by Jeff Crook
“What about me, Deacon? If you go back, who is going to save me?”
He looked down at me, his face shining like Moses on the mountain, but it was only the glow of the fire surrounding his head. “You have already saved yourself, Jackie Lyons. Now go.” He shook loose of my grasp and disappeared up the stairs.
I waited for him until burning timbers were falling into the cellar. I couldn’t see for the smoke, couldn’t hear for the dying shrieks of the house as it was consumed in flame. Deacon had made his decision. I had made mine. He was the only thing that mattered to me, the only reason I had to be there. Not the work, not the job or the camera or the pictures, not even justice for a murdered man. Just him, and without him, there was nothing. I closed my eyes against the stinging smoke and waited.
Then I felt his strong hand in mine, dragging me away into darkness and into air I could breathe. I didn’t know how he made it out. “Did you find her?” I gasped. He didn’t answer, just pulled me along. A hot wind choked with ash and cinders carried us down the tunnel and we emerged into the crypt as though spat out of hell itself. As I collapsed against the wall, I felt his hand slip from mine. It was a few minutes before I could even see, but I knew he was gone. I’d felt his hand, felt his strength drag me forward when I would have lain down and died, and I knew he’d never been there. He was still in the house, looking for someone or something he would never find.
The gate of the crypt was locked. I sat with my face against the bars, swallowing sips of air while smoke poured out around me, watching the house burn in the night and collapse and then transform into a whirlwind of fire that lifted up and up, covering the sky, while in the distance futile sirens screamed their aching slow progress through wood and field only to watch it burn from a safe distance, helpless to stop it, miles from the nearest hydrant.
It reminded me of something I had forgotten, buried most of my life, only now to recall in stupefying clarity. I remembered the first time I saw a ghost. I must have been four or five years old. The terror of that vision was my earliest clear memory of anything.
It was Christmas and we were staying with my mother’s sister, who lived in Mountain Home, Arkansas. I was looking out an upstairs window when I saw a man standing next to the mailbox by the road. Somehow I knew he was dead. I screamed and screamed, but when they pulled me away from the window, they couldn’t see him. They thought I was having a fit (later they would take me to the doctor, but this was an ill that had no cure).
They put me to bed in my aunt’s bedroom and later that night she came in to talk to me. She asked me about the man and I described him—short, thin and dark, wearing a hospital gown. She nodded and said, Yes, that’s him, without ever explaining what she meant. She lay down beside me in the dark and fell asleep holding my hand, and during the night she woke me up, pulling me out of bed because the house was on fire. I watched my father and uncle carry the furniture out of the house while the upper story burned, ashes and cinders falling like snowflakes all around and setting little fires in the dry grass. We made a game of stomping them out.
There was nobody to carry furniture out of Deacon’s house. There was no furniture to carry, nothing worth saving. Priceless, two-hundred-year-old chestnut beams and planks and molding, dry as snake’s breath, burned like fireworks.
During the night, the Opossum Paul crawled through the bars and curled up in my lap. As dry as the summer had been and as hot as the fire had burned, somehow it didn’t spread into the woods, probably because Deacon had cleared all the underbrush from around the house. Otherwise the whole forest might have gone up and saved Luther the trouble of bulldozing it. Otherwise, Paul and I would have been baked like blackbirds in a crypt with the bones of Luther’s forgotten ancestors.
45
A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down.
—CHARLES DICKENS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES
HOLLY DISCOVERED ME AROUND nine o’clock the next morning. I don’t know how. She was clutching a blanket as though she knew just where to find me. “Oh Jacqueline,” she cried when she saw me, speaking with that soft French “J” that sounded so beautiful and yet so full of despair. She passed the blanket through the bars of the gate.
They couldn’t get fire trucks close enough to the house to put out the fire. They didn’t have hoses long enough to reach the hydrants on the highway. Senator Mickelson had funneled ten million dollars through Congress to build a paramilitary force to guard his gated mansion, while the county was still relying on volunteer firefighters driving thirty-year-old secondhand trucks. Rescuing me from the crypt finally gave them something to do. Holly led them to me. I recognized some of the firemen from last April, when they came to fish Sam Loftin’s body from the lake. They recognized me, too, but we didn’t hug.
