Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  Considering everything, though, I know there’s a good chance you’re furious with me. That you feel we’ve betrayed you, Holly in one way and I in another. Perhaps I would feel that way too, in your shoes. But that’s the whole point. I am no longer in your shoes and am now certain that I don’t ever want to be. Because of Holly? I can hear you. I can actually hear you saying this. Yes, because of Holly. A few days ago I was so content with myself. Now I am not. Not at all. I need a bit of time and distance. When I’ve sorted things out, I’ll come home.

  It’s true that I couldn’t stay in that house after hearing how you’ve treated Holly, but it’s also true that I want to help you. While I’m gone, I hope you’ll face the fact that you need help. And when I come home maybe you’ll let me see that you get it.

  He signed it Kit, folded it up as neatly as he could, and stuck it in the visor, ready for an envelope. He would have to remember to find a stamp too, and a mailbox, first thing. Feeling better now, he started up the Schooner and carefully got back under way.

  Kit didn’t know, in the early days after leaving home, that these were to be among the most important miles he would ever travel. He didn’t yet know much about humility, though he was quickly learning, and never imagined that he’d come to value so pedestrian an attitude as that. He had never before felt the world curve ahead as it did for him then, urging him down its imperceptible slope with nameless promises and endless possibilities. He had never had a home so entirely his own, and he looked forward to inaugurating it soon with a meal and a long night’s sleep.

  As twilight approached, Kit decided to moor the Schooner at the next likely spot that presented itself. Somewhere near a gas station, he hoped, for he still felt some trepidation about the Schooner’s own facilities and furthermore had not yet filled its water tank. Somewhere near a grocery store, too, since the only food he had on board was a half-eaten Snickers bar and a six-pack of ginger ale he’d bought at a gas station that morning. Somewhere civilized, although he wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. Perhaps somewhere quiet and lovely, ringed with pastures, where people wouldn’t mind giving him some advice and a place to park.

  Maybe I’ll stop in this next town, he said to himself as he passed Belle Haven’s outer limits. But before he’d gone much farther down the road, he came upon a sign mounted on a sawhorse straddling a wide, deserted intersection, DETOUR WEST TO RANDALL, it commanded in orange and black. LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY. In smaller letters painted by hand underneath was the cryptic message: New borehole at the Spring Run Extension. As of 5/14, migrating hot spot SE of Jackson’s silo. Stay on the road. Pass at your own risk.

  Kit idled at the intersection, pondering the sign, the only man-made thing in sight save the road itself and the furrows in the fields. The last town he’d passed had been as charmless as any he’d yet seen. Randall could turn out to be even worse. And he liked the name Belle Haven. It sounded like a place that won hearts easily and would never turn anyone away. Stronger than anything, however, was the lure of the sign up ahead. As he drove slowly on along the empty road toward Belle Haven, he was filled with curiosity and anticipation, both of which were soon rewarded.

  Chapter 8

  As Kit was following the road into Belle Haven, Rachel was making a salad for her supper and looking back down the gray months that stretched behind her like a leash, to the time before her parents had died.

  She hated chopping, slicing, or paring—could not imagine choosing to be a butcher, or a lumberjack, or anyone who wielded a blade for a living—but she loved salads and no longer had anyone to make them for her. Only one thing made the task easier, and that was her anger.

  Rachel stood at the kitchen counter, a gleaming knife in her hand, and fashioned a hundred neat coins of celery while she pictured Harry, working his sly choreography, and Paul, weak-kneed, complying.

  The image of the drunken truck driver who had obliterated her parents took the ache from her fingers as she washed the lettuce in frigid water. The police officers who had pried the man from his truck had said he could not keep his feet, had vomited on the road, reeking of alcohol. But somehow his carefully siphoned blood had been misplaced, and so there was no proof, later, of his guilt. He had been convicted of nothing more than reckless driving. And Rachel had been left with the task of identifying the broken bodies of her parents, looking into their torn faces, and, unwisely, touching them. That had been the worst of all—the feel of them.

  She dried the lettuce and ripped it into pieces, scrubbed a trio of scallions. At the thought of the state official from Community Affairs who had tried to tell her how, when, and where she could bury her parents’ remains, she eviscerated a green pepper with one well-executed twist of its stem.

  “We like to keep tabs on where everyone’s buried around here,” he had told her shortly after she’d arrived home. “Anywhere near the fire, we might have to move the remains at some point. It’s a touchy matter. Best to cooperate so things don’t get messy later on, Miss Hearn.”

  “Go away,” she’d said, and slammed the door in his face.

  Most of the people who lived in Belle Haven were old-fashioned. While they had permitted progress to take its course—in the shape of a better fire engine, new and sometimes alarming books for the library, a free clinic, and a recycling depot—they stubbornly refused to fool with their more deeply rooted traditions. Their grief over the deaths of Frederick and Suzanne Hearn had therefore been shot through with disapproval at the manner of their burial. Rachel had simply refused to consign her parents to the graveyard of the church they had attended all their lives. It was a lovely church that sat out at the edge of town, graced with unfarmed fields, with a graveyard once known for its lilacs. But far below the church was a mine tunnel full of fire, and the graveyard was now surprisingly hot.

