Twilight's Burning

by Diane Guest

  With that, she turned and disappeared down the hall, leaving Sylvanus on the stairway, furious. He knew that she had embarrassed both Quintal and himself for the sheer pleasure of seeing their discomfort, and that by losing his temper he had played her game the way she wanted it played. Mrs. Morgan, he thought, what a complete bitch you are. I wonder if I will ever get sick enough of you to do something about it in spite of what happened six years ago. But he pushed the thought away quickly because he knew that his mind and soul were still not strong enough to even begin to consider the past. Or the future.

  The sound of the mill whistle split the air, sharp and screaming. "Jesus Christ," he said aloud, echoing the sentiment of Susannah Snell. "Why does it have to be so goddamn loud? I hope to hell it's not a fire."

  He arrived at the mill just in time to go in with John Meade, who was being led along by an almost hysterical Sam Becker. "You'll have to go in by yourself, Doc. I can't look again," he gulped.

  "What the hell is going on, John?" Sylvanus asked.

  "Be damned if I know. The most I could get was something about Edwin Snell and the saw." They walked into the mill, both making faces at the putrid smell. The noise was deafening. The saw had not yet been shut down and the whine sent fingers scratching up their backbones. Sylvanus gave an order and then moved over toward the silent group of men congregating around the saw.

  "God Almighty," Sylvanus gasped when he saw the minister. The stump of Edwin's arm was wedged between his body and the heavy frame of the saw. "How in the name of God did he do that?" Sylvanus turned to Nate Dolbeer, his woods boss.

  "I don't know, Mr. Morgan. I run to the mill from the boarding house, quick as I heard the siren. Jesus. I seen some bad accidents in these woods, but this one stinks."

  Sylvanus squatted down beside the doctor. "How is he, John?"

  "Can't say for sure, Sylvanus. He's lost a lot of blood. Damndest thing I ever saw. What was he doing here anyway?"

  "Blasted if I know," he said. "He has no business with me." He looked around. "Anyone get his wife?"

  John looked up and said in a quiet voice that no one else could hear, "You'd better send someone, Sylvanus. She's got to be told. Far as I'm concerned, she would have been better off if it had been his neck instead of his arm."

  "He is a pompous ass, isn't he?"

  "Worse than that," John said.

  "You think a lot of Susannah Snell, don't you?"

  John sat back on his heels and looked at his friend. "She's one damn fine lady, and if I weren't married to a woman I love, I'd take her away from this insufferable prig and give her the kind of life she deserves."

  When Susannah Snell finally appeared in the doorway, Sylvanus leaned against the wall off to one side and observed her. He had heard men say she was beautiful, but to his taste her mouth was too full, her coloring too earthy. And her hair, caught in a prim, sensible knot at the back of her head, was compacted into such a confined area that its color was almost indefinable. Like a rosy-cheeked nun, he thought. She was thin enough, though. He liked thin women, but even in this light he could see her full breasts rising rapidly under the thin cotton of her dress as she walked with firm direction to where her husband lay. No bumbling or faltering. He raised an eyebrow. At least she was no coward. She knelt quietly beside John and they talked in low tones. With critical detachment, he waited for her to scream or faint or burst into a rampage of tears.

  She did none of those things. It was only when she turned to walk away that he could see her distress. She stumbled and as he reached out to steady her she turned so that he could see her full in the face. Her expression was one of unspeakable sadness. For some reason he felt a quiet, far-off pain and, worse, a shocking impulse to protect her.

  It all happened in an instant and then she was gone, leaving Sylvanus Morgan shaken, feeling as though he had seen the crumbling frame of her soul. He was angered at her for it, for letting him see her pain, for making him feel a corresponding pain in his own heart.

  The air was hot and still as Sylvanus followed the byroad toward the west pasture. Except for the sound made by his own passing, the woods around him were deathly quiet. A feeling of uneasiness came over him, caused by more than just the smoke that hung heavy in spots and the unnatural soundlessness. He was used to these isolated fires. Anyone who lived in these woods for long knew that it didn't take much to start one— a careless farmer letting a clearing project burn out of control, a hunter's cooking fire left to smolder, a flash of dry lightning. But something about this felt different. He didn't like it.

