Town Burning

by Thomas Williams

  In the busy heat of the corridor, his hand upon the sick flesh, he began to feel faint. A dented aluminum tray turned from dull silver to orange, and he let his head fall forward to bring back the blood. Bruce pulled weakly on, intent upon his bath. In the bathroom an old-fashioned deep-sided tub pushed its hollow belly above the floor on claw-and-ball feet. The narrow faucets dripped yellow stain on the porcelain. Bruce sat passively on a cane chair and watched John work the drain plug and faucets.

  “Not too hot now,” he said, a greedy look on his face. John helped pull his bathrobe off, then had to lift him over the high rim and sit him like a baby in the water. “Ah,” Bruce said, leaning back against the cold porcelain.

  “Isn’t the back cold?” John asked.

  “Don’t feel it. They got me all doped up. A little hotter—got to feel it. More. There! That’s good.”

  The water came around his plump stomach and over his belly-button. With limp white hands he splashed it up over his chest. His skin became pink beneath the black hair. He began to slip down, not noticing it; his stocky legs opened and his knees broke water until he lay completely relaxed and helpless. All tone gone from his muscles, he turned as limp as a dead, boneless water animal—like a squid in a tank of alcohol. After a while John woke him up and lifted him out. He had to do everything for him now; prop him in the chair, dry him, slide his arms through the bathrobe sleeves.

  “Thanks,” Bruce said. In the hall he began to walk a little bit, but he could barely support himself.

  “You know the old man’s kaput. Business no business with him. You know that, don’t you?”

  “We all know you do everything, Bruce.”

  Bruce smiled. “You going to give it a try? Or just let it go to hell and take off for Paris?”

  “I’ll help the old man until you get back.”

  “What? Don’t kid me, sonny. They don’t know how to unscramble brains yet. I’ll be lucky if I know my own name after tomorrow.” Bruce started to sink down, and John had to grab him with both hands. “Sorry,” Bruce said.

  “You’ll come out of it. You wait and see. They’ve done a lot of work on stuff like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what you’ve got—tumors and stuff.”

  “Listen. They don’t know asshole, those doctors. They don’t even know what’s wrong with me. When I first came over here they thought my ears needed cleaning. Then they thought I was working too hard—you know—lost my marbles. Now they got to knock a hole in my head and look at the cream-of-wheat.”

  In the room Gladys and William Cotter sat as if they hadn’t moved.

  “Oh, was it good, Bruce?” Gladys Cotter asked.

  “Very good,” Bruce said sharply. When he was settled in bed again he lit a cigarette. “You must be tired of sitting here,” he said in a low voice.

  “No! No, Bruce!” his mother said. “No! We want to stay with you!”

  Bruce stared at his father, who would not look up, then at John.

  “I’ll stay as long as you want me,” John said.

  “Sure,” William Cotter mumbled.

  Bruce stared them down. “Sure,” he said. “Now go home and get some air. Go home. I want to go to sleep.”

  “Oh, Bruce. We don’t want to leave you!”

  “Get the hell home,” Bruce said.

  “We’ll be back at one,” John said. Gladys Cotter stood against the doorframe, crying. John waited until his father and mother left the room. “Is there anything we can bring you, Bruce?” he asked.

  Bruce wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t look at him. John saw the dark profile against the white window, steady and tense again as Bruce brought the cigarette up to his mouth.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jane waited alone in the Spinellis’ living room beneath the terracotta Virgin and burning candle. Mrs. Spinelli had gone whimpering to bed, and her little husband ran up and down attending to her while they waited for the call from the hospital. The new television set stared blindly across the room. Michael Spinelli, tinted and in black and white, smiled here and there from framed photographs. He looked at her from across the room, his lips too red, his hair too black, his face too white, his Navy uniform too blue. On the sofa, tilted against a white crocheted doily, a rayon pillow in gold, red, white and blue:

  M is for the Million things she gave me,

  O means only that she’s growing Old,

  T is for the Tears she shed to save me,

  H is for her Heart of purest gold,

  E is for her Eyes with love light shining,

  R means Right and right she’ll always be—

  Put them all together

  They spell MOTHER,

  A word that means

  The world to me.

