“Where was I,” he said.
The congregation burst into nervous laughter. There was even a scattering of applause.
Jim didn’t laugh; Jim didn’t clap. Glancing sideways, he noticed that his mother was not laughing, either.
“In my humble home,” continued Father, “I have a small corner, a room of my own, where I say my prayers. Praying, you see, is not only my day job.”
Jim felt the congregation smile with pride at Father’s recovery, the way he was turning the interruption around.
“Folks,” said the pastor, “I take my work home with me. It is always unfinished. We are unfinished. Without the Lord to talk to, to bring our sins and sorrows to, we would be wretched beyond hope,”
A few parishioners mumbled, “Amen.”
Fisher looked regretful, repentant. “We all have our crosses to bear,” he said. Jim saw a few chins quiver with emotion. Everybody was nodding. Jim wasn’t sure if he meant Ruth Rose or Nancy or, maybe, someone else altogether. But Fisher was quick to make his point clear.
“My daughter needs so much. Needs attention in the worst way, as you have witnessed this morning. She needs us! Needs you and me and needs the Lord who has so much to give her if she could but open her heart to Him.
“And if she were here right now, I would say to her, Ruth Rose, if you want to hear some praying, sneak up to my door tonight, sneak up with your tape recorder and ‘catch me out,’ and you will hear me sob and whimper and, yes, moan. That moaning is the sound the door of the heart makes as it opens wide. It will be your name I will be uttering, your name I will be drawing His attention to, your name I will be honouring in my secret prayers.”
He went on for another ten or fifteen minutes, folding the startling incident into the batter of his sermon, as if it were a surprise ingredient, but one that would only make the final dish all thė more tasty. He even managed to pour over his concoction the golden maple syrup with which he had begun the sermon.
Jim heard with half a mind. He was thinking of Ruth Rose. She was crazy, all right, foolhardy, but she was right about one thing. There was something in Father Fisher’s secret praying voice that was as guilty as sin.
He looked for her at the beaver dam Monday and again Tuesday. She wasn’t there. He called out her name.
“I want to talk!” he shouted to the woods.
The only response he got was the screeching of blue jays and Gladys grinning at him with her crooked smile.
Tuesday night, after his mother had gone to work, he plucked up his courage and called Ruth Rose. Father answered the phone and Jim hung up quickly.
Shopping day rolled around again and this time Jim went to Ruth Rose’s house. It was beside the church in the east end of town. The train tracks, Ruth Rose Way, passed by the foot of her garden. The Godmobile was not around.
He waited, glancing nervously up and down the quiet little street, afraid that at any moment the van would appear. He knocked.
Finally the door opened and there was Nancy Fisher. She looked at him but made no move to open the screen door. Her hair was neat, all in bubbly curls. She was wearing bright red trousers and another vibrant blouse. But her eyes looked washed out, vacant.
Jim opened the screen door. “Hello, Mrs. Fisher. I was looking for Ruth Rose.”
He wasn’t sure whether she recognized him or not.
“She’s gone.”
Jim remembered Father Fisher’s threat about sending her to an institution. “Gone where?”
Nancy shook her head. “Don’t know.”
“You mean she ran away?”
Nancy shrugged. “Can’t say.” Then she peered into Jim’s eyes, and an idea seemed to flood her face. “Wait here,” she said.
She turned her wheelchair around and rolled off down the hall into the darkness. There seemed to be no lights on anywhere.
Jim waited, growing more tense by the minute. The hallway smelled of furniture polish and fried onions. There was a cross on the wall above a small table with a bowl of colourful gourds. But there were no coats or keys or signs of anyone living there.
At one point Nancy reappeared at the end of the hall and wheeled across his vision into another room. He wondered if she had forgotten all about him.
“Mrs. Fisher?” he called out.
“Coming,” she said. But she didn’t. He suddenly wondered if she was phoning Father. He stepped back out onto the porch and stared up and down the block, ready to run.