  As he approached the three-acre clearing, he noticed a sporadic flash now and again, off to his left, giving proof that the forest around him was full of drowsing fires just waiting for a favorable wind to stir them up, breathe life into them, turn them into irresistible agents of hell. The preachers are going to have a field day over this, he thought. They're going to whip people into such a doomsday frenzy if it doesn't rain soon that it'll be worth your life to find a respectable sinner around here.

  The smoke above his head was brown, unlike the gray-blue haze that hung over the bay. It was the only way he could tell the sun was shining.

  He dismounted and tied his horse to the green sap-wood fence that ran partway around the pasture.

  "Mr. Morgan, I'm glad you're here." Sylvanus couldn't see Quintal clearly until he moved out of the smoke about ten yards away. "We got a lot of the brush and trees cut. The boys are shoveling the leaves and topsoil off now. Shouldn't be long."

  "How far away is the main blaze, do you figure?"

  "I reckon it to be about two miles, maybe less. It's rolling this way, though. That's for sure. And fast."

  "You have a crew planning to stay here to patrol the fire line? Make sure that nothing goes wrong?"

  "Yes, sir. They'll be here all right. But there ain't no way to make sure that nothing will go wrong. You know that."

  Sylvanus met Quintal's eyes and nodded. They both understood the risks. They walked to the edge of the clearing and watched the men, sweaty, with eyes red-rimmed and swollen from the smoke, cutting the line that ran north and south around the clearing—the first and, they hoped, the only line of defense they would need against the advancing fire. If this worked, the small fire they were setting would be sucked back with the cooler air toward the main blaze, leaving it without fuel as it advanced over the burned-out area.

  "Things look good," Sylvanus said. "That is, what I can see in this damnable fog. There's not a breath of air stirring." He paused and when he finally spoke it was with reluctance. "Now is as good a time as any to get this over with. Let's set the fires."

  Sylvanus watched silently as the piles of slash were lit, piles so bone-dry that they burst instantly into great roaring sheets of flame. For a moment the heat was intense, but it eased as the fire rolled away into the forest, scarcely touching the bark on the trees before it moved on.

  He wiped the soot and sweat from his face, amazed at the speed with which the backfire had seared its way toward the mother blaze even though there was no wind of any kind.

  "Oh, Holy Jesus Christ." The words came from Quint like gunshots.

  "I was about to say much the same thing," Sylvanus said. "I never saw a fire move so goddamn fast in my life." He never took his eyes from the whirling fire-mist that was sweeping through the trees as if they were so many match sticks.

  "Holy Jesus Christ." Quintal said it again but this time it was not an oath. It was a prayer. "I wasn't going to move into the big house, Mr. Morgan. But now, if it's okay with you, I think I better."

  Both men stood in silence and watched as the fire raced through the haze, now stained copper-red. Sylvanus spoke above the roar. "I don't know about you, Quint, but for a nonpraying man, I'm going to start to do some fancy praying. If we don't get some rain soon, I think we're going to have one hell of a lot of pasture land around here, and mighty few trees."

  Ten miles to the southwest Jacob Marler swished a mouthful of water
around inside his cheeks and spit it out against a tree stump. Damned thirsty business, this clearing, he thought, as he began to load his tools into the wagon. All the same, he felt good about the morning's accomplishments. Another acre cleared, ready for planting come spring. Would have been a lot easier if he could have burned the whole kit and caboodle, but he hadn't dared. Woods were too dry. No sense risking it.

  Well, at least he had a good-sized pile of firewood cut and stacked. Too bad he had such a monstrous pile of brush left over. He'd have to drag it out of there before he could turn over the soil.