  SAMPSON NAVAL TRAINING STATION

  Mike’s favorite pipe, in the shape of a toilet bowl, lay cleaned in a shining ash tray on a bookcase full of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Above the glass-fronted bookcase hung the two discharges, Mike’s from the Second World War and Mr. Spinelli’s from the First. At Chateau-Thierry Mr. Spinelli had won several blue indentations in the flesh of his right arm, a collapsed lung and the Silver Star. He wore the miniature ribbon in the lapel of his good suit when he went to the Legion Hall.

  Now he came downstairs and stood in the archway between the hall and the living room, his angular hands hanging slightly forward of his body.

  “I got to call the shop and tell why I can’t work,” he said. He picked up the telephone twice before he asked for the paper mill. “I never called up before,” he said, turning and smiling, “I don’t even know the number, twenty-five years.” Then back to the telephone, “Hello. Speak to Mr. Jarvis, please. What? Where? O.K. You tell Mr. Jarvis I can’t work today. My son got in a accident. Hospital. Cesare Spinelli. You tell him. Thank you, thank you.” He came over, stood in front of the Virgin in her corner and stared at the linoleum floor. “You feel O.K., Janie?”

  “I guess so,” Jane said.

  “I’m sorry you got to worry like this, Janie.” He sat down on the edge of the sofa and picked at a callus on the palm of his hand.

  “It’s all right,” she said. She wanted at that moment to put her arms around him, but didn’t know how to do it. She didn’t even have a name for him. She had never called him Dad, or Cesare, or even Mr. Spinelli—had lived in the same house with him for ten years and never called him by name.

  “You got a lousy deal, Janie. I know that. Mikey’s a good boy, but he ain’t—I don’t know.” He looked straight at her. “I’m sorry a nice girl like you had to get mixed up with him, that’s all!” He jumped up and walked to the front window, breathing deeply and shrugging his shoulders. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but Mikey never was no good. They kick him out of school.” He raised his hands above his head, palms up; then he went out of the room and Jane heard him climbing the stairs.

  Before he reached the second floor the telephone rang three times. Jane heard him stop to listen, then run quickly back down the stairs. In a second he came into the living room.

  “Janie? You answer it?”

  “Mrs. Spinelli?” The telephone asked.

  “Yes. Mrs. Spinelli,” she said, but it didn’t sound right. For a second she felt that she was impersonating Mike’s mother.

  “You’d better come to the hospital right away, Mrs. Spinelli. Your husband’s condition is worse, now. This is Dr. Karmis. Are you there?”

  “Yes, Doctor, we’ll come now.”

  “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Spinelli.”

  She went into the living room and up to Mr. Spinelli, who stood at the window looking out. She put her hands on his small shoulders. “We’ve got to go to the hospital right away,” she said.

  “O.K., Janie,” he said, his eyes averted. She followed him into the hall.

  Mr. Spinelli called upstairs, “Mama! We’ll be back as soon as we can!” No answer from upstairs, but she had heard.

  Mr. Spinelli drove fast, for hi
m, but when they were let into Michael Spinelli’s room they heard the last two or three of long, croupy breaths, and the time between them lengthened and stopped being important. All at once the doctors and nurses straightened up and began to make distinctly different, purposeful movements around the bed. They put away stethoscopes, folded the oxygen tent, gathered long tubes, pulled the sheet up over Michael Spinelli’s head. Jane saw this before Dr. Karmis’ worried face appeared before her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Spinelli. We did everything we could.” How could he stand to tell anyone this? She looked at him stupidly. Mr. Spinelli led her out into the hall.

  “It’s all right, Doctor,” Mr. Spinelli said, “you done all you could. I’ll take her home. I’ll come right back. Is that O.K., Doctor?”

  He took her to the car and helped her in, then drove through Northlee and took the river road to Leah. When they had gone a mile he pulled over to a wide shoulder where, in winter, the snow-plows turned around. He stopped the car and began to get out, but he forgot to turn off the ignition and the car jerked forward and stalled.

