by Jane Rule
“Don’t mind if I do,” Jimmy said. “I’ll just get you some water.”
“I’m afraid the barrels will be frozen.”
“Nope. I checked. I’ll bring enough in to put some in the tub.”
As the kitchen warmed, Laura moved around more easily. She found the doughnuts, some stale bread and seeds for the birds, and, when she and Jimmy sat down together, she wondered why she had fretted in the night. A power failure, snow, anything of that sort turned an ordinary day into a holiday. What boy in the city would come pounding at her door ready to do all her chores for nothing but a snack which he stayed for more to keep her company than because he wanted it?
Laura knew not to ask about school. Jimmy was at an age when he fretted to be out of the classroom and into the woods or onto a fishing boat. His father would have let him, but his mother was determined that all the kids were going to finish high school. They spoke instead about the logging truck that had gone off the road last week, three fires in as many days so that the volunteer firemen all finally went home to bed and said either the island would burn down or the kids and women would have to cope with the next one.
Once Jimmy had gone and the birds were fed, Laura was briefly at loose ends without the chores she had expected to do for herself. Then she realized that on such a day she could simply settle to read while she had the light to. There was not even any point in cleaning up Jimmy’s muddy boot prints since Peter’s would be there this evening. A power failure was even a sort of luxury, if it didn’t go on too long.
By evening, however, when her eyes were too tired to read by poor light, when there was no television, and Peter had so overloaded the stove that she would have to wait for hours to bank it, she decided to take her battery radio to bed, feeling the same kind of discouragement she had the night before. “If I should die before I wake” had seemed to her a morbid prayer when she was a child. Now she understood it as a prayer for the old, not morbid at all but simply mortal.
Static on the radio woke her, but when she reached to turn it off, it was not on. Fire. Something was on fire! For no more than a second, those reluctant old bones held her prisoner of a prayer. Then she moved, no longer aware of pain. It was the kitchen, somehow the stove…The kitchen door, like a great hearth cast huge heat and light into the living room which had begun to fill with smoke. Laura backed away from it toward her front door, stepped into her boots, grabbed a coat and flashlight and stepped out into the shocking cold.
It woke her but left her inside the nightmare of fire, where she now must think what to do. It had already been too late to grab the fire extinguisher, too late to phone the fire department, too late to think what to save. She moved slowly, stupidly down the path and then turned back to believe what was happening. The fire had eaten into the second floor and flowered onto the roof. Even if the firemen arrived—and how could they when they didn’t know?—it was already too late to save the house.
Laura watched the upstairs corner bedroom fold in on itself. She thought of the closet full of Thorny’s clothes which she’d never got round to giving away and found herself weeping for them, the things of his life like his life itself gone. How perfectly silly she was, in tears over his clothes when she had nothing but the nightgown, coat and boots she stood in, nothing.
“Not so much as my handbag,” she said aloud.
Then she saw flames dance into the cedar next to the house and realized the danger as well as the loss. She did not know if she’d been standing there a minute or half an hour. She must get help at once. Her nightgown fluttering in the snow around her boots, she lighted her way to the empty house of her neighbors. Fortunately she had left their key under a flower pot on their deck, fearing that otherwise, in her absent-mindedness, she would misplace it.
The fire number was stickered to their phone as it was in every island house. Once Laura had made the call, she sat in the dark house waiting to hear the fire station siren and then realizing it could not sound without power. Everyone would have to be phoned. What would they do if the woods were ablaze by the time they got there? Should she go back and try to attach the hose? The well pump was useless. In any case, Laura was too cold and weak to move. Should she call her son?
Laura didn’t want any of her children to know, but they would have to know. She hadn’t even a handkerchief to blow her nose. It made her feel guilty, sitting there sniffing, and then resentful, bitterly resentful to be cold and alone in the middle of the night. How she hated the night which had become like a personal enemy to her!
It must have been the overloaded stove…or a fire in the chimney. Well, what difference did any of that make now? She thought of her books from the Open Shelf Library. She would have to pay to replace those. She’d have to phone the bank for another cheque book. Things, after all, could be replaced. They were insured. Even the house was insured. But surrounding these reasonable thoughts, threatening to engulf them was the darkness.
Laura heard the wailing siren of the fire truck. Then its lights swung into view on the lane that passed this house on its way to hers. Behind the yellow fire engine came the tanker truck, and behind that a line of cars. Only when they had all gone by did Laura think she should let them know where she was.
She got as far as the deck and could go no further. Her stiff old bones simply refused to carry her back to that roaring, collapsing house. Then a late, lone car came along, and she signaled it with her flashlight.
It was Jim O’Hea with his three oldest boys.
“Run for it!” he ordered them.
Then he got out of the car, bounded up onto the deck and surrounded her with a strong arm.
“Come on,” he said gently, “I’ll take you home to Mum,” as he always referred to his wife.
Laura did not protest. The little will she had had left her. In most of the houses they passed she could see the demented darting of fire, and it frightened her newly each time, as if the whole neighborhood were kindling for disaster. In several she also saw random arcs of flashlights.
“The damned power!” Jim muttered. “We ought none of us to pay our bills this month. They should have had a crew here today.”
