Ethan picked up his bow tie from the counter. It was damp from the beer. He snapped it on and picked up his jacket.
"Let's go, buddy," he said to Jer.
* * *
From that moment on, Ethan did what was expected of him. At the altar he stood solemn and groom-like before the Presbyterian minister Katie Anne had chosen to marry them, a soft-jowled man with an earnest smile, an old friend of the Mackey family whom Ethan had never met. He said his vows clearly and credibly. He pledged to love and honor her in sickness and in health, and to forsake all others. And he meant it. He thought how pretty she looked and how hope and relief and adoration poured from her eyes. He felt his own dry heart sitting underneath his starched shirt and wondered how it had come to pass that he had lost it to someone else instead of this smiling, love-struck girl.
* * *
It was one hell of a way to spend a honeymoon, as more than one friend or neighbor commented to Ethan, but the wind was right, and they'd had enough rain, and these were the things that dictated the spring burn, not honeymoons. The spring burn was deadly serious business. There were backfires to plan, cattle to be moved to safer ground, neighbors and authorities to notify, heavy equipment to commandeer and troops to enlist. For years Ethan had helped his neighbors with their burn. He'd driven trucks mounted with water tanks, pulled huge sprayers behind his tractor or wielded fire sticks alongside other ranchers. They worked in parallel lines, stringing fire across the prairie, men and women on foot, on the backs of feed trucks, on four-wheelers, igniting the brown winter grass with friendly napalm dripping from ten-foot pipes. He'd worked the mop-up crew, beating out little fingers of unruly fire with paddles and rakes. When they were done he always looked out at the blackened hills and marveled at the potency of fire and the phoenix-like regenerative power of nature, at how life and death were so mysteriously one. For in less than a week the new bluestem would appear underneath the blackened crust, tiny green sprouts bursting with nutrients. Then they'd turn the cattle loose again, and the beasts would nudge aside the charred earth with their soft, broad muzzles and nibble on the green, juicy blades that tasted better than anything else in the world. The bluestem would grow quickly and so would the cattle. So would the pockets of the ranchers who owned them.
Now it was Ethan's turn to burn. With Tom's help he had carefully assessed the weather and the wind and planned the burn with military precision. This was his land. Its conservation was his salvation.
Ethan stood on the bed of his truck and surveyed the burning hills. It was a spectacular sight with the red flames outlining the hills against the night sky. The burn had gone well, and the county firefighting crew that had been in a state of readiness throughout the day was now preparing to move on. His attention was torn away from the hills by the blue-and-red strobing light of the sheriff's patrol car as it cruised down the dirt road toward them. It stopped next to Ethan's truck and the fire chief got out of the passenger side and came up to Ethan.
"How're we doing?" Ethan asked as he jumped down.
"Looks good," the fire chief said. "Fire's out by the tree line up north. It was touch and go there for a while. Sure felt like that wind was changin' on us."
"We're about finished with the mop-up down here."
The fire chief told him he was leaving a truck next to the firebreak where they still had some flames, and that he was sending the other units back to the station.
Ethan said that was fine by him, and he thanked the fire chief and said he was grateful to his crew.
* * *
When Ethan stepped under the shower that night and felt the cool water stream over his face and through his hair, he realized he hadn't thought of Annette all day. The burn had distracted his body and mind. He was very tired and it felt good. For the first time in months it felt as though chaos no longer threatened the orderliness of his world.
Chapter 21
Annette sat at the old yellow Formica kitchen table staring out the dark window waiting for dawn. It was the same table where she'd eaten as a girl, and she remembered the times she had stared out another window, not unlike this one, at the flat wheat fields of western Kansas buzzing with crickets in the hot summer sun and wished herself away. This morning the only sound was the wind. Usually the winds calmed before dawn, but not today. It was her send-off. Her enemy come to bid her good-bye.
