Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

She nodded.

  Gerry came out from beneath the porch, carrying an armload of wet towels and a bucket of water. “I’ll help here. You get the little boy someplace safe, ma’am.”

  Without a word, she turned away and found the path that would get her to the water the quickest. It wasn’t hard to follow, even in the dark, because so many feet had beaten it down over so many years. Emma herself had walked this path many times when she came out to visit Faye and Joe.

  The wind brought a sudden gust of smoke. Michael coughed and so did she. She looked back over her shoulder at the house her friend Faye loved so much. Tall windows, shady porches, walls that were always as clean and white as Faye’s paintbrush could keep them. Those walls were a dull red now, reflecting the coming flames.

  Faye was going to lose it.

  She was going to lose this heap of old wood that her ancestors had hewn with hand tools. Its roof was going to fall when the burning timbers could no longer support its weight. She was going to be left with nothing but memories of her mother and grandmother and the stories they’d told her about the people who had gone before. Photographs, clothes, furniture, books. It was all going to go up in flames.

  Michael cuddled his sleepy face into Emma’s neck, spurring her to walk faster. She couldn’t save Faye’s house, no more than she’d been able to stop the miscarriage that had wounded her friend’s heart so deeply, but she could save this boy.

  She had meant to linger, waiting until the fire got close before she took Michael into the water, but she didn’t. The fire had grown close enough for her to see it in the short time it had taken her to walk to the shore. She was scared.

  The sand made soft noises under her feet as she walked across the beach. When she reached the water’s edge, she kept walking, shoes and clothes and all. The water was November-cold and it made Michael cry, but a little cold wasn’t going to kill either of them. When it reached her waist, she turned around and saw that all the coastline to her right was alight. Straight ahead, where Gerry and Sly were defending the house with an ax and some towels, she saw only darkness. She had no idea where Faye and Joe were.

  As the wet cold seeped into her bones, it occurred to her that she should have called the sheriff, 911, Sheriff Mike, somebody, but the phone and gun she’d tucked into her pocket were both drenched. It hadn’t occurred to her to call the law, because Gerry was the law, but he was in as much trouble as the rest of them right now. They all needed help.

  Sacrilegious though it might be, she always turned to Douglass for help in trying times, even before she asked God. She asked him to watch over Sly and Gerry and Joe and Michael and her and, especially, she asked him to watch over Faye. She didn’t know how much more pain her friend could take.

  ***

  Faye staggered on, falling further behind Joe but always moving forward.

  The trees in front of her still seemed draped in black velvet. Where was the moon? It had to rise sometime. No disaster could stop the proper progression of the seasons and the tides.

  Behind her, the fire forced a sighing wind through the trees. It blew hot on her back. Trees were crashing to the ground. The fire’s roar grew louder with every breath she took.

  A spot of white ahead of her said that she’d reached the opening in the trees where her house stood. It was too small. The clearing was too small for her to hope that the fire would miss her house as it leapt from tree to tree.

  She saw Gerry standing at the edge of the clearing. A ditch stretched behind him, and he was making steady progress at lengthening it. A fire break was an excellent idea. In the absence of fire hydrants and a fire department, it was probably the best weapon they had, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Gerry was smart enough to see that there was not going to be enough time for one man to separate her house from the blaze. The fact that he was out here digging anyway, instead of heading for the safety of the water, made him her friend for life. If Gerry ever needed help, his friend Faye would be there.

  He kept digging as he said, “Emma took Michael to the beach. They’ll be safe there.”

  “Joe and his dad?”

  He jerked his head in the direction of the house. “I don’t know where they went. I lost them in the dark. I figure you’ve got other shovels and they’re over there doing the same thing I am.”

  A spark set off a small fire just a few feet away from where she stood. Gerry nodded at a bucket of wet towels. “I’ve been fighting hot spots with those. If you’ll do that, I can dig faster.”

  She picked up a towel and slapped at the flames until they went out. If she had a big enough towel, she could drop it over the whole island and snuff out all the danger. She could put the whole island out. Since she didn’t, she just attacked the flames that were in her reach and tried not to think about the ones that weren’t.

  “I called the sheriff when I heard the shot,” Gerry said. “Several officers should be here any minute.”

  Faye couldn’t believe she hadn’t already thought of calling for help. Her phone was on the windowsill where she left it, and that should have been the first place she went when she came out of the woods. Where was her mind?

  It was stuck in the mode of fighting only the crisis directly in front of her, and it had been stuck there since she followed Joe out of the house to the place where she killed a woman.

  With two words, “Delia’s dead,” she told Gerry who had killed Liz and stalked Emma and Faye. Those two words told him who had been on the wrong end of the gunshot he’d heard. Later, she could explain to him how and why Delia did what she did, and she could take responsibility for shooting Delia dead. Right now, the important thing was this battle against a wildfire that was bound to beat them.

  ***

  Joe saw his father and he saw the ax. He saw Sly running faster than any man his age had a right to run, and he knew where Sly was going.

  His father went first to the biggest cistern, nearly as tall as the house itself. It collected all the rainwater that ran in gutters off the east side of the house, as if its long-ago designer had known where danger would someday arise. Its wood was just as old as the house’s timbers, and Faye kept it painted just as white. Sly readied his ax and chose his spot. Drawing the ax back and turning his body hard to maximize its power, he swung hard and the ax hit the cistern in exactly the spot he had chosen. Wood chips and sawdust flew, and he drew back the ax again. He struck the cistern again and he struck it a third time.

  Joe heard a loud crack, and water began to spray out of a hole opened up by his father’s ax. It spewed hard, driven by the weight of twenty feet of water, and both men were instantly wet to the skin.

  Sly swung his ax again, opening up the hole. The gush of water grew bigger and it began to flow down the sides of the cistern, rather than shooting out of its side in a single stream. He struck again and the power of this blow destroyed the old tank’s structural integrity. It failed spectacularly, collapsing in a heap of wooden beams and loosing a gush of water that reached far enough into the woods to quench a large swath of flames.

  Sly was fast, but he wasn’t fast enough. Joe saw Sly collapse under the weight of the falling timbers, and he knew that he couldn’t bear to lose his father when he’d just gotten him back.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Joe’s voice cut through the wind and fire. Faye heard him say, “Dad!” and she heard fear.

  He was behind her, somewhere between where she stood and the house. Still holding a wet towel, on the off-chance that it was the secret weapon that would save everybody and everything, she ran for Joe’s voice.

  She found him bending over a pile of broken wood. The biggest cistern on Joyeuse Island had stood since 1857, at least, but it wasn’t standing anymore. Faye knew that Joe’s father and his ax must lie somewhere beneath the wreckage.

  Joe lifted a timber heavy enough to bow his back. He shoved it aside and reached a hand
down into the pile. He had found his father.

  Faye, who had never known a father before now, rushed to help Joe pull the debris off Sly. She could see him pushing up against the boards piled on top of him. Was the fire lighting Sly’s face as it peeked through the wreckage or was the moon finally starting to rise?

  “I’m fine, Son,” he said, lifting a beam that lay across his legs and handing it to Joe. “Daughter, I’m fine.”

  When Joe had set that beam aside and turned back to finish uncovering his father, he found a big arm extending out of the debris, an ax in its hand. “You got four other cisterns, Son. You know what to do. I can get myself out of this mess.”

  Joe started to help his father anyway, but Faye stayed his arm. “I can do this,” she said. “I can help him. Take the ax and go.”

  She draped her wet towel around her husband’s shoulders, knowing that he would shed it when he needed to swing the ax, but maybe that little bit of wetness would help him. Maybe a damp shirt would hold up better against the sparks that were starting to fly.

  Red light reflected on her husband’s face as he ran to the first of the four cisterns that stood near the house’s four corners. The ax swung and swung again. In just a few blows, Joe brought the smaller cistern down, leaping free of the water that first shot out of its side and then gushed across the ground. He dodged the falling frame of the cistern, too, and ran for the second one.

  The water was helping, at least a little. In two broad swathes of the woods surrounding her home, the flames on the ground were quenched. Faye could see that Sly and Joe had chosen their points of attack so that the water wouldn’t spew straight out into the woods. It had flowed laterally, parallel to the nearest wall of the house. They were doing their best to make a watery buffer that circled the house.

  Faye gave Sly a hand as he lifted himself out of the rubble of the cistern. “We need to find Gerry. If the three of us get out there with shovels and some towels, we may be able to finish digging that firebreak. Let’s go.”

  A cracking, splitting sound told them that Joe had finished wrecking the second cistern. As Faye ran for the last place she’d seen Gerry, she realized that she could see better, a lot better, but that there was still no moon. She needed to face the fact that the fire was bringing all the light. It was closing in, and they would soon need to run for the shore and let the Gulf of Mexico protect them as all of Joyeuse Island went up in flames.

  But not yet. Faye wasn’t ready to run yet.

  They found Gerry and showed him where the water from the cisterns had opened up big holes in the encroaching fire. Starting from those openings, they worked with shovel and wet towels to complete the ring of protection around Faye’s house. Around her home.

  Faye wasn’t stupid. She could look deeper into the woods and see that flames were working their way toward them through the tree canopy. They couldn’t fight a fire that was twenty feet above their heads. Failing to run from a fire like that could kill them all, but Faye wasn’t running yet.

  She slung her towel so hard at a chunk of burning bark that she knocked it right off the tree. It lay there on the ground, still burning, so she had to flap her towel at it again. This wasted time she didn’t have. She swatted the burning bark until it went black, like charcoal, then she moved on to the next burning thing.

  The sound of an ax splitting wood told her that Joe had reached the third cistern. That left two more. When the cisterns were gone, there would be nothing left to fight the fire but four people, a shovel, and a bucket of wet towels. If something hadn’t changed by then, it would be time to run.

  Faye started trying to make her peace with the loss. Joe and Sly and Gerry shouldn’t risk their lives for her house. It was a symbol of her hard work in preserving it and it was a symbol of all the people who had lived in it before her, all the way back to Cally and beyond, but it was just a symbol, just an object.

  It was time to let her home go.

  A percussive noise near the house told her that Joe was slinging the ax at the last cistern, unleashing its water to fight the fire that would never stop coming. She gestured to Gerry and Sly that it was time to leave. They drew back from the fire’s edge, into the front yard of Joyeuse’s big house.

  Faye knew every square inch of it. She had patched the tabby walls of its basement. She had run wiring and ductwork to bring it up to twenty-first-century standards of comfort. She had painted its walls, restored its murals, hung vintage wallpaper to replace the antique paper destroyed by the hurricane. She and Joe, working together, had rebuilt the spiral staircase and both exterior staircases. They had made a new cupola to replace the one that had blown away. They had installed up-to-date roofing.

  Long ago, and this memory threatened to take her to her knees, her grandmother had taken a teenaged Faye up on that roof and taught her to patch the ancient tin that had covered it in those days.

  She was losing it. She hadn’t been sure she could walk away and let the fire come, but it was just a house. She had survived the loss of her baby daughter. She would survive this.

  She heard Joe’s ax strike again. Collected rainwater rushed out of the last cistern with such power that she could hear it, even over the roar of a fire that had nearly come. He had done everything in his power to save their home, and she loved him for it, but the fight was done. She went to him, held out her hand, and said, “It’s time to go to the water.”

  Joe’s face was wet, and it wasn’t cistern water shining on his cheeks. “Faye, I tried.”

  “I know you did. We all did. Let’s go.”

  The fire had crept way too close to the path to the beach. They should have fled long ago. Gerry handed wet towels all around. They wrapped their heads and upper bodies in them. When a burning branch crashed to the ground ten feet away from the entrance to the path, they ran. By the time they had pushed down the path far enough to feel branches brush their arms on either side, the opening behind them was alight.

  As they ran, more branches fell all around them, and some of them dropped coals onto the path ahead. Faye had only enough of her wits about her to think, “I’m barefoot,” as she ran across them.

  Joe had an arm curled around her back. He wasn’t pushing her and he wasn’t carrying her, but she saw that he was prepared to do either. If she staggered, he would throw her over his shoulder, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to leave her home for the last time under her own power.

  The beach and its sand looked so soft and so cool. Her feet wanted her to get there, where the sand would soothe them and they could rest. They took her there but the dry grains of sand did no good at all. They did nothing but stick to her burned and bleeding feet.

  Emma and Michael were waiting in the water. Her son was already wailing, but when he saw Faye and Joe, he held out both arms and shrieked.

  They went to him. Their family was all together, almost. When Amande got home, everything would be right. Even if she came home to a family that was camping out on an island that had been burned black, everything would be right. Or close enough to right.

  She heard another crack, much louder, as if Joe, Gerry, Sly, and Emma had all sunk axes into a wooden tank of water while Faye waited inside. Sly’s ax had been left behind and no one but the dead Delia was left on the island to wield it, so she had to be hearing something else

  Faye and all the others stood in the water, like penitents waiting for baptism, and looked ashore to see what was making all that noise.

  A flash of light broke open the black sky. Less than a second passed before they heard another loud crack. Faye looked up and saw a great cloud gathering itself overhead. She saw pinpricks of stars on the sliver of sky just above the water to the south. Those stars hadn’t been there a moment before. They had been covered by the cloud that had rolled off the water and spread itself over Joyeuse Island. Among those stars was a brightness that grayed the black night. The
gray light looked like hope.

  Sure enough, the clouds pulled further away from the horizon, revealing a moon that had been shining behind them for quite some time. Those clouds rushed in front of a strong wind that piled them up over Faye’s head. Thunder pealed again, signaling the clouds to release the rain.

  And it fell.

  Water fell on them like a blessing. The water rinsed the smoke from Faye’s hair. It ran off Joe’s face in black streams of soot. It pattered on Michael’s cheeks and Emma’s curls and Sly’s broad shoulders and Gerry’s upturned face. It washed them all clean.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Sheriff Rainey had been in his car within two minutes of answering Detective Steinberg’s call. Steinberg had said he’d heard gunfire from somewhere near the Longchamp-Mantooth house, and that couldn’t be a good thing. The sheriff hadn’t been sure yet where he was going, to his office or to one of the department’s boats, so he had used the drive time to call the dispatcher and try to get the whereabouts of all the officers out on the Gulf. While the dispatcher did his work, Rainey’s phone had rung again. One of the officers out on the water looking for Tommy Barnes had called to give him the news that Joyeuse Island was burning.

  Rainey had started barking questions. “Did you call Detective Steinberg? Is he still out there? And what about the people who live there?”

  “Steinberg’s not answering his phone. I can’t tell you anything except I see a really big fire.” The young woman’s voice was cracking under the strain of shouting over a boat motor, but she sounded calm and ready to do what needed doing.

  “Tell me you already called the Coast Guard.”

  “I’m not stupid.” There was a moment of dead air while she reconsidered her tone of voice. She amended her error by adding a belated “Sir.”

  “No, you’re not stupid. You’re a good officer. Go help Steinberg. I’m on my way and, thanks to you, so is the Coast Guard.”

  He had hardly hung up the phone when it rang again. Mike McKenzie’s name was on the screen.