“It—it can’t be smoke, can it?” she asked then, in a voice so uncertain—unlike her—that it cut, finally, through the spell they lived under, and everyone looked suddenly and saw an orange flame licking out of the woods.
“Fire,” Theresa said—with shocked certainty as if she had always expected such a thing.
It was a drought year: the dry trees flamed over like torches one by one, passing the fire up the hill.
“Fire,” Katherine whispered, with a quiet thrill.
“It’s not a show,” Steve said curtly, dialing 911.
“We ought to get out of here,” Katherine said a minute later, though she was still entranced by the flames and didn’t move. She was right, Steve saw. If the wind shifted it would come right at them … and he took the boys by their hands while Theresa grabbed Stella up in her arms.
“We’re together, that’s all that matters,” he said as they drove away down the hill. He felt a strange lightness, a spring of hope … the past would burn away now, it would finally, really, be over, and hardship would bind them together so they could take strength from each other again.
“We’re safe,” Theresa corrected him. Later she would say they’d never been together, that he’d kept in his own bubble and imagined a happy family life because he couldn’t have made one for real. He pulled over and the fire trucks roared by, shifting gears for the hillcrest with a low growl that made Stella shriek as if they would eat her. The others knelt in the backseat, looking out the window. It smelled so good, of autumn and burning leaves.
Next day the smoke still curled up from the charred tree trunks and the stone fences stood out again on the hillside. The stone walls of the house looked more massive with the roof burned away. The devastation seemed fitting—it suited Steve’s sense that everything ends in dust, and he felt strangely lighthearted, because what really mattered, if so? “It’ll be good blueberrying,” he said, and saw his wife smile, tenderly, one last time. A relief to her, too—nothing to pack, nothing to fight over. The insurance renewal had been on his desk, among the other things he couldn’t bear to attend to. He heard a catch of sympathy in the Aetna woman’s voice, when she said, “That policy has lapsed…” as if it hurt her, too.
* * *
He awoke on his fiftieth birthday in his childhood bed, with the fresh scent of the sea blowing in. Fifty—he had feared—and expected—an early death, had never imagined himself living so long. Where his father’s footsteps had ended, so, he was sure, must his. It was ten years since he’d seen Theresa. He’d returned to his mother’s—he’d promised to care for her; though at seventy-five she was stubborn and vigorous, and the best he could do for her was to pretend she was taking care of him.
“Good morning, sweetie!” she said. She’d been to the bakery already, there were warm brioche and soft butter, and FedEx rang the doorbell and left two packages—a book on the life of the Amazon rain forest from conscientious Stella—he would add it to the high pile by his bed—and a nautical chart of the Narrows, from Stephen the third. This was how it had turned out; they knew him by his minor obsessions, the places his father still lived in his mind. He needed to keep his hand set on these things or he’d have floated away into space. To awake from the anesthetic of memory was intolerable; in the evenings, when the day had worn through it, he drank until it seemed to return.
“How nice, Mom. Thank you,” he said, sitting down with the Times.
“This came yesterday,” she said, indicating a small package in brown paper, with Katherine’s return address.
“I remembered you liked chemistry,” the card read. A book called The Periodic Table. Yes, it was all memory. Katherine would call later, and put the grandkids on the phone; she never said anything of substance and somehow he was afraid to ask a question for fear of putting a foot wrong and losing what little he had of her. He set the book aside with a small laugh, or sigh—it was years since the periodic table had meant anything to him.
It was only then that he remembered the phosphorus, the test tube he’d hidden in the woods. The winter, the freezing and melting, would have cracked it, the dry leaves sifted over, and one warm day …
They’d never known what caused the fire. A hunter, careless with a cigarette? A broken bottle magnifying the sunlight on the leaves? No, he’d set it himself. He was the danger. Unwitting, of course, always unwitting. To see, to know, was more than he could bear.
“Schuler’s has fallen off,” his mother said. “Carl doesn’t do the baking anymore.”