“Here,” she said, wheeling up behind him, startling him.
On her lap she carried a gym bag. She seemed to want him to take it.
“It’s some things for her,” she said. “I’ve been so blind,” she added, as if that somehow explained anything.
Jim wasn’t sure what to do. “I don’t know where she is,” he said. Nancy handed him the bag anyway. He took it. “I hardly know her,” he added.
It was the first time he saw her smile. “Welcome to the club,” she said.
At the library waiting for his mother, he opened the bag and looked inside. It was mostly underclothes and socks. But there was something rolled up in a piece of paper held with an elastic band. He opened it. There was a note, three twenty-dollar bills and a container of pills, a prescription in Ruth Rose’s name for something called Diazepam. The note simply read, “I love you,” and was signed, “Mom.”
Jim’s mother somehow didn’t seem surprised when he placed the gym bag in the truck alongside the groceries and told her where he had picked it up. He told her about the note and the money and the pills.
“I tried to tell her I didn’t know where Ruth Rose was,” said Jim. His mother looked hard into his eyes, but he had nothing to hide and her eyes softened. She sighed as she turned on the ignition and the old truck shuddered to life.
“Poor Nancy,” she said.
Jim lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. He kept listening for a knock at the door, a tap on the window. All he heard was the wind in the maples, the rattling of the window glass with every gust. Several times he crawled to the end of his bed and pulled back the curtains to stare out into the yard. They had never bothered with curtains before the media people started coming around. There were no neighbours, no one to spy on them.
There was no one out there now, as far as he could tell. He crawled back under his eiderdown. He found his mind drifting, going over what he had heard in church on Sunday, the tape of Father Fisher praying. He could still hear the voice in his head, so eerie, like someone in a trance. But some of the words seemed vaguely familiar.
As Thy transfigured Son, Jesus Christ, our Saviour, commanded His disciples on the mountain to keep what they had seen to themselves, may our secret sins be something just between us.
It was cold outside the covers; Jim didn’t want to leave his bed. But curiosity got the better of him. He climbed out and made his way down the creaking stairs to the parlour. He flipped on a light, blinked in the brightness of it. In a corner by the front window stood a lectern with a large Bible sitting on it. The passage was somewhere in the synoptic gospels, he seemed to recall. It was a special passage for any parishioner of the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration. He flipped through Matthew, scanning the headings.
And there it was. Chapter Seventeen, the Transfiguration of Christ.
“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John, his brother, and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiments were white as the light.”
The transfiguration was a story well known to Sunday schoolers at the Blessed T., for the church was dedicated to the mysterious happening on the mountain when God came down in a great bright cloud and told the disciples that Jesus was His Son and to listen to Him and do what He told them.
Jim thought about the passage. His father had read the Bible, a fair bit. He was interested in Biblical history, too, and he kept a few books, companion volumes, on a shelf near the lectern.
&
nbsp; Jim turned there now. He took down a Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend.
Suddenly the rooster crowed, startling him.
He went to the window, peeking out through the curtains towards the barn. It was a long way until morning. A floodlight illuminated the yard almost to the doors of the barn. The wind picked up and leaves danced but he saw nothing else move. The rooster crowed again.
“Stupid bird,” Jim muttered to himself. His father had once told him that roosters dreamed of sunrise and that was why they sometimes crowed in the middle of the night. But the sound disturbed Jim. He flipped off the light and took the dictionary up to his bedroom, where he perused it by flashlight.
It didn’t take long to discover what he was looking for, but it stunned him all the same. Another bit of the puzzle. He turned off his bedside light and lay there listening to the dark.
He closed his eyes and prayed she would come around. And into the darkness he whispered, “Ruth Rose, have I got news for you!”
11
The fall rains came, hard as sticks, churning up the front yard until it looked like a muddy battlefield. Leaves in soggy wavelets lapped against the steps of the farmhouse.
