Town Burning

by Thomas Williams

  Nothing could stop the train, not even the wind and the heat; not even the fires they had been having to the west in Chaldee and to the south along the tracks at Summersville. The stationmaster leaned over his desk in the little bay window, a green eyeshade on his forehead, and a half-mile down the tracks a signal changed, hazy and wiggly on its pole.

  “I offered to take the children over to Leah for your mother, but she said you’d come and get them yourself. So nice of you, John, and I’ve got four others to ‘deliver,’ so I appreciate that, too.”

  The train pulled in, stopping with many creaks and sighs, the Diesel engines zooming even though the train was stopped. Out came the children and their keeper, the only passengers to get off.

  Mrs. Rutherford spoke to the travel-haggard woman with the shifting eyes, and between them they sorted a sheaf of papers. The six children for the moment stood gravely into the wind and looked stolidly at the yellow and brown station and the dirty tracks leading back to where they had come from, where John supposed they all wanted to be at that moment. They were stunned, and the haggard woman cast several glances their way as if to calculate just how long they would remain stunned. She probably depended a great deal upon such short periods of inaction. Only two of the children were colored, and they must be—he looked at the fancy handwriting again—Jenny Lou and Franklin Persons, aged seven and ten. But, God! They were black, black as night—so black he could, at ten feet, barely make out their expressions. The boy held his sister’s hand and stared even more hopelessly than the rest back down the hazy roadbed toward the South. The little girl, in dungarees so new and stiff he wondered how she could bend the cloth to walk, hugged her brother’s side and peered at the station eaves and the sky as if her brother were a roof protecting her from all this strangeness: she seemed to have to stoop and put her head forward a little to see out from under him.

  John received the papers concerning Jenny Lou and Franklin Persons, and the haggard woman introduced them. Franklin nodded and said hello, but couldn’t smile. With an almost painful surge of memory John recognized upon Franklin Person’s shiny black face a constriction of nervousness and fear that he knew had once been his own. He, too, never smiled unless something was funny. He had always wondered how people could form those inevitable, easy, social smiles. Jenny Lou’s face was impassive, although she still pushed against her brother’s side. He had to lean to keep from being pushed off his feet, and it seemed as if she wanted to get right inside him. Finally Franklin, with firm, yet gentle hands, stood her on her own feet.

  They followed him obediently to the car and waited, both sitting rigidly, without touching the seatback, while he went to get their suitcase. He found it in the pile by the Southbound mailbox, brand-new, made of brown-and-white-striped cardboard with their names carefully painted on it. He helped Mrs. Rutherford carry the other luggage to her car, where her four children were noisily recovering from the shock of leaving the train.

  Back in Bruce’s car Jenny Lou had pushed Franklin over against the door, where he must have felt the knobs rather painfully digging into his side. Once again he gently set her straight.

  “Weill” John said. “It’s hot, isn’t it?” and immediately realized that he sounded like Mrs. Rutherford.

  “Yes,” Franklin said. Jenny Lou sneaked a quick look and turned back to watch the dashboard. There had been a certain rational, evaluating quality in Franklin’s “Yes.” Obviously it was hot. Feeling that he had somehow been squelched, John backed the car around and turned toward the covered bridge into New Hampshire.

  Franklin looked curiously at the long bridge, at the great curved wooden arches along the inside of it, and held the door handle tightly as if he expected the old timbers to break. Flimp flamp flump flimp went the flexing boards beneath their wheels, and Franklin winced at each sound.

  “It’s all right,” John said, glancing at him again.

  “I’ve never seen a covered bridge before,” Franklin said.

  “Covered bridge!” Jenny Lou said, and hunched down harder.

  “That’s right, Jenny Lou,” Franklin said tolerantly, then turned toward John. “Why do they put a roof on a bridge?” he asked, and John felt certain that Franklin knew why—that he now tried to make conversation for social purposes. For a moment John felt one up on the little boy.

  “To keep the rain from rotting the wood, I suppose,” he said, “and to keep the snow off in the winter.”

