternly warned against judging others.”
Elijah was now on a roll, and it was his finger pointing at the woman, who was beginning to gape like a fish gasping for air. His voice held the thunderous sound that made him such a popular, memorable preacher. “Remember, Sister, the admonition when our Lord was asked which was the greatest commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’”
He was silenced by the sound of slow clapping behind him. Turning, he saw Sam standing there, applauding. Several other people had gathered, but at a look from Sam they hurried on.
“You’re still good,” Sam said to him.
Elijah didn’t know how to respond. For the first time in his life, the sight of his son tongue-tied him.
But Sam didn’t wait for a response. “Mrs. Beemis,” he said, “the Constitution protects your right of free speech. I can’t arrest you for what you said in there. But there’s a fine line between exercising your right to express an opinion and disturbing the peace.”
“They had their arms around each other!”
“But that’s not illegal. They have as much right to shop in that store as you do. So leave them alone. Save your sermonizing for more appropriate venues.”
She glared at Sam. “A public place is appropriate.”
Sam shook his head. “Not if it leads to trouble. And that was heading toward trouble. Don’t incite your neighbors, ma’am. And don’t harass them, either.”
“I’m obeying a higher law.”
“Fine. As long as you’re willing to go to jail for breaking human laws, go ahead.”
The woman huffed, then turned on her heel and marched away.
Elijah felt a sweeping sense of relief. For a little while, the Beemis thorn was out of his side. But then he looked again at Sam and felt an uncomfortable pang. For a man who made his living by speaking, he was pathetically speechless right now.
Sam broke the silence. “When did you start preaching tolerance?”
“I always did.”
Sam lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “That’s not how I remember it.”
Once again Elijah was at a loss. He was too aware of his own failings these days to argue that Sam had misunderstood him. Finally he said simply, “I feared for you, boy.”
“I’m not a boy.” Sam turned and strode away, a good-looking man in his prime. A man any father should be proud of. A son Elijah couldn’t seem to forgive.
“We’re shorthanded,” Sheriff Earl Sanders had said to Sam that morning. “Jeff Bauer is laid up again with asthma from all the smoke, Brad Gomez’s wife is in labor, Chas Elgin got a severe burn on his arm last night, fighting the fire, and Irena Figueroa is going to Denver for her grandmother’s funeral. Plus Teal is still on vacation, Luci Landro has to go to her son’s swim meet, and Phil Potter ate something bad last night and is tied to the porcelain god. That pretty much guts us. Anyway, the pros have pretty much taken over the fire fighting. I need you on patrol.”
Sam didn’t mind. Over the past days, as firefighters had arrived from all over the country, he’d begun to feel more and more like a fifth wheel. What the hell did he know about fighting a fire, anyway?
On his way in, he stopped by the hospital to see Chas and learned that he was being shipped off to a burn unit for treatment and grafting of the burn on his left forearm.
“It was stupid,” Chas said, groggy with morphine. “Stupid. I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.”
“You were too tired. We get sloppy when we get exhausted.”
“Yeah. But we gotta put that fire out.”
After that he signed in at a rather quiet, empty roll call, got his assignment and checked over the reports from the night before. It was all the usual stuff: a couple of domestics, a drunk who couldn’t find his own house, a DUI, and a half-dozen under-age kids who had been found drinking around a campfire near an abandoned mine. He hoped somebody had given them a stern lecture about the danger of building a fire in the woods just now.
His first call had been to the hardware store. Just what he needed to start his day: Mrs. Beemis and his father.
The Beemis woman was a well-known pain-in-the-ass around town. Six months ago she’d raised Cain in a city council meeting by ranting that Bob Hinderhoff ought to resign from the council because his eight-year-old son had been caught stealing a package of candy from the drugstore. As if nearly every kid didn’t try that at least once. But Mrs. Beemis had insisted it was a sign of Bob’s moral weakness and it made him unfit to be a councilman. She’d raised enough of a ruckus that the police finally had to remove her. That hadn’t stopped her. She’d spent the next week on the front page of the small local paper, picketing city hall with a couple of her cronies. The whole town was as used to her hijinks as they were to the strangeness of the schizophrenic novelist who had painted every inch of his house, inside and out, shocking pink, and occasionally paid for half-page ads in the paper claiming that the government was beaming messages into his mind.
Such things happened everywhere, but in a small town everyone was aware of them. And most of the local people shrugged it off, or found it good for a laugh.