  He rubbed the back of his neck with a calloused hand. Ought to be gettin' home, he thought, glancing at the sun, already sunk far below the tops of the trees. He climbed into the wagon and whickered softly to his horse, then pulled him up short before the horse had even taken a step. If he was nothing else, Jacob Marler was a tidy man, disliking to leave loose ends, disliking to put off until tomorrow anything he could accomplish today. If he set fire to the huge pile of slash mounded up in the center of the clearing, it would be burned away and cool by morning. And the fire couldn't go nowheres, circled like it was by a field of stumps. With the slash out of the way, tomorrow he could set to pulling out the stumps.

  He jumped down from the wagon and walked to the brush pile. He took a match from his hip pocket, struck it on the seat of his pants, and threw it into the tangle of branches.

  The small tongue of flame licked and flickered and, for a minute, Jacob thought it was going to go out. Damn green wood, he thought. But it didn't go out. It darted and danced from one small twig to another, tasting the very ends of the branches as if trying to decide whether it wanted to go further, then running up the bark toward the thicker limbs, consuming everything along the way.

  Jacob Marler stood and watched. Then, when he was sure the fire wasn't going to quit on him, he climbed back into his wagon and turned his horse toward the small farmhouse that he and his wife called home. He began to whistle.

  By the time Jacob Marler reached his barnyard, the slash pile was gone, incinerated into nothingness. But the flames that should have died with the loss of fuel had burrowed their way across the clearing, deep under the layer of bone-dry leaves and moss, charring but not consuming, leaving something for another day, a day when a change in the weather, a change in the wind, might bring all the small snakes of fire together at last.

  MATTHEW: SEPTEMBER 29, 1871

  There wasn't no doubt about it. He was going to have to ask Miz Snell if she would help him. He didn't want to, but he had no choice. There was too much fire out there, running through the leaves every which way. Boy was getting scared being left in the woods all alone. Not that Matt blamed him. He had been born in the woods just like Boy, and he was scared, too. He had seen fires in the woods before at this time of year, but never so many.

  He hurried across the clearing on the west side of the town. He knew if he didn't get home and do his chores before his paw woke up, he'd be in for another beating. Maybe worse than the one he got last night. He shivered remembering, and the fear of his father sent him flying down the road toward the squalid, one-room cabin at the edge of town where he lived with his father and his mother. The rotting shack had been built in haste to-provide shelter for some drifter and then abandoned with the same degree of carelessness. Matthew and his family had come there three years ago. He hated it, but he knew that it was better than nothing.

  Matthew Shepherd needn't have worried that his father might be awake, for Jake Shepherd lay like a stone on the vermin-infested bed where he had fallen the night before in a drunken stupor. His wife, Bertha, sat silently in a chair by the window, praying that her unborn child would die like five of her others and not live to face the obscenity that would be its lot in life.

  She rocked slowly back and forth, trancelike. The only evidence that she still had any feeling was the single tear that tracked down her cheek. The night before she had cringed in the corner of the shack, a skulking, cowlike woman, and watched as the whistling leather belt chewed up what little flesh there was on her son's thin back. She had hidden her face, mute, as she had done so many times before, for fear that Jake's attention would turn to her.

  Bertha Shepherd was not a mean woman, but neither was she kind. In truth she was a woman whose life was no more than a series of atrocities performed upon her—beatings, sexual abuses, untold horrors first at the hands of her father, then at the hands of her husband— until there was no human emotion left in her, save for a remote flicker of feeling for her son and a mechanical prayer for death for the child she carried now in her womb.

  If asked as to her age, one might have guessed fifty, then corrected it to forty, considering Matthew. In fact, she was twenty-eight.

  She heard Matthew stacking wood out behind the house and shifted a sidelong glance at the snoring, leaden figure on the bed. With any luck, Matt would be off to school before he woke. It was the only thing she had ever asked for, that he be allowed to go to school. A small spark of intuition in her dull brain told her that it was Matthew's only way out. Jake hadn't objected. He didn't give a damn, really, what the boy did, as long as it didn't cost anything. And as long as his chores were done. And as long as he kept out of his father's way.

  She got up with great effort, her belly distended and swollen, and crossed to the door. She spoke low to Matthew, "You'd best git on with them chores, 'for yer paw gits after you." Her voice was rough and unpleasant. "Where you been, anyway? Up in them damn woods again?" Without waiting for an answer, she turned and went back inside.