Luther brought the key, unlocked the gate and rolled back the stone. Holly helped me through the woods back to Jenny’s house. She hugged me close, her arm tight around my shoulders. “Now you and me are just alike,” she said. “We have both gone through fire and been resurrected.”
It wasn’t even August yet. The grass was dead and brown, but the lawn services were out mowing the levee anyway, throwing up clouds of choking red dust. Jenny met us at the door of her house, folded me into her arms and held on, rocking and moaning. Holly guided us inside and into the kitchen, where she attempted to prepare breakfast as though nothing in the world was wrong. She poured me a cup of coffee and put the cup in the refrigerator and set the hot coffee carafe on the table. Then she cracked three eggs into the sink before she knew what she was doing. She stood there looking at the eggs in the sink. “Oh Lord. Look what I done.” She tried to laugh, but it was more of a whimper. She washed the eggs down the drain, then picked the shells out and tossed them in the garbage. Cassie sat by the fireplace and cried.
Everybody was a wreck except me.
Later in the day the fire marshal stopped by with Sheriff Stegall to interview me. It was just a routine procedure, he assured me, but an investigation was required since the fire had resulted in a fatality. According to me, anyway. They hadn’t found a body yet. “We’re still looking,” he said as he patted my hand.
I didn’t know men still looked like Fred Mertz. He wore his fireman’s coveralls with big strapping suspenders stretched crosswise over his belly, a smear of soot across the bridge of his nose and up the outside of his right forearm to his elbow.
Jenny and I hadn’t talked yet. I hadn’t told her what happened. It was too soon. She asked the fire marshal if he had any idea how the fire started. “Well,” he growled in a friendly way, “that old house, it just went up like a box of matches. But it’s been my experience, thirty years putting out fires in this county, that when you have a fire starting late at night upstairs, it’s usually somebody smoking in bed.” He shot me a quick side-eye that said, Ain’t that right, Ethel?
I hated to disappoint his thirty years of experience. “We were firebombed.”
Stegall stepped from the kitchen, half a chocolate cake falling out of his mouth. Fred did his famous double take. Jenny gripped my hand.
“Molotov cocktail through the bedroom window.” I made a sound like breaking glass. “Another one in the hall. Woosh. Downstairs, too. Front porch. Back door.” Thinking about the fire seemed to rekindle it in my flesh. My skin felt tight and dry, like an old glove left out in the sun.
Sheriff and marshal exchanged a worried glance. Malvern was a small town and its officers liked nice easy investigations where they didn’t have to wait for the ruins or the bodies to get cold. They liked going home to supper at six o’clock Monday through Friday. They liked suicides and people smoking in bed and events that could be explained from a nice safe distance.
Fred took his notepad from his shirt pocket and licked a pencil. “What time was that?”
I didn’t know the time. I wasn’t wearing a watch. It was late. He put his notebook in his shirt pocket and leaned back in the chair, creaking the wood
with his weight. “Renovating these old houses,” he said, thumbing his bracers, “I’ve seen it a hundred times. All kinds of accelerants laying around, paint thinner, mineral oil, piles of rags. Add some old wiring and a little carelessness…” He shrugged.
“There wasn’t any electricity in the house.”
“A house will go up so fast, it’s easy to think it’s been firebombed.”
I sighed and pressed my fists between the cushions of the couch. “I saw the bottle come through the window and break on the floor.”
“Fire gets so hot, it blows out the windows,” Stegall added helpfully.
“I’ve heard houses groan and scream, just like somebody was dying inside it,” the fat old man said. “It’s downright creepy. It’s just hot gases escaping, but it makes you wonder sometimes. You never really know until you find the bones.”
I wondered if they would ever find Deacon’s bones. There was nothing left of the house, nothing but a smoking white moonscape between two crooked, blackened brick chimneys rising impossibly slender from the ash. It had burned up even the largest beams.