But finding his father there…well, it hadn’t put him in a good mood. Although he had to admit that Elijah’s little sermon on the street had sounded more temperate than those he remembered from his youth. In fact, Sam hadn’t found a thing to disagree with, which nagged at him. Had Elijah lost some of his self-righteousness? Or had Sam exaggerated what he’d heard as a youth?
He didn’t know what to make of it. And, like most people, he wasn’t comfortable when things fell out of their tidy mental niches.
Then he remembered what his father had said after Beth’s funeral. That phone call hadn’t displayed either temperance or love. Punishment for his sins. Right.
Sam didn’t know what had hurt him worse that night, the revelation of how Elijah viewed Sam’s character, the fact that Elijah clearly didn’t give a damn for his feelings, or the inevitable sense of guilt that he might somehow have been responsible for B
eth’s death.
The memory did its work, though, reinstalling the anger and ice in Sam’s heart.
By two that afternoon, however, he was ready to turn in his badge and join a monastery of any brand other than his father’s. There was something mightily depressing about being called out on domestic disturbances that involved your friends and neighbors, people you actually knew.
The Tenants, Foster and Pat, who lived just four doors down from his own house, got into it over their burned-out yard. Their raised voices drew the attention of a neighbor who called the sheriff. By the time Sam arrived on the scene, they were in the front yard, threatening each other with garden implements and screaming at the top of their lungs.
Sam pulled up and climbed out. Neither of them noticed him, so he slammed his door as hard and loud as he could. That got their attention.
“We don’t need you, Sam,” Fos said flatly. “We’re just arguing.”
“I know.” Sam was careful to amble slowly in their direction. “It would be kind of nice if you’d put down the rake and the shovel, though.” Pat, who was holding the rake like a baseball bat, and Fos, who was holding the spade like a battering ram, seemed to jerk awake.
“Oh, jeez,” Fos said, tossing the spade aside. “I was just going to dig up the dead shrubs.”
Pat lowered the rake. “Like hell you were. You said you were going to dig up every inch of the sod.”
“The damn stuff’s dead anyway! I told you not to buy it. Damn it, four thousand dollars on grass! I told you it was too dry.”
“How was I supposed to know they were going to tell us we couldn’t water? What am I, a mind reader? Besides, you signed the check.”
“Only to shut you up!”
They were getting into it again, and Sam deftly inserted himself in the middle. “You know,” he said with a smile, “I could sure use a cold drink. Pat, you got any of that great ice tea of yours?”
A minute later they were in the house. Sam made them sit on opposite sides of the kitchen table and mediated as best he could. It took a while, but they calmed down. Pat and Fos, as far as he knew, got along pretty well most of the time. Whatever had set this off wasn’t usual for them.
He’d hardly left the Tenants imitating reasonable domestic bliss when he got a call that Ike and Marcia Leip were at each other’s throats. He knew Ike and Marcia from the community theater, where he occasionally helped build sets and props. They were both a little freaky, given to extravagant “artistic temperament,” but they’d always seemed to get along well.
That afternoon they weren’t getting along well at all. In fact, they had devolved into throwing things at each other. Sam was past caring what had started it; he basically gave them a choice: solve it, or somebody was going to jail.
They solved it. In fact, they both seemed pretty embarrassed to have Sam involved, even though Marcia had been the one to call the police.
It was a weird world. Stepping back outside, though, Sam had an idea what was getting to people. The smoke was a constant irritant now, making eyes and throats burn. The sky to the west was a deep gray, fading away to a bluer color overhead, but even so, the day looked hazy and dark. The sun, now in the west, was a dulled, dirty yellow.
Last night’s storm apparently hadn’t helped at all.
And he found himself thinking of Mary again. He wondered if she’d ever been married, and, if so, had her marriage erupted the way he’d seen today? He and Beth had fought at times, but nothing so loud or violent as what he often saw in his job. He couldn’t imagine Mary screaming at anyone, let alone throwing things.
But he didn’t know Mary all that well. In fact, he reminded himself, all he really knew about her was that she seemed gentler and quieter than Beth. Not that there had been anything wrong with his late wife. Nothing serious, at any rate. Nobody was perfect, and everyone had to overlook things with their partners. That was just life.
But an almost traitorous thought wormed its way into his brain, asking him if he would have married Beth again if he met her today.
And worse than the question was the answer that came unbidden: He didn’t think so.
That hurt, really hurt. His heart squeezed so hard he had to pull his car over to the curb and wait for the pain to pass. Had he really loved her?
Of course he had. Completely. Totally.
But maybe…maybe he just wasn’t the same person anymore. That wasn’t a flaw in Beth or his feelings for her. That was just an inevitable fact of life. Time had changed him, and Beth hadn’t been there to change with him.