Stephen looked out over the tangle that had once been the garden, where the butterfly bushes struggled now for lack of sun. The laboratory roof had collapsed under a snarl of bittersweet and Virginia creeper. The world he’d been born into—where explosive chemicals were sold from glass pharmaceutical jars, exotic animals sent between continents in crates—that world with all its possibilities was gone. The mercury was here, in his mother’s basement, with the few other possessions left after the fire. Stephen kept meaning to take it in on hazardous waste disposal days, but month after month some inconvenience prevented him.
“You can tell by the texture, they use a machine,” his mother said. Her voice went on, and on, and on. If only his father could have had her longevity! It seemed to Stephen there was only one precious thing left on earth: that teaspoon of quicksilver. He had seen himself in the bathroom mirror that morning—the big, lost eyes of a child in a weary face, and likely to live another thirty years.
Out of Purmort
“Now, His Honor is a very short man,” the bailiff said, holding his hand out hip-high, which, even given that the bailiff was a very tall man (and he stood with his feet apart, thumbs at the belt, looking out over us jurors with … well, discomfort, as if he wanted to apologize for the lack of judicial stature) would have meant the judge was at best a dwarf. I glanced around, but no one else seemed to find this declaration unusual—the rest of the jury pool was listening earnestly and several people appeared to be taking notes. Not wanting to be conspicuous, I opened my notebook and wrote short at the top of the first page. I’d never been on a jury, but I’m an excellent schoolgirl.
“And he speaks very softly.…,” the bailiff continued, with me hurriedly copying. “He doesn’t speak from his diaphragm, but from his throat, so it can be hard to hear him. If you have trouble, please don’t hesitate to raise your hand. Are there any questions?”
“Any impotence?” I imagined asking, but supposed the matter had been addressed. I wondered if we could hear his quirks—which offenses he found particularly loathsome, which he might condone. I’d have been soft on kids, I knew—my high school boyfriend asked his father for money one morning and, being told to “rob a bank,” obediently went across the street to brandish a pistol in Purmort Savings and Loan. He got three years and when he was released he came straight to my college dorm room and found me in bed with Madame Bovary. We looked at each other across a horrible chasm, me trying frantically to locate the well of tenderness I’d used to feel for him, he squinting in an effort to see the girl he’d known (jeans dragging, head hung) through the new veneer. By the time I collected myself and offered him a glass of the sherry I’d taken to keeping on my dressertop, he was backing out the door, and the next time I saw him he was pumping gas at Purmort Texaco. I started using the Shell station when I was home. I couldn’t bear to think of the little flicks of fate that had sent my life up while his went down, and I had a foreboding that if his hand so much as brushed mine, I’d lose my footing and slip back into Purmort forever.
“Please rise,” said the bailiff (from his diaphragm), and we did, eyes trained on the door to the judge’s chambers, at about the height of its knob.
He emerged to disappoint us—slight, yes, and fair, engulfed in his robes, but not the white mouse I’d begun to look forward to, though he did show a mouselike curiosity, eyes lighting quickly on each of us, thoughts ticking until he nodded in minor satisfaction and began:
“Jury, you have b
een called here to do one of the most deeply serious things that will ever be asked of you.” His voice did lack resonance, but this suited the modern courtroom with its metal desks and polyester satin flag. I’d gone to the state courthouse first by mistake, and climbing the steps between the great columns there had the sense that American justice would protect me absolutely, for all my days. As I was ducking in under one of the velvet ropes though, a constable came out and directed me to the county court across the way: a box covered in steel links, like those vests made of beer-can pop-tops in the seventies.
Here I passed through the metal detector and joined the ranks, who—attorneys and defendants both—looked as if life had pressed down on them until they were slightly misshapen. Their mouths were crumpled, their eyes half closed, and every one of them was smoking with rapt concentration. The whole town of Purmort smoked like that when I was a kid; most of them still do. My mother is a virtual chimney, and after she visits us, my husband pointedly washes the curtains and beats the rugs. “We came to Cape Cod for the air!” he says, but really I think he’s afraid our lives will be tainted by some nebulous, ineradicable Purmort stain. He’s thoughtful and deliberate and he can’t imagine the tempest that rages constantly in some people, abating only for that one sacred moment when the lungs are wholly, deeply, filled with nicotine.
