Those Who Favor Fire

by Lauren Wolk

  If you change your mind, want to join us on the farm, you can stay in the house I built for Frank. I’d let you keep it, but it’s meant for someone who doesn’t have the kind of money you do. Someone like Ed Zingham, but he’s already taken an apartment in Randall. Maybe you could call him for me and ask him if he wants it. Tell him where to find me.

  Well, you’re probably not interested in all this talk about the farm. I wish I didn’t love you so much. Sometimes I wish I’d never come to Belle Haven. But most of the time I thank God I did.

  Yours,

  Joe

  Chapter 46

  “What do you. mean, you’re not leaving?”

  “I’m not leaving yet, I said. My mother’s going up to get the house ready. Earl and Mag will give her some help if she needs it. But Rusty and I are going to stay another week or so. I want to spend some time with Rachel, Joe. See if I can get her to change her mind. And Rusty wants a few more days with his friends. He’s known them all his life, and he’s never going to see some of them again. How can I say no?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s over at Mary Beth Sanderson’s house. You know, over on Rachel’s side of the creek. There’s been no trouble over there. The nearest borehole is real quiet. The kids are just playing in the yard. Relax, Joe. Everything’s okay.”

  He took Angela’s hands. She noticed that his fingernails were torn. He was growing a beard. “Don’t stay too much longer, Angie,” he said. He never called her Angie. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all this.”

  Judy and Daniel Sanderson and their three children were among the hundred or so people still living in Belle Haven when the first cold nights came to town and the leaves began to turn. Judy, immense with her fourth child, had spent a whole week wandering through her house, looking at each room, checking to make sure the canaries were still on their tiny trapezes, trying to find the energy to pack everything up into the boxes she’d been collecting for months. It wasn’t that she wanted to hang around any longer than she had to. With the A&P closed and the Superette always low on everything, even putting supper on the table had become a challenge. But the check from the government would be arriving any day now, and then they would go. Daniel would still have his job in Krebs Corners. They had found a house real close to his office, a good fifteen miles from the fire, and had all but paid for it. They had to wait for the check to arrive. Then they’d go. But she couldn’t get organized. She couldn’t stop thinking about that motor home going down the other day. Three blocks away, other side of the creek. Maybe the creek would keep the fire away.

  She walked back down to the kitchen and stood at the window watching Mary Beth and Rusty in the backyard, sitting at the picnic table, eating grapes and reading comic books. Everything looked okay. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not stop thinking that maybe in the next minute, in the minute when she was not watching, the fire would come right up out of the ground. She looked down at the linoleum on the kitchen floor. It was blue and white and very pretty. She sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and took off her shoes. Took off her socks. Put her bare feet flat on the kitchen floor so she could feel the cool linoleum. And finally began to pack.

  Angela, too, had begun to pack. She was still serving odd, scanty meals to use up everything she had in stock. She wasn’t making any money, barely breaking even, but with her check on the way and the house Joe had given her outright, she was not worried. She and Dolly packed up everything in their apartment over the Kitchen in just a couple of days. They didn’t have much to pack, really. Then Angela borrowed a big pickup, Joe and Frank helped her with the fridge, the beds, the heavy things, and they both drove up north with her to unload everything at the farm.

  When Angela got back to Belle Haven, exhausted and pleased, she loaded up the pickup with smaller, lighter cargo, and drove north once more, this time with Dolly.

  “Now, don’t worry about a thing,” she told her mother after they’d carted the last boxes inside. “And don’t rush around trying to make everything perfect inside of a week. Rusty and I will be along soon. A few days more. We’ll be fine staying at Rachel’s house, and maybe, when we come up, we’ll be bringing her with us.”

  Dolly took Angela in her arms. “Don’t stay too much longer, girl,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to tempt fate.”

  “I know, Mother. I won’t.”

  The next morning, Angela put a sign in the Kitchen’s front window. It said, CLOSING DAY. EVERYTHING’S ON THE HOUSE. She served lots of eggs and ham, canned peas, raisin bread, cranberry juice she’d brought in for Joe. Odd stuff. Some of the people eating it were crying.

  When she’d had enough, Angela and Rusty gave everyone something to take home: a sack of flour, sugar, salt, pickles, whatever was left. Then she sent Rusty on ahead to Rachel’s house, watched him as he walked away.

  “So that’s it,” she said, closing the door as night came on. She washed the dishes, dusted off the shelves in the pantry, scraped down the big grill, swept the floor, scrubbed the counter, set everything to rights before the bulldozers came in a day, a week, whenever they were through wrecking someone else’s home.

  Then she went upstairs one last time and sat on a milk crate by a window, her cheek resting on the sill, and looked down into the street where she’d been walking the day her water broke, looked over toward Raccoon Creek where she’d taught Rusty how to skip rocks, looked up into the sky where the night’s stars had started shining, and said the first of her good-byes.

  When Angela arrived at Rachel’s house, she was shivering with exhaustion.

  “Where’s Rusty?” she asked as she came through the door.

  “He’s out in the tree house with Joe,” Rachel muttered, shutting the door and switching on some lights.

