The Boy in the Burning House

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Jim lay with his arms akimbo, his knees up, working out the pain in his side. He turned his head. She was sullen, brooding.

  He propped himself up on his elbows. He spoke very quietly. “You ever thought people might listen to you if you didn’t knock them over?”

  It was hard to tell in the gloom, but he thought he saw a smile flicker across her face. It gave him courage.

  “Why don’t you go to the cops?” he asked.

  “Ha! With what I know about the cops?”

  “Oh, right,” he said and lay back quietly on the ground. But she didn’t look like she was going to jump him again. So he edged himself up.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

  “Didn’t I tell you? I have a life,” he said.

  She parted the curtains of her bangs with her white fingers. “That’s more than your daddy’s got.”

  For a split second, he was too stunned to react. Then the tears came. They surprised him as much as they surprised her. He thought he had cried them all months ago. But he had only been damming them up, it seemed, for now they flowed out of him and dripped from his face onto the hillside. He made no attempt to stop them or mop them up. He sank back down to the ground and cried and his tears fell on the earth where they would eventually find their watery way through the loam to Incognito Creek.

  “They were friends,” she said. She didn’t look at Jim. It was as if she were talking to herself. “Your daddy and Eldon, except he was Fish in those days. When they were kids. There’s others — someone named Tuffy, someone else named Laverne. He talks to himself — Father, I mean. Well, it starts off like praying and then he drifts off and sometimes he sort of ends up a kid again. Like he’s way gone. There’s someone called Tabor, too. He says, ‘Tabor will look after him,’ or, ‘O, God, vouchsafe that Tabor can keep our secret.’ He uses words like that — Bible words.”

  She looked at Jim expectantly. He wasn’t crying anymore. He was watching her closely, wondering if the things she was saying were from a dream or if she was just pulling them out of thin air.

  “All I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who these people are. Something happened. A long time ago. I need to know what.”

  Jim didn’t say anything. He was all talked out.

  “Oh, yeah, and try to find out about a secret club or clubhouse,” she added. “Can you do that? It’s important.” It was like she was a classmate asking him what their homework assignment was.

  “I’ll see,” he muttered finally.

  “We’ve got to put him behind bars,” she said, “or else…” She looked at Jim eagerly. “Don’t you want to know or else what?”

  He shook his head.

  “Or else he’ll kill me,” she explained.

  “Oh,” said Jim.

  Ruth Rose looked at him peevishly. Then she looked curious. “You knew that about your daddy and Fisher, didn’t you? Them growing up together?”

  Jim didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure. As close as he had been to his father, he couldn’t remember him talking much about his childhood — not about friends, any way. He had talked about the farm and his folks and school — stuff like that. Jim, if he had ever thought about it at all, had just assumed that his father had been like him — alone a lot, satisfied to be that way for the most part.

  As long as he could remember, Father Fisher had been around. At church, obviously, but at home, too. He had been a regular visitor. But Jim had never thought of him as a family friend. Friends stayed for supper or an evening of cards now and then. Father Fisher was never that kind of a visitor. He had never sat with Hub on the deck drinking a beer. But then he was a pastor. Hub used to go for walks with him. Towards the end, when Hub’s nerves were going on him, he had seen a lot of the pastor.

  Had they grown up together? Wouldn’t Jim know something like that?

  “Can you do it?” said Ruth Rose.

  He looked at her like a zombie.

  “Do what?”

  “Find out,” she said. “About…you know, Tuffy, Tabor, Laverne — anything.”

  It was no use arguing with her.

  “Whatever you say,” he replied. If he sounded less than convincing, she didn’t try to stop him from leaving.

  “I’m sorry for hurting you,” she said. “And about… you know… It.”

  “What?” he said. He had jumped over to the other side of Incognito Creek. It wasn’t much but it put something between them. When he turned, she seemed almost invisible, as if she had gathered up dusk all around her like a cape. As if she was just a part of the forest, a part of the coming night.