  Matthew picked up the pace a little, torn between the desire to be done, and the fear that haste might produce noise, noise that might wake his paw. He needn't have bothered to be quiet, for at that instant, the emergency siren at the mill blasted and Jake Shepherd appeared at the door, pulling up his suspenders over his ham-hock arms, his pig eyes red, blurry. He was a fat abomination of a man, dirty, unshaven, his bulbous nose a conglomeration of broken blood vessels and blackheads.

  Matt crouched, terrified, but his father paid him no mind. Hawking up an enormous ball of phlegm, he spat it out against the side of the house, turned, and shuffled off in the direction of the mill.

  The boy cowered where he was until his father was out of sight. It wasn't long, however, before his ten-year-old's curiosity overcame his fear and, finishing up his chores quickly, he ran off to see what had caused the commotion.

  Matthew threaded his way to the landing down along the water behind the cluster of sheds that bordered the bay. He lingered to one side of the mill, away from the crowd, and was joined almost at once by two of his friends, Bobber Peabody and Fat Teddy Marlowe.

  "You know what's going on in there, Matt?" Bobber gestured toward the mill.

  "Nope. My paw's in there, though."

  Fat Teddy walked around to the side of the mill, hoping to get a look at what was going on inside. He stood under one of the windows, but it was too high off the ground for him to see in. "Hey. Give me a boost."

  "You crazy?" Bobber said. "We ain't got no winch and chain, Teddy."

  Fat Teddy was unaffected. "Hey, Matt. Get over here and I'll boost you up."

  Matthew didn't move. He was too busy staring up the road, watching his teacher, Miz Snell, coming toward him a ways behind Mr. Becker.

  If Matthew Shepherd had to count in his life all the things he had ever loved, the total would number five. First, there was Boy, the colt he kept hidden in the woods. And Peavey, Mr. Becker's draft horse. Mr. Becker sometimes let him brush Peavey, or walk him around the service yard. Once, he even let Matt hold the traces while he was in the saloon.

  He had loved his sister, Betsy, but she died. And, of course, Whitey, his dog. But he died, too. Paw beat him to death. That was one of the reasons he kept Boy hidden. Nothing like that was ever going to happen again if Matt could help it.

  Number Five was Her. Miz Snell. He guessed he loved her more than anything else in the world. She was so beautiful
and she smelled like the inside of Harmon's General Store. But more than that, she was nicer to him than anyone had ever been in his life; when she talked to him, her voice was always low and warm like the sound the schoolroom stove made on a cold January morning. She was teaching him to read and cipher, and even though he didn't like it much, he would have put his hand into a jar of snail slime just to see her smile. So he worked hard.

  When he had first come to school, almost a year ago, he had painted a sorry picture in his dirty woolen homespun, worn and ripped in spots but never mended.

  Miz Snell had given him some of her own son's clothes to wear, without one single hole in them. And she had protected him from the bigger boys, making his apprenticeship in the schoolroom bearable. He returned her kindness with nothing short of single-minded hero worship.

  As she moved toward the mill door, Fat Teddy called to Matthew again, impatient. "Matt. What's the matter with you? You deaf or something? Get on over here."

  The two boys boosted Matt to the edge of the sill, and once he propped himself up, he had a panoramic view of the interior of the mill.

  "Can you see?" Bobber asked. Matthew was conscious that some other children had gathered around.

  "Doctor Meade is there, kneelin' next to Mr. Morgan," he whispered. "Somebody's lying next to the saw. I can't see who." At that moment John Meade moved to one side, and Matthew had a clear view. "Caesar's ghost! It's the Reverend." A small group of men were standing around, but he could see the minister clearly.

  Matt thought he would get sick. Fat Teddy jerked him so he bumped his chin. "Come on, Matt. What's going on? You're getting heavy."

  "Let me down," Matt said. "I don't want to see anymore."

  He was lowered to the ground. "Hey, you look like you seen a ghost." Bobber Peabody looked close into Matthew's face.