But the house was getting to be too much for them. Mom did all right keeping the indoors clean and neat, but slowly, steadily, the outside had got away from Dad. Bill had tried to convince them to sell, get an apartment closer to downtown where they’d have a fraction of their present maintenance and could walk to the harborfront. Uh-uh. They weren’t having any of that. They’d always lived here and so they would continue to live here and let’s not discuss it anymore.
He loved them dearly but they could be royal pains when it came to this house. Though in a way he couldn’t blame them. The idea of selling the old place and letting someone else live in it didn’t sit too well with him either. The house seemed like an island of stability in a world of flux and flow.
So, since last summer, a couple of times a month, Bill would devote his Sunday off to the upkeep of the three-bedroom ranch that was the Ryan family homestead. Decades at St. F.’s had turned him into a skilled handyman. And now he was almost caught up. By summer he figured he could reduce his maintenance schedule to once a month.
“I think I’ll hit the sack,” he said, pushing himself away from the table.
“But you haven’t finished your pie.”
“Full, Ma,” he said, patting his thickening waist.
He was carrying more weight than he liked. Mom didn’t seem to realize that a man his age did not need cherry pie at one in the morning.
After good-nights, he headed for the bedroom at the far end of the house—his since childhood. He was beat. Without bothering to change out of his sweats, he slipped into the creaky old bed like a tired foot into a well-worn slipper.
3
Bill awoke coughing, with stinging eyes and nose. Either he was having an allergy attack or—
Smoke! Something was burning!
Then he heard the approaching sirens.
Fire!
He jumped out of bed and turned on the lamp but it didn’t work. He pulled the flashlight he’d kept in the nightstand since he was a kid and that did work, but feebly. He stumbled through the white smoke that layered the air of his room and swirled in his wake. His bedroom door was closed. He spotted the smoke eddying in around the edges.
The house was on fire.
Bill grabbed the doorknob—hot … blistering hot—but he ignored the pain and pulled it open. The blast of heat from the hallway threw him back as a torrent of smoke and flame roared into the bedroom. He lurched for the window, yanked it open, and dove through the screen.
Cold fresh air. He gulped it. He rolled onto his back and stared at the house. Flames jetted from his bedroom window with a deafening roar, as if someone had opened the door to a blast furnace.
And then an awful thought tore through his gut and propelled him to his feet.
What about the rest of the house? What about the other end where his parents had their bedroom?
Jesus God oh please let them be all right!
He ran to his right toward the front of the house but froze when he rounded the corner.
The rest of the house was a mass of flame. It gushed from the windows and licked up the walls and climbed toward heaven through holes in the roof.
Dear God no!
Bill dashed forward to where the firemen were setting up their hoses.
“My parents! The Ryans! Did you get them out?”
A fireman turned to him, his expression grim in the flickering golden light.
“We just got here. You really think there might be someone in there?”
“If you haven’t seen an elderly couple out here, then yes, they’re definitely in there!”
The fireman glanced at the blaze, then back at Bill. His eyes said everything.
With a hoarse cry, Bill ran toward the front door. The fireman grabbed his arm but he shook him off. He had to get them out of there! As he neared the house, the heat buffeted him in waves. He’d seen blazing houses on the TV news over the years but film and videotape had never conveyed the true ferocity of a fire once it had the upper hand. He felt as if his skin was going to blister, as if his eyes were going to boil in their sockets. He crossed his arms in front of his face and pushed forward, hoping his hair didn’t burst into flame.
On the front porch he grabbed the brass door handle but winced and let go. Hot. Hotter even than his bedroom doorknob had been. Too hot to grip. And then he cursed as he realized it didn’t matter how hot it was—the door was locked.
He ran around the shrubs toward his parents’ bedroom where flames roared unchallenged from the windows. And yet from within, above the roar, he thought he heard …
… a scream.
He turned to the firemen and let out his own scream.
“In here!” He pointed to the pair of windows that opened into their bedroom. “They’re in here!”
Bill ducked as the fire fighters got the hose going and directed the fat stream directly through the window and into the bedroom.
He heard the scream again. Screams. Two voices now—wailing in agony. His father and mother were in there burning alive!
The fire fighter he had met before ran up to him and began pulling him back.
“Get away from here! You’ll get yourself killed!”
Bill fought him off. “You got to help me get them out of there!”
The fire fighter grabbed Bill’s shoulders and turned him toward the blaze.
“Take a look at that fire! Take a real good look! Nobody can be alive in there!”
“My God, don’t you hear them?”
The fireman stood still a moment, listening. Bill watched his craggy face as he took off his fire hat and cocked an ear toward the house.
He had to hear them! How could he miss those terrified, agonized cries? Each wail tore through Bill like barbed wire across an open wound.
The fireman shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, pal. There’s no one alive in there. Now come on—”
As Bill pulled free of his grasp again, the roof over the bedroom collapsed in an explosion of sparks and flaming embers. The blast of heat knocked Bill off his feet.
And that was when he knew they were gone. He felt his chest constrict around the pain. Mom … Dad … dead. They had to be. The bedroom was a crematorium now. Had been for some time. Nothing could have survived an instant in there.