  “About you losing your father,” she said. “I know what it’s like.”

  He looked at her. “No, you don’t. You know what it’s like losing your father.”

  He didn’t turn around again when she called after him.

  “It’s worse for me,” she shouted. “I’ve got a new one who wants to kill me.”

  The wind picked up just as Jim opened the gate from the cornfield. He had to fight to rope the gate closed again. The rope was fraying badly; he’d need to replace it. There was so much to do.

  He stopped in his tracks. He had left the shovel at the dam. He stamped his foot like a three-year-old. He swore.

  “You don’t leave a tool out in the rain, Jimbo, unless you never plan on using it again.”

  He turned to go and retrieve it. But he couldn’t. For all he knew, Ruth Rose was still out there prowling around, her teeth bared, worse than any wild dog with wildly impossible things pouring out of her black lips. She was a witch.

  He heard the screen of the kitchen door slam back hard against the house, caught by the wind. He could just make out the form of his mother outlined in the doorway, the warm light of the kitchen behind her spilling out into the cool. Then she stepped out of his line of vision; the shrubbery and garden shed came between them.

  Jim headed through the apple orchard until he caught a glimpse of her again. She was standing on the porch, talking to someone. A man. He was standing beyond the light of the doorway. Jim hurried, uneasy.

  Out from behind the protective ranks of corn, the wind made him shiver, made him pull his open jacket closed around him. The zipper was broken. He hadn’t even bothered showing it to his mom. When was she going to find time to fix it?

  He got close enough that he could hear snatches of conversation from the porch. His mom was laughing. Now she was shaking the man’s hand. Now the man stepped back up the steps to give her a hug. Big dark arms closed around her. She hugged him back.

  Jim was at the garden shed now. He leaned against it, out of sight, watching.

  It was okay. The man was going. His mother was already heading back inside.

  Jim waited. The man was heading towards the front yard where his van was sitting, gleamy black under the yard light. Jim looked that way for the first time.

  He knew the van, knew the scripture that was quoted in white scrolled letters on the side panels. The only thing he could read from where he was standing was what was written on the plastic wind foil across the front of the hood. “I Am The Lord Thy Saviour.”

  It was the car people around town called the Godmobile. Father Fisher’s car.

  4

  His mom saw him before she shut the door. She waited to herd him inside with a warm hug. There were tears in her eyes.

  “What did he want?” Jim asked.

  His mother was mopping up a tear with the corner of her apron, but there was a smile on her face.

  “He was looking for his daughter,” she said as she cleared the kitchen table of tea things.

  Jim hung up his coat, kicked off his boots, stopped himself from blurting out anything.

  “Apparently she roams. Lettie Kitchen — you know Lettie down on the Glenshee Road, the one who makes the horrible green Jello with miniature marshmallows for every church social — she phoned Father to let him know she’d seen the girl on the tracks heading up this way.”
>
  Snoot was curled up on the rocker by the wood-stove. Jim picked her up and held her against his face. She was full of woodstove warmth. Jim took the seat and rocked a bit. It was strange to hear his mother so chatty. Obviously, Father Fisher’s visit hadn’t just been about Ruth Rose.

  She was filling the soup tureen. Jim should have been helping but the stove and the kitten held him captive.

  “The girl’s quite a problem for them, I gather. Poor Nancy.”

  Nancy was Mrs. Fisher. Ruth Rose’s mother. She was the kind of person you said “poor Nancy” about. She was in a wheelchair, but that wasn’t the reason. She had lost an unborn child in the car crash that had crippled her and killed her husband. But that wasn’t the reason, either. She seemed helpless in some other way, almost haunted. She was sweet, though. Everybody at the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration liked her a lot, remarked about what a saintly soul she was.

  Iris Hawkins carried the tureen to the table. She glanced at Jim and smiled to see him with the kitten on his lap. Then she returned to the counter for bread and butter. Reluctantly, Jim got up and washed his hands at the kitchen sink.