“There’s just one more thing,” Fred said, leaning forward and putting his fat, sooty hand on my knee. “Why didn’t Mr. Falgoust escape with you?”
* * *
The next night, Jenny and the kids were all safely ensconced in their beds, already able to sleep again, already getting on with their lives. I returned to the scene of my resurrection, walked between the headstones white in the moonlight, and the shaggy cedar trees blacker than the night itself, my feet shuffling through drifts of brown needles dry as the still-smoking ash of Deacon’s pyre. All the normal human superstitions had been burned out of me over the years, like an overexposed photograph. I had seen too much human meat, photographed too many murders and accidents and suicides, gone home too many times with the smell of them lingering in my clothes and woke up too many mornings with their blood dried to the soles of my Buster Brown shoes. A person can grow accustomed to anything. I found it far too easy to imagine Deacon’s disarticulated bones sprawled six feet below my toes, too easy to visualize the ultimate ruination of a man. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about him coughing out the last breath of life as the black smoke lowered and the flames crept up his legs, nobody there to hear and remember his last words, nobody to deliver a last message to his flock of saints or even the woman or women he loved.
None of it mattered. Look at John Vardry, dead these seventy years in his dead wife’s crypt. Lying among his bones the bits of shrapnel and German lead that put a swift end to his life. John Vardry, one of seventy-two million people killed in that war. Seventy-two million—a number too enormous to comprehend. Think of that many bodies stacked up. It beggars belief. Their bones would fill a hundred Superdomes. But was the world diminished one jot, one tittle by their loss? John Vardry had sired Luther Vardry and by extension this whole land and this whole situation, even me, standing here in a graveyard with nothing and no one to mourn.
That’s all that mattered. The world would go on, but for me, it had stopped when I looked between the bars of the crypt gate and watched the burning house collapse upon itself and the fire go up like a whirlwind from hell. The world had not turned for me since that moment. I was frozen in that instant, like a phantasm endlessly repeating. A hundred years from now I’ll still be sitting in that crypt, staring through the bars, and maybe the people living here might feel a cold spot in the air where my heart once hung, or maybe they would hear the hollow keening of my voice and tell themselves It’s the wind, only the wind, my dear, go back to sleep.
Grief itself must leave a ghost. I was already that ghost, blind to the world’s continuing revolutions. Two solid days of bone-deep grief had done that to me, worn me down like an old tooth. I hardly felt alive. My heart was an empty sack, still beating.
I didn’t know what else to do. I looked up at the weak, hazy stars. If only it would rain, I thought. Everything is dying. If only it would rain and wash it all away.
* * *
I crawled back to Jenny’s house in the dark and out to the end of the boat dock beneath the bug-swirled lamp. I stood there for I don’t know how long, standing until I could stand no more, until I sank to the deck and sat with my feet dangling over the water, rubbing the crusty edges of hunger and exhaustion against the file of my grief until the file was dull and smooth, and I fell asleep and slept nearly six hours and woke with the sun baking my already baked face red as a beret.
I entered the kitchen and found Jenny standing at the stove watching a pot boil. Her hair was pulled up in a banana clip with a few wet strands of blond hair dangling in her face. “Have you eaten?” she asked over her shoulder.
“No.”
“Sit down and let me fix you something.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. “What are you doing?”
She turned back to the stove and adjusted the flame under the pot. “Parboiling peas so I can freeze them.” She had been to the farmers’ market.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
“I know what you mean, Jackie.” She moved things around on the counter—a ladle, the lid of the pot, a shaker of salt, nervously rearranging them. “I’m doing the only thing I know how to do. I’ve been through this twice already. The only thing to do is to keep going. Try to keep busy.” She seemed to have grown smaller somehow, older. She looked frail, with her face sweaty from the steam. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and I couldn’t recall a time when Jenny wasn’t wearing her face after nine in the morning.
She rested her elbows on the edge of the sink and stared out the window at the sunburned grass of the back lawn. “Go upstairs, take a shower and get some sleep. We’re going to church tonight.”