He didn’t—couldn’t—resist as the fireman dragged him back to safety. He could only shout out his grief and anguished helplessness at the flames, at the night.
FIFTEEN
1
Why?
Bill stood alone beside the double grave under an obscenely bright winter sky. The unfiltered sunlight stung the healing burns on his cheeks, feebly warmed his chest and shoulders, but left his soul untouched. The cold knife of the wind sliced across the bare knolls of Tall Oaks Cemetery, ripping through the thin fabric of his black pants and jacket.
The mourners were gone; the caretakers had yet to arrive. By tradition he should have hosted a gathering at home, but his home was gone. Home was now a tumble of blackened, ice-encrusted timbers.
Why?
Bill had made all the mourners go, practically pushed them away from the graveside. He had wept his tears, had pounded his fists of rage against unyielding walls until they were bruised and swollen, now he wanted to be alone with his folks one last time before the earth was resealed over them.
How alone he felt at this moment. He realized that subconsciously he had taken it for granted that his parents would always be around. Consciously, of course, he had known that their remaining years were numbered in single digits, but he had envisioned them leaving him one at a time, taken off by natural causes. Never in his worst nightmares had he envisioned the possibility of such a … catastrophe. Their sudden departure had left a gaping hole in his life. Even the old ranch house was gone. Where was home now? He felt adrift, as if his anchor had torn loose three days ago and could no longer find purchase.
A long three days—two for the wake, then the Requiem Mass and funeral service itself this morning—f
ull of pain and the sympathy of friends and acquaintances, days in which he’d tried to leaven his grief by telling himself that his parents had led long, happy, productive lives and hadn’t had much time left anyway, and how lucky he’d been to have had them around as long as he had. But none of it worked. Whatever tempering effect that sort of reasoning might have on his almost overwhelming sense of loss was repeatedly blasted away by the insistent memory of the two blackened twisted corpses he had seen removed from the ruins of their bedroom.
Why?
How many times had he offered pat, soothing bromides to a deceased’s mourning family when they turned to him with that same question? He had always avoided perpetuating the nonsense that it was God’s will, that God was “testing” the living, trying their faith. Circumstance, the capriciousness of reality, those were what tested one’s faith. God didn’t have to stick his finger into the soup and squash somebody. Disease, injury, genetic accidents, and the forces of nature were all quite capable of ruining and ending lives without the slightest help from God.
And yet here he was, Father Ryan, asking the same question—one chagrined Father Ryan who realized that he never really had answered the question for others, and now could do no better for himself.
Chief Morgan of the Monroe Fire Company had provided some sort of an explanation, though. He had pulled Bill aside in the rear of Cahill’s Funeral Home during the wake.
“I think we found the cause, Father.”
“Was it arson?”
Bill felt a wave of rage rise in him. He’d been sure the fire had been set. He had no idea who or why, but he couldn’t believe a fire could spread so far so fast on its own.
“No. We had the arson team go over the place. No sign of an accelerant. We think it started in the wiring.”
Bill had been dumbfounded.
“You mean a short circuit could make a house burn like that?”
“Your folks built that house before the war—World War Two. It was a tinderbox. A good thing one of the neighbors called it in or you wouldn’t be standing here.”
“Electrical…?”
“Well, the wiring was as old as the house. Not made for modern appliances. Something gets overheated once too often and then…” He finished the sentence with an elaborate shrug.
But he had said more than enough to leave Bill feeling weak and sick. Even now as he turned away from the grave and began walking aimlessly, the nausea still churned in his gut. He hadn’t mentioned to Chief Morgan that not all the wiring had been old. He’d spent a couple of weekends over the winter rewiring a few of the rooms himself.
My God, did the fire start in one of my junction boxes?
But he’d done the work in January, two months ago. If he’d botched something it would have been apparent before now. The sparks had probably originated in some of the old wiring he hadn’t got around to replacing. Still, Bill was unnerved by the mere possibility that he had contributed to his parents’ horrible deaths.
He stopped and looked around. Where was he? He’d wandered away from the graveside without actually watching where he was going. He remembered walking through a stand of oaks and was now halfway up the rise on another of Tall Oaks’ grave-studded knolls. No upright tombstones at Tall Oaks; everyone got uniform flat granite markers, the implication being that no matter what you were in life, you’re all the same in death. Something about that approach appealed to Bill.
A patch of lush, dark green grass off to his left caught his eye. The grass in Tall Oaks was just beginning to come back from its winter brown, but the green of this one small spot was almost tropical.
Curious, Bill approached it, then stopped in shock. He recognized the grave before he was close enough to read the marker. It belonged to Jim Stevens.
A flood of memories swirled around him, especially of the afternoon he had stood here with Jim’s wife Carol and looked down at this same spot, only then it had been dead grass surrounded by living. The grass over the grave today was so green, so perfectly rectangular, almost as if …
Bill squatted and ran his hands over the emerald blades. Despite the setting, despite the horror and misery of the last three days, he had to smile.
Plastic.
