Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  She closed one eye, considered him soberly through the other. “I don’t want to give you nightmares.”

  Joe grinned at her. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a big boy.”

  Rachel smiled like a cat. “It’s not a very nice story.”

  But Joe could not imagine that she knew any stories to compare to the ones that had sent him to Belle Haven in the first place.

  “Shoot,” he said.

  Rachel pulled out a chair at the table. Sat down across from Joe. “When I was eleven years old,” she said and was momentarily silenced by the look on Joe’s face. “Is something the matter?”

  She had sounded so much like Holly. When I was eleven years old …

  “Go on,” he said. “Nothing’s the matter.”

  Which Rachel did not believe for a second. She watched him rearrange his face, fold his hands on the table in front of him. “Do you want some coffee?” she asked, more to give him a moment than anything else.

  “Sure. If it’s no trouble.” He was startled by his own good manners.

  Rachel got up and took an old percolator out of a cupboard beneath the sink. “The fire started when I was ten, so I guess I was ten when this happened. Maybe eleven.” She cocked her head. “Thereabouts anyway.” She filled the percolator with water. “I was playing at my friend Lynn’s house. Lynn Cooper. She lived out near the tunnels, and north of town, where the fire started. We usually played here at my house because her brothers always pestered us, but her dog, Elvira—”

  “Elvira?” he said. “They had a dog named Elvira?”

  “I know. Don’t ask me. Anyway, she had a litter of new pups in the coal shed, and I wanted to see them. We kept trying to sneak a look, but Elvira went nuts if we got too close. She was a good mother.”

  Rachel poured coffee directly out of a can into the basket of the percolator. She didn’t bother to measure it. Joe watched her hands as she made the coffee. She handled everything with the same sure, steady touch.

  “She was a good ratter, too, which was a good thing for the Coopers. Lots of rats lived in the tunnels, and when the mines shut down and there were no more lunch scraps for the rats to eat, they had to come up for all their food. But Elvira didn’t have any trouble keeping them under control until the fire started. After that, the rats had to completely abandon the tunnels. People living near mine shafts, like the Coopers, suddenly had a real rat problem. Ever seen a mine rat?”

  Joe shook his head. He thought about asking her to stop. “No, I never have.”

  “Lucky you.” Rachel made a face. “Big as cats, some of them. Mean as spit. So up they came, looking for food and a new place to live. The Coopers had plenty of garden and a big barn, too. Rat heaven. Within a week of the fire starting, there were rat holes all over the place. Lynn’s father was afraid they’d find a way into the basement, especially when Elvira was so busy with her pups. And Lynn kept having nightmares about one of those enormous rats eating the puppies. So her father got it into his head to wipe out the rats, once and for all.” Rachel held the basket of coffee in one hand but had clearly forgotten it was there. She had gone pale with remembering. Joe watched the basket of coffee the way someone watches a long cigarette ash.

  “First,” Rachel said, “he filled in all the rat holes he could find, except two. Then he attached a hose to the tailpipe of his truck and stuck it down one of the two open rat holes. And then he started up the truck and left it running while he ran over and stood next to the other rat hole with a paddle in his hands.”

  She lowered her face to the coffee grounds, took a long breath, and, straightening up, refreshed by the smell of the grounds, dropped the basket onto its stalk inside the pot. Crammed on the lid. Plugged it in. Almost immediately, the percolator began to gurgle and spit.

  “God, it was awful,” she said. “We all sat on the back steps to watch—Lynn and I, Lynn’s mother and her three brothers. Like it was 4-H or something.” Rachel made a sound like there was something clinging to the lining of her throat. Joe wondered what 4-H stood for.

  “I’ll never forget … Lynn’s father was wearing waders to keep the blood off his pants, and one of the boys kept yelling, ‘Batter up!’ ”

  It was at this point that Joe became aware of the eggs slowly liquefying in his stomach. Rachel, too, suddenly looked very grim. She swallowed so hard Joe could hear it above the grumble of the percolator.