  “I see,” Franklin said, and John knew at once that the question had not been a lie, but a kindness. They were now, in Franklin’s estimation, supposed to be even for the remark about the heat. This time he did smile, and caught Franklin smiling too.

  “Keep the rain off!” Jenny Lou said, and scrunched down again. As they entered Leah and turned around the square, she kept her eyes down and didn’t see any of it.

  “This is Leah,” John said, and Franklin stared intently at the buildings and into the high elms, his eyes wide open, a slight smile on his lips. He nodded several times.

  On Maple Street Jenny Lou raised her head and stared, her large eyes black and the whites so wide and clear John could see them flash from the corner of his eyes. She had been watching the high arches of the trees, and as he looked down at her for part of a second she looked right at him. He turned away first, having seen on her face an almost fierce, yet steady expression of inquiry. It was not the trees or the strange town she was thinking about; it was John Cotter, and he knew it. She was not shy, she was not afraid, she was not self-conscious—not in that small part of a second, anyway.

  “Here we are,” he said, turned into the driveway and stopped beside the kitchen door. Franklin opened the door and got out, Jenny Lou following him, and stood at the edge of the grass by the kitchen lilac bush. Sunlight moved, filtered by the tunnel of trees, and the wind rode above the street. Franklin took a few steps down the driveway, careful not to step on the grass, careful not to go too far. He looked up and down Maple Street and then turned Jenny Lou around and brought her back to the car.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, and waved his hand quickly at the row of white houses and neat lawns, the massive tree trunks reaching to the ceiling of the tunnel, “I never would’ve believed it. Like in Penrod.”

  “You read that?” John asked.

  “Yes, I read it. I’ve got it in the suitcase.” John had opened the rear door of the car, and Franklin went to it and pulled out the suitcase. “I’ll show you,” he said. He quickly undid the straps and opened the cardboard lid. There on top lay the light green, faded book, just like the one John had in the old bookcase in his closet.

  “I’ve got that one, too,” John said. “I’ve got some other books upstairs I read when I was around your age. Maybe you’d like some of them, too.”

  “I’d like to see them,” Franklin said politely.

  John picked up the suitcase, holding it together, and led them into the house. He understood Franklin’s lack of interest in the other books, and he remembered himself when he was ten and everybody wanted him to read “other” books. You just barely began to enjoy a book when they wanted you to read another, entirely strange and different book all full of strangers you could hardly understand. You had a book and you read it all the time, backward and forward and in the middle, and you understood it and lived right in it. You had a book, so why did you want another one?

  In the living room Franklin stopped in the middle of the braided rug. “It’s just like I expected,” he said.

  “The house is?” John said.

  “Just the same. Isn’t it, Jenny Lou?”

  “Like you said!” Jenny Lou shouted, then giggled and looked shy.

  John took them on a tour of the house, showed them their towels on the bathroom rack. Their room was next to Bruce’s—a guest room, but now cluttered by his mother with all the Teddy bears and Tinkertoys that had been in the attic. Flowers, old children’s books, a wing-warped model airplane she had unskillfully patched with Scotch ta
pe, jars of marbles—every bit of junk she could find, his mother had cleaned and set out. Jenny Lou went around the gaudy room and examined everything, touched nothing. Franklin stood in the door with John.

  “Take anything you want,” John said to Jenny Lou. He felt that he must apologize to Franklin. “They’re nothing but old toys my mother got out of the attic. My brother and I wore them out a long time ago. I guess she thought Jenny Lou might like to play with them.”

  “Oh, I like toys,” Franklin said. He picked up the airplane and began to wind the propeller. “I like airplanes.”

  Jenny Lou took Franklin’s arm and shook it. She pointed to a newly laundered, one-eyed Teddy bear.

  “Take it,” Franklin said. “You heard what he said. He said you could.” Jenny Lou looked at John, and he nodded.

  “You call me John,” he said.

  “All right,” Franklin said. He carefully put the airplane back on the bureau.

