The Boy in the Burning House

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  Nothing. It was ancient history. And he would probably end up as cracked as she was if he started thinking that way.

  Snoot suddenly jumped onto his lap and Jim cried out in astonishment, which frightened the kitten who jumped right off, taking some flesh from his leg with her. Her sharp little claws had gone right through his jeans. He rubbed his thigh and settled back to work.

  His mother kissed him goodbye on the way out, went over for the hundredth time the business about locking the doors and checking the woodstove and which lights to leave on.

  “I know, I know,” he said, submitting to a second and third bone-crushing hug.

  “Hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast?” she asked. Jim looked appropriately blissful. The Sunflower Bakery was just firing up when she got off work, and sometimes she would stop by on her way home. She came home stinking like soap. “I’m going to have to rub myself down with a fish,” she had said once. But, no matter how tired she was, she would walk out to the road with him every morning and wait for the school bus.

  Jim watched her drive off in the truck, locking up as soon as she was gone. Then he went into the sitting room.

  The family photos lay loose in an old, carved wooden box with a hinged lid. It was called a monk’s bench and the carvings on the front were kind of churchy with monks praying. His mother wasn’t sure if it had ever really belonged to a monk, but it was supposed to be where one would keep his stuff. Now it was filled with photos and the odd Christmas card, yellowing newspaper clippings.

  After a few minutes, Jim stopped rifling through the stuff in a random kind of way and took out a huge armful. Sitting cross-legged on the rag carpet, he started a more thorough search.

  Here were his father and mother when they were young, dressed up for some formal, standing beside the Malibu. Here was Jim with Hub at the curling club’s annual father-and-son bonspiel. Here was his father pretending to saw Jim’s bike in half with a chainsaw. Jim laughed.

  He got out a second and a third armful, sorting the older pictures into a separate pile and then studying them carefully.

  Finally, he hit pay dirt. A black-and-white snapshot of three boys in T-shirts sitting on the front stoop of an old log cabin squinting into the light. On the back someone had written: “The Three Musketeers.” And under it: “Frankie,’Fish’ and little Hub.”

  Little Hub Hawkins was in shorts. His bare feet didn’t even reach the ground. He looked about twelve. Fish was a teenager, a senior by the size of him. He was leaning against the stoop with his chest puffed out and his arms crossed like Mr. Clean. Frankie was pointing at him and laughing. Frankie was older than Hub and younger than Fish and kind of gawky looking. His hair looked white in the photo — the colour of sunlight on a window. Fish’s hair was black, longish with wide sideburns, like pictures Jim had seen from the sixties. Father Fisher’s hair was the same colour now, though not so long.

  That was when the phone rang.

  Jim nearly jumped out of his skin. He got up awkwardly, his legs filled with pins and needles. He hobbled into the kitchen to the wall phone above the table. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was almost midnight.

  Who would be phoning so late? The phone rang again, too loud in the silent house.

  Dad.

  The thought made his knees buckle.

  He’s phoning to tell us where he is, why he left so suddenly, why he didn’t even say goodbye.

  On the eleventh ring, it suddenly occurred to Jim that it might be the factory to say his mother had been injured. That broke the spell. He snapped up the phone and spoke into the receiver breathlessly, as if he had run a mile.

  “Hello?”

  The voice at the other end of the phone whispered, “Did you talk to him? Did you tell him anything?”

  Jim didn’t speak. He guessed who it was, but he was too stunned to say a word.

  “What’s the matter? Is there someone there?”

  Jim didn’t answer.

  “Say’you’ve got the wrong number’ if there’s somebody there and I’ll get back to you some other time.”

  Jim swallowed and took a deep breath. “You’re scaring me,” he said, sounding like a six-year-old.

  Now it was her turn to go silent, and in the silence Jim heard a man’s voice. The voice said, “Ruth Rose?” Then there was nothing but a sharp click and a dial tone.

