by Lauren Wolk
By the time Rachel had made her way to her bedroom, Joe had found his way slowly through the woods behind her house, covered his apples with a bit of canvas to keep off the frost, and climbed the ladder to his house. He’d built it in a mighty walnut tree on land he didn’t own, with wood he’d salvaged from fallen barns near and far, with nails others had given him outright, with his own potent sweat.
He would never again sleep in this refuge. The fire had come, winter was close behind it, and much as he loved this place, he would not die for it. But on this Halloween night he was content, unafraid, wrapped in worn but mended blankets, and could see the stars without even opening his eyes.
Chapter 2
It was easy for the people of Belle Haven to remember the day when the fire began. Most of them had been at the Fourth of July parade, in itself quite memorable and as perfect a companion for a fire’s genesis as anyone could want. When Rachel thought about that day she often wondered how much of her memory was authentic, pure, and how much had been garnered from more than a decade of conversations, of all the things said and written about the fire, of scrapbooks and church sermons and the songs children made up when they skipped rope. In a way it didn’t matter. Whether her memory of that day was purely her own or a blending of things she’d encountered since, Rachel knew that it was in many ways her most important recollection, one that was somehow linked to all the rest, even those from much further back into childhood. For her, as for most people in Belle Haven, the fire was a landmark against which nearly all events were measured. Things had happened either before or after the fire took root: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, catastrophes, celebrations. There were other ways to recount their history but none more familiar.
The Fourth, that year, had been too hot, too dry, too hard. The farmers walked around with their heads tipped back, watching for clouds, feeling the air with their skins, aware of the dust. The children were all tired out before the morning had waned. The smaller ones sat in the shade, panting like cats, their hair wringing with sweat, waiting for the sound of the band. The air was white with heat. Cicadas screamed. The tar on the street was so hot that the smell of it hurt Rachel’s nose as she sat atop the mailbox outside Paula’s Beauty Salon waiting for the parade. She’d imagined that the mailbox would be a clean, comfortable perch. She had not counted on it being so hot. Her thighs stuck to the metal.
“You all right there, Rachel?”
“Great,” she said, sliding her arm through her father’s. “But maybe I’ll get down now. I’m too big for this sort of thing.” She seemed too mature for many such things, now that she was ten.
When she slid down off the mailbox, her skin stuck, came away from the metal all at once, and would have sent her sprawling if her father had not held her by the arm.
“You’re about as graceful as I am.” Her mother laughed. She had on a blue-and-white gingham dress with a red belt. Rachel was wearing a pair of red shorts, a white blouse with blue stripes on it, and a red ribbon in her hair. She had painted red and blue stars on her Keds. Her father, who was an electrician, wore what he nearly always wore in the summertime—dull green work pants with a short-sleeved, Perma-Prest, one-pocket shirt, leather belt and boots, a plain cap. For the Fourth, he always flew a flag up at the house and, when the Belle Haven veterans marched by, saluted theirs.
“I hear the tubas,” Rachel said. The children came running from under the trees and sat along the hot curb. Rachel’s mother stepped back and slapped the flat of her hand against the beauty-shop door. “Band’s coming, Paula,” she called through the screen. Paula carried a half dozen hair clips on the collar of her blouse and a pair of scissors in her hand when she came through the door. Cora Ball, completely unabashed, swept out behind her in strange array, a pink sheet draped around her shoulders and dusted with bits of her gray hair, half her head glinting with clips.
“Who’s gonna be lookin’ at me … and who cares anyway?” Cora laughed, and Rachel found herself filled with admiration.
Before the sound of the band became much louder, the parade leaders turned onto Maple Street and down toward the crowd. Teenage boys with painted faces and homemade tricornes popped wheelies on their bikes. Three antique cars puttered by, their horns off-key. Kids with soapbox cars. The veterans, hot and breathless in their tight, old uniforms. A horse-drawn hay wagon done up like a float with a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty that everyone said looked just like Molly, who worked at the checkout over at the A&P. A girl in white boots and flag colors, twirling a baton. Then the school band: small, ragtag, magnificent.