  “O.K., John!” Jenny Lou said as if she were out of breath. She took the one-eyed Teddy bear and squeezed it roughly in both arms, putting its face to hers and staring into its one button eye. “I love this bear!” she said.

  Jenny Lou had to go to the bathroom. She took the Teddy bear in with her, while John took Franklin into his room to see the stuffed partridge and the guns.

  “You shot that?” Franklin asked. But his eyes were on the guns. When John handed him the carbine he took it as if it were terribly fragile and valuable, his long face tense, his small black hands smoothing the stock and the barrel—pink finger ends sliding gently over the rifle.

  “It’s the first real gun I ever held,” he said. “It’s heavier than I thought. Did you shoot the bird with this?”

  “No. You use a shotgun on birds. This is a rifle—for deer and bear.”

  “You shot a deer and a bear?”

  “I shot a deer once, but never a bear. My father shot a bear a few years ago.”

  “A bear!” Franklin looked eagerly out of the window, as if he might see a bear in the back yard.

  “You won’t see any bears out there. They stay up in the hills out of sight,” John said. “I’ve never even seen one in the woods. I heard one once. I’ve heard them calling at night, too, but you don’t see them very often—they usually see you first.”

  “They’re afraid of you?”

  “All the animals are afraid of you. They know man is the deadliest animal in the woods.”

  “‘Man is the deadliest animal,’ “Franklin said thoughtfully. “I never thought of it like that. With this…” He held the rifle to his shoulder and said, with a note of pride in his voice, “man is the deadliest animal.” He put the rifle back in the rack. “But without it, he’s not much, is he?” He held out his small hands, pink palms up.

  “Well, he’s still pretty strong,” John said, “but as far as the animals are concerned, maybe they think every man has a rifle built in. They run, anyway.”

  “I guess that’s right!” He inspected the shotgun and the .22 pistol, and then they heard Jenny Lou come out of the bathroom.

  “We’re in here, Jenny Lou,” Franklin called, and she came and stood in the door, still hugging the Teddy bear. “Once she takes to something she really takes to it,” Franklin said.

  Jenny Lou pretended not to hear this. She swung from side to side and hummed to the Teddy bear.

  “She’s like a kid with stuff like that,” Franklin said.

  John was about to take them downstairs when something in Franklin’s attitude made him turn. Bookshelves were visible through the open closet door, and Franklin went toward them, a quizzical frown on his face. He pulled two faded green books into his hands, looked them over carefully and turned to John. John nodded, and Franklin opened Penrod in the middle, read a few lines and closed it, nodding. Then he opened Penrod and Sam, read a little of it, and turned his head around, his eyes perceptibly wider.

  “More?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you know there were more?”

  In Franklin’s expression he saw first a desire to believe, perhaps much disbelief, increasing delight.

  “Can I read it?”

  “You can have it,” John said, remembering the difference.

  “I can have it?” Franklin seemed to give this offer serious consideration. He measured the thickness of the book.

  “You’d like to read it right now,” John said. Franklin smiled guiltily. “But you want to be polite. Isn’t that right?”

  The face changed completely. From long and narrow it turned round as Franklin grinned, and what seemed to be hundreds of little white teeth flashed across it.

  “You read it, then. You don’t have to be polite until my mother comes home.”

  “Thank you, John,” Franklin said. He already had his finger in the first page, and he slowly let himself down into the leather chair, reading.

  John and Jenny Lou went down the back stairs. Her black head bobbed below him, wiry pigtails bouncing and bending as she jumped from step to step.

  He remembered Penrod’s simple world with a clarity that was quite surprising. The streets of Penrod’s adventures, from this nostalgic distance, might have been the shady streets of Leah. Part of his boyhood, certainly, existed only within the pages of the pale green book. His memories of Leah were darker—but then, he remembered, Penrod never laughed at himself.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sam Stevens sat next to the radio, and near him Aubrey, favoring his best ear. Sam worked the knobs but he kept the volume up for Aubrey. Adolf sat next to the sink and smoked his pipe, listening carefully even to the commercials, nodding his head when he understood something. Mrs. Pettibone stood at the drainboard carefully skinning out a red fox, the white rubbery underside of its skin turned outside, ballooned by the thick fur underneath. The body of the fox, naked and almost free of its skin, looked like a large rat. It would be thrown away, because even the dogs wouldn’t eat it. After she had fleshed the skin Mrs. Pettibone would fit it, still inside out, over a wooden stretch-board to let it dry. Sam had shot the fox with a .22 that morning,as it came to examine the scraps of the old gray horse.

