Jim ran back to his truck, but Susan sprinted across the lawn. By the time he reached the giant cottonwood, Jim couldn’t see his wife. The front doors of the house were burning now, and Junior, Eddie at his side, appeared at the kitchen door, waving a burning chair in the air. The crowd cheered again as he set the door on fire.
Jim charged up the steps, but Junior blocked his way. “Now you eat Schapen dirt, Jim Grellier.”
“The witches are in there, the big fat one, and little skinny Lala. They’ll smoke to death and burn in hell forever,” Eddie screeched.
Peter Ropes ran to help Jim; Clem and Turk Burton suddenly appeared as well. The crowd saw a battle was under way. They didn’t know the issues, but they surged up to take on anyone who was trying to fight Junior.
Jim backed away for a moment, looking for his wife. A surge from the mob thrust him back into the fight. He didn’t know until later that Junior threw Susan out of the kitchen when she had run up a minute earlier. She didn’t try to fight him but ran around to the back of the house to the cellar doors. The bolts were loose; she hefted one door up and slid down the coal chute. The floor was muddy, and the smell of mold was thick. Little furry creatures were squeaking around her, moving away from the burning front of the house.
This was the cellar where Una Fremantle had hidden her children when Quantrill’s raiders came through. Susan’s fingers felt on the left for the joists to the small rooms that used to hold coal and root vegetables in the winter. Six more paces to the kitchen stairs. They rose steeply along the north wall. Fifteen of them and then the kitchen door. She pushed against it, but it didn’t open. She shoved, but it was nailed shut. Oh, yes, Jim and Blitz—they’d done it one night when Gina had been frightened by a prowler. Who was probably Lara, sneaking into the house, hiding Abigail’s diaries.
Susan made her way back down the stairs and went into the front half of the basement. It was warm in here from the fire overhead, but there was no help for it. She’d have to go up this way.
Her fingers, as sensitive as a counterfeiter’s, felt along the walls, finding the furnace room. The Fremantles had put this system in fifty years ago. It was antiquated now, the air vents too big to be fuel-efficient, but now that was a good thing. Susan felt for the metal tentacles, reaching up an arm and finding the one that went straight overhead into the back parlor. She ran her fingers along it for the join that Mr. Fremantle had soldered when the tube split; the metal would be weak there. She pushed against it and felt it give a little.
Above her, she could hear pounding feet and animal-like cries—Junior fighting someone. She slammed her shoulder into the weld. This time, it gave, and she kicked away the bottom half of the tube, which was connected to the boiler.
The top half dangled above her. She reached inside, found a metal ridge, and pulled herself up inside the tube. It was a tight fit. Good thing she had lost all that weight or she’d never have made it. Bad thing she’d lain around and let her muscles go; she was struggling and trembling as she inched up the tube. She kept putting her hand up, checking for the grate. The air above her was hot but not unbearable. Thank you, Jesus, for small mercies. I’m grateful for them.
When she found the grate, she leaned against the tube so it would take the weight of her hips. She needed to put all the muscle she had left into pushing up, pushing against the cast-iron grate, pushing against the cherrywood table that stood over it. Just when she thought her back would tear in half, metal and table gave, toppled over. I’m grateful, she thought again, and laughed, a little hysterically, at the pun.
She heard the wooden table crack as it landed. Una brought that table with her from Boston. The Marquis de Lafayette had taken tea at it, or so Una always bragged to Abigail. Now it was broken, but it would burn soon, anyway.
Susan hoisted her skinny body through the opening, tripped on the grate, and cut her ankle. She felt the blood wet around her foot, but the foot wasn’t broken, she could put full weight on it.
“Lara! Lara, it’s Mom. Where are you?”
She strained to listen, trying to hear her daughter above the crackling of the fire and the noise of the crowd. She called again and again but heard nothing.
The whole front of the house was on fire now. She couldn’t use the front staircase, and flames were lapping the north side. The back parlor was full of smoke, but the blaze gave her some light, too. She took a moment to take off her jacket, pull her sweatshirt off to wrap around her face, and put the jacket back on to protect her skin from the embers falling into the room from the outer walls.