  “The first rat came scampering up out of that hole like the hounds of hell were after it,” she said. “Lynn’s father took a huge swing at it, but he hadn’t expected the rats to panic. He thought the exhaust would slow them down, blind them. And he missed. And in the next second he realized what he’d done.” Rachel took a quick step backward. “He started screaming for us to get in the house, but I was up off those steps and through that door before the words were out of his mouth. We all were. Then we watched from the windows.” The coffee gurgled in its pot. Joe could hardly wait for the taste of it. “There were hundreds of them. Thousands. They came out so close together it was like watching a black river gushing up from the ground. We watched for over an hour before they stopped coming up out of that hole. And they ran out into the fields, into the barn. Elvira stood in the door of the coal shed and fought off the ones that came her way. Lynn’s mother got on the phone and called the nearest neighbors to warn them what was coming. It took about a year and all kinds of exterminators, but we finally got the mine rats under control. I haven’t seen one for years. Although now and then one will show up in somebody’s garbage and everyone will act like there’s a gargoyle on the loose.” Rachel took a pot of sugar and put it on a tray. “But that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened.

  “Go on out to the porch,” she said, “and I’ll bring the coffee.”

  And although Joe, too, saw that things could have been much worse for Belle Haven, he took a long look through Rachel’s screen door before he opened it on this particular corner of the world.

  The balance of their conversation that morning was full of the courtesy of strangers, of curiosity unappeased. They spoke some more about the town but little about themselves. Joe was reluctant to reveal his reasons for coming to this town. Rachel was so undecided about her future that she preferred to dwell on the here and now. So they talked about the fire, about the Schooner and the bridge, about Angela and Earl, about Ian Spalding and the demise of his campground.

  “How does he make a living now?” Joe asked.

  “He’s a part-time schoolteacher, nearly ready to retire in any event.” Which Joe could easily believe, for Ian had a teacher’s way about him: he explained things well, seemed happy to share what he knew, had a voice made for the ear and an easy way about him. Joe thought he would be hard to ruffle. But he was also aware that he cared what Ian thought about him, which was unusual for Joe. Perhaps this was because Ian was so much older, so respectable-looking: his cuffs buttoned, sparse hair nicely cut, matching crow’s feet around his kind eyes. Or perhaps because he had taught school for so long that he had learned the trick of treating others as he himself wanted to be treated: with patience and respect.

  “The campground wasn’t anything more than a way for Ian to keep busy during the summers and make a bit of extra money,” Rachel said. “It was never very popular anyway. Just people passing through on their way somewhere else. But nobody passes through here on purpose anymore.” She wondered if Joe was an exception, and if so, why. But she figured he’d tell her if he wanted to.

  After their coffee was gone, they grew awkward with each other and Joe realized it was time to leave. “I guess I’d better go fetch my Schooner,” he said. “I left it over at the A&P. Too bad Ian lives so far out. I’d rather not drive the Schooner into town again if I can help it, but I can’t see walking all that way.”

  Rachel thought about that for a moment and then reluctantly said, “I guess you could borrow my father’s bike. If you promise to take good care of it.” She had mixed feelings about this man. One minute h
e was saying something to offend her, the next smiling his winsome smile, looking at her with those remarkably blue eyes, daring her to think ill of him.

  He made her wary, suspicious, but she was tempted to trust him with small things. As if he were an ex-con or a friend known to lie. She had allowed him into her home. She would lend him her father’s old bike.

  “You’ll need to walk it down to Frank’s,” she warned as they hauled the bike out of the cellar. “The tires need air, and I’ll bet the chain wants a bit of oil.”

  “This is wonderful,” he said, meaning it. “I’ll take great care of it. Thanks.”

  Before he went away, she gave him her phone number (she’d thought about the wisdom of that while bringing out the bike and decided it could do no harm). “It’s such a small town you shouldn’t have trouble finding anything you need, but call me if you do.”

  “Thanks, Rachel. Ian’s right there, but thanks. Maybe I’ll see you at Angela’s again.”

  She watched him walk off down the hill, wheeling the old bike that had been her father’s for so many years. She liked Joe despite herself. “I’ll have to watch that,” she thought. The day stretched ahead of her with no reason to hurry, no plans or commitments. She sighed and turned back toward the porch.