Finally came the polished fire engine and the volunteers who manned it, sweaty and exhausted in their gear. It was, for many of the children, the most wonderful part of the parade, for as the truck trundled slowly past they were permitted to run alongside, step up on its running boards, run their fingers along its hoses, smell the gleaming smell of it, feel its engine rumble. Rachel was just wondering whether she was now too old for this when the radio inside the cab began to chatter.
The firemen shooed the children back. The siren burped, the big truck swung slowly off Maple onto a side street, the firemen all waved their arms for people to stand clear, and then the truck was away, siren going, lights spinning, dust rising in its wake.
Nobody knew where it was headed. It wasn’t until much later, at the picnic out by the Methodist church, when they’d all had their fill of chicken and potato salad, baked beans, corn bread, five-bean salad, red Jell-O mold with white marshmallows and blue gumdrops on top, lemonade and punch, and sparklers nearly invisible in the afternoon glare, that they heard about the fire in the mine pit.
“But it’s out now. Took no time hardly at all to put it out.” George Spade, one of the volunteers, was the first of them to shower and come looking for his lunch. Rachel was watching his paper plate to see what would happen when George put it down on his knee. There was so much food on it that beans were falling off the side. “But there’s such a mess of garbage in that pit that we had to give it a good soaking, you know. It’s been so dry we didn’t want to leave any stray sparks behind.” He nodded, satisfied. Everybody was watching for the other firemen to arrive so they could be fed, settled in the shade, applauded.
It was not until a good week later that someone noticed smoke spilling from an old mine shaft out by the pit and figured that the Fourth of July fire had not been put out after all. Nobody figured that it would still be burning thirteen years later.
For the first few years the fire seemed little more than a nuisance. Even when the contractors who were sent in to contain it botched the job, even after the fire began to wander down along the mine tunnels out under the fields around Belle Haven, everybody decided that it was a distant threat at best. There were maybe a dozen houses and a church scattered out along the western edge of the town, directly above the tunnels that ran north more than a mile before they hit the fire. Nobody living out there seemed too worried.
Most of them agreed with Henry Buck, who had a three-bedroom on an acre right smack above a tunnel. “I say, come on in. Cut my heating bill in half, I bet. Maybe cure Sandra’s rheumatiz.” He shook his head, took off his cap, fingered a seam. “What’s it gonna do, come right up through all that dirt and singe my butt?” He had a laugh like an old car, all wheeze and hiccup.
To Rachel, too, the fire seemed at worst a minor threat. She had begun to learn the truth about the world, to recognize its many perils: all manner of holocausts, crimes beyond comprehension, extinction, plague, anonymity. In comparison, the fire seemed little cause for concern. Like others her age, Rachel also felt somewhat invulnerable. If, at night, she thought of missiles arcing up over the pole, by day she felt as if she would live to do great things, accomplish all of her dreams, survive any disaster.
And because she approached adolescence in the safety of a small, close-knit, law-abiding, sweet and peaceful town—where there was no real poverty or menace to distract her—Rachel surrendered to an irresis
tible preoccupation with which no distant fire could compete. She spent a great deal of time thinking about herself. She thought about the kind of person she was and how she might evolve.
Without a brother or sister to loosen her hold on her parents and theirs on her, Rachel had spent her earliest years thinking that there was nothing in the universe to compare with their lives together. Keeping house with her mother, marching down the hill to do the marketing, spending long hours in the garden, popping the jaws of obliging snapdragons while her father tended their tomatoes … for Rachel these were labors of love, proof that her parents were better off with her than without.
If her mother became upset with her—for smearing her clothes with egg yolk, breaking something forbidden, talking back—Rachel would simply drag her down by the hand, grab her around the neck, and kiss her. Bring her a glass of water. Brush her hair. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she would say. Her mother would smile and hold her, hum with pleasure as Rachel brushed out her long hair, and play Rachel’s favorite games, even though she was really too busy and might easily have said so.