Jim went out into the rain with a sign he had made under his coat. He had wrapped the sign in a clear plastic bag. With safety pins he attached it to Gladys out at the dam. The sign read, “I know who Tabor is.”
A week passed.
At church, Jim watched Father Fisher, watched his every move, half expecting to see clues drop off him like buttons. Or lip balm dispensers. After the service Jim lined up at the door and shook the pastor’s hand. He looked into his eyes and came face to face with someone looking hard into his own eyes, and they were both looking for the same person.
The rain was so bad Monday afternoon that Everett pulled the bus over at the bottom of the cut road. He turned in his seat to look back at his only passenger.
“This is what you’d call raining cats and dogs, eh, Jimbo? Mind if we wait up a bit? I can’t see a thing and I hate getting them cats and dogs smeared all over the undercarriage, know what I mean?”
Jim minded, all right, but what could he do? The windshield wipers could barely keep up with the downpour. Cats and dogs didn’t begin to describe the deluge. More like beavers and bears.
On the floor of the bus lay a canary yellow notice with muddy shoe marks on it. Jim had one in his binder; all the kids were taking them home. It was about Father Fisher’s Kosovo Relief Fund. They were going to adopt a town in that war-torn Serbian province, a town the size of Ladybank, a few kilometres northeast of Srbica where refugees were flooding. The title of the notice read, “From Ladybank to Ljivno.”
Jim looked up and saw Everett leaning back in his chair reading the same notice. He was wagging his head. “And we think we’ve got problems, eh, Jimbo?”
Jim turned back to the window. Being stuck in the rain was one thing; getting caught up in a one-way conversation with Everett was another.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his seat. What was he thinking? Everett had grown up in these parts. And he was Father’s age, more or less.
Jim got up and walked to the front, pretending that all he wanted to do was look out the windshield to check on the road. The hill up ahead — what he could see of it — looked more like a river.
He plunked himself down in the front seat. Everett smiled at him, folded up the notice and tucked it in his pocket.
“Hear they’re nicknamin’ it the Father Plan,” he said.
Jim nodded. “Father Fisher sure gets himself involved, doesn’t he? Was he always like that?”
Everett hooted. “Well, you could say that. But involved in what, would be the question.”
“Like he was wild, kind of?”
“He was a real caution,” said Everett. He whooped again, punched the horn to emphasize the point. Then he leaned towards Jim and whispered behind his hand, as if there was anyone to overhear. “Drinkin’, carousin’ — you name it. Wheelin’ and dealin’. Always near the cow plop but never got his shoes soiled, if you know what I mean.”
“So what changed him?”
Everett leaned back in his seat, scratched his belly. “I guess it was after the fire. The Tufts boy dyin’. You hear about that?” Jim nodded. “Fisher, he just dropped outa sight, eh. Gone. Next thing his drinkin’ buddies hear he’s in Ohio somewhere at theology school. Boy, did that get a few laughs. But people laughed out the other side of their face when he come back, a reg’lar sobersides with a dog collar to boot.”
“Must have come as a shock,” said Jim.
Everett nodded. “Oh, jeez, yeah. His father was fit to be tied. Oh, boy, Wilf Fisher. Now there was a piece of work, if I ever seen one.”
“But the fire…” said Jim, sensing that he was losing Everett.
“Oh, the fire. Well, that was somethin’ else. I chummed around with Stan Tufts a bit — Frankie’s little brother —’til they moved down to Brockville. He and I even wrote once or twice when they headed down to Mississippi. Pen pals, like. Baton Rouge. Hot down there, so I hear.”
This was the trouble with Everett. He could keep his bus on the road, more or less, but not a conversation.
“She was following up on her Acadian roots, Laverne Tufts — except her maiden name was Roncelier, see — French. Never liked it here. So she left that old slug-a-bed Wendall Tufts in Brockville and highed off south with little Stanley. I guess after Frankie died…”
Jim saw his chance. “Why do you think Tuff…I mean, Frankie’s…death tore up Father Fisher so much?”
