Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  “Jesus Christ, Rachel, he’s not a monster. You think he killed my sister?”

  And then she knew for sure that she should let this go. It would be cruel to speculate about things he had laid to rest. Joe had shouldered all the hurt he could. He couldn’t take on any more. Not right now. And she also knew that as much as Joe might seem to be defending his father, he was in equal parts protecting himself.

  “Of course not,” she said. “The thought never entered my mind.”

  She watched Joe’s body relax. She watched his chest expand.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though,” Rachel said. “I thought you were bringing me out here to explain why you’ve stayed in Belle Haven.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you decided to stay over a year ago, Joe, long before you started carving like this. And a minute ago you said that it was that phone call you made to your father—learning about Holly’s death—that made you stay. So why bring me out here? Out of the blue? As if this”—she gestured again toward the blackened grove—“as if this is your explanation?”

  “Because it is. The best one I can give you. Of course Holly’s death changed things. Of course I found it impossible to go home after … after the things my father said to me that night. But there’s more to it than that.” He took a deep breath. “Almost from my first day in Belle Haven, I’ve felt like a changeling. Things have been cooking inside me all along. It’s hard to be sure about the reasons I’ve felt this way, but I have. And I have the feeling that there’s more to come.”

  Joe took one of Rachel’s hands in his. He felt that her arrival had extracted from this place a portion of its magic. But her presence and her admiration had also affirmed what he had done. If it was less magical, it was also more real. Something he could count on. Something he had not imagined.

  “I want to do this for the rest of my life,” he said, kissing her palm.

  She was not certain, as she brought her other hand up to cradle his face, what it was that he meant.

  Chapter 22

  When Angela saw the package Joe had brought Rusty on his eleventh birthday, she nudged it with a knuckle and leaned close for a better look.

  “Ask a man to fix a carburetor, barbecue a steak, mow a lawn,” she said, “and he breaks out all over in Y chromosomes, his biceps swell, pecker perks up, grunts like a caveman. But ask him to preheat an oven, buy a box of tampons, wrap a birthday present … his eyes glaze over, his palms sweat, ‘I don’t know how,’ he says. Which he’d never dream of saying if you asked him to build a rocket ship. The stronger sex. The world’s rulers. I give you”—here she bowed to Joe, who sat scowling at her kitchen table—“the answer to every woman’s prayers.”

  “Oh, shut up, Angela. I did my best.”

  “That’s what’s so amazing, Joe,” she said, kissing the top of his head. “I’m sure you did. But Jesus, honey, you must’ve been wearing boxing gloves.”

  “Anyhow, who cares how it’s wrapped? Look at him. He’s ripping it off faster than a raccoon husking corn.”

  “Oh, my,” Rachel said laughing and clapping her hands softly, “I do believe he’s made the leap, Angie.”

  “You think? I don’t know, Rachel. Say wash, Joe.”

  “Warsh,” he obliged.

  “Well, tie me to an anthill and stuff my ears with jam. I’d never have believed it a year ago.” Angela picked up her camera and aimed it at Joe. “Say wash again, Joe. This one’s for my scrapbook. Think of a caption, Rachel.”

  “Something simple,” she said. “How about, ‘Just Joe’?”

  “That’s to replace the one you gave me,” Joe said to Rusty, ignoring the women.

  “It’s great, Joe. Mom, look at the knife Joe gave me.”

  “Oh, Lord, Joe. I should’ve known you’d give him something I’ve got to worry about.”

  “I have something else for you, Rusty, but it was too big to wrap.”

  “A horse?”

  “No, not a horse. Good grief, boy, what do you think your mother would do to me if I gave you a horse?”

  “She’d make you take care of it,” Rusty said.

  “Exactly. Now finish your cake and we’ll all take a walk up to Rachel’s place.”

  Angela lifted her eyebrows at Rachel, who shrugged and smiled and filled her mouth with cake.

