by Lauren Wolk
Dolly dusted the crumbs from her hands.
“Took the words right out of my mouth.” She drank the last of the Dr Pepper. “We probably should have gone, though. Your mother talks tough, but the fire’s got her scared.”
Rusty huffed with impatience. “I don’t see why,” he said. “It took years and years for the fire to come a mile. It ought to take years for it to come the rest of the way into town.”
“Ought to.” Dolly held out her hand for a cookie. “Two words that don’t amount to a hill of beans.”
“You two eating all the cookies again?” Angela stood in the doorway, unaware of the catastrophe of her face.
“Never, my girl,” Dolly said, rising. “Come sit down here. I’ll make some coffee.”
Angela sat down, eased off her shoes. “What’s on?” she asked, looking at the TV.
“M*A*S*H, in a minute.”
“Good.” She reached for a cookie.
“So what happened?”
“If it’s okay with you, Rusty, I’d just as soon not talk about it right now.”
He hadn’t wanted to hear about it anyway, knew that he would soon enough, but he said, “Why not?”
Through his father’s long absence, through the perpetual struggle to make ends meet, through housemaid’s knee, the parching of her skin, the way her body was slowly bowing to gravity, Rusty had only very rarely seen his mother as she was now. When he turned to her, all innocence, for his answer, he was unprepared for the sight of her, immobile, her hands in her lap, her head nodding heavily, her face slack with worry and fatigue.
“Never mind,” he said quickly. But she either had not heard him or intended, by her silence, to pardon his mistake. It was, more than anything, this silence, this distance, that finally convinced Rusty he had something to fear.
In the morning, toting eggs and home fries to early risers, Rusty heard about the trench. A sentence here, there, and, later, straight talk from Joe told Rusty what his mother had not. The talk startled him, silenced him, sent him out in search of Mendelson and his crew.
Like many children, Rusty believed that Saturday mornings were the most tangible, most reliable embodiment of freedom. To spend one in pursuit of a man he despised so he could talk about a situation he deplored seemed a lot to ask. But to wander through the day without voicing his objections seemed worse still. So he packed a pear, a meat-loaf sandwich, and a thermos of milk into his bike basket and set out toward Fainsville. He saw plenty on the way to make him glad he’d come: a penny-colored horse; a black snake that crossed the road ahead of him, as long and liquid as a whip; a fat hawk after mice in the grain.
It didn’t take Rusty long to reach the region where Mendelson meant to dig his trench. The boy assumed that the land they had chosen would be pasture or cropland, since digging up trees would make for much harder work. He wondered about the farmers whose land was to be sacrificed, whether they had sold their land willingly.
Rusty left his bike at the edge of the road and walked into the fields. He didn’t really know where he was going. He didn’t really know if he should expect to find anyone out here. He wasn’t even sure, suddenly, why he’d come. Perhaps he had come out here too soon. Perhaps they would not start to dig for weeks yet. He looked for flags, stakes, markers of any sort, but saw none. He saw no machines. There was no one around, not even a farmer, not even a dog out trotting.
He lay down on his back in the tall grain. The patch of sky above him was shaped vaguely like his shadow, edged with the neat heads of the grain. On every side he saw the stalks of the grain, heard the movement of grasshoppers and birds. He sat up, ate his sandwich and his pear, drank some of the milk and capped the rest. He had waited long enough. It was clear that Mendelson was not out in these fields.
He did not feel as if he were sitting on top of so much coal. He had expected to feel it from afar, as if it were alive, as if it were moving. Set afire, it would send up signals. He was sure that it would. He did not believe that a massive fire, even one deep underground, could pass unnoticed. He was sure that he would know when the fire worked its way into town. Lying back again in the golden grain, warm and drowsy, he was simply not so sure that it ever would.
When his mother asked him, later that day, where he’d been, he told her that he’d gone out looking for arrowheads.