  They sat down. Holding his hand, bowing her head and closing her eyes, his mother said grace. Jim didn’t bow his head or close his eyes. As far as he was concerned, there was no God to thank for anything.

  Jim had filled the sky with prayers — stood out in the middle of the field on clear days so that no roof, no trees, no clouds could stop his prayers from reaching the ear of the Maker. He had promised the Almighty elaborate penance, a life dedicated to helping the poor — whatever God ordained. But God had done nothing.

  So now, Jim sat in respectful silence. The respect was for his mother.

  His mother ladled rich corn and potato chowder into his bowl. He cut thick slices of bread, poured them each a glass of water. There was still a smile playing around the edge of his mother’s face. She caught him looking at her and grinned.

  “What’s up?” he asked, taking a bowl of soup.

  She took a deep, wobbly breath. “The church…” she said, then stopped to compose herself. “The church has decided — well, almost, anyway — to assume our mortgage.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that if everything goes according to plan, they’re going to pay the bank the money we had to borrow this year, and we’ll pay back the church at a lower interest rate and with much better terms. Take as long as we want, was the way Father put it.” Her voice was breaking with emotion.

  When Jim didn’t reply, his mother added, “It’s a real blessing, Jim.”

  He nodded and ate some soup. He knew they had money problems. It was the reason his mother had taken the job at the soap factory. He wondered if this meant she could stop now. He didn’t ask, didn’t want to seem too eager about it in case she thought her working bothered him.

  “So he didn’t just come out looking for his daughter?” he said.

  “Oh, he was looking for her, all right. He had wanted to tell us about the mortgage business but he hadn’t wanted to mention it until it was in the bag.”

  “And it’s in the bag?”

  “Pretty much,” said his mother, crossing her fingers. “We’re lucky, Jim, to have such a caring community.” She paused with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth as if she were going to say something else. Something about him going to church. But she changed her mind.

  Jim kept his thoughts to himself. They ate in silence for a moment. There was just the sound of spoon against bowl, the clicking that came from the wood-stove when it was cranking out the heat, and occasionally the sound of the wind blustering outside, shaking the trees, whipping around the tarp that covered the firewood.

  “He grew up with Dad, didn’t he?” Jim tried to make his voice sound casual, just table talk.

  “Father Fisher? Yes.” She looked at him quizzically, as if surprised that he didn’t know. “Father’s a few years older, but they were pals, I guess. You know the big old brownstone place up the hill this side of the McCoys? That was the house he grew up in. His father Wilfred Fisher was the richest man on the Twelfth Line. The richest man in this corner of the township.”

  Jim nodded. He knew the house. It was boarded up like a lot of places on the line. But it was much more imposing, set on a hill with a long circular drive. There was even a stone wall along the road and the remains of a wrought-iron fence. People around these parts didn’t go in for such showiness — didn’t have the money for it.

  “How come Father Fisher doesn’t live there?” Jim asked.

  “Probably couldn’t afford to on a minister’s salary. Anyway, what would Nancy do in a cavernous place like that? They’d need ramps and…Lord, can you imagine the heating bill…”

  Jim was only half listening. He was busy trying to imagine Father Fisher as his father’s pal.

  His mother started talking about farm stuff — some problems they were having with the milk separator, how she thought maybe one of her hens was going broody, how someone might phone tonight about seeing the Malibu and what to say if they did. “I was going to sell it as is, but Orm McCoy convinced me that with a little body work, we could get a really good price on it. An antique. Imagine.”

  Jim listened up, put aside his resentment about selling his father’s car, put aside the incident in the woods.

  At first he had hated it when his mother started talking to him about grown-up things. There was always stuff breaking down, needing parts, needing attention. When his father had been alive this had been exactly the kind of thing his folks had jawed over at the supper table, and it had been fine as background noise while he thought his own thoughts. Now he had to pay attention. His mother had never said it in so many words, but she expected him to figure out what jobs he was supposed to do.