  “My boy,” he said. His forehead hit the horn, which went beep. Jane let him cry but could not help him. Finally she went around to the other side of the car and helped him move over, then drove him home to Leah. By the time they turned into the driveway he had recovered. “I’ll tell her, Janie,” he said.

  They found Mrs. Spinelli in the kitchen, and when she saw their faces she began to scream. Jane walked on through it, and it felt as it had once as a child when her brother put a whistle to her ear and blew as hard as he could—a nearby physical blow against the bones of her head. In her room the closed door did not stop the sound. It rose and fell, sometimes like a siren and sometimes watery, like surf.

  Later the sound diminished. Neighbors and relatives talked in the kitchen in low voices, and only once in a while the siren rose and stopped, or a breaker crashed among the insistent murmurs of sympathy.

  Her window was a hot white square upon the side of the cool room. She went to the window and looked at the street, up and down, bright and clear as childhood in the sun. She had rarely come to this street as a child. The school bus hadn’t passed this street, although the red-brick parochial grammar school, an alien, nun-haunted building, stood on the corner. Mike went to the parochial school, and because of this she hadn’t really known him until high school. She had never been interested in him, except that the continual excitement he caused in school kept him in the news—the girls’ washroom news, the scandalous, whispered news. If someone turned his back on Mike at the wrong time, someone got goosed. It was Mike who started the bent-pin business with the rubber bands, and that ended with another one of his expulsions from school. He shot Miss Colchester, and the pin stuck into her leg. That was when they found out she wore men’s garters with white bandages under them. The teachers always knew when Mike was guilty. How many times had he been expelled? And each time Mr. Spinelli brought him back again and talked to the principal. Nobody disliked Mike. Not the way they disliked Junior, who was nearly as bad, but lacked Mike’s good looks and utter cheerfulness. Mike had never been sneaky—he was always caught. But now he’d been caught and expelled from life, and Mr. Spinelli couldn’t bring him back, apologize and make impossible promises.

  Mike was the first in his class to go into service. All the boys wanted to go, or nearly all, and when they graduated in June, 1944, all but two or three did go. Most came back in 1946. Four were killed, but more came back just to say goodbye to Leah before going West, where most of Leah’s sons went when they were old enough. Some stayed, but they were the ones whose parents owned businesses, or they were the ones who stayed because all they wanted to do was to go into the mill or whatever—the post office, a store, the tannery—and work and marry and get it regular, as Mike said once.

  She had chosen one of these, although it hadn’t been obvious at the time. Mike seemed to have so much energy left over, and she believed that the war had done something to him beyond making him put on the common grim act of the veteran, which sooner or later became old-fashioned as terminal leave pay ran out and time payments became more threatening than the memory of war. But she knew that she tended to plan sketchily, in visions and scenes: to her the constant excitement and energy of Michael Spinelli would somehow, through some maturing process, in time produce the home she saw vividly, as if she were looking in the window to see herself in a lovely scene of firelight and children.

  But there had been ten years and another war since then, and another crop of young men come home only to say goodbye. The town seemed always to send away its best. The population of Leah hadn’t changed in one hundred years, her grandfather said, and he once told her of the farms and hills that in his lifetime had turned from field and pasture back into woods. Even the woolen mill in the town had become obsolete. Last year it shut down for two months, and everybody was afraid that it would be for good. It was then that Mike started going with Junior and the Riders and cashed in his defense bonds to buy the new motorcycle. “It’s a Harley-Davidson!” he kept saying, as if it were impossible that his father and mother and wife were not infected by the magic of the words. “Look at the spark plugs!” He made them look at the two cylinders, the big saddle of genuine cowhide, the big balloon-like fenders. He insisted that they come and look, as if the bright, dangerous meaning of the machine might convince them of his need of it. And when he saw their disapproval he answered with the boom of his engine at night, burned rubber on the driveway, lifted his front wheel in the air as a horse rears and turns before it gallops away.