  5

  Jim was tired all the next day but after school he dropped off his backpack at home, changed into his grubby clothes and set off for the beaver dam, bent on recovering the shovel he had left behind and undoing whatever the beavers might have gotten up to overnight.

  Ruth Rose beat him to it. He could hear her singing to herself good and loud.

  There was nothing to stop him from heading back home. But as he stood listening he realized she was straining at something as she sang. So he made his way soundlessly through the sopping wet grass until he caught sight of her.

  She was hacking away at the dam, the same cavity he had worked at the day before. But she wasn’t using his shovel. It was leaning against a tree along with Gladys. She was using a pickaxe, and she wasn’t squeamish about it, either.

  She swung it high above her head and brought it down into the guck up to its hilt. She had muscle, all right. She hauled at the axe and brought up a great gob of putrefied vegetation. The water spilled into the crevice and on through the busted dam but not with much force. By now, it was good and low.

  She stopped singing. Without looking back, she said in a good clear voice, “You might as well come out. You’re not going to catch me giving Gladys a soaker.”

  Jim blushed. He stood up tall, stepped out into the open and made his way towards her. Her red T-shirt was stained with sweat and splatters of mud. He looked out across the flats where the water had been so high just the day before.

  “You did a good job,” he managed to say.

  She scrinched up her nose, rubbed it, looking a little flustered, as if she wasn’t used to compliments. “The beavers didn’t do any building last night, as far as I could tell. I guess Gladys deserves some of the credit.”

  Jim laughed nervously.

  Ruth Rose came down off the dam and made her way towards him with her pickaxe over her shoulder like one of the seven dwarfs, but which one? Grumpy? Dopey? Crazy?

  “Did you carry that all the way from town?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “There was a work crew on the tracks. They gave me a lift.” He wondered, from the hesitant way she said it, whether maybe she had stolen the pickaxe.

  She put it down and went to get Gladys, planting her in the spot at the mouth of the breach where Jim had placed her the day before. She made Gladys wave to him. Jim gulped. Waved back.

  “Care to give her another dousing?” Ruth Rose said. “I won’t peek this time, promise.”

  Jim turned red.

  “It’s your call,” she said.

  There was something altogether different about her manner today. She joined him again and they walked up the lane a bit, found a dry log and sat down.

  “I’m on my medication,” she said, as if she had been reading his mind. “Bummer, eh? Just when it looks like I’m a human being after all, it turns out I’m a real nut-case who has to be drugged.”

  He looked at her and there was a glassy look in her eyes.

  She looked down, picked up a small branch, broke it twig by twig.

  “This isn’t the real me,” she said. “But the thing is, the fiend you met yesterday wasn’t the real me, either. I’m a mess, okay? I hate the drugs, but if I don’t take them like a good girl…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “I didn’t talk to Father yesterday,” said Jim. “Honest.” He told her about the pastor being at the house when he got back. “Did you get in trouble?”

  She smiled a kind of loopy smile. “I’m always in trouble.”

  Jim looked sideways at her. “Does he hit you?”

  Then she really laughed. �
�It’s much worse than that. You know what he does when I’m being recalcitrant, as he puts it?” Ruth Rose leaned up close. “He prays for me.”

  She seemed to enjoy the surprise on his face. “He just drops to his knees, right there — wherever it is — and folds his hands in front of his face and he starts in praying for my recalcitrant soul. That’s what he did last night. Once he did it in the middle of a supermart. In the canned vegetable aisle.”

  Jim shook his head in astonishment, “That must be awful.”

  She nodded and was silent. “He prays all the time.” Then she smirked. “Like a hawk.”

  The sky was plugged up with clouds, the temperature was dropping. Jim noticed that now that she wasn’t working anymore, Ruth Rose was shivering, her narrow shoulders up high, her shoulder blades sticking out like wings.

  “I’ll get your jacket,” he said.