  After the cake was gone and the dishes washed and put away, the four of them walked down the street, over Raccoon Creek, and up the hill to Rachel’s house. It was just approaching twilight, for Angela had closed the Kitchen up early in honor of her son’s birthday and the August evening was long and light.

  When they reached the house, Rusty started up the front steps, but Joe called him back and led them all around the house and up the path into the woods. It was clear that the boy was mystified and excited in a way peculiar to children and a very few adults. He walked directly behind Joe, bumping into him now and again, not at all distracted by the lightning bugs that flashed along the edges of the shadowed trail like channel markers.

  When they passed the big pine and the bed of moss, Joe turned around and gave Rachel a slow smile.

  “Much nicer than flowers, Rachel,” Angela whispered; she knew why this particular tree, this exact plot of moss, made Joe smile, Rachel slow her step.

  Rachel slid her hands into her pockets. “Much,” she said.

  When they reached the huge walnut tree, Joe turned quickly and clapped his hand over Rusty’s eyes.

  “Only two things you have to promise,” Joe said. “No fires, and no girls for a while yet.”

  “Done,” Rusty promised, and pried Joe’s fingers from his eyes.

  He was speechless, at first, when he saw the house that Joe had built in the tree. He blinked, gaped, took a slow step forward. Then he let out a whoop of delight and ran for the tree, launched himself up the ladder, onto the sturdy, railed-in deck and through the door.

  In a minute he appeared on the deck again.

  “You got to see this, Mom,” he called down, dancing from foot to foot. “It’s fantastic.”

  So Rachel and Angela and Joe climbed up the capable ladder and onto the small deck. Angela cast a mother’s eye over the rungs, the rails, the beams that fixed the house to the ancient tree, and nodded her approval. Rachel, who had seen the house in various stages of construction, was nonetheless surprised to see it done, for Joe had finished it with the sort of details seldom spent on animals or children.

  The door had wooden handles inside and out, a hardwood dolphin for a knocker, and the single word—RUSTY—carved on a small plaque above the door frame. He had made the door full size, furnished it with a lock, and carefully fit door to frame so the boy inside would not be bothered by mosquitoes or weather. For the same reason, Joe had bought three small glass panes that were set into metal, hinged frames. They fit snugly into the square holes cut in the walls, swung outward on their hinges, and came with braces so they could be propped safely open on windy days.

  The house was an eight-foot square with a peaked, shingled roof and a smooth wooden floor. Joe had paneled it from the outside with wood he’d begged from farmers with fallen barns, loaded into Ian’s pickup, and carried into the woods, plank by plank. He had chinked the cracks between the weathered boards but had not paneled the inside of the house. In between the vertical supports of the frame he had built small shelves and cupboards and stocked them with books, licorice, a lantern and extra batteries, a tablet of writing paper, and a jug filled with sharp, fragrant pencils. There was a small table and a matching chair, a cot folded up and stashed against one wall, and in another corner the wooden trunk that Joe had carefully removed from the Schooner and carried up into the tree.

  It was plain to see that Joe had learned a lot in the months he’d spent working with his hands. Helping farmers and neighbors with the heavy work of building barns, of fixing things broken by weather or age, had taught Joe how to earn a living. But as he had come to know about wood and tools an
d sweat, he had also come to know things about himself. He liked what he had learned, and he knew that he would always love this tree house as much as any other dwelling on earth.

  “Earl gave me all kinds of stuff I needed,” Joe offered. “Nails, lots of hardware, lumber for the frame, lent me his drill, a couple of saws. He also helped me with the hard parts. So it’s really his birthday present, too,” he said to Rusty. “Don’t forget to thank him.”

  “I won’t, Joe.” He looked around the house one more time, turning on his feet like a boy in a music box, and then put his arms around Joe and laid his head against his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”

  “You won’t need to,” Joe said, his hands in Rusty’s sleek hair. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he put the boy away from him. “Listen, Rusty,” he said slowly. “I know that you might have preferred something a little less … refined. You know: a rope ladder, apple crates. Don’t think you have to keep it this way just to please me. It’s your house. Do whatever you want with it. I just couldn’t help making it this way. For some reason I just can’t help thinking of you as much older than eleven.”

