by Simon Toyne
“If we make it? If—don’t be talking that way. Of course we’ll make it.”
“I hope you’re right.” He glanced over at the two fire trucks, their hoses sending arcs of water across the buildings closest to the control line. “I fear you may not be. How much water do they hold?”
Cassidy followed his gaze to the trucks. “About three thousand gallons apiece.”
Solomon nodded. “I don’t see a hydrant system on the streets.”
“That’s because we don’t have one.”
“So what happens when the fire trucks run out of water?”
“What happ—” Cassidy leaned in, his face flushing red. “If we run out of water, then we’ll run hose from the houses and do what we can with that. Hell, we’ll start a bucket chain, if that’s what it takes.”
Solomon shook his head. “You don’t have the manpower. But at least you’re getting angry now. That’s good. Anger is almost as powerful as fear.”
Cassidy went to say something but never got the chance.
“FIRE! WE GOT A FIRE HERE!” someone hollered.
Smoke was pouring through a gap between two houses a block back from the control line and a little way off the main road. The crowd in front of the truck broke up and started running toward it. Solomon shook his head. The first whiff of smoke and everything fell apart. The town was doomed.
“Go to your area,” Morgan hollered through the megaphone. “Go to your area. Let the trucks deal with this one.” His amplified words cut through the roar of the main fire and the hiss of the fire hoses. “We start running after every fire like this and we will lose this town.”
One of the fire trucks disengaged and sped down the street toward the smoking house, turning its hose to the fire. Everyone else hurried to their section, running now, frightened of the fire and the memory of Bobby Gallagher still fresh in their minds.
Fear.
Solomon could feel it crackling in the dry air. He could smell it, mingling with the sweat and the stench of smoke. Fear was good. Fear could make people do almost anything. Maybe the town wasn’t doomed after all.
Another blast of wind brought heat and embers flying out of the desert. The billboard was starting to steam now, the water-soaked images of old-style cowboys looking like they were sweating for real. The fire was coming fast but the heat was coming faster, a solid pressure wave so dry it made the air uncomfortable to breathe. Solomon remembered the coach horses, restless and desperate to run but tethered by their reins. He felt like that too—wanting to run but bound here. He felt like the fire was a part of him, a part of his story.
Only those who face the fire . . . can hope to escape the inferno.
He took a step forward, his feet cracking the red-stained crust of the earth, and stared into the heart of the fire. He could feel the heat of it like a solid thing and he was breathing fast, drawing the hot air inside himself, feeling like he was part of the fire already. The flames roiled and twisted like something about to strike and Solomon braced himself as the wind gusted and roared in his ears. He felt it buffet his body and rock him on his feet. But the fire did not surge forward. Instead it pulled back, rearing up and away like a horse from a snake.
The wind had changed. The gust of wind had come not from the desert but from behind him. It had come from the mountains.
“You smell that?” The shout came from behind him and he turned and saw one of the medics turn toward the town. “You smell it?”
Others stopped work and turned their noses to the air, breathing in the coal-tar smell of the creosote bush being carried to them on the wind, a smell desert folk learned to identify before they learned their ABCs.
“Look—,” someone else shouted and pointed up at the high mountains. A raft of gray cloud had appeared over the ridge and was sliding fast across the sky. “Rain. There’s rain coming. Lord be praised, there’s rain on its way.”
Solomon turned back to the fire and stared up at the arch of smoke above his head like the vaulted roof of a burning cathedral. A loop of fire lashed out like a tentacle, whipping across the air above Solomon’s head.
“Go away,” he said.
And the first drops of rain began to fall.
The fire hissed and the rain hissed back, falling fast and washing the heat and ash from the air.
Cheers rang out behind him. Cheers, and prayers of thanks, and sobs of relief.