  “You been sitting here in the dark?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Boy, oh boy. I can see I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

  “You think you’re going to bring sweetness and light back into my life, talk me into moving up to that farm with you? Save your breath.”

  Angela sat down heavily in a big, mushy chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. “You got any brandy?” she asked.

  When he came in through the back door, Rusty heard his mother and Rachel talking. He took off his jacket, meaning to join them, but then heard what Rachel was saying and stood where he was, listening.

  “You all have too much faith in the man, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. You’ve known him for a couple of years only, and he’s never done one single thing to prove he’s capable of making this thing work.”

  “Come on, Rachel. You saw those houses. They’re there. They exist. What kind of proof are you talking about?”

  “Since when can a person like Joe—who’s never had to work for a living, not really, or deal with the real world—in a single year build all those houses with all the proper permits, utilities, wells, you name it. One year. It’s impossible. It’ll be the middle of winter and some guy with a badge will show up on your doorstep and start asking you a lot of questions you just won’t have the answers to. And who knows where Joe will be by then?”

  Rusty listened for his mother to come to Joe’s defense, but she did not.

  “When I want to know something,” he said, walking into the room, “I ask. Why can’t you ask Joe about all this?”

  When Rachel didn’t answer, Rusty said, “I asked Joe what it was like, building those houses, having all that money and being able to say, ‘I want you to build me a house here, and one over there, a bigger one, and a little cottage right in those birches there, and make them all beautiful.’ I thought he must have felt like a king.”

  Rachel sat forward in her chair, opened her mouth to say something, but Rusty cut her off. “But he said, no, he didn’t feel like a king. He felt good, but mostly lucky. He realized that he’d need all kinds of permits and probably wouldn’t ever be able to get them, at least not in
time to do what he wanted to do, as quickly as he wanted to do it. But when he called up some of the commissioners and told them what he wanted to do, as soon as he said, ‘Belle Haven,’ they jumped all over him trying to help. They made sure everything got done right. Imagine how happy they must have been when this strange guy with a zillion bucks walks in and says, ‘Hi. I want to settle a bunch of people who are being burned out of their town.’ So they helped him. Makes them look good, he figured. Makes Belle Haven an easier problem. Gets a few people out of town faster. That’s what Joe figured, anyway. He didn’t really care why they were so helpful, though. As long as they didn’t try to stop him.” Rusty sat down, looking pleased with himself, expecting the women to smile and fan themselves with their hands, relieved to hear that everything was taken care of all right. Rachel surprised him.

  “He’s not just an opportunist,” she said quietly. “That was bad enough. Now he’s a traitor, too. I feel sick.”

  “Oh, come on now, Rachel. I know you’re angry with Joe,” Angela said tiredly. “I know you want to hang on to this town as long as you can. But it’s not Joe’s fault we’re in trouble. And you of all people ought to know he’d never do anything to hurt you.”

  Rachel smacked the top of her thigh. “But he has, hasn’t he? You don’t understand, Angela. He thinks he knows what’s best for me. Goddamnit, I’m not a child. And he’s not my father.” Rusty remembered telling Joe the same thing. He felt awful.

  Angela wanted to say, “If your father were here, he’d be on Joe’s side.” But she knew better than to say such a thing.

  “I know what’s best for me,” Rachel said. “I always have.” She walked off toward the kitchen.

  Angela remembered how much Rachel had changed when her parents died. But in some ways she seemed exactly the same as she’d always been. For the first time, Angela wondered if Rachel was clinging to Belle Haven because it was a part of something else that she did not know how to give up.

  If that was the case, no one, not even Joe, could loosen her grip until she was ready to let go.

  Angela held her hand out to Rusty, who walked over to sit on the arm of her chair. “I don’t think we’d better stay here too much longer,” she said, running her hand slowly over the hair at the nape of his neck. “Everything’s going wrong, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do to set it right.”

  “Will Joe come with us?” Rusty asked.

  “I don’t know,” his mother replied. “But I don’t think there’s anything he can do, either.”

  Chapter 47

  In the morning, Rachel drove her truck to Randall. Succinctly, she told Mr. Murdock to keep her money where it was.

  “I’ve decided not to buy any land just now,” she said, to his immense relief. “You were right. Owning a few acres here and there isn’t going to change things.” She had chosen to stand, had kept her coat. “I’m going to follow your advice, wait and see what happens, but perhaps for longer than you intended. The fire’s coming faster and faster now. Who knows—maybe it won’t hang around for very long. Or maybe it will change direction. The government’s moving quickly now, too, buying up everything in sight. But maybe, when everyone who’s going to leave has left, the government will start to wonder what it has gotten itself into. Maybe the fire will force them out, too, eat up all the coal they hope to mine, leave them holding the bag. It may take years, but when the fire and the government have both finished with Belle Haven, if there’s anything left worth buying, I may well want to buy it.”

  “Fair enough,” Mr. Murdock said. Once again, looking at her, he felt that what Rachel really needed was time. He was pleased that she had chosen to grant herself some.