She glanced at her watch. Not yet five o'clock. The coffeemaker sputtered and hissed, and she rose, poured herself a cup and raised the window. A blast of warm air blew the curtains into her face. It would be a hot day, but she'd be gone before the end of it. For two days she'd been ready. Suitcases packed, tickets and passports on top of the dresser. She hadn't been able to sleep or eat, so anxious was she that a freak incident might hold up her departure. Charlie's heart or Eliana coming down with a fever. Something to prolong the misery.
Thanks to Ethan's friendship she'd survived six months of her father's ill-tempered selfishness. Sometimes during one of his rages he'd threaten to throw her out, and she'd endured his abuse and sucked down her indignation and put on a happy face to her daughter, and then she'd carried it to Ethan and he'd listened and loved her. Having no one to turn to for the past month had left her in complete emotional isolation and desperate to flee. Her father had sulked for days when she told him she was leaving early, but he never asked why. She wondered how much he knew. How much everyone knew. She had no way of knowing and no friends to ask. Only Jer. And Jer was silent like a rock.
She had waited for Ethan that night until the snow covered her old Buick in a wispy white blanket, and then she had cautiously driven home through the blizzard with her heart heavy with something she refused to name. Even after his call the next morning she couldn't wrap her thoughts around losing him. Every morning she'd drive to the house hoping to find him waiting for her. She'd sit at the table and write long letters to him and then burn them in the fireplace. Then she'd pick up her violin and play the sad melodies of Mahler and Gorecki, her sadness echoing across the hills, carried on the warm breezes, until even the songbirds paused to listen. The bed Ethan had purchased still sat in the living room, its twenty-year warranty blazoned on a satin banner across the corner. She couldn't bear to look at it, and after a while she quit going to the house.
Every Friday when she left Matthew Winegarner's home she walked quickly to her car with her eyes straight ahead, determined not to look up and perhaps find his face framed in the office window—or, worse, not find it there at all. And every Thursday, when she drove to Jer's to pick up Eliana after her riding lesson, a terrible sensation invaded her stomach, and her knees and arms grew weak for fear that she might find him there or, even worse, not find him there at all. Jer looked at her differently now. There was an element of reticence in his already quiet demeanor that Annette found troubling. He seemed to want to avoid conversation with her, so Annette quit coming early to observe as she had done in the past, and the last few weeks she took to waiting in her car.
Most difficult of all was attending mass without Ethan at her side. One weekday afternoon she drove to Strong City and knelt in a back pew and remained there for a long time, her mind emptied of thought, until she felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice whisper, "Annie."
She looked up to see Father Liddy standing in the aisle. She saw on his kind face a compassionate recognition of her heartache, and it struck Annette that perhaps sainthood was not the absence of sin in a man but rather a boundless compassion, a fearlessness of human suffering, a willingness to take it on and make it one's own.
She told him that she'd be leaving soon for Paris, and she asked him to hear her confession. He looked at her in his quiet manner and sat down on the pew in front of her.
"You're doing the right thing."
"I suppose I am."
"It will get easier."
"I only pray for strength."
"God will grant it to you."
"You've been very kind, Father."
"I'll miss you
, Annette."
"I'll miss you too, Father."
"I envy you," the old Irishman said. "To be going home."
* * *
Those words infused light into Annette's lonely heart, and the strength he had promised her began to grow from that moment on. Only once did it waver, one evening when she was out to dinner at Hannah's with Eliana and her father, and Ethan had come into the café. It was unfortunate that she had looked up just as his eyes found her, because she read on his face an emotion quite different from any she imagined him to feel. Not guilt, and not fear. Nor embarrassment. Rather, in that brief moment, his eyes revealed that he was floundering in a depth of agony just like her own. That his heart had taken him somewhere far away from his beloved hills and his soul was stranded there, and he didn't know how to bring it back. He held her gaze, and then Patti came up and spoke to him. He tipped his hat to her without a reply, and turned and walked out.