Stay down for smoke. Move slower but safer on your knees. The instruction she had given Etienne and Lara when they were little. In the country, no fire truck will come in time to save you. Children have to be able to save themselves. But that was impossible, children can’t save themselves. And their mothers were pretty useless protection, too.
Not today, though. She would save Lara today. Her daughter was alive; Susan was certain of that. She was in the house and alive. If her remaining little chick had died, she, Susan, would have known, would have felt all that was left of her heart die in that instant, so she knew Lara was in here waiting for her.
Susan crawled from the back parlor to Judge Fremantle’s study and through there to the tiny bathroom the Fremantles installed in the 1920s. She ran water in the rusty shower, stood under it to soak herself thoroughly, then went up the back stairs.
The smoke was thicker here, so thick she started to choke. The fire had grabbed the front of the house, devoured the bathroom there, and run along the long wood floor. Flames were dancing around the doorway to the master bedroom, licking along the polished walnut base of the drinking fountain.
“Lara! Lulu!” she called over and over.
She crawled past the room Gina had used as her study. Through the haze of smoke, she saw Elaine Logan’s bulk. Elaine was sitting on the floor, kissing her hands.
“Elaine!” Susan cried. “Elaine, where’s my daughter?”
“Dante,” Elaine crooned. “I found my baby’s picture. Gina stole him from me, but he’s come back to me, he’s come back to his lily maid, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the fair. He never loved anyone but me, did you, my darling?”
“Elaine!” Susan screamed. “Get up! Where’s Lara?”
Elaine didn’t look at her, just kept kissing the snapshot in her fingers. Susan went far enough into the room to see that her daughter wasn’t hidden behind Elaine’s bulk. Choking from the smoke, weeping with despair, she crawled back into the hall and called again to her daughter.
Over the crackling of the fire, over the sirens of the arriving fire brigade, she finally heard Lara answer. Susan found her daughter huddled underneath the faded prom dress in the closet of the far back bedroom, clutching Abigail’s tin trunk. Susan pressed Lara against her breast so hard that their hearts beat through each other’s chests.
“Mom? Mom? Oh, Mom, I thought—I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry. I put Abigail’s trunk in here, and now I can’t get out. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—I tried to rescue Elaine but I couldn’t move her, and then I got trapped in here and now I’ll kill you, too.”
“Oh, Lulu, these papers, they weren’t worth the price of your life. No one is going to die in here. Not you, not me, not Elaine, if we can get the fire brigade. We’re getting out. We’re going home, you hear?”
The smoke and heat in the hall were too intense now for them to risk returning to the stairs. Light was filtering into the room from the flames along the roof and the strobes of the fire trucks on the far side of the house. Susan tore the gray prom dress into strips and knotted them together. She tied one end around the legs of the bed and opened the window. She could hear the shouts from the front of the house and the kitchen, but the window opened away from all the action. No one was underneath.
She tied the makeshift rope around Lara’s chest and lowered her daughter, Susan’s unused muscles trembling with the effort. “Undo the knot, Lulu,” she shouted when Lara was
on the ground. “Undo the knot and find your daddy.”
Part Five
CODA
Fifty-Six
HISTORY LESSON
From the Douglas County Herald, November 3
HELL NIGHT IN KANSAS
Nasya the Miracle Calf Injured;
Historic Mansion Destroyed in Blaze
The calf which has drawn pilgrims from as far away as Israel went on a pilgrimage herself Wednesday night that ended her prospects as the harbinger of the Second Coming and led to disastrous consequences for the Lawrence woman who abducted her. Reb Meir, of the Bet HaMikdash yeshiva in Kansas City, says the calf’s injuries were too extensive for her to be considered a perfect red heifer, even if her hide retains its lustrous color into her third year.
Arnie Schapen, who was raising the calf, wants to put her down, but area residents, including Animals R Kin, are protesting and have taken the cow into their custody.