  It disturbed people to think of the bodies interred there becoming brittle and crisp as they baked. And it frightened them to think of the ground giving way, taking the bodies with it or, worse yet, exposing them to the air. Still, the churchyard was holy ground and people continued to bury their dead in its dusty soil. Folks took the Bible fairly literally in Belle Haven: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Rachel even more so.

  “I want them cremated and buried here, on the hill,” she had insisted. But at the last minute, Rachel had changed her mind.

  While a hundred mourners plodded up the hill to the Hearn house and quietly gathered in the windy yard, Rachel took the heavy urn that held her parents’ ashes and hurried up to her bedroom. She stood in the middle of the room, clutching the urn to her chest, and looked frantically around until she caught sight of a lopsided crock she’d made in the eighth grade. She’d made it big enough to hold cattails or hollyhocks. It would be big enough to hold the remnants of both her parents.

  After dusting it out with the hem of her black dress, Rachel filled the crock with the ashes from the urn. They were uglier than she had supposed they’d be, with hard chunks among the soot. She poured them as gently as she could, but even so a cloud of fine ash billowed above the mouth of the crock, and Rachel was left with the taste of the ash on her tongue and a film of it on her eyes. Then she opened the window and with her bare hands pried chunks of cold soil from the vacant window box. She left the window open, cold air flooding the room. Then she crumbled the soil into the urn, stopped it up again, and went down to join the others.

  She found her kitchen full of women. There was an astounding assortment of food on the big harvest table, plates and flatware on the countertop. The women were all wearing aprons. Rachel wondered whether they ever went anywhere without them. The scorn she suddenly felt was diluted, well hidden, but nonetheless shocking, and it took Rachel a moment to collect herself, to remind herself that these were the friends of a lifetime, and to remember what she had come to say.

  “If you all don’t mind, I think I’m ready now.” They had not noticed her in the doorway and looked, all of them, ashamed of their chatter, the precision of their cookie trays,
the thought that maybe they looked nice, even in black.

  “Oh, you poor darlin’,” somebody said. Rachel wasn’t sure who it was. She was looking down at the urn in her hands, thinking of the crock upstairs and its irregular cargo.

  Rachel waited for the women to fetch their coats and then led them out and around to the side of the house, past a stand of lilac trees, past the garden going to rot, almost to the edge of her parents’ land, where no one had any reason to go—except, perhaps, her.

  She had cleared a spot under an old, twisted apple tree. If she wanted to, she could let the violets come back and cover everything over. She hadn’t decided yet.

  There were a lot of people on the hill. Those who had not come would be by sooner or later to say how very sorry they were. The thought filled Rachel with dread.

  She knelt down and put the urn full of soil into the hole she had prepared. She stayed there, on her knees, while the minister read the service. Then, unconcerned with tradition, she pushed dirt in on top of the urn and tamped it down with hands that had become red and chapped from neglect.

  “I would like to recite a poem,” she said, calling back a few mourners who had thought the funeral over. “It is called ‘Dirge Without Music.’ Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote it.” And without another word she began.

  I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

  So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

  Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

  With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

  Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

  Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

  A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

  A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

  The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

  They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

  Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom, I know. But I do not approve.

  More precious was the light in your eyed than all the roses in the world.

  Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

  Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

  Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

  I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

  Unsure, now, what might come next, those assembled on the hill stood and watched Rachel as she took one long, last look around. Then, without further hesitation or the smallest misstep, she started back toward the house, her chin held high, eyes dry.

  Once inside, Rachel washed the dirt from her hands and found herself a vacant chair. From this chair she did not move. Not for food: someone brought her a plate of meats and cheeses and the inevitable deviled egg. Not for drink: there was cider from somewhere, but Rachel could not drink it. Not for comfort: as if she were a queen or, perhaps, a recumbent bride, the mourners came to her, one by one, and bent or bowed or even knelt to share with her their sorrow.

  “Your parents were lovely people, Rachel,” said one of her neighbors, and Rachel was astounded that she could not remember his name.

  “Thank you,” she said. “They were.” She was having trouble with her voice. It was coming out all wrong. And although she could move them, she suddenly had no feeling in her legs. These were the people she loved and cherished, but there was nothing Rachel wanted so much as to have her house empty again.

  When it was, finally, she moved the chairs back where they had been and went to bed in the middle of the afternoon.

  Late that night she took the crock containing her parents’ remains down the hill and along Maple Street to Raccoon Creek. She left her shoes balancing on the railing of the bridge—toes hanging out over the water as if inclined to jump—and stepped carefully down the embankment with slippery feet, the poor crock tucked into the harbor of her arm. The shallow creek was icy, and for a moment she became dizzy as she felt the water racing against her ankles. Shivering, she walked down the center of the stream to where it abruptly curved away and broadened, leaving a tiny island of slick pebbles. A stubborn old willow tree reached out from the bank to canopy the island, and a few dormant weeds gave it a degree of permanence.