  “How do you expect me to fill his shoes?” he wanted to say. But he kept it to himself.

  His mother cleaned up while he sat at the kitchen table and did some homework. But it was hard to concentrate. He kept getting flashes of Ruth Rose’s face hovering over him, ready to bite his nose off.

  “There were other kids, too, weren’t there?” he said, out of the blue, trying to sound conversational.

  “What’s that?”

  “Other friends. Dad and Father Fisher and some others?”

  His question met with a stony silence. Then the sound of water and a scrub brush working hard.

  “I’m surprised your father would have told you about that.” She didn’t sound especially suspicious or alarmed. Just surprised. Jim dared to go on.

  “Why?”

  He listened while his mother rinsed the soup pot and put it in the drying rack. “Well, it was somethinghe didn’t much like to talk about, that’s all.”

  Jim swivelled around in his chair. “What happened?”

  His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. She was frowning a bit, and part of him wanted to say forget it, but he couldn’t make himself.

  “Francis,” she said. “That was his name.” Jim’s interest deflated a little — Francis wasn’t one of the names Ruth Rose had mentioned — but he nodded for his mother to go on.

  “Well, it was long before I arrived on the scene,” she said, “when Hub was young. Francis died. A terrible death. Hub was around seventeen, I guess. It hit him pretty hard. He was in the eleventh grade, never did finish his year.”

  Iris Hawkins went back to washing. Jim didn’t want to push her too far but, as it turned out, she was only collecting her thoughts.

  “Died on New Year’s Eve. In a fire — a fire he started himself.”

  “You mean it was suicide?”

  His mother shrugged. “At the inquest they called it death by misadventure. At least, I think that’s what it was called. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know your father then but he talked about it from time to time. It troubled him.”

  “Does death by misadventure mean it was a mistake, kind of? Like he was playing with matches and it got out of
hand?”

  Iris nodded and went back to her work. Then she dried her hands and turned to face him. “Since you’re so morbidly interested, the boy was a known arsonist. A pyromaniac. Do you know what that is?”

  Jim nodded hesitantly. “Someone who likes fire?”

  “Someone who starts fires,” his mother said. “I like fires, in their place. This Frankie kid, he started all sorts of them in the area. Some of the old-timers could tell you. At first, I guess, it was just mischief, an outhouse or a tumbledown shed. But it got worse. He burned down a chicken shack up at Lar Perkins’ father’s place and killed twenty layers and fifty meat birds. Then he hit a small barn at Jock Boomhower’s with a couple of cows in it. That’s when he got caught. Sent off to jail.”

  “But he came back?” asked Jim.

  “Came back and burned down the house his family had lived in. Can you imagine? Of course, no one was living in it then. His family had moved. Wilf Fisher had bought the property and was using the old place to store hay.”

  “In a house?”

  “It was a very old house. A log cabin. You know the place. It’s in the low field just east of the cut road, below the Fisher mansion.”

  Jim knew the field, all right, but he couldn’t remember any house.

  “It’s just a rubble heap now,” said his mother.

  “Mostly grown over. Heavens, it must be twenty-five years ago, at least.” He saw her do the math in her head. “1972. New Year’s Eve, 1972.”

  His mother’s eyes glanced up at the clock above the kitchen table and Jim took the hint. He turned back to his homework, but his mind was buzzing. A moment later, his mother scruffled his hair as she passed him on her way upstairs.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” she said. But she turned at the parlour door. “I remember now. The family was called Tufts. Francis Tufts.”

  As soon as she was gone, Jim sat back in his chair thinking through what he had learned. Did Ruth Rose, who knew everything, know about this fire? And Francis Tufts — it wasn’t much of a stretch from that to Tuffy. But what did it have to do with her stepfather or his own father’s disappearance?