More serious are the injuries to local resident Elaine Logan. She is in critical condition at Lawrence Memorial Hospital for burns and smoke inhalation she incurred when a Halloween bonfire at the old Fremantle farm east of town burned out of control. The fire, set by Gina Haring, who is a Wiccan, or so-called “white witch,” spread to the Fremantle home, which was almost completely destroyed.
“That’s such a crock,” Lara cried, reading the paper at breakfast Saturday morning. “Gina’s fire was a million miles from the house, which the stupid paper would know if they could get outside of Lawrence and actually look at the land. Anyway, Junior set that fire, him and Eddie!”
“He and Eddie,” Susan corrected.
“Hank Drysdale told me the district attorney is trying to work out how to charge Junior,” Jim put in. “Junior’s persuaded Eddie to take the blame, and of course that isn’t right.”
“But what about Gina and her friends? They saw Junior setting the fire, and so did Robbie and me.”
“Let’s not go overboard until we see what the DA decides, okay, Lulu? I’m not crazy about the idea of you getting up in court to testify against Junior unless there’s no other choice. Arnie feels enough ill will toward us without you adding to his grievances. Besides, Junior is an aggressive guy, with the muscle to back it up. You and he are going to be neighbors for a long time, unless one or the other of you gives up on the land.”
Jim had a black eye and a cracked rib from fighting Junior Wednesday night. By the time he and Peter Ropes, with help from Turk and Clem Burton, had battled Junior away from the door, it was burning so fiercely that Jim couldn’t get in the kitchen. He still felt a kind of shame for not helping Susan rescue Lara. By the time Lara found him, after Susan lowered her to the grass Wednesday night, he was working feverishly with the fire brigade, who were trying to get enough of the blaze under control to get into the house. When he saw his daughter, he abandoned the fire brigade and got to the far side of the house just in time to catch his wife as she slipped down her makeshift rope.
He and Susan spent the remainder of Wednesday at the hospital, the two of them brooding over Lara, not sleeping, not quite believing the doctors, who said she’d made it through the inferno without major injury. When they brought her home, on Thursday, she spent the day in his and Susan’s bed. Her mother wouldn’t leave her side, and Jim had to fight back a panicky fear that this was the prelude to another, larger collapse for his wife, worse this time because she’d take their daughter with her.
On Friday, though, Lara was ready to get up again. She was still sub-dued, picking at her food. She still clung to her mother, as if afraid, like Jim, that with the crisis past, Susan would start to retreat from her again.
Late in the afternoon, Lara finally decided to tell her parents the whole story of her Halloween. “It was so horrible, Dad, all of it. But the worst was, all that stuff at the church. It was, oh, it was disgusting. You never heard anything like it. Pastor Nabo went on and on in this totally gross way about sex and women being agents of the devil! He was touching me, he was saying I had the devil in me, that I had ruined Robbie’s life. I should never have gone, I should have told you about it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Both parents rushed to comfort her. Jim secretly thought it was very nearly worth all the traumas of Halloween night if rescuing Lara had brought Susan back to this world. He stepped back and let his wife have the major share of reassuring their child.
He remembered Lara’s comment a month or so ago about the prince coming to kiss Susan and wake her up. Maybe he’d made a mistake, all these weeks since Chip’s death, in trying to console his wife. Instead of trying to comfort her, should he have tried to make her feel needed or even heroic?
Lara returned to the paper and started reading it aloud to her parents:
Elaine Logan is a well-known local figure often seen panhandling near popular student watering holes in downtown Lawrence. Logan used to be an honors English student at the University of Kansas. She dropped out in 1970 to join the Free State Commune, which the Fremantle family allowed to live rent-free in an unused bunkhouse. When the bunkhouse burned down thirty-six years ago, Logan’s boyfriend, Dante Spirota, died in the fire. Logan suffered a miscarriage as a result of the shock. Logan accused Schapen’s 87-year-old mother Myra of causing the bunkhouse fire, which led to escalating hostility between Logan and the Schapen family.