  Rusty looked as if he would explode. “It’s perfect,” he said.

  “One more thing you haven’t seen,” said Joe, leading him out onto the deck and lifting his chin up toward the pinnacle of the tree.

  “A crow’s nest!” Rusty cried, scrambling farther up the walnut’s massive trunk, rung by rung, to where it was encircled by a sturdy, narrow walk. From his perch Rusty could look through the walnut’s upper branches, over the tops of its smaller neighbor trees, and down the gradual slope of the hill. In one direction he could see the top of Rachel’s house and, beyond that, a distant field, moving with wheat and a mare’s tail of smoke drifting in the breeze. When he looked quickly away toward the town he could see more, for the hill sloped sharply down to Raccoon Creek. As the walnut’s upper branches soughed gently the boy caught glimpses of his own rooftop.

  “You can send me messages, Mom,” he called down. “We can learn Morse code and use flashlights.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, looking up, her feet making continuous small adjustments like an outfielder gauging descent. She held the back of her head in both hands, her fingers buried in her sandy hair. “Just watch yourself on the way back down, Rusty.”

  By now it was well and truly sundown, and somewhere below them a choir of frogs began its fervent evensong.

  They all climbed down from the old black walnut. Rusty kissed his smiling mother, Rachel took Joe’s callused hand, and the four of them walked along the well-worn path and out of the woods. At the edge of the trees they were silenced by a sunset as gaudy as a parrot’s wing and felt themselves slipping from long practice into uneasy admiration of the fine, polluted light that swept slowly toward Belle Haven.

  Chapter 23

  That night, in a field not far from town, not even as far as Ian Spalding’s campground, alongside an old stone wall that had mostly tumbled down, a doe stopped grazing and lifted her head. Her companions, loitering in the near distance, paused to watch her. The ones closest to her began to tremble. The doe gathered herself to flee. For one silent, enormous moment, she knew nothing but terror and the exhilarating notion that she could save herself. But even as her hooves braced themselves against the ground, it melted away like sand touched by tide. Where the deer had stood was nothing but a dissipating spout of smoke.

  A few more stones had fallen from the mossy old wall. The site of the deer’s abduction was oddly bare. But there were, otherwise, no signs to caution passersby that this was a place best avoided. Just as flags were lacking in a dozen other scattered places waiting for unlucky strays.

  Chapter 24

  It was the middle of August, and Joe had not been up to the second floor of Rachel’s house since Easter.

  “I’m redecorating,” she’d said in the spring. “No going upstairs until I’m done.” And Joe had been aware, all summer long, of panel trucks parked by Rachel’s house, trails of sawdust on her front porch, the sound of hammers coming down the hill as he biked into town.

  With her house in such disarray, Rachel sometimes drove out to the Schooner to spend a short summer night, cook with Joe, play crazy eights, maybe dance in the clearing. And on nights when the moon was big or the days so hot that the streets melted, Joe often showed up at Rachel’s door and led her to the moss in the woods or, if Rusty was in his tree, lay with her on her cool kitchen floor.

  He had long deferred to Rachel’s wish that they—neither of them—spoil their lovemaking with concerns about the future. It wasn’t that he no longer cared whether or not Rachel became pregnant, but the thought of a child no longer alarmed him as it once had. If Rachel didn’t worry about it, neither would he. They were already a family of sorts, married or not. More, in some ways, than the one he’d lost.

  These notions of family had made Joe miss the house on the hill, where everything was both a source and an extension of Rachel, and he was glad when she invited him to see what she had done with it.

  Rachel was unlike anyone else he’d ever known, but Joe somehow expected to climb the stairs into the upper regions of her house and there encounter something predictably feminine. Pretty. Charming. Full of mirrors and scent. He felt strangely gratified to be joining the fraternity of mated men who are presented with such emasculating bowers and are expected, unconditionally, to applaud.