He dug a finger under the edge and lifted. The plastic sod came up, revealing a patch of cold, brown, denuded earth beneath. His smile faded as he realized that even decades later the gardeners at Tall Oaks had been unable to make anything grow over Jim’s grave. He glanced up at the flat granite-and-brass marker.
“What’s the story, Jim?” he said aloud. “What’s going on here?”
No reply, of course, but he felt his heart give a sudden twist as he noticed the dates on Jim’s marker:
JANUARY 6, 1942 – MARCH 10, 1968
March 10 …
Today was March 13—his parents had burned to death three days ago … in the early hours of March 10.
Suddenly the wind through Tall Oaks seemed to blow colder, the sunlight seemed to fade. Bill dropped the corner of the plastic turf and rose to his feet.
As he walked down the slope his mind whirled. What was going on here? Jim Stevens, his best friend, had died violently, horribly on March 10. And now his parents had died just as horribly on the same day.
Coincidence? Of course. But he could not escape the feeling that there was some sort of message there, some sort of warning.
But of what?
He shook off the thought. Superstitious garbage.
He returned to his parents’ grave, said a final prayer over their coffins, then headed toward his car.
2
The boys of St. F.’s were all waiting for him when he returned, swarming like bees around the hive of his office door. He’d been back only once for a few moments since the fire, like a thief in the night, long enough to grab a few changes of clothes before rushing back to Long Island. Father Lesko was letting him bunk in Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow’s rectory for the duration of the wake and funeral. But he was certain the kids all knew what had happened. Especially since so many of them seemed to be having trouble meeting his gaze this morning when he said hello to each of them by name.
What kind of talk had run through these halls last Sunday? He could almost hear it: Hey! Didja hear? Father Bill’s folks got burnt up in a fire last night!… No way!… Yeah! Burnt to a crisp!… Is he comin’ back?… Who knows?
Bill knew.
He would always come back. And he would keep coming back until they closed this place down. No personal loss, no matter how great, would keep him from fulfilling that vow.
Only a few of the boys were smiling. Weren’t they glad to see him?
As he stuck the key into the lock on his office door, Marty Sesta stepped forward from the group. He was one of the oldest boys at St. F.’s, and the biggest. He tended to throw his weight around but he was basically a good kid.
“Here, Father,” he said, his brown eyes averted as he thrust a legal-size envelope at Bill. “Dis is from us.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Bill said, taking the envelope.
“Alla us.”
Bill opened the envelope. Inside was a piece of drawing paper, quarter folded. Someone had drawn a sun behind a cloud. Below was a flat green line with some tulip-like flowers sprouting from it. Block-printed words hung in the air: We are sorry about your Mom and Dad, Father Bill.
“Thank you, boys,” Bill managed to say past a steadily constricting throat. He was touched. “This means a lot. I’ll … see you all later, okay?”
They nodded and waved and took off, leaving Bill alone to ponder the incomprehensible wonders of children and what they could wring from a single piece of paper and some crayons. He’d expected a little sympathy from some of them, but never this kind of united display. He was deeply moved.
“Are you sad?” said a familiar small voice.
Bill looked up and saw blond hair and blue eyes. Danny Gordon was standing in his office doorway.
“Hi, Danny. Yes, I’m sad. Very sad.”<
br />
“Can I sit with you?”
“Sure.”
Bill dropped into the chair and let Danny hop up onto his lap. And suddenly the dark winter chill that had enshrouded his soul since Sunday morning melted away. The drifting sensation faded. The gaping emptiness within began to fill.
“Are your mommy and daddy in heaven?”
“Yes. I’m sure they are.”
“And they won’t be coming back?”
“No, Danny. They’re gone for good.”
“That means you’re just like us.”
And then it was all clear to him. The touching drawing, the sympathy from the kids. They’d been longtime citizens of the country to which he’d just emigrated. They were welcoming him to a land where no one wanted to be.
“That’s right,” he said softly. “We’re all orphans now, aren’t we.”
As Danny jumped off his lap, unable to confine himself to one location a second longer, Bill felt a sudden oneness with the boy, with all the boys who had passed through the doors of St. F.’s during his tenure. Not mere empathy, more like a merging of souls. The drifting sensation dissipated as his anchor found purchase again.
But he wasn’t entirely without family. He knew that although he was indeed an orphan like the other residents of St. F.’s, he still had the Society of Jesus. Being a Jesuit was like belonging to a family of sorts. The Society was a close-knit brotherhood. Whenever he needed them he knew his brother Jesuits would be there for him. In fact, as a priest, there was no reason why he shouldn’t consider the whole Church as one huge, extended spiritual family. And in that great body of relatives, the residents of the St. Francis Home for Boys could be looked upon as his immediate family.
True, he had lost his parents, but he never would be truly alone as long as he had the Church, the Jesuits, and the boys of St. F.’s. He would always have a home, he’d always belong.
And that was a good feeling.
Bill put the horrors of that night behind him by throwing himself back into the daily routine of running one of New York City’s last surviving Catholic orphanages. He felt he’d already faced and survived the worst that life could offer. What else was left to go wrong? Whatever could go sour had already done so—in spades. Things would be looking up from now on.
Reprisal Page 16