“Well, at least I won’t have to worry about the food in my freezer,” Laura commented cheerfully, her social self functioning out there beyond the shuddering anxiety.
“You don’t have to worry about a thing now,” Jim said gently.
Even the younger O’Hea children were up, their mother urging them to finish glasses of milk so that she could herd them back to bed again.
The large room in which they cooked, ate, and entertained themselves was amply warmed by the wood stove, and it was cheerfully lighted by kerosene lamps. Laura gratefully accepted an old chair by the stove and the offer of a cup of tea.
“I sent over to Lyvia’s for some clothes for you,” Kathleen O’Hea said. “She’s about your size. She ought to be here any minute.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Laura protested.
“About five in the morning by now, not much more than an hour before she’d be up anyway, and the engine’s woke everybody anyway. Phone’s been ringing off its ear.”
“Oh dear,” Laura said. “Oh dear.”
“Burned right down, is it?” Kathleen asked.
“I suppose so. I waited at my neighbors.”
“Sensible.”
“I hope they can save the woods at the back.”
“They’ll do the best they can. How did it start, do you know?”
“In the chimney probably,” Laura said, realizing that she didn’t want little Peter implicated, though she was sure Jimmy would think to suspect him.
“Have you phoned your kids?”
“Not yet,” Laura said. “I’ll wait until they’re up.”
“One of them will want to be on the morning ferry.”
“Oh, I don’t want to go over there!” Laura said.
“Have to go some place,” Kathleen commented reasonably.
Lyv
ia Tey was at the door with a large, cardboard box full of clothes.
“My poor dear!” she exclaimed. “Are you all right?”
Then followed the same questions Kathleen had asked before Lyvia got around to the box.
“I didn’t know about shoes,” Lyvia said. “Whether they’d fit you, but I brought some.”
“Oh, my boots should do until I can get something else.”
“It’s a good thing I remembered underwear! Nothing but your nightgown?”
“Why don’t you go into our bedroom and try them on?” Kathleen suggested.
Once alone in the bedroom with its large, unmade bed, Laura wanted simply to crawl into it, turn out the lamp and fall asleep, leaving all the horror and confusion and kindness behind her. She didn’t want to put on Lyvia’s clothes. She didn’t like Lyvia’s clothes. Her snobbish ingratitude shocked and oddly reassured her. At least her own taste hadn’t burned up in the fire. Of course, she had to get dressed. She couldn’t go on through the day in her nightgown, coat and boots, and day was coming.
Laura looked through the contents of the box, holding up a dress, then a pair of slacks, a blouse, a sweater, examining them in the shadowy light. It touched and shamed her that Lyvia hadn’t brought over anything but her very best. Laura found a vest and underpants, discarded a bra, found a pair of socks. Then she didn’t try on the shoes. There was only a small cracked mirror on a table, in which Laura could dimly see only her uncombed hair and unmade face. She hadn’t a comb or lipstick to her name, and she looked simply awful. Thank heaven she had most of her own teeth, for no one could see that her bridge, soaking in the bathroom, had also been lost.
“How are you coming along in there?” Kathleen called. “May I come in?”
She brought with her a pitcher of warm water and a bowl, covered with a towel on which there was a comb and lipstick.
“I wish I could offer you a nice, hot bath,” Kathleen said.
“Oh, that’s just wonderful. I look such a fright!”
“You’re all right. That’s the main thing.”
Other women had arrived by the time Laura reappeared. On the family’s dining table were casseroles, bowls of salad, plates of cookies, pies, dozens of eggs, a ham, and in boxes piling up by the door were more clothes, bedding, towels, even a little battery radio.
“Oh, I can’t accept all this!” Laura protested in dismay. “I don’t even have anywhere to put it.”
“You will,” they reassured her.
She shouldn’t have been surprised. In her years on the island she, too, had hurried to whatever place sheltered a burned out family, fire so terrifyingly common a disaster, taking food and clothing, household goods, and, if there was no insurance, money. It simply had never occurred to her that it would ever happen to her. Whatever was given she was bound to accept; yet it felt a kind of madness to her, things piling up around her when she had no place to go.
The children were getting up again as dawn light began to take over the shadows. Kathleen, helped by the other women, was getting breakfast ready. She sent one of the older girls on her bicycle to tell the firemen there would be breakfast ready for them when they were done.
Laura couldn’t eat. She accepted another cup of tea and said, “I suppose I must call my son.”
“My fishing tackle, too?” he asked, incredulous, and then took himself in hand.
It was only Thorny’s clothes she had thought to mourn, not the closets full of belongings of her children and grandchildren, about which she hadn’t concerned herself since her own were grown. She had no idea how many pairs of riding boots, tennis rackets, fishing rods, skin diving suits, to say nothing of ordinary clothing had been lost in the fire. She could only assure her son that it was everything. “Even my bridge,” she added wryly.
“Your what?”
“My bridge: my teeth.”
It was so ridiculous a conversation that Laura began to laugh, which, far from reassuring her son, convinced him she was hysterical. He promised to be on the morning boat.
“What day of the week is it?” Laura asked as she turned away from the phone.