Everett looked momentarily confused, as if he had lost the thread and couldn’t find his way back. Then he flashed a snaggle-toothed smile.
“Well, they was as thick as thieves, lad. They and…” Everett’s face clouded suddenly. His mouth had gotten away on him.
“They and my dad,” said Jim.
Everett looked up the road, sniffed, pinched his nose with his fingers.
“I knew they hung out,” said Jim, not wanting the tap turned off just yet.
“He was just a kid,” Everett said at last. “Just taggin’ along.”
Jim primed the pump. “Frankie’s death upset him a lot, too,” he said.
Everett nodded thoughtfully, but then his memory uncovered something to smile about. “Old Wilf was pretty sore about it, that’s for sure. He was wild as a rabid fox, let me tell you.”
It took Jim a moment to remember that the abandoned cabin had been full of Wilfred Fisher’s hay.
“’Course Wilf was mad most near all the time, except when he was buying somebody’s farm out from underneath ’em. The only thing made him truly happy was lining his purse. Most everybody hated that man.”
Jim was about to throw in the towel, but then Everett said, “Your daddy — now he hated Wilf Fisher somethin’ awful.”
“Hub?”
“Well, who could blame him? Everybody in the county kept a weather eye on that horse thief. But Hub…” He shook his head.
Hate was a word that was never heard in the Hawkins house. A word Jim’s father had forbidden him to use. Jim had never heard his father utter hateful words about anything, or anybody.
“Why?” asked Jim, draping himself over his backpack. “Why did he hate Wilf? I mean, if he was thick with Fisher.”
Everett glowered, staring out at the rain. “Same reason we all did,” he said. “He tried to buy your grandaddy out when he was down. Old man Hawkins was just scraping by — this would be the late sixties. Your grandfather had made some bad loans, interest rates went sky high, and Wilf was just hanging around like a vulture waiting to gobble up the place.” He snapped his fingers. Then he laughed. “Why, one time Hub come across Wilf on his tractor and Hub, he pelted that old crow with crabapples ’til the old man near crashed the thing.” Everett let out a great guffaw of laughter.
“My dad?” said Jim incredulously.
“The same. I seen it. Me and Stanley. Oh, it was somethin’ to behold.
” He laughed some more, his gut jiggling at the memory.
“Another time he stove in the windscreen on the old man’s pick-up.”
Jim sat back, limp with disbelief, shaking his head. From the corner of his eye, Everett noticed and looked sheepish.
“Oh, you mustn’t think I’m sayin’ anything bad about your pop, Jimbo. Why, I remember my own daddy sayin’ that Hub Hawkins deserved a medal for showing some backbone, havin’ some spunk. And he was just a lad, mind you. A bit hot-headed, a bit of what you’d call a firebrand, eh. Nothin’ wrong with that in a young fella. No, sir.”
Jim could see that Everett was afraid he might have offended him. “Phew!” he said, grinning. “My dad, the dragon slayer.”
“You got ’er, Jimbo. And as fine a man as I ever met,” said Everett. Then he decided it was time to move on, mudslide or no mudslide. With his tongue in his cheek, and his bushy eyebrows jutting out like twin visors, he let out the brake and steered the school bus out into the flood.
The engine was revving high, the wheels spun, the bus shimmied from side to side. Jim clutched the guard rail as they made their way through one turn and climbed into the next.
His father a hot-head, a firebrand. This wasn’t what he had been looking for.
They pulled up finally to the stop sign at the Twelfth Line. Jim was pressing his face to the window, looking out the other side of the bus, not at his own land but at the fields that sloped down towards the old Tufts place, now nothing more than a grassy hummock. He could almost make it out through the fence-line trees, the wild grasses and the slanting rain. Or maybe he was just imagining it.
A log cabin converted to storage, filled with hay, consumed by flames. And a boy inside — a self-confessed fire-starter — stupid with drink, but maybe just sober enough to be hammering on the door, trying to get out.
The Boy in the Burning House Page 8