  On her way out of Randall, Rachel saw the road to Spence and took it. She wanted, unexpectedly, to see the government’s development where some of the Belle Haven condemnees now lived. But as she approached the grid of cheap new houses, the sight of endless mud, the absence of even a single tree, the streets named by someone who had never walked them, all of this sent her racing away in another direction, the radio turned up too high, the windows open to the wind, an unwelcome memory of Joe’s beautiful houses made more alluring by the place she had just seen.

  When she got home, she found Mendelson sitting on her front porch.

  “Good morning, Miss Hearn,” he said, rising.

  “Morning,” she replied. “What can I do for you, Mendelson?”

  “I know it’s a long shot,” he said, smiling. “But I just had to come up here myself to see if maybe you’d decided to sell your house.”

  “Sell my house?”

  “Uh-huh. I know you got a written offer, same as everyone else, but I’d like to make an offer of my own, ten grand more than before, maybe move the house somewhere safer.” He looked around him, stomped his boot on the floorboards of the old porch. “It’s a good house.”

  Rachel stared at him. “This house is not for sale,” she said. “Not now or ever.”

  “Well, I know we’re not talking about that much money here—not by your standards anyway—but it’s better than nothing, which is what you’re going to end up with if you keep this place.”

  Rachel waved him up out of the chair. “Why are you still here?” she said. “I told you, it’s not for sale. Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I did. I did. Can’t blame a man for trying.”

  As he turned to go, Rachel said, “No one’s ever blamed you for that,”

  Mendelson stopped with his boot on the top step. “Now, what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that all you’ve ever tried to do around here is screw things up for the rest of us.”

  “I’ve screwed things up?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  In all the years since she had first laid eyes on Mendelson, Rachel had known him to be rude, hard, disturbing, but she had never seen him lose control.

  “Why, you selfish, spoiled, stupid little bitch,” he said, stepping back up onto her porch and only now, incongruously, removing his hat. “One of you started the goddamned fire in the first place, not me. But let’s not blame some old fool who’s got cataracts and can’t drive out to the landfill no more so he dumps his shit in a mine pit and throws a match in after it. Or maybe it was some stupid little boys smoking butts. Whatever. All I know is, it wasn’t me. But ever since I had the great misfortune to step foot in this miserable town, I’ve been blamed for every single thing that’s gone wrong. I’ve done everything that anyone could have done, but nothing was ever good enough for you high and mighty, second-guessing, finger-pointing, armchair assholes. ‘Dig here, dig there, do this, don’t do that, hurry up, get out of our town.’ ” He was shouting now. Rachel could see his spit in the sunlight. “And none of it means anything at all because only two things are really true: you started the fire, and I’m the one who’s spent nearly a third of my life trying to put it out.” He jammed his hat back on his head. “Keep your goddamned house. It’ll make fine kindling.”

  As she watched him drive away, Rachel realized that there was some truth in what Mendelson had said. But it was so very easy to dislike him, and from there it was only a small step to blaming him for the fire that had kept him in Belle Haven long after his welcome had worn out.

  Rachel didn’t really care. She was tired. It no longer mattered to her how the fire had made its way into town, only that it had. She had little energy to spare for Mendelson—not enough to condemn him or to absolve him, just barely enough to wish him away.

  Chapter 48

  After four days at Rachel’s house, Angela was ready to head north. She was worn out with talking and with worrying, and she figured that Rusty would never feel he’d said good-bye properly, so why not go now. Lots of other people were on the verge of leaving. There were only about eighty people left in town, and the place was looking awful. It still amazed her that there were some people who had no intention of leaving town, now or ever. They were convinced that the fire would r
ace on under the town and southward, away. They argued that the bulldozers had done all the damage, not the fire. Not counting Ross Caspar’s place—which wasn’t right in the town—only one motor home had gone down. No great loss. Not a single fire. Just some fumes, big deal.

  Angela no longer cared whether the fire or Mendelson was to blame. The town was dying, by whichever hand.

  “It’s time we left,” she said.

  “If you say so, Angie. But you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want.” They were out in Rachel’s front yard, giving the perennials their fall pruning. It was a lovely October day. “You sure you don’t want to hang around until Halloween? For Rusty’s sake?”

  “You really think anyone’s going to be trick-or-treating, Rachel?”

  “If there are kids in Belle Haven, there will be trick-or-treating. You know there will. And jack-o’-lanterns, and all that stuff. Hell, I’ve already got my costume made and my candies bought.”

  “Well, I think maybe we’ll have to miss Halloween this year, all the same. I don’t want to push my luck.”

  “I understand,” Rachel said, plunging her pruning shears into the ground, straightening up. “I’ll even go up there with you when you’re ready.”

  “You will?” Angela gasped, hoping.

  “I didn’t get a chance to give everyone a garden pot,” she said, looking over the ones left in her yard. “They’ll all fit in the back of the pickup, and there’s plenty of room for the three of us up front. Save you a bus ticket.”

  “Oh.” Angela turned away, looked down the hill toward the town. “For a minute I thought—” And then she stopped and abruptly turned her head, held up a hand to silence Rachel, opened her mouth so she could hear better, and suddenly began to run down the hill, her hair flying out behind her like a veil, just as Rachel, too, heard the sound of screaming from somewhere among the houses below.