  “That damned step,” she muttered when it sagged under her weight. “Today’s the day I fix that damned step.” Ed would be disappointed, she knew. It gave him something to complain about when he brought her mail. “One of these days it’s gonna go,” he often warned her. “Someone’s gonna get hurt.” And he was right, of course. The step was rotten with worms and wet. So she gathered up her tools and set to work.

  With a crowbar, she pried and tugged and cursed until the top plank of the step gave way, splintering and shrieking, flakes of old paint flying. As she worked, she began to remember herself as a small girl. Struggling with her father’s hammer. Handing him nails and clapping her hands over her ears as he pounded them in. Trailing her small paintbrush along the wood, leaving grasslike streaks that skipped against the grain. Strangling with pride when he admired her work. These had been their steps, the ones they had built together. This rotten plank had been measured by his hands, fashioned with his saw, borne his weight, her mother’s, hers. This rotten plank. She set it to one side and looked straight into the sun. It was nothing to the brightness of her memory.

  And suddenly it seemed to Rachel that she simply could not leave this place. The thought of going back to school again while this house stood here, locked up, mute with dust, made her sob aloud. She would stay, she decided. She would stay right here where she belonged.

  As if afraid that her resolve might waver, she sprinted inside the house, up the stairs, and into the small study that overlooked the woods behind the house. Two blue jays were wrestling in the branches of a big maple. Rachel kept an eye on them as she rolled clean paper into her mother’s old typewriter and began to compose her letter to Dean Franklin. It thanked him for three good years, informed him that she had decided to postpone the fourth. She wouldn’t be wandering through Europe or getting the jump on her career, she wrote. She’d be catching her breath. Getting her bearings. She would be back, she assured him, when the time was right. If they would still have her.

  She signed the letter, sealed it up in an envelope, stamped it, put it out on the porch for Ed. She felt better than she had since arriving back in Belle Haven, as deliciously guilty as a child who is kept home from school for a fever but does not yet feel any pain.

  Before heading out to get a piece of lumber for the new step, Rachel wandered about the house looking for other things in need of repair. She had never done this sort of thing before, still had trouble thinking of this house as hers, not theirs. She had never before questioned the furnishings, the wallpaper, the way things were arranged. Now, suddenly, she began to become excited by the prospect of making this house her own. She would keep some of the furniture, things that reminded her of her mother and father. And the artwork, such as it was: faded prints of bucolic scenes, simple watercolors here and there, several black-and-white photographs of dead relatives posing arm in arm. The braided rugs would stay. Certainly the curtains, stitched by her mother. Most everything, in fact, now that she came right down to it, reminded her of them. But once she had given away some of the weary old furniture, there would be room to add some things of her own. More art. More books. More color.

  First, the step. She had all the time in the world to feather her nest. “Just keep your distance,” she said softly, looking out toward the horizon where a thread of smoke wavered like a cobra. Then she turned her back and went about her business.

  Chapter 12

  After leaving Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go, Joe pedaled over to the A&P. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for ages and felt such a sense of liberation as he flew down the streets of Belle Haven that he waved to an old woman sitting on a bench in the sun.

  Since the Schooner’s stern was equipped with a bike rack, it took Joe no more than a minute to stow his new transport and get under way. He had no good reason to linger in town: no money to spare, no errands to run, no appointments to keep. And, considering how small Belle Haven was, he was loath to do any more exploring than he’d already done. He would save the rest for the days that waited ahead, empty as drums.

  Once back at the campsite, Joe parked the Schooner as before. With the bicycle Rachel had lent him, he probably wouldn’t have to drive it for days—if his father came to fetch him, perhaps not ever again. He paused to consider this idea, to plumb its depths, then briskly disembarked and began to make a less impermanent camp.