  The two old men leaned toward the radio to hear the state news and the progress of the fires to the west, in Vermont. It was the new, local station in Northlee, and the announcer’s voice was shallowly nasal and amateurish. He explained the great circulating high-pressure front that had settled over northern New England and would not move out to sea. The dry weather would continue and the wind would not change. One thousand acres of forest had burned in Summersville, to the southwest, and the water level was so low in ponds and rivers the fire-fighters could barely pump it out. Creeks had died altogether, and fires had crowned across fairly wide roads and highways. Houses and barns had burned to the ground while people watched helplessly.

  “If that wind don’t stop!” Sam said suddenly. Adolf nodded, but Aubrey leaned to the radio and concentrated on the announcer’s voice.

  “Tomorrow we’re going to clear grass and brush all around the house and barn,” Sam said, “as far as possible. Dry as tinder. Bad.”

  Jane sat still on a kitchen chair, waiting for John Cotter. Her grandfather was really worried, and for the first time she herself felt the danger of the dry weather as fear. In all her life she had never seen Sam Stevens clear the brush for fear of fire. He was not careless—far from it. Before anyone entered the barn he had to leave his pipe on a little rack outside, and that rule was never broken. But the farm spring on the hill above was nearly dry, even though it had been cleaned and cleared of mud. The spring had never failed before.

  John Cotter’s headlights flickered against the kitchen windows as his car turned in the dooryard, and in a minute he stood in the open door, looking neat almost to the point of frailty in his good clothes. Sam got up and shook his hand, smiling briefly before returning to the radio.

  “There was a grass fire on the river flats today,” John said, and even Aubrey looked up. “They got it out, though. They had ab
out a hundred people out.”

  “They put it out?” Mrs. Pettibone said, holding her hands, dirtied with the fox’s scent, up to, but not touching, her face. John nodded.

  “They had brooms and shovels. It really flared up, right to the road. I guess the road stopped it. It’s the wind.”

  “The God-damned wind!” Sam said. He turned the radio off and they all heard the wind around the windows. “It ain’t natural for a wind to last so long.”

  “Hills ought to break it up and slow it down,” Aubrey said, “if it’s the wind you’re cussin’.”

  Sam turned to him and spoke in a loud voice, “Aubrey, you recall the yellow day?”

  “By God! I do. Ayuh. ‘Way back, now.”

  “That was a freak,” Sam said. “Scared the daylights out of everybody. I’ll tell you what it was.” He turned to Jane and John, who couldn’t have known, and out of politeness to Adolf, who wouldn’t understand. “The sky came all over yellow—no dusty yellow, neither—bright canary yellow. Nothing that warn’t yellow: a man’s face, his hands, the leaves on the trees was yellow, and the tree trunks was a darker shade of yellow. It near made a man sick to open his eyes. Nobody knew what it was. Air smelt good, like always, sun was up there, only yellower. I’ll tell you what it was like—like looking through a piece of yellow cellophane. Only everybody saw it that way. Now we didn’t have no raddios then. Nobody to tell us what was going on outside, so to speak, nor to git expert advice from Concord nor Boston. There was wind that day, too.”

  “Ayuh,” Aubrey said.

  “Hadn’t been blowing for a month, like this, but it was the same kind of a wind—a mean, pushing hot wind. Some said it was the breath of hell, and believed it. Considerable thought it was the end of the world, and a hell of a lot more wouldn’t have bet it warn’t. No, sir! I was a young man then, and not given to fancying the end of the world, but I felt considerable better when the next day come clean and clear.” He shook his head.

  “What made it like that?” John said.