Rachel thought that she had won her mother over with her penance and her charm. She didn’t know that, even had she been endlessly difficult, rebellious, and vain, her mother would not have loved her less.
When her mother suddenly collapsed one morning to lie gasping in the garden, it was six-year-old Rachel who ran to a neighbor for help, who told her father how the blood had spread across her mother’s old gardening slacks, who stayed near her mother for many days, until she was finally back on her feet again. The following week, when she saw her weeping mother unravel a tiny yellow sweater, Rachel crept off to the kitchen, made her own lunch, and did not ask for a single thing that whole day. She had seen enough of patience and kindness to practice them, and so she did.
In those early years, no one thought twice about Rachel’s eagerness to please, to be whatever she thought her parents wanted her to be. But as she matured, it became obvious to everyone, and to Rachel herself, that she was far less prone than her friends to the mild rebellion that all parents expect from even the sweetest of their daughters.
When her friends began to wear makeup—too much, and poorly—she joined them with great misgivings.
“Ah,” her mother sighed when Rachel came home from her friend Estelle’s house one day, her lashes clotted with bottled tar, cheeks as red as friction burns. “So soon.” She shook her head. “I was just as anxious, when I was your age, to grow up. What a shame.”
Other mothers, Estelle’s among them, scrubbed their daughters clean, forbade such experiments. But Rachel’s mother simply sighed, turned back to her sewing, and let the thump of her foot on the floor pedal, the angle of her spine, speak her disapproval.
After that, Rachel, alone among her friends, left her face bare.
At fourteen, just when Rachel was becoming accustomed to her alarming breasts and the messy, painful periods that some of her friends celebrated and others cursed, she discovered that although they were all tied together in these physical ways, they were also taking the first steps along separate courses that could keep them squarely apart, maybe even for life.
“Have you ever been finger-fucked?” The flashlight in her face made Rachel blink, which hid some of her shock, gave her a moment to decide whether to tell the truth or take the dare.
She was surrounded by a half dozen girls in sleeping bags. They looked, to Rachel, like giant, moulting insects. To admit to them not only that she had never been finger-fucked but that she did not even know what this meant was too much. So she smiled and said, “I’ll take the dare.” Try as she might, she would never be able to forget having to stand in front of her companions and lift her nightgown, ease her underpants to her knees, and show them the shadow of hair that had begun to grow. They had giggled. One or two had actually joined her. To compare, they said.
When she learned that another sleepover party was to be held in the loft of a barn and that boys had been told, Rachel said, Sure. Of course she would go. But a few hours beforehand she went into the bathroom and stuck her fingers down her throat.
“You missed a great party,” Estelle said. “Stupid time to get sick.”
“Figures,” Rachel said, shrugging. But in the years to come she learned other tricks that saw her through all kinds of tight spots: how to drink slowly and by sips; how to kiss a boy without granting him further license; how to blow smoke through her nose without inhaling; how to lie to her parents without argument or repercussion.
As she came of age, Rachel watched her friends closely, as if they were birds. She was careful not to stare or to interrogate, but she was always aware of how they conducted themselves and how they chose their words. This was how Rachel looked at the world: she kept vigils, spied, tempered her instincts with all kinds of reasonable reactions to what she saw.
She came to realize, by comparison with schoolmates and by scrutinizing the way people treated her, that she preferred to be as she was, a peacemaker and a good daughter. In the struggle to define herself, to name the things that made her unique without relinquishing her ties to those around her, Rachel isolated this facet of her character, held it up to the light, and pronounced it beautiful. With great deliberation, she practiced diplomacy, tact, and kindness. A strange curriculum for a girl her age, but one she relished. It was hard work to avoid trouble, but it made her feel good. And that was enough.