  One of Rachel’s earliest memories was of time spent on this island, watching the crayfish spar in the shadow of the willow’s branches, cupping the sunstruck water in her hands, and imagining that the twigs she launched on the ceaseless current would somehow find their way to the sea. Her parents, watching from the bank, their arms locked, had not discouraged this notion. As she poured their ashes carefully onto the black water, she imagined that they would follow a similar course.

  When she got home not long before first light, she made herself some scalding coffee, wrapped herself up in blankets, and went out onto her front porch to think about how she would spend the months ahead. But, faced with this prospect, she could no longer ignore what she had discovered that morning before the funeral. Exhausted with the drama and the details of her parents’ death, Rachel had thought that today of all days she would be spared any further need to make arrangements or heed advice. But she was wrong.

  “It won’t take but a few minutes,” said Mr. Murdock, the lawyer from Randall who had called her out of the blue at eight o’clock that morning and insisted that they meet right away. “I’ll come over to Belle Haven. I can be there in half an hour. It’s important, Miss Hearn, that we discuss the provisions your parents made for you in their will.”

  She had agreed because it took too much energy to do anything else. Already long out of her bed, Rachel dressed quickly and then went downstairs to wait for Mr. Murdock, a man she’d never met, never even known her parents had hired. She knew that they had owned the house outright and had never allowed their debts to mount. She knew they had been thrifty and smart with what money they had. But she also knew there was not much to begin with and assumed that there could not now be much to disperse. Certainly not after their deaths were taxed, their cremation paid for, and Mr. Murdock himself duly compensated. For the second time that morning, she was wrong.

  “Did you know that your parents had each taken out a life-insurance policy just a few days after you were born?” Mr. Murdock sat across the kitchen table from Rachel with coffee at his elbow and a sheaf of papers in his hands.

  “No, I didn’t,” she replied. She had never heard them speak about such things.

  “Well, they did, Miss Hearn. The types of policies that don’t mature. In other words, your parents could never have cashed them in.” He looked down at the table. “And, if your parents had died of natural causes, the policies would not have paid all that much. But your parents wanted you to be in good shape if they died suddenly, accidentally, as they in fact did.” After a moment he looked up at her, clearly uncomfortable with everything he had said but just as clearly anticipating her reaction to his next words.

  “In a nutshell, Miss Hearn, each policy stipulated that, in case of the accidental death of the insured party, the beneficiary would be awarded one hundred fifty thousand dollars. And in both cases, the beneficiary is you and you alone.”

  Which meant that Rachel Hearn was not only a twenty-year-old orphan but a relatively wealthy one as well.

  The news of her inheritance had so startled Rachel that she’d found it easier not to think about it at the time. She had thanked Mr. Murdock and said she’d be in touch, shown him to the door, told him that she had to get ready for the funeral. He nodded, disappointed with her reaction, and went away. When he returned later that afternoon to pay his respects, he had the grace to keep his peace, certain that in time she would want to hear more about her inheritance and to claim it.

  As Rachel sat on her porch, her feet aching from the cold creek water, waiting out the night, her unsought windfall still seemed so unreal that it didn’t bear close scrutiny. She thought instead about what she was going to
do now that she was on her own.

  No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn’t feel any kind of kinship with the good, clean girl she’d been only days before. Until Sunday afternoon, she had been a thoughtful daughter. A good friend. Well-groomed, upright, and honest. She had worried about the welfare of others, concerned herself with their happiness, and thought herself fulfilled along with them. She had been touched by everyone and everything in her immediate world. She had anticipated the needs of others, the repercussions of her every action, the consequences of her words, her deeds, even her thoughts.

  My God, she thought. What a waste of time.

  She remembered one day when she was maybe ten or eleven and her parents had taken her to a fair over on the far side of Randall. She had wanted a second hot dog and been willing to wait in a long, unruly line to get it while her parents sat on a bench, resting. When she finally reached the hot dog stand she found herself wedged between far bigger people. The hot dog vendor was running with sweat. His hands looked like meat from reaching into the steam after hot dogs. The smell of mustard was so strong it made Rachel’s eyes water. One after another, people who came up beside her reached for the hot dog that was meant for her, took it, paid, twisted away, and were gone.

  She could have pushed right back. Summoned her parents. Made a fuss. But for many long minutes she simply stood there, mute, holding up her hand now and then as if she were in school, feeling oddly virtuous. She would not make things harder for the hot dog man. She would not—she would not—be rude. That these other people had no manners was no reason she should abandon hers.

  A man who had squeezed past Rachel and dressed his hot dog now said to her, as he turned to leave, “You’ll never get anywhere in life if you don’t learn to speak up, girl.”