It was that look that held her there until after the wedding, nursing a thin hope that he wouldn't go through with it. She could have gone earlier, but she found enough reasons to stay. She planned a recital for her students and scheduled it for the day after Ethan's wedding. All her students and their parents and many friends attended. Matthew Winegarner performed in his wheelchair to a hushed audience, and Mrs. Winegarner, who had volunteered her large home for the event, prepared cookies and punch for a reception. When everyone had gone and Annette was washing the punch bowl, Mrs. Winegarner broke down in tears. The two women sat together at the kitchen table and cried while Eliana pushed Matthew in his wheelchair around the backyard.
* * *
One last last thing remained to be done: to go through the few boxes her mother had left in the attic of the Reilly house. For months she'd procrastinated, then at the end she'd put it off because she couldn't bear to return to the old house. Ethan had said they were things her mother had intended for a garage sale. But perhaps there was something overlooked. Something that still had meaning for a daughter.
She finished her coffee and wrote a note telling her father where she was going, and that she would be back shortly. Then she took the keys to the Buick and went out.
The eastern horizon had lightened to a deep purple when she backed out of the driveway, and by the time the farmhouse came into view the sky had washed to a pale blue. To the north, giant pillars of smoke rose from the fields. The night before as they were driving back from Strong City, she had been alarmed to see long ribbons of fire consuming the prairie. But her father explained that they did it every year. A planned burn, he called it.
She pulled up in front of the house and sat in the car with the engine idling, while in the distance the columns of smoke moved across the horizon with the wind. She and Ethan had made love in this house and taken vows in this house. She knew she'd open the door and see him smiling at her, his hat on a chair and his hands around hers over the table with their coffee cups between them. She'd hear his footsteps coming up the porch and his deep, reassuring voice, reminding her how she'd be safe with him.
The bed was still there. Everything was as she had left it. She averted her eyes and dragged her heavy heart up the stairs to the attic.
She'd clear out her mother's things; after that the place could burn to the ground.
Chapter 22
Ethan had been asleep only a few hours when the phone woke him up. It was the county sheriff. He said they had a bad situation on their hands, that the wind had come up unexpectedly and carried embers from smoldering cow chips into dry winter pasture that hadn't been burned. The fire line was moving east, away from the town, into the hills, but livestock were threatened and he couldn't be sure the wind wouldn't change again.
When Ethan got off the phone Katie Anne was already up and digging her jeans out from a pile of clothing.
"I heard," she mumbled groggily. "What's the wind speed?"
"Around twenty-two," he said.
"That's not good."
When Ethan had dressed, he found her in the kitchen filling a thermos full of hot coffee.
"Your dad's gonna take the Cessna up at dawn," he said. "We'll need a firebreak somewhere north of here. He wants you to get the disc tractor from the Obermuellers and bring it up the road. Stay on the radio. He'll tell you where to plow."
Ethan could smell it as he sat on the porch pulling on his boots. The woodsy smell of burning leaves in autumn. It grew stronger as he drove along the road with the window down. Pungent. Hard on his nostrils. Black ashes floated in the air. He passed the road to the old Reilly house and had a sudden urge to turn onto it. He hadn't returned since the evening he'd spent there with Annette. Memories flooded his thoughts: the feel of the woman's skin next to his, her warmth, the taste of her tongue in his mouth, stirring him in a way no woman had ever done before. Profoundly. He accelerated and sped quickly north toward the fire. Let it burn, he thought. Let it burn to the ground.
You watched the land and it looked like the wind was painting the earth with fire. Fueled by the dry winter grass, it moved with startling speed—roaring walls of ferocious heat and fury. An alert was sent out to all the neighboring counties. Sirens wailed. Ranchers awakened from their sleep. Trucks and tractors were recruited to carry water from ponds and set backfires. But the backfires, goaded by the renegade wind, turned on them with a vengeance. Men drove alongside the fire, spraying it with water from the tanks mounted on their trucks. But then the wind would suddenly shift and the fire would come at them. The fire outran the fire trucks; it trapped cattle and foxes and deer in rings of fire. It dwarfed the men and their red and green machines with its towering columns of smoke that rose into the pale morning sky. It swallowed up their spinning red and blue lights. And each time, as the wind shifted, the fire turned, separated, and a new fire line was born.