Rusty let a few days go by and then returned to find the fields of grain shorn down to stubble yet much as they had been. He smiled, turned to go, and that was when he saw, farther south, a bit of smoke rising, heard the grunt of machines, felt a trace of something disturbing the ground beneath his feet. So he rode farther along the road to where it sloped slowly down and turned before flattening out through a nice stretch of bottomland where black cows were known to graze. It was here that Rusty found Mendelson, the earth all in a shambles, the machines already digging, and not a cow in sight.
He had intended to talk to the man when he found him, to register his protest, probe for a soft spot. But when he saw the long, black incision they had made in the flat belly of ground, he knew that nothing he could say would make any difference at all. Not to Mendelson. And if he had anything important to say, if he wanted to speak his mind, bare his soul, expose his heart, he would, he decided, do better with someone who loved him.
He went back to Belle Haven, straight to his mother, and told her about the trench.
“What are we going to do?” he asked. “We’re not leaving, are we?”
Angela was mixing up a vast bowl of tuna salad. Dolly sat at the far end of the counter, rolling quarters. She looked up, listening.
Angela gazed at her son for a moment, turned back to the bowl. “You don’t want to leave?”
He pulled up the bill of his cap, scratched his forehead with the back of his thumbnail, pulled the cap back down. “No,” he said. “ ’Course I don’t want to leave. Do you?” He looked at his mother, at Dolly, at his mother again.
Angela dug at the salad with a massive spoon. Her forearm was as muscled as a farmer’s. “I don’t think this is something you have to worry about just yet,” she told him. Dolly set aside a roll of quarters and began the next. “There’s time for us to decide what to do. The fire’s not here yet. It may never come this far,” she said.
Rusty grinned. “That’s just what I was thinking,” he said, then he kissed his grandmother and headed for the door.
Chapter 38
It couldn’t have been Ian, or Rachel, or Angela. They were the only three people who had fed Joe, in those early days after he’d arrived in Belle Haven, but they were also the only three who knew why he had come. Even if they had not believed his story about a bad father and a disfigured sister, none of them was the sort to sneak away from the supper table with a dirty butter knife, wrap it carefully, and send it off to the FBI. He simply could not believe such a thing. Dolly? This, too, seemed fantastic. But Rusty could have done it. He was a boy with an imagination and a mind of his own. It could have been no one else.
Rusty looked up from the comics and caught Joe watching him.
“What?” he said.
“What what?”
“Do I have a booger in my nose or something?”
“No, you don’t have a booger in your nose or something. Can’t I look at you?”
“Suit yourself.” Rusty went back to his comics. He was sitting, cross-legged, on Joe’s bunk, Pal with her velvet jowl on his thigh, while Joe sat in the kitchen booth with a cup of coffee and a letter from Holly. He watched the boy and wondered when his young voice would begin to crack. He was growing leggy and lean, like his mother.
Without looking up this time, Rusty said, “What?”
“You always get this shook up when people look at you?”
“Who’s shook up? I’m trying to read, is all.”
Joe folded Holly’s letter and put it in his shirt pocket. “Your mother tells me you went out looking for Mendelson the other day.”
Rusty sighed, put the comics away from him.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You worried about all this?”
“All what?”
Joe put his coffee down on the tabletop and looked at Rusty for a moment. “All this,” he said. “All this business about the fire coming in.”
Rusty flopped onto his back, crossed his arms behind his head. “What’s there to worry about? So far, it’s all just talk. If the fire comes all the way in, we’ll do something about it, I guess. Until then, why worry?”
“Just talk?” Joe slid out of the booth and walked over to his bunk. He grabbed Rusty by the wrist and hauled him to his feet. Pal leaped up.
“If you’re going to come over here and read my paper and eat my cookies and listen to my goddamned radio and ask me about girls and practice swearing in my Schooner, you’re going to have to play by Schooner rules.” He let Rusty go. “Rule one,” he said, pushing Pal’s nose out of his hand. “None of this goddamned ‘just talk’ bullshit. The fire is nearly here, and that is all there is to it.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t go up to Rachel’s house anymore. I haven’t spoken to her for a week. You know why?” Rusty shook his head. “Because we can’t talk about the fire without fighting, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to keep my mouth shut. I don’t dare talk to your mother about the fire, you know why? Because she’s already scared to death and I love her too much to make things worse.” Rusty seemed to grow smaller before Joe’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry if this kind of talk scares you. But inside these four walls I speak my mind. This is my home. You will always be welcome here. And I will always do whatever you want me to do, to help keep you safe, to help keep you happy. But I won’t lie to you.”