The flames began to shrink away and melt into steam, and rain ran down Solomon’s face like tears, soaking his clothes, cooling his skin. A surge of people surrounded him, some still holding the tools they no longer needed. Arms snaked around his shoulders, a woman kissed him. They were all talking and laughing and treating him as if he had personally summoned the rain in order to save their town. Someone offered him shoes, another asked if he needed a place to stay while he was in town. But there was only one thing he wanted. He turned to Cassidy.
“I’d like to visit Holly Coronado,” he said.
PART 5
The unexamined life is not worth living.
—SOCRATES
Extract from Riches and Redemption—The Making of a Town
The published memoir of the Reverend Jack “King” Cassidy
The next thing I came across was a wooden box, its surface darkened by wax and wear and splintered open at one corner where it had struck the hard ground. It lay between the wheel ruts, just as the cage had done, with white cotton sheets and clothes spilling out from it and onto the dirt. There were petticoats and aprons, some boy’s britches and a pair of men’s trousers all scattered and dusty on the ground, the Sunday best of a small family. There was a twist of cloth too, knotted at the corners to make the arms and legs of a child’s doll. I scooped this up, imagining the distress of the child who had lost it, but the box looked to be too heavy to carry so I left it in the track along with its spilled contents. As I passed it I saw sunlight glint off a rectangle of brass on the lid and read the name etched upon it—Eldridge.
It was evident the box must have fallen with some force for it to split open like this and yet the noise of the splintering wood had clearly not caused the wagon to stop. The wheels had continued rolling, meandering away along the wide riverbed, following their strange course without break or pause, and I found something deeply unsettling in the way this well-cared-for box with its precious contents had been so casually abandoned.
I picked up my pace, disregarding all previous resolve to take things slowly and preserve both energy and water. I had been anxious for human company but now I feared some misfortune or disease or delirium had befallen the party to cause such aimless transit and the steady abandonment of their belongings.
I had seen things like this before on my travels, items that had seemed so essential at the beginning of a trek steadily losing value as the days and weeks wore on until they became nothing more than a worthless burden. I had once seen an upright piano, standing alone in the middle of a prairie with the stool in front of it slightly askew, as if the pianist had stopped playing then vanished into the air. I wondered now whether the birdcage I had retrieved had not been lost at all but jettisoned, along with the wooden box, to lighten the load on the heavy-laden wagon. Nevertheless I kept hold of the cage and uttered a silent prayer that the wagon party’s arrival at the well might revive them and the subsequent appearance of a stranger returning something lost might cheer them still further. I clung to these hopes and pressed on. Then I saw the third thing, and knew that no amount of water or rest or the retrieval of lost valuables was ever going to restore that poor family to whatever former joy they may have known.
She must have been about three years old. Her tiny body curled up the way babies do when sleeping. She wore clothes that would have been too big for her even before starvation had withered her away to almost nothing. She was lying on her side, her auburn hair spilling from beneath a salt-stained cotton bonnet and spreading out in a puddle of dark copper. Her eyes were shut, as if she were merely sleeping, but the da
rk line of flies clustered around her lashes as they scavenged the salt of her dried tears showed it was a slumber from which she would never wake.
She had been dead awhile, I could smell the rot coming off her as my mule drew closer, and she lay so rigid and flat upon the uneven ground that I could see she had the death stiffness already, that peculiar hardening of the flesh that takes place in a body a few hours dead. I imagined the girl curled up on the floor of the covered wagon, perhaps the smallest of a family all lying in the wagon alongside her in exhaustion. This would explain the unusually deep wheel marks in the dirt. Folks generally walk alongside their wagons during the heat of the day to spare the horse—but not if they are dying.
Maybe the poor girl had been shaken loose by the jostling of the cart as her body started to stiffen. Or someone had pushed her out to rid the wagon of her growing smell and lighten the burden some, though the poor starved thing could not have weighed much more than a sack of coffee. I like to think it was the former, though I know what survival and being close to death will make a person do. God knows I have been to the edge of that dread abyss myself.