  She woke up in the middle of the afternoon, hearing a knock on her door. Mr. Spinelli looked in.

  “Your grandfather is here, Janie. I thought maybe you want to wake up.”

  In the living room she found her grandfather sitting uneasily on the edge of a wooden chair, a huge old man in clean workshirt and overalls. His great head solid on his short pillar of neck, he sat and mauled his visored cap between fingers that looked like the arms and legs of brawny wrestlers. His face was ruddy, shiny in little squares between fine cracks and wrinkles that were nearly as regular as the grid lines on a map. Curly white hair came down over his collar in back and on the sides halfway over his ears. A faint, pleasant smell of horses drifted across the room. He stood up and watched her, his feet wide apart as if he thought the fragile house might fall apart beneath him—but if it did he would still land in the basement right side up and on his two feet amid the fragments.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Jane said. As he came toward her the floor creaked under his feet. His expression seldom changed, and it didn’t now. His eyes were bright and wide open; so blue it seemed that she looked right through his head into the sky. His eyebrows were raised as if he were slightly surprised and amused. He put one hand on her shoulder, lightly, yet she felt that if she were to fall the hand would hold her up as easily as if the old man held a rifle at arm’s length to weigh it.

  “I figured maybe you’d want to come home for a while,” he said. His voice was soft and breathy, yet everything he said sounded at first too aggressive, almost accusing. The surprised, sweet expression on his face belied the tone of his voice, and one result of this difference between voice and meaning was that everyone felt compelled to look him straight in the eye.

  “I could stay over tonight,” she said.

  Cesare Spinelli came into the room, harried and damp from his running through the house.

  “Mr. Stevens, I heard,” he said. “I think maybe that’s good for Janie. She’d be happier out of this house for now. I think you got a good idea.”

  Sam Stevens nodded. “I’m terribly sorry about your son,” he said. “I hope your wife feels better.”

  “Oh, I worry about Janie,” the little man said. He looked at her closely. “She don’t seem to be taking it too good.”

  She hadn’t cried. If she cried, she was afraid she would be crying for Jane Stevens Spinelli and ten wasted years, not for a poor fool who had killed him
self. She would not cry at all.

  When she came downstairs with her suitcase—a wedding present she had never used before—the two men stood as she had left them: the huge farmer and the little father. Mr. Spinelli took her hand and said, “It’s all right, Janie. You’ll feel better after a while, now. You just wait and see.”

  Her grandfather backed the pickup truck carefully out into the street, then started slowly, as he always did, going deliberately through each gear, watching and not trusting other cars. They went around the Town Square and took the road to Cascom and the farm. When they turned off the asphalt onto the steep gravel road up the mountain, he spoke for the first time.

  “He’s a mighty funny feller, Spinelli.” Jane didn’t answer, and she saw him glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Seems to me he’s a good man,” he said, “although you never can tell about them people.”

  CHAPTER 5

  John sat in his room in his old leather chair, a can of beer in his hand and four empties on the floor. His father had gone to the yard and his mother to a neighbor’s. The old house was empty around him, brittle and too clean. He thought of his miserable cave of a room in Paris; mold, mice, cockroaches and all, and he wished himself back there again. There were roses on the walls of that room, too, in the places where the paper hadn’t been turned back into brownish pulp by rot, the plaster absorbing, as if it were a sponge, the sweat of the ancient stone walls.

  He sat staring at the sun-glittering leaves of the rock maple, then got up and took his .30-.30 carbine from the gunrack. He balanced the short rifle in his left hand and flicked down the lever. Click clack; the crisp sounds were lovely and satisfying. The square bolt slid back and then forward to lock, leaving the large hammer cocked. He let the hammer down slowly and worked the action again: after two years the rifle had regained, as beautiful objects do, a measure of its original freshness and wonder. He didn’t want to put it to his shoulder just yet—he wanted to save that view of it—but he turned it over in his hands, discovering again the little planes and curves of it, from the slightly curved butt plate to the deep rifling visible at the muzzle.