“Sunday,” Peter said, and then he leaned up against her, offering the burden of his small weight to comfort her. It did.
Kathleen’s daughter came breathlessly back into the house, her presence commanding everyone’s attention. It occurred to Laura that anyone from so large a family would have no self-consciousness in public speaking since even asking for the butter had to be done before a large audience.
“They said to say they were sorry, Mrs. Thornstrom, but it was pretty well gone before they got there.”
Laura nodded. It was no news to her.
“But they’ve got the woods pretty well out, and they’re just coming in for breakfast, except for Jimmy and one other who have to stay behind to watch.”
The children were urged to finish breakfast quickly to give up their places to a dozen soot blackened and tired men who came discouragedly into the house, shaking their heads, cursing the power company which had so delayed their response, telling Laura how damned sorry they were, but there was nothing much left but the chimney and the bathtub. She had seen enough island fires to know what it would look like. She would not, as some did, try to sift through the ashes in hope of finding, oh, anything.
“Shut up a minute, all of you,” Jim O’Hea commanded. “Can you hear that?”
It was the hum of the refrigerator. The power was back on.
“Thank God!” Kathleen said. “You can all wash.”
One of the kids went immediately to the television and turned it on. Another tried all the by now unnecessary light switches. The women urged the men off to the bathroom to leave the kitchen sink free for washing dishes for the next round of breakfast.
All through the morning, more people arrived, bringing food and gifts. Only much later Laura also found in a handbag several hundred dollars in cash. She was offered places to stay, advice about rebuilding, “Hell of a way to get a new house, but it makes nice work for some of us.”
By the time Thorny junior arrived, his stricken face looked out of place in the cheerful crowd. But Laura was very glad to see him. Maybe he could figure out what to do with the carloads of goods turning the O’Hea’s into a warehouse.
“Now that you’re here, darling, I think I’ll just lie down for a while.”
Kathleen led her back into the bedroom which she had somehow managed to straighten. Laura lay down and slept for a few minutes or an hour, waking to escape the fire that burned all around her, hoping, until she realized where she was, that it was only her dream that had frightened her.
Her room at Thorny junior’s house was no more reassuring as she woke again and again from dreams of fire. She wept for ridiculous things like her own needle and thimble, her little travel clock, and was unconsoled by the swiftness with which her children replaced them. She was furious with herself that such irrationalities only made them more convinced that the fire was a blessing in disguise to bring her back to what senses she had left.
“Think of this as your house now, Mother,” Thorny junior said.
“But it isn’t,” she protested. “It’s yours.”
If only she could get one good night’s sleep, she could begin to pull herself together.
“You mustn’t keep waiting on me like this,” she said to her daughter-in-law as she came in with the now accustomed breakfast tray.
“It’s no trouble, Mother. At your age, you’ve got a right to start the day slowly.”
“Most days never get started at all,” Laura observed.
“You just rest.”
Resting gave Laura time to grieve for her house, yet what had it been but a place too big for her with too much of her own and other people’s clutter? The memories, well, they hadn’t burned after all. She didn’t need the house to go on being mad at Thorny for being dead.
It was the insurance release papers that got her out of bed.
“No, I’m
not signing them, son.”
“But why not?”
“Because I’m going to rebuild.”
“What?”
“I only just realized it,” Laura said. “But a small house, one my own size.”
“Where?”
“Why, right where the other one was. And don’t tell me there’s no one to look in on me over there.”
“But, Mother, you’re too old to live alone.”
“No, I’m not. I’m too old to live any other way.”
“But we don’t want to be worrying about you. We want to look after you. Why, Mother, some days you can’t even get out of bed.”
“Because I don’t have to,” Laura replied. “Oh, there will be mornings when breakfast in bed will sound like heaven, but, until I’m actually there, it’s better for me to get up. Who’s feeding my birds, I’d like to know?”
Her other children were invited to dinner that night in order to persuade her to change her mind, to live in the city at least, if not with one of them.
“I can’t afford to live in the city,” Laura answered them. “And I don’t want to.”
They were irritated with her, even angry, but finally she could begin to see them giving way, giving up, washing their hands of her. They were dim-witted city people, every last one of them. Nobody on the island would be surprised to see her back. With the insurance money, she could be a paying guest in Lyvia’s spare room until the new house was built, a project which would provide much needed work for Jim O’Hea and several others. It was not just Laura’s way of saying thank you. It was getting back into the rhythm of give and take, the rhythm of living.
“I’ll be going back,” Laura told her children, “next week.”
PUZZLE
EVEN IN HER LATE seventies Ella Carr was still trying to put her life together like a puzzle which, when she’d finally managed it, she could live in terms of, a character out of Mary Poppins walking into the completed picture. Some of the pieces of it were not difficult. The largest part had always been her work, and it was central—husband, children, lovers all at the hard edges. Oh, there were dark areas, moments when she wished she had made other choices, to write well instead of successfully, not to write at all so that she could have been the wife her husband expected, the mother she hired for her children instead. But Ella Carr was too accomplished an entertainer far too handsomely rewarded to sustain serious regret, even about the several fortunes less generous people might have said she’d squandered on the children, on friends, and on herself.