I kicked my mule onward, whispering a promise to the dead child that I would return as soon as I might and properly commend her soul to God and bury her deep enough in the ground so that scavengers would not nose her and dig her up for a meal. And though it pained me to abandon her that way, I knew my Christian duty lay with the living, if any of the wagon party lived still, and I doubted but they were too far ahead of me.
My mule was laboring now, sweat foaming around the saddle straps, but I had no water to spare and precious little for myself so I pushed on, knowing that somewhere ahead of me, where the ground began to rise up to the twin mountain peaks, I would find fresh water and here my mule could rest and drink, and so could I.
I saw the trees first, a small thicket of mesquite, the crowns rising darkly beyond the bleached banks of the dead river, then, as I spurred the mule on in prospect of shade, I saw the wagon. It had come to rest in the first fringe of shadow, the dusty canvas of its cover standing out against the dark background of the trees. I took the wagon’s rest as a good sign, imagining the party’s horse must have halted the moment it came upon water.
I entered the shadows and felt the instant relief of it. The temperature beneath the trees was many degrees cooler than out in the crucible of the riverbed and it took my sun-scorched eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloom. I blinked away my sun blindness as my mule trudged closer and saw the horse, not halted at a water hole but lying on its side, its foam-flecked hide stretched tight across ribs that were sharp-edged and still. It looked like it had been dead for days, but I knew this could not be so. I smelled death and saw the flies in thick clouds, seething about the horse and wagon. I reached the wagon and peered through the rear flap.
Flies were everywhere, thickening the air and crawling over every surface, so many that I wondered how they had hatched so quickly. There were three people inside, a mother and two children stretched out one next t’other between sacks of dry goods. They were folded into each other as if in some deep slumber, the woman on the left, one arm raised as a pillow for her head, the other draped over a boy of around twelve. He in turn had his arm around a girl of five or six and it was the sight of her that nearly undid me. Her arm too was extended, the arc of it preserved by the death stiffness over a small empty space on the bare boards of the wagon floor. This was where the tiny child I had found on the track must have lain until death and the movement of the wagon had edged her away from her family. There was something unutterably beautiful and unspeakably sad about this and I offered a prayer for them all, which I did silently, not daring to open my mouth on account of the flies and a fear that if I tasted that foul air I would never again rid myself of its flavor.
I said an amen then maneuvered past the wagon where I expected to find the last of the party, the man of the family, fallen by the horse he had led here. But I did not find him lying on the ground.
I found blood.
27
HOLLY CORONADO FELT LIKE SHE WAS FLOATING AND LOOKING DOWN AT herself, putting one foot in front of the other, her black dress torn, her feet and hands blistered and bleeding. She had buried Jim and fulfilled the promise she had made to him. Now all she wanted was to be home and curl up in the bed they had shared: fall into a numbed sleep, wrapped in the fading scent of him that still clung to the sheets. She never wanted to face the pain of another day.
The rain made it heavy going, soaking her clothes and weighing her down and making it hard to see too far ahead. She had been thinking a lot lately about the time when she and Jim had first gotten together, looking back at the start of their relationship from the bleak vantage point of its end, torturing herself with thoughts of whether Jim would still be alive if they had done things differently. But the truth was that, for Jim, all roads led here. The town had a peculiar hold on him, always had done from way before she even met him, and now it would never let him go.
The first time she told him she loved him he had gone quiet and sat her down, looking so serious and sad she’d thought he was going to tell her he was already married or something. Instead he had told her about this place, the town, and how it was like a family to him. He’d told her how it had cared for him when he was a baby, clothed him, fed him, educated him, impressed good Christian moral values on him, nursed him whenever he fell sick, even provided a scholarship for him to go to college.