“That’s true.” Lara looked up from the paper. “At the—the thing they were doing to me, Arnie and Pastor Nabo and them—Elaine said she saw Myra set the fire. She says Myra lit a fuse right up against the bunkhouse and waited for it to go up in flames.”
“Lit a fuse? That could mean anything, you know that, Lara. Anyway, if Elaine watched her set the fire, why didn’t she say something at the time?”
“Maybe she did and no one listened to her then any more than they do today,” Lara suggested.
“Maybe she was high,” Susan said. “They used a lot of drugs out there. She could have thought she was saying something but couldn’t get the words out.”
“Maybe she was high and imagined the whole thing,” Jim said. “No, Lulu, don’t get wound up about this. If Myra set the bunkhouse on fire, we’ll never prove it. It’s Elaine Logan’s word against hers, assuming Elaine even survives.”
Last Monday, Logan broke into the special calf’s private pen and spray-painted it. According to witnesses, the Schapen family retaliated against Logan’s attack on their calf by holding an exorcism on Logan and some area teens at the Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church. Pastor Nabo stresses that his church considers this a “service of deliverance,” not a Catholic exorcism rite.
Witnesses say the attempted exorcism so enraged Logan that she ran away from the church, stole Arnold Schapen’s Ford truck, and used it to break down the walls of the perfect red heifer’s special enclosure.
Arnold Schapen had served as a deputy sheriff in Douglas County for the past six years. Sheriff Drysdale has informed the Herald that Schapen has turned in his deputy’s badge and will no longer be working for the county. Schapen’s son, Arnold Jr., is a widely acclaimed local football hero now in his first year at Tonganoxie Bible College.
“It doesn’t say how Elaine is,” Lara said. “Is she—will she—”
“We don’t know, baby,” Jim answered. “She was in pretty bad shape by the time the fire brigade could get to her. Rachel Carmody has organized a fund to take care of her hospital bills if Medicaid doesn’t cover them all.”
“And what’s Gina going to do?” Lara asked. “Is she going back to New York?”
“I think Gina is living with Autumn Minsky right now,” Jim said, his color heightened. “That’s what Curly says, and he usually knows, doesn’t he? What about Robbie, Lulu? Is he still at Greynards’?”
Lara nodded, her own face flushed. She and Robbie—what would she say to him when they met at school on Monday? They could never go back to the barn. Their private idyll had been made so public, so ugly, she didn’t think she could ever let a boy get close
enough to her again to touch her.
“It will pass, Lulu, darling, it will pass,” Susan said. “You’re too lovable not to find love again.”
“I’M LEAVING FOR New York now,” Gina told Jim a few weeks later. “I suppose you’ll be glad to see the last of me.”
She had sat in her battered Escort, watching the Grellier house from the side of the barren cornfield until she saw Jim go into the barn. She crossed the field, in her impractical red suede boots, lugging a heavy box, and confronted him as he started to sharpen a coulter blade.
He put the blade down. “What will you do?”
“My old job. I worked for a PR company that supports nonprofits. It’s where I met my husband, my ex. He heads a foundation that we did work for. Someone quit, so they can use another hand on the telephone. I came out here hoping to make big changes in my life, but I feel as though I’m going back to where I started.”
“Maybe you are,” Jim said, “but that doesn’t mean you can’t go in a different direction. It’s like the harvest, you know, life is, I mean. You start in the same place every year—seeds, fertilizer, soil—but every year is different.” He paused, sheepish at his pompous words. “What about your book, the story you wanted to write about Elaine and her dead lover?”
“I may still do that. Hatred in the Heartland, I’ll call it, or something like that. How the hatreds of the seventies still obsess people and make them do unbelievable acts of violence. There’s poor old Elaine, back at New Haven Manor, where she’s going to be on oxygen for the rest of her life because of Junior Schapen. And what happens to him? Nothing at all. He’s still at Tonganoxie, playing football, while Arnie and Myra try to blame Eddie Burton for burning down Uncle John’s house.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing at all happened to Junior,” Jim said. “Clem Burton took a potshot at him and got him in the ass at last Saturday’s game.”
Bleeding Kansas Page 45