But the time they’d had together, well, that had been just about perfect. Maybe not what he would want now that he was older, but certainly what he had wanted then.
And that was okay, wasn’t it?
But guilt settled over him like a cloud of doom. It just wasn’t right to be thinking this way.
Maybe his father had been right. Maybe he was being punished for his sins.
The wind and lightning from the night before had spread the fire. The valley was now dotted with spreading flames. Every firefighter they could find was desperately digging firebreaks and creating back burns, trying to corral the worst of it in the north end of the valley.
In the late afternoon, something went awry. The wind suddenly picked up, and the back burns shifted direction. Instead of the man-made fires being sucked toward the already burning acreage by the fire’s own draft, the wind twisted them around. With heart-stopping speed, a wall of fire ignited south of the firebreak, sandwiching in the firefighters. The only choice they had was to get out of there as fast as they could.
And not too far away, a man drove toward his house, unaware that the fire was racing toward him on gusts of dry wind.
10
“Dinner tonight? At the Steak Place?”
Sam’s voice coming over the telephone was like a balm to Mary’s fatigue. Elijah had been good to his word, and his church members had taken over delivering and serving food to the fire crews, so Mary had stayed at home running a sandwich assembly line. The thing was, it was hot today, and she’d had to keep the windows open or suffocate. Now her house smelled of wood smoke and her lungs felt as if she had bronchitis. That had worn her out more than standing on her feet in the kitchen for so many hours, something that wasn’t all that different from her teaching job, although the endless repetitive motions and boredom took their toll, too.
A dinner out sounded like heaven. “Are you sure you’re not too tired?” she asked Sam.
“Me? Nah. I got to play cop today. We’re shorthanded. No fire fighting for me.”
She hoped he could continue playing cop, because she didn’t at all like the idea of him being down there in those growing flames. The cable news had picked up the fire as a major story, and she’d spent all day glancing at her TV set to see the frightening pictures of flames reaching sixty to eighty feet into the sky, and the puny, exhausted, blackened firefighters who were too close to them for comfort. Now they were saying a group of firefighters had nearly been trapped between two walls of flame. She didn’t want Sam out there. She didn’t want anybody out there. “What about tomorrow?” she couldn’t help asking.
“Same thing. Although, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s worse, fighting forest fires or fighting domestic fires.”
She almost laughed, then realized it wasn’t funny, even if he was trying to sound light about it. “Oh, Sam.”
“It’s okay. Nobody bled. So, want me to pick you up around six?”
“That’d be great.”
But when she hung up the phone, she found herself wondering why he’d asked her. And wondering why she’d accepted.
Even on their short acquaintance, she had the feeling that Sam was as ambivalent about getting involved as she was. That he had as many, albeit different, reasons for preferring solitude.
But that didn’t keep her from putting on a nice navy-blue linen dress and red pumps, or from using makeup, or from brushing her hair until it s
hone.
It felt good. It felt good that a man wanted to take her to dinner. And she assured herself that his ambivalence was even more protection for her.
This was an opportunity to have a friend with whom she could share the semblance of normalcy without all the dreaded complications. It would be good for both of them.
Her doubts thus quelled, Mary was waiting for Sam with a smile when he arrived. He apparently liked what he saw, because a smile creased his face as his gaze swept over her.
“You look really nice,” he said.
“So do you.” And he did, in a white Western shirt, pressed jeans and polished Ropers. Better even than he looked in uniform.
The sun had gone behind the mountains already, leaving the town in a bright twilight that was cooling rapidly. Mary grabbed a sweater and draped it over her shoulders.
Sam was driving his own vehicle tonight, a Grand Cherokee equipped with ski racks on top and a bicycle rack on the back. He opened the door and helped her in, an old-fashioned courtesy that was a rare experience these days. Mary actually appreciated it. Being an independent woman didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy the social niceties at times.
Instinctively she glanced over at Elijah’s house, to see if he was watching, but there was no sign of him.
“Is the Steak Place okay with you?” Sam asked as they drove.
“It’s great.” There weren’t a whole lot of choices in a town this size. The fern bar on the corner of Main, the diner, a burger joint and a chain pizza place. And, of course, the two saloons that also sold sandwiches and wings. The fern bar was okay if you were in the mood for a huge salad topped with alfalfa sprouts, but it wasn’t the place to get a full meal. And Mary was definitely in the mood for a full meal.
“It’ll be nice,” Sam remarked, “when Witt Matlock gets that new hotel of his done. Hardy Wingate tells me they’re going to have a great dining room, and I guess his wife is already on the hunt for a chef who suits her.”