  Her black leather jacket was hanging from a poplar bough. Something on the lapel glittered with reflected light. A mirror the size of a campaign button. She had been watching for him.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. The pimple on his nose said he was fourteen. The bewilderment in his eyes said he was going on four.

  “Don’t you go to school?” he asked, when he got back.

  She shook her head. “I’m home-schooled.”

  Poor Nancy, thought Jim.

  “Before the accident, Mom taught public school. We work all morning and then I have the afternoon off. I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “Didn’t say you were,” said Jim.

  “I know you didn’t,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You were thinking what kind of dumb chick spends her spare time snooping around trying to prove her stepfather is a murderer.”

  Jim looked at her. “Actually, I was thinking what kind of a maniac goes around doing that.”

  She smiled in a maniac kind of way. Then she thrust her hands into her jacket pockets and dug out two slightly battered Hershey bars. She offered one to Jim.

  “I owe you this for yesterday,” she said. “I didn’t know how to talk to you.”

  “That,” said Jim, taking the candy, “is the biggest understatement of the year.”

  “It’s just that there didn’t seem an easy way to start. You know, it’s a pretty tough thing to try to tell someone. So I kind of used the Ruth Rose Way.”

  “You mean roll over somebody like a freight train?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I was thinking more of the track than the train. The Ruth Rose Way goes straight to where it’s going, cuts through people’s yards instead of going around, cuts across roads wherever it wants. Cars stop. People stay clear.”

  Jim wasn’t sure what to say. “Well, thanks for helping with the dam.”

  She bit off a mouthful of chocolate. “Hey, I’m asking you for help so I figure I should return the favour.”

  The chocolate in Jim’s mouth tasted unpalatable all of a sudden. He had been enjoying sitting on a log sharing some candy with her, like ordinary kids. But nothing about Ruth Rose was ordinary.

  “Did you find out anything?” she asked.

  Jim swallowed and wrapped up the rest of the bar.

  He started to hand it back to her but a flicker in her eyes stopped him.

  Everything was quiet for a moment. Then he told her about the photograph of the Three Musketeers, about Frankie, the boy with the white hair. Francis Tufts.

  Her eyes lit up. “Tuffy!” she said. Jim shrugged, but he was proud of himself nonetheless.

  “Could be,” he said. Then he told her about Francis dying in the log house on New Year’s Eve of 1972.

  “Holy cow,” she said. He watched her try to incorporate his news into her plot.

  “I didn’t find out anything about the others,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You will. I know it.”

  Jim took no pleasure from her encouragement. “It’s all ancient history. I don’t know how it’s supposed to help.”

  “I don’t know how, either,” she replied. “But I know why. Because a life might depend on it. Mine.”

  Jim looked away. He wanted out and yet there was something holding him captive.

  “You really think he’d do anything to you?”

  She looked at him with surprise. “Unless I do something first,” she said. “He’s known for awhile that I was on to him. Now he acts as if maybe I’m getting too close for comfort.”

  Jim fought off a minor panic attack. “Don’t get mad,” he said as calmly as he could. “But why do you hate him? Because he prays for you?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain it,” she said. “I hated him from the start. Hated him for marrying my mother. The doctors tell me that’s pretty natural. A lot of kids hate their steps, at first. But it’s more than that.”

  She paused, staring off across the wet lowlands to the meadow beyond, where a wind they could not feel down in the hollow was bending the heads of the tall grass.

  “When he prays, he always starts out by saying how he himself is a sinner, a great sinner. I know, I know, we’re all sinners. That’s how the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration stays in business. But when Father Fisher says it, man, he sounds like he means it. I can feel it in here.” She pounded her fist against her breast bone. “Which is why I started watching him. Eavesdropping. Which is why I know what happened.”

  She glanced nervously at Jim, afraid he was going to run away on her.