Rusty had not once taken his eyes from Joe’s face.
“Do you know why I came to Belle Haven?” Joe asked. Rusty shook his head.
“I had to leave home for a while because I found out that my father had been lying to me about some things. And then, after I got here, he told me another lie that kept me from going home. And when I finally figured out the truth, I made up my mind to face things, squarely, whenever I could. It is so much, so much worse, Rusty, to look the other way and hope for the best. And I only wish that I had had someone to teach me that when I was a boy.” Pal put her nose into Joe’s hand again, and this time he rubbed his fingers gently along her jaw. “Didn’t your mother ever wonder why the FBI was writing to you?”
Rusty’s eyebrows shot up, his jaw fell. “How’d you find out?”
Joe laughed. “Mendelson told me someone had sent in my fingerprints on a butter knife.”
Rusty ran a fingernail down the grain of his jeans. “How’d you know it was me?”
“Wild guess,” Joe said.
“You mad?”
“Mad? Me? At you?” He put one hand on the back of Rusty’s neck. “Never.”
It was Rusty, then, who began to talk about hot wells and poison gas, the house that was still sinking by inches deeper into the bottomless soil in Caspar’s Hollow.
They talked for a long time, until Angela finally ran over in her apron to call Rusty home for supper, homework, and bed.
Asked to join them for chicken pot pie and cider, Joe had quietly declined. Here, in his Schooner, it had felt right to talk with Rusty about the things that Angela refused to confront. As he had taught Rusty about Mars and the Parthenon, so had he tried to teach him about the danger of blinders, and of embracing the shadows they cast. But to sit in Angela’s Kitchen and eat her food—payment for the instruction he gave her son—when he knew full well that she had resolved to shield Rusty from certain knowledge … this seemed like a betrayal. And so, alone in his Schooner, he ate stew from a can. And wondered why it was that he had spoken so long and with such certainty to Rusty when such talk with Rachel always, always led him to retreat.
Chapter 39
While Mendelson began work on the giant trench, other, milder men came into town to hold town meetings and offer the people a loathsome trade. The government, they said, would pay people to leave Belle Haven. By the head. Twenty-five thousand per adult (forty for anyone living alone). Ten thousand for each of no more than two children.
Those with the most land and the nicest houses went inside them, shut their doors, and roared with disgust. Those with the mean lots, poor houses, especially those living over the tunnels, counted themselves lucky.
“It’s only fair,” the strangers from Harrisburg had said. “Starting fresh somewhere else shouldn’t mean starting from scratch, no matter what kind of house you’re leaving behind.”
Or, if they preferred, people could trade their houses outright for brand-new prefabs that the government planned to erect at the edge of a new development twenty miles east, right outside of Spence.
“We’d like to maintain a sense of community,” the government men said. “To relocate not only the people of Belle Haven but its heart and soul as well. To preserve its integrity and maintain its heritage.” They were even willing, they claimed, to move one or two important structures: one of the churches, perhaps, or the old train depot, charming and defunct.
It didn’t take long for people to take sides. There were some surprises: a few parents with young children who wanted very badly to stay in Belle Haven; a few old people who had lived in Belle Haven all of their lives but had reluctantly decided that their final days might be spent more wisely in a safer place. Mostly, though, the town divided much as everyone had thought it would. Old miners, many dying slowly from black lung, intended to stay. They were not afraid of coal or coal fire. Young, able-bodied families began to talk about departure. Some widows and widowers finally picked up their phones and called their far-flung children. If it comes to that, would you take me in? they asked, afraid of whichever answer they might hear.