* * *
Katie Anne had Jacob's Mound in her sight. A few more miles and the firebreak on Ethan's land would be finished. For the past hour she had listened to her father's voice on the two-way radio as he spoke to the fire chief, deciding strategy and plans of attack, using methods he had learned from his father and grandfather, men who had known fire as an implacable enemy. In a few minutes he would be taking up his plane and they would have a better assessment of the scope of the fire. But they all knew one thing: it was moving fast.
Katie Anne had spoken to Ethan only once over the radio and then he was out of reach. He had taken a crew west of the fire line to start a backfire. She turned around to look at the mark she had made on the earth. The disc had torn up a fifteen-foot-wide stretch of prairie, plowing under the dried winter grass, bringing to the surface cool, moist earth that defied fire. When she reached Jacob's Mound she would turn around and come back right alongside this line, widening the break another fifteen feet, making it impossible for the fire, even with its grotesque gymnastics, to breach their land. She could see the fire now in the north, a thin line of orange flame with a smoking tail, sweeping over the hills. The air was cluttered with flying ashes, and the sun, which had risen only moments earlier, was a huge muted orange orb barely visible through the smoky haze. It suddenly occurred to her that the old Reilly house that Ethan had bought was right in the path of the fire. The old Reilly place. Where Ethan had betrayed her. Let it burn.
She looked back at Jacob's Mound and felt a sudden jolt of fear. A patch of fire had appeared at the top only a few hundred feet in front of her. Quickly, it came down the slope of the mound and advanced toward her. She threw the controls to lift the disc. Once the lumbering machine was free of the earth she turned it around and gave it full throttle. The heavy tractor, its mammoth engine whining, rumbled across the prairie, throwing up a curtain of dust and dirt, and the fire rushed steadily after her. The wind blew the smoke forward, ahead of the fire line. It caught up with her and rolled over her, and she disappeared in a cloud of ash.
* * *
Annette was sitting on a chair in the dark attic with her flashlight and a box of letters in her lap, oblivious t
o the heat, the passage of time and the quiet arrival of dawn. She was totally perplexed by what she had found. Perhaps her mother had simply forgotten the letters were here. But Annette suspected it was to keep them hidden from her father, and she wondered if her mother had intended her to find them.
The letters were from a childhood friend of her mother's who had moved to Los Angeles to study painting. From her small studio in the Hollywood Hills, the friend had written letter after letter, pleading with Emma Reilly to take her baby and flee her emotionally abusive husband. Here in letters that spanned decades, Annette finally understood her mother's regrets, her sense of entrapment, and how she had justified the difficult choice she had made. She saw how much her mother truly loved her father, despite his flaws; how submission had become easier with time and how she had buried her guilt and indignation in the name of marital devotion.
Within months after marrying, her mother had recognized her mistake. Beneath Charles Ferguson's good looks and persuasive charm lay a narrow-minded and rigidly authoritarian man who demanded absolute submission to his will. He became fiercely jealous of her friendships and coldly disapproved of any pleasures or interests she didn't share with him. She would be devoted to Charlie and his world. Pleasing him first and foremost was the role she would play throughout her life.
She lived in constant fear of his suspicions and rage. One day after lunch while Charlie was secluded in his study working on the church budget, a neighbor dropped by. Emma invited her into the kitchen and put on some fresh coffee while she finished tidying up. At one point she closed the door to sweep behind it, and at that moment Charlie came down from his study and found the two women shut in the kitchen chatting and laughing. He waited until the neighbor had gone and then burst in on his wife, accusing her of ridiculing him to the neighbors. The following day was her birthday, and they had planned to drive to Emporia for dinner at her favorite restaurant. But Charlie didn't return until ten o'clock that night, and then he slept in the guest room; three days passed before he spoke to her again.
Firebird (The Flint Hills Novels) Page 14