I’ve given up smoking, needless to say, and I sat, like the other jurors, poker-faced and looking neither right nor left, as if fearing squalor by association.
“You—people of all cultures and experiences, each of whom will see the defendant through different eyes—are the backbone of the American system of justice,” the judge said, “and flawed though this system may be, it’s still the greatest in the world.” His tone was tender, dignified, and very slightly patronizing, and I felt tears pricking, a great swelling in my breast, as if by sitting on this jury I was at long last being given the chance to come to the aid of my country as I’d wanted to do since third grade. The notion that we random souls might be able to balance the scales of justice together seemed so cheerfully quixotic that I was proud to be a member of the society that had dreamed it up.
“We have ten cases on the docket, and by noon most of them will be resolved, because you are in this building. Defendants are searching their souls … wondering if they really believe a jury of people like themselves will agree that they are not guilty.…”
Might there be people like oneself? In my experience, no. Sent to wait in the jury room, the thirty of us sat wedged together with nothing in common but the deep inhibition that prevented us from speaking or even shifting in our seats. The others looked numbingly ordinary: secretaries locked into tiny, windowless lives whose furniture they daily rearranged; businessmen plodding through like dray horses; a guy in canvas coveralls and a woman whose sweater had two fuzzy cats knitted in. I forget that everyone lives as the hero of his own drama, and I’m vain of my life, the way hardship has formed me; in the bottom of my mind I’m always thinking how the scramble out of Purmort made me tougher and smarter than everyone else. My mother’s a bartender—she named me Brandy, I think in hopes I’d appeal to a wealthy man. She didn’t realize she was marking me as a raggie from the valley, who was supposed to get drunk, knocked up, onto AFDC, and no more. Instead I became a dogged student, or really a wolfish student—I’d have torn out the throats of my competitors before I let them get the better of me, and no surprise, I was high school valedictorian, got a regents scholarship, got away.
Only to find, at Vassar, that my “sleazy life,” as my roommate dreamily called it, had slicked me over with the exact glamour the others aspired to. They were shedding their bourgeois manners as quickly as they could, and I can always make something of other people’s castoffs. Pretty soon I had the aspect of a Vassar girl while they looked at risk for head lice, and now people think I’m “well brought up”—it’s a riot. Not that I’ve succeeded by Seven Sister standards: I’m director of the Department of Tourism in Spinnaker, Massachusetts, in charge of making a dead fishing village seem like a wonderful, exciting place. My envious roommate is Moscow correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution. But for a person named Brandy, Director is a heady title, and my husband is the high school principal. I drive a Volvo. We live on Main Street. Our daughter is named Victoria.
Squeezed between an old man whose suit smelled of mothballs and the guy in coveralls, I pushed my elbows out and laid my work on the table. It was my report on the Pilgrim Festival, at which the mayor, having coined the town’s new motto (“They Landed Here First!”—the Mayflower ran aground briefly at Spinnaker on its way to Plymouth) and coordinated the celebrations including the fireworks and the parade of direct descendants, suffered a last-minute change of heart after listening to some Native American protesters and changed his speech to compare the Pilgrims’ landing with the Nazi march on Poland. I was supposed to put a positive spin on this, and an air of suspense built in the room as I racked my mind, to be released with a sigh every time my pencil hit the page. I was working while they sat avoiding one another’s eyes, and out of such things an authority can grow. When we were called back to the courtroom, I automatically led them, and they sat when I sat, waited for me to rise before they stood to greet the little judge with his flying robes.
There was one case left, a DWI, for which a jury of six persons was needed; everyone else would be allowed to leave.
“Now if there is any reason,” the judge said, “that you feel you may not be an impartial juror—if you or anyone you care for has been involved in a motor vehicle accident which may have involved alcohol, and certainly if you are a member of Mothers against Drunk Driving, or Students against Drunk Driving—any of these organizations—please see me and you will be excused.”