Having convinced herself that her life was the best anyone could hope for, Rachel became convinced, too, in terms that she herself could not articulate, that to doubt her blessings in any way was to risk them, and certainly to dishonor them.
It did not occur to her that counting herself as a daughter first and a separate and independent person second had so colored her view of the world that she could not see herself clearly in it.
Rachel was content with her choices. She might even have been truly happy if her behavior had been less deliberate. If she had been more herself and less the way she thought she ought to be. If she had only had a guitar.
That was all Rachel wanted for Christmas the year she turned fifteen. Nothing but a guitar. She had long since investigated the cost of a piano and found it too high. Something she simply could not ask for. Something she would have to do without. But a guitar was different. Expensive, too, but not out of her grasp. Not entirely.
It was only a week past Thanksgiving, but Maple Street was already rigged with ropes of tinsel and colored lights, there were plastic reindeer in several front yards, and all the mannequins in the Sears window display wore red velvet elf caps on their sculpted heads.
“What do you think I ought to get Dad for Christmas?” Rachel whispered. She and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table after supper, paring apples. Her father was watching a Steelers game. The radio in the kitchen, turned on low, played Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”
“A bottle of cornhuskers lotion and a pound of dried apricots, same as always.”
“Yeah, but what else? Something different. Something that I actually go out and buy for him.” She sliced the last bit of skin from her apple, halved it, quartered it, cored it, sliced the quarters into an enormous bowl.
“Why don’t you make him something? He loves everything you’ve ever made him.”
Rachel picked up another apple. “Like what?”
“How about you embroider a couple of hankies for him?”
“I already did that.”
“Knit him a scarf.”
“I could do that.” Rachel rested her forearms on the table. Her wrists were getting sore. They needed enough apples for seven pies. Her mother had orders for fourteen apple, two pecan, two coconut-cream, three pumpkin, and one banana-cream. For tomorrow, noon. The cream pies and half of the apple were cooling on the counter.
“Or maybe just give him a head rub every night Christmas week and clean up his bike. I don’t know a single thing he’d like more than that.”
That sounded good to Rac
hel, something she did well. Something her father would love.
“What about you?” She looked across the table at her mother and picked up a fresh apple. “Not something you need. Something you want.”
Rachel had expected protests, reluctant talk of hand cream and hairpins, but was surprised with the answer she got.
“Something I want,” her mother mused. “Well, actually, there is something.” She shook her head. “And I’m not trying to let you off the hook either. It’s something you could do for me that would be hard for me to do myself, in all kinds of ways.” She got up from the table and carried the big bowl of sliced apples over to the sink, began to mix them with brown sugar, white sugar, and cinnamon.
“You know my grandmother’s house?” she said.
It was an old house, way out past the tunnels, boarded up. Too old now to be any good to anyone. Part of a farm that no one farmed anymore, bought up by the coal company but never mined. “They’re going to be tearing it down any day now,” Rachel’s mother said. “Or burning it, maybe. So I called up and asked if anyone would mind if I went back to look for a memento of some kind.” When she turned the apples over with her big spoon, a lazy cloud of cinnamon dust lifted and settled above the bowl. “My mother never took anything with her when she married. Her parents—my grandparents—were terribly upset with her for getting married so young, I suppose for leaving them all alone, and so abruptly, to marry a man they barely knew and didn’t much like.” She began to roll out pie dough with a fat pin. “Anyway, I spent quite a lot of time there when I was a kid. Usually without my parents along. It was a long walk for me, but I didn’t care. I loved going over there. I loved the house. I loved the garden. My grandparents were wonderful to me. And then they died when I was still little. And then my own parents died before you were born. And I haven’t been inside that house for thirty years—it’s been empty for the last five anyway—but, I don’t know, maybe a scrap of wallpaper, or one of the old porcelain sinks. I used to play at the kitchen sink all the time, got all wet, went home wrinkled. Take your father over there, Rachel, and bring me back something. That’s what I want for Christmas.”