For many, the decision of whether to stay or leave was easy compared to the choice between striking out alone or relocating to the Spence development. Alone, elsewhere, they had the chance of finding a good home in an authentic, rooted, albeit foreign community. In the Spence development they saw dreariness and woe. They would become, they feared, a collection of refugees with only two things in common: having lived in Belle Haven and having left it.
And so the debate began. It was kept alive between the cashiers and the customers at the A&P, the farmers baling their hay, the breakfast crowd at Angela’s, the children in their classrooms. We should leave, some said. We should stay, some said. They all felt it best that they stay together, but they could not agree on the best way to stay alive.
“Houses are full of gases. It’s natural,” claimed a large woman named Ruby who had come into the Superette for some Pop-Tarts. “Furniture, rugs, insulation … everything gives off gas of some sort or other.”
“Dogs, beans …” said Lenny, behind the counter, grinning.
Ruby laughed. “Whenever I give Tom beans for supper, he goes off to watch TV with the dogs, I hide the matches.” She trembled with mirth. The Pop-Tarts rattled in their box.
At the Baptist church the next Sunday the preacher, thinking he might unite his flock with hope and gumption, tore it right in two.
“I have spoken to Mr. Mendelson,” he said when he had put his sermon to bed. “And I have learned that Belle Haven will not be declared a disaster area. Not even if the fire gets as bad as he claims it will. He wouldn’t tell me why, but I think I know. When the government declares someplace a disaster area, the people who live there, or who must leave there, are given replacement value for the homes they’ve lost or left. Which is quite a bit more than some of us have been offered.
“The upside is that we don’t have to leave unless our houses are condemned, which I am confident will not happen. We can stay put, if we like. Those who sell out and leave—well, their houses will be torn down right away. Mendelson says the idea is to tear them down so they can’t catch fire and cause bigger problems. So what will we have, those who stay? We’ll have our homes. And around our homes we’ll have empty lots. So h
ere’s what I propose.” He paused, smiling.
“I propose that we set out to beautify our town. In every empty lot—and, God willing, there won’t be many—we’ll plant new grass and flowers, trees, make parks. None of us wants to see our neighbors leave, but if they do, we’ll heal up the wounds with our own hands, keep Belle Haven from scarring. That,” he said, smiling, “is what I propose.”
The next Sunday, half of the pews in the church were empty. Missing were those who thought that no one, much less a preacher, had the right to shame or tempt anyone into staying in a place that they had begun, reluctantly, to fear. Husbands were there without their wives, wives without their husbands. So far, there was no proof that there was any more fire under Belle Haven than there had ever been, but it felt like maybe there was.
Some people, already weary of debate, declared themselves in more subtle ways. Fran Harkley was seen putting a hundred new tulip bulbs in her front garden and a ring of daffodil bulbs round the birch by her porch. The Danielses put a new roof on their house. And Sarah Clemm ran an ad in The Randall Recorder. Fire Sale! Swing set, kiddie pool, TV antennae, porch swing, you name it. Everything must go. The house, if you want it. Sat. 9–5. But she didn’t sell much. Someone said it felt too much like a foreclosure.
Halloween—Joe’s third in Belle Haven—brought a respite. No one had yet left town. No one was even packing. The monitors were all quiet. Wherever the fire was, it had not yet surfaced the way Mendelson said it someday would. So the town turned its attention to the annual business of horror and delight.
Rachel, dressed as a tiger and with a huge sack of candies in her paw, climbed the giant willow in the park and settled herself in a roomy fork. Joe hung himself with tattered furs, sooted his face, gave himself sharp nails and teeth, green hair and a club, and toted his bushel basket to the tree stump by the bridge over Raccoon Creek. Ghosts and corpses dangled in the trees along Maple. Jack-o’-lanterns glowed on every front porch. Earl leaned out of his window above the hardware store and dropped rubber spiders onto the heads of passers-by, then reeled them back in again, laughing like a child. Angela had painted the big front windows of the Kitchen so it looked vaguely like the gingerbread house in “Hansel and Gretel.” But the sky, in the distance, glowed with the light of hot spots, many now closer than anyone liked to see.