Nearly everyone in the room stood up: the woman whose face was puffy as if she’d cried all night, the environmentally conscious man in corduroy and a beard, the lady with the kitty cat sweater, and the beauty whose hair fell so softly at her shoulders that she’d become an object of contemplation—so her departure caused a kind of awakening as we all looked around for something else to rest our eyes on. Finally six of us were left: the drunks, I supposed, myself the only woman.
“Juror number thirty-two, you will act as foreman. This does not mean you are more important than the other jurors, but that you have additional responsibilities.…”
I wasn’t fooled—they thought he was better than me, or they’d have put me in charge. No one will trust real responsibility to a person named for an alcoholic beverage. I’d have been a great foreman—by the time I was sixteen my eye was so steady that when my stepbrother threatened to stab me, I just held his gaze unwavering until he dropped the knife. Juror thirty-two looked so utterly flaccid I could hardly imagine anyone pulling a knife on him in the first place. He also looked extremely uncomfortable, and as he went up to take his tally sheet from the judge he kept one hand on his windbreaker pocket like he had something hidden there.
* * *
“Jury,” the judge said in his patient, paternal way. “Today you and you alone will decide the guilt or innocence of one of your fellow men…”
And here she came, our fellow man: one Dawn LaRue, blowsy, fortyish, wearing jeans and a jacket that wouldn’t quite close across her bosom, her hair pinned up hastily as if dishevelment was her natural state and she’d worried that a quick comb might make her seem false and suspicious. She looked worn out, not so much by life as by love: you could guess that her heart went out everywhere, she’d take in stray animals and men, that she was always a little hurt and full of wistful hopes and ready to have a good time while she waited for those hopes to come true. That is, she was the kind of person I’d have become, in a very slightly different world, and therefore almost certainly guilty of whatever she’d been accused of—and much, much more. I imagined bumping into her in the ladies’ room and telling her she looked beautiful, so she wouldn’t feel so bad when she got convicted.
The prosecutor, a skinn
y woman with lips pressed tight together in case something might try to crawl in between them, laid out the case with righteous disdain: Ms. LaRue had been discovered in the driver’s seat of her boyfriend’s car, parked half in the road at 1:30 A.M., with traffic (and what traffic—the bars close at one) snarled behind it, while she performed an operation described by her own lawyer as removing lint from between her toes. When the cop asked her to recite the alphabet, she gave up a hash of letters and then retrieved her sandals from the pile of empty Budweiser bottles in the hatchback—
—and walked what she insisted was a straight line, though the cop fiercely disagreed, which led to a long and unresolved debate about the reliability of those machines that paint lines on the road. Told to touch her right forefinger to her nose, Ms. LaRue instantly complied—with her left, and at this point her boyfriend, who was either obnoxious (cop’s testimony) or boisterous (boyfriend’s testimony), began either bellowing, or merely singing, an alternative version of La Marseillaise. Both Dawn and the boyfriend were taken in to the station to be booked, including mug shots, which—
“Objection, Your Honor. Exhibit A would be prejudicial to the defendant.” Dawn’s attorney jumped up and approached the bench, followed by the prosecutor, between whose toes no lint could ever have accumulated. She whispered vigorously to the judge, who patted his robe for his reading glasses, withdrew the photograph from a manila envelope, and, with a dry glance at the defendant, said he would sustain the objection.
Wounded, the prosecutor began her cross examination: “So, Ms. LaRue, you spent the afternoon at this barbecue…”
“At my daughter’s place.”
“And your daughter’s place is … number 28 Forsythia Lane, in the Pilgrim Spring Trailer Colony?” She cast a significant glance toward the jury, as if the address alone were reason to convict. The police blotter would pretty much have confirmed this, which only inflamed me: I thought of barbecues back in Purmort, the way they, like everything there, had to do with our pride in our own hardihood and ingenuity, our ability to make a good time out of nearly nothing. Bluefish, burgers, tomatoes from the garden, a pitcher of Ma’s special Bloody Marys … what else did you need? In Purmort you were always thinking about the things you didn’t need. What you never thought about was the future—age, illness, hard poverty. It just hung over you, a vague dread to be answered with a shrug. You might win the lottery; you might die tomorrow.…
Darling? Page 17