  First, he unfurled the Schooner’s red-and-white striped awning and was relieved to find it clean and intact. Under the awning and next to a flat-topped tree stump, he set up the cheap lawn chair he’d bought in town. Then he mixed himself a glass of instant iced tea and carried it outside. The chocolate bar he’d bought at Frank’s and carried home in his shirt pocket was soft and warm. He ate it slowly, sipping his cold tea, and stared at the sunlight on the stream. With the exception of a damaged cuticle, his entire body felt marvelous. He was aware of each breath lifting his chest, the smooth, uncomplicated function of his elbow, the way his brilliantly designed toes lay alongside one another and how the lenses of his eyes—the miracle of his eyes—brought to him so unerringly the majesty of the trees.

  For the rest of the morning, Joe did nothing more than putter around his Schooner and make it more his own. He took an empty pop bottle and filled it with stream water and Queen Anne’s lace for the sill of his kitchen window. He read the side panel of his carton of laundry soap, measured out what he needed, and washed his clothes in his new laundry tub. Then he rinsed them well and pegged them to the line he’d hung between two obedient pines in the middle of the sunny clearing.

  For his lunch he had two bacon sandwiches with a cold bottle of beer, washed up his frying pan and dishes, dried them and put them away. He wiped the crumbs off his kitchen counter, squeezed out his sponge, dried his hands on a crisp tea towel, and hung it on a rack to dry. He dusted every surface, shook out the door mat, swept the Schooner’s steps, and opened all the windows to let the breezes through. When he stumbled across the letter he had scribbled to his father the day before, Joe was taken aback. It still said what he wanted to say, but he was no longer so eager to make contact. In a week or so he would find a phone and courage enough to call home. Until then, he didn’t much want to think about what he’d done or what he would say when his father answered the phone. He stuffed the letter into the glove compartment, slammed the door, and forgot about it.

  At one-thirty on the afternoon of Joe’s first full day in Belle Haven, he realized that he was both content and something akin to lonely. An early morning spent with Rachel had made the day seem unusually long and quiet. So, without thinking much about his intentions, he locked the Schooner and walked through the woods to Ian’s house.

  “Good afternoon,” Ian said when Joe knocked on his ba
ck door. “How you making out?”

  “Fine,” Joe replied, smiling. “Feel like taking a walk?”

  So the two of them strolled out across the fields that ringed the campground, wended their way through stands of pine and birch, and finally sidled up to a small hot spot that had opened in the bottom of a shallow ditch like a drain hole filled with flame.

  “Yikes,” said Joe, appalled. “I can understand why people stopped coming here to camp.”

  “That’s nothing. You can’t even get near the big ones, they’re so hot. And they can come up so fast that even when you’re well clear of the tunnels it’s impossible to know where it’s safe to camp. Except where you are,” he amended quickly, seeing the look on Joe’s face. “At least I think that spot’s okay. It’s hundreds of yards from the closest tunnel. And even though the fire branches out a bit, I’ve never seen any sign of trouble anywhere near there, maybe because of the stream, although I don’t know how a shallow little creek could discourage a fire that runs so deep. But it seems to.”

  “I’m surprised no one’s been killed by one of these things.”

  “Well, like I said, most all of them are within spitting distance of a shaft or a tunnel, and we all know where those are, give or take. Easy enough to steer clear of them if you know where they’re bound to be. Remind me to give you a map later on.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joe nodded, his skin clammy.

  “Plus,” Ian said, clearly accustomed to describing the fire and its habits, “the fire usually gives some warning on its way to the surface. Sort of like a whale coming up for air. The ground gets hot, of course, and softer, and sometimes buckles a bit right before the fire arrives. We get a few big hot spots around the tunnels because of the way the coal was mined. Traditional room-and-pillar style.” He looked at Joe for any sign of comprehension. Found none. “That’s when they leave pillars of coal to support the surface. The theory is that long, thin coal veins that didn’t get mined are carrying the fire out from the tunnels and lighting these pillars. Or sometimes a skinny vein will travel underground for a while and then head for the surface, where it makes a smaller hot spot.” He rotated his hands, one around the other. “Which in turn burns for as long as the coal vein lasts, peters out pretty quickly, the burned-out vein collapses in on itself, and the hot spot disappears as fast as it came. Leaves a bit of a crater, is all. But a lot of coal veins never hit a pillar or run near the surface so the fire doesn’t often break through.” Ian looked at the hot spot with grudging respect.