  As they climbed the winding stairs together, Joe felt a great tenderness for Rachel. She had seen his work unveiled. He readied his smile and his kindest words as he climbed toward hers.

  “Well,” she said, watching his face. “What do you think?”

  At one time there had been, at the top of the stairs, a hallway joining two bedrooms, a study, and a sewing room. All of that was gone. There was, instead, one large open space. The main supporting beams remained, as did a portion of the ceiling that had before entirely hidden the attic and roof above. The bare wood floor, too, had been exposed but had then been sanded and finished to a gleam. The windows, drapeless, sparkled. They were filled with the blue of the sky and the myriad greens of the trees, as if they were changeable paintings.

  One end of the room held a polished brass bed, its immaculate white spread stitched with a wreath of roses. Next to the bed, a simple wooden table held a lamp made from a bottle of red glass and a painted shade. There was a small wicker wardrobe, a braided rug, a jug of clover on the windowsill.

  On the other side of the room, in one large corner, was a hodgepodge of bookcases, all filled with books. Each case was topped with motley stuff: colored bottles shot with sunlight; a spiny blowfish; a coffee mug full of birds’ feathers; a large conch shell; a fan of coral; a childish purple crock. On the floor was a plain blue rug. On the rug was an old rocking chair. On the chair was an open book.

  The rest of the room was filled with odds and ends, piles of colorful pillows, good prints, a huge desk heaped with books and papers, and, against one wall, a deep fireplace of red brick with a simple wooden mantelpiece. Over the fireplace hung a portrait of a young man and woman with their arms around each other.

  “That was my one extravagance,” she said. “I had it painted from a picture I found in my mother’s scrapbook. The rest of this stuff I bought at flea markets or rummage sales.”

  “It’s really something,” Joe said, wandering around the room. Above them, in the part of the room that had no ceiling, the peaked roof of the house seemed high. “You won’t be too cold in the winter?”

  “I had them insulate between the rafters before they paneled the inside. I think it’ll be okay.”

  “What’s the loft for?” In one half of the room the wooden ceiling and attic remained but had been finished off with a triangular wall. “And how in the world do you get up there?”

  Rachel pointed toward a slender, rod-shaped handle that hung down from the ceiling. When Joe pulled on it, it brought a portion of the ceiling abou
t as big as a door slowly downward on a set of hinges. As this hatch tilted open, a set of stairs, built on rollers and fixed to runners on the upper face of the hatch, slid gently down until the bottom step came to rest on the floor below. “Ingenious,” said Joe.

  “It’s just for storage,” Rachel said. “I keep the other seasons up there.”

  “Other seasons?”

  “This is summer,” she said, looking around the great room.

  In October Rachel traded the wicker, the white spread, the blow-fish and the seashells, the colored glass and pillows for a big wooden blanket box, cream-colored drapes, a patchwork bedspread, an overstuffed chair, and the dozen wooden creatures that Joe had carved for her during the summer, among them a sandpiper and a miniature cat.

  Rachel was curled up in the fat chair, reading a book and half sleeping one Saturday morning in October when she heard a knock at her door, the sound of it opening, and a voice, down below, yelling, “Hey, Rachel. It’s me, Angela. Come on out and play.”

  “Go away,” she yelled back.

  “No kidding, Rachel. Get your ass down here.”

  Which is when it occurred to Rachel that Angela should have been at the Kitchen, busy with the last of the breakfast crowd.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, hopping down the stairs with her shoes half on.

  “Everything or nothing, depending.”

  “Depending on what?”

  “Depending on how you feel about Belle Haven’s dearly departed.” She opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

  Rachel threw on her coat. “What?”

  “Just follow me, pal,” Angela said, her apron hanging out from underneath her coat, nurse’s shoes on her feet. “And bring your keys.”

  They took Rachel’s truck down the hill, over the bridge, past the Kitchen, toward the western edge of town, to park outside the church where Rachel’s parents had always taken her. There were already a number of cars along the street, and the church lot was full.