He’d also told her that the town, his family, was in trouble, that it was struggling to survive and he felt he could help. That was why he was studying trust law, not so he could get a fancy job in a big-city law firm and get rich, but so he could help the town get back on its feet. He said he’d made a promise to himself that when he graduated, he would return there and run for public office and spend his life in the service of the town, and that, though he loved her more than he had ever thought it possible to love another person, if she didn’t want that, if she wanted to go off and be a big-city lawyer, then he would understand and she should not waste any more time on him.
He had cried when he’d told her all this, a big bear of a guy holding her hands and talking with the kind of pain only love can bring, so selfless and loyal and noble. How could any girl turn away from a guy like that? Not her, that was for sure.
So when they both graduated, him top of his class and with several big firms dangling six-figure salaries in front of him, he had kept his promise and turned them all down and come back here to try to save the town that had raised him. And now he was dead and she felt like a piece of her had been torn out and replaced with a jagged block of ice. His future was gone and so was hers. She couldn’t see a way through it. To top it all, she was broke too.
Broke and broken.
Fancy educations were expensive. Jim had gotten a scholarship from the town, but it hadn’t covered much. They had both graduated with student debt and gone even deeper while Jim ran for sheriff. When he got elected they thought the tide was about to turn, but he hadn’t taken office before he died. No salary. No widow’s pension. The house was rented and she couldn’t afford to keep it—not that she wanted to. But she had nowhere else to go. Her parents were dead. She had no brothers or sisters. She had nothing. Jim had been her everything. She’d felt like a better person when she was with him. Even colors had seemed brighter. Now the world was gray and black and ugly.
The rain was torrential now, hammering the ground and throwing up mist that washed the heat from the air and the dust of the grave from her hands and clothes. Rivers gurgled down gutters and into storm drains that fed into the main run-off channel running out of town toward where the flames had been replaced by clouds of steam. So much for the town burning to the ground.
She had to leave here, get away from all the ugliness and pain. She had been thinking about that a lot too. How she might do it. How she would do it.
She’d prepared everything the night before. Jim had always been a troubled slee
per and she had hunted through the house for his various stashes of sleeping pills. Jim had his own minicloset in the bathroom where he kept his “man stuff” and going through it had felt like a small betrayal, like she was trespassing on something private. He was everywhere inside: in the old Gillette razor he had used since college, in the few strands of hair trapped in his hairbrush, in the half-empty bottle of cologne. She had sprayed it in the air then walked through it as if she was stepping through the ghost of him.
She found three bottles in total of Ambien and emptied them out onto the granite countertops in the kitchen. A search online had proved mostly unhelpful, her question “How many sleeping pills will prove fatal?” directing her to sleep forums and links to suicide help lines. The closest she had gotten to real information was a post from a nurse who said an adult would need to take at least fifty. She had sixty-three and figured, with her slight frame, that it should be enough, but she crushed them inside a freezer bag to make sure she didn’t lose any, the jagged edges piercing the plastic and leaving small traces of white powder on the granite. She had also noted the warnings on the label not to take the pills with alcohol and had taken a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt from the cabinet and placed it by her bed. She planned to dissolve the powder in a large Scotch, drink it straight down, then lie back and drift away on a pleasant whiskey haze. All she had to do was get home.
She forced herself on through the hammering rain, one foot in front of the other, until her house appeared in the mist up ahead. She reached her driveway and almost staggered up it, forcing her legs to walk the last few feet home. Her car was tucked right up at the top of the drive to make room for Jim’s and she felt the absence of him come crashing down when she thought of how his car would never be parked there again. It made her feel sick, really sick, and she grabbed at the wooden rail, leaning heavily on it for support until the nausea passed. Then she hauled herself up the steps and onto her wide, covered porch. There was a couch to the right of the door and she was so wrung out and bone-deep exhausted she felt like lying down on it and resting a minute. If her dress hadn’t been so wet she might have done just that, but she felt wretched and chilled and there were no blankets to warm her and, besides, she had a job to do. So she continued, heaving the screen door open and twisting the handle of the front door her urban-girl heart still got a kick out of never having to lock.