  But Jim stood his ground. There was this bully at school,” he said. “I hated him. He beat me up a couple of times. I hated everything he did. If he was eating a candy bar, I thought, what a greedy pig. If he scored a touchdown, I thought, what a show-off. One day I saw him helping an old lady across a street and I thought, he’s probably going to steal her purse.”

  “Did he?”

  “No,” said Jim. “That’s the point. He wasn’t so bad, except for being a pain in the butt. It was only because I hated him I figured everything he did was bad.”

  Ruth Rose frowned, looked down again so that her hair hid her face. She folded up her chocolate bar and put it in her pocket. Then she got up and, without a backward glance at Jim, left.

  It took Jim a moment to recover. “Hey,” he yelled. “What did I say?”

  She stopped, but she didn’t turn around. “Forget it.”

  “Ruth Rose,” he shouted, surprised at how snappish it sounded, as if he was yelling at Snoot to get off the table.

  Then she turned around. “Listen, if you can’t take this seriously—”

  “I do,” Jim interrupted.

  “We’re not talking here about a schoolyard bully.”

  “I was just—”

  “You were just telling me a story,” she said. “Like this is the Brady Bunch or something.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” said Jim. “I want to know what happened.”

  She came closer, stared at him and, despite the medication, it seemed to Jim as if she were looking right inside him.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You’re too afraid.

  Then she started to walk away again, towards the woods.

  He couldn’t let her go just like that. Letting go was a problem he had.

  “I am not afraid!” he shouted.

  “You aren’t ready,” she shouted back.

  “Ready for what?”

  “You don’t want to face the fact that your daddy is dead. D-E-A-D.”

  Jim felt like he was teetering, suddenly. On the edge of a rushing stream and not sure whether to jump or go looking for a bridge. Not sure he could clear it, not sure he wouldn’t drown if he fell in. Ruth Rose was on the other side of that stream and she wasn’t the kind of guide he would have wished to lead him anywhere. But what was there anymore on this side of the stream?

  He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Leapt.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Please.”

  She turned and walked back towards him. When she was close enough, she looked him in
the eye long and hard. He didn’t flinch.

  “Your dad saw Father a bunch of times right before he disappeared.”

  “I know,” said Jim. “On account of his nerves. Father came out to the farm. They went on these long walks.”

  “And your dad came to our house, too. Father didn’t like him coming over. He always took him to the church where they could talk in private. The last time was September twenty-fifth.”

  The twenty-fifth was the day before Jim’s father went missing. He nodded for her to go on.

  “They had a big argument. Something about a letter and what they were going to do about it. It wasn’t the first letter, either, but it was the worst, as far as I could tell. Your dad was real upset. Father kept trying to cool him down.”

  “I thought you said they met at the church?”

  “They did,” said Ruth Rose. “I followed them there. There was no one around so they could talk more freely without Father having to shush your dad up all the time.”

  “So what did they say?” demanded Jim.

  “I told you. They were talking about this letter. Your dad mentioned Tuffy. Father told him not to talk about Tuffy. Not ever.”

  She paused. “I couldn’t hear much. The sacristy door is solid oak. I heard bits and pieces of stuff.’She’s got nothing to go on,’ Father said more than once. I think they were talking about someone called Laverne. I heard your dad saying,’I’ve suffered long enough.’ Then I heard Father say this: ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’ Those were his exact words. ‘Tomorrow’s a good day.’”

  Jim swallowed hard.

  “And the thing is,” said Ruth Rose, “the next day Father wasn’t around. He wasn’t at the church. I checked. And where was your mother, Jim? She was at the church, decorating it with the altar guild for the Harvest Festival. You think Father didn’t know she was going to be away from the farm all day?”

  Jim’s chin twitched. “Why didn’t you say something then?” he asked. “I mean at the inquest.”

  “Me?” she said. “Who’d believe me? Anyway, I didn’t have any proof. So I decided to get some. I figured the letters had to be blackmail. I figured, since I couldn’t find them around our place, they were probably hidden in the sacristy somewhere. So one night, I broke in.”