When Oliver walked in, Sam was standing at the large window of the viewing room, looking out over the river.
“Where is everyone?” he asked. “It’s almost four o’clock.”
“Not here yet,” Sam said, sitting at the long table, spreading out the sheets of plans for the next show.
Oliver took the copy of Currents and settled into the couch to read the parts about himself again. He liked the article. He liked in particular what the reporter said about him, and it pleased him to have special recognition, since Plum & Jaggers was mainly Sam.
“Oliver McWilliams is Mr. Normal in this clan,” the reporter had written. “He’s Anarchy, the talking dog, loyal, stubborn, brave, a little stupid. Or himself, a boy whose character is marked by the kind of repeated tediousness and energetic spurts familiar in a fourteen-year-old. Like the fool, or child, he can be counted on to tell the essential truths. And as Anarchy, he never shuts up, compensating for Sam’s silence. ‘Strong and gentle,’ his sister Charlotte says of him.”
In the photograph of