“Church!” I said, incredulous. “Why tonight?” She knew what I was thinking. More and more, she seemed to always know.
“We can’t have a funeral, so Luther is doing a memorial service for Deacon.”
* * *
I dragged myself upstairs, but I knew I’d never be able to sleep. I sat in a chair by the window and watched Sam do his familiar old dance on the levee, over and over. What the hell are you trying to tell me?
He wasn’t trying to tell me anything. He really was just a broken record, worse than useless because all it did was remind me of what I could no longer hear. Like the photos full of orbs, reflections of light off dust motes. All destroyed in the fire.
Downstairs Jenny was making lunch for her kids. Holly was swimming laps in the pool, Nathan sitting on the edge of the pool with a stopwatch. Sometimes I knew what it felt like to be a ghost, to sit on the edge of other people’s lives, unheard and unseen, often unsuspected, watching people come and go, unable to participate in the simplest human interaction—a touch, a kind word—never again belonging anywhere or with anyone. I still didn’t believe in Deacon’s idea of Jesus or redemption, heaven or hell, but if there was a hell, this was it. It must grieve the dead most to know how swiftly we forget them.
I couldn’t stay with Jenny any longer. My reason for being there had burned to the ground. I couldn’t go with them to Deacon’s memorial and listen to that old man tell his lies. I had attended too many funerals already.
I slipped out of the house while they were eating lunch by the pool. The grass in the yard was brittle beneath my naked soles, the cedar boughs turning brown as though sprayed with herbicide by a leaky crop duster. The heat off the street was swollen and vampiric, baking the last life from the weeds growing along the verge and from anything that dared cross. I crossed, oblivious to the heat, worn out to my bones, aching in body and soul.
I went back to take a last look at the ruin in the light of day. The chimneys had fallen, one across the other. Crime scene tape was strung through the silent woods like confetti after a New Year’s Eve party. Deacon’s saints were gone, their camp as empty as if it had never been.
I went home to pack. They had gone to church, the house was empty, supper sitting on
the stove. Even though I wasn’t hungry, I picked up the plate and took it into the den, turned on the television and sat down with the plate in my lap—baked chicken in some kind of cold white sauce, cold steamed broccoli, glutinous beans with onions and peppers. I tasted nothing while I clicked through the channels, finding nothing, until there was nothing, just darkness and silence and at long last sleep.
46
I WOKE WITH THE FEELING THAT someone had touched my face. I sat up in the dark. My supper plate had been put away and a blanket spread over me while I lay unconscious on the couch. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed twice.
It was agony to move, a trial of will just to lift an arm, every breath a deliberate act. Yet somehow I managed to stand and stagger to the kitchen, where I found the keys to Jenny’s van. I had just one thought, one desire—somewhere out there on the streets of Memphis was a score to end all scores. I knew how I would do it. Not by drowning or hanging and certainly not by way of a bullet. My old friend, Mr. Brownstone. We’d been apart too long and that was no way to treat such a dear friend.
I dragged myself up the stairs, hand over hand, to gather what little money I had from pockets and drawers, enough to buy enough smack to stop my heart one last time. At the top I stumbled over Jenny sitting on the top step in her lavender housecoat, silent and still as a cat, her arms wrapped around her knees, long blond hair spread over her shoulders and back.
“I know you hurt,” she said. “Trust me, I know. But when the people we love die, we don’t have the luxury of falling apart. Not when others are depending on us.”
“I can’t, Jenny.”
“You have to.”
“You have to. I don’t have to.”
“Dammit Jackie, you were a detective.”
The strangeness of her declaration was like a dash of cold water down my back. It made me stand up straight, asshole puckered. “So?”
“So … go detect something. Investigate. Find out who did this.” She meant Deacon. She didn’t know I’d spent the last two months trying to prove her husband had been molesting her daughter. I was glad I never shared my suspicions with her, because I’d been as wrong as a person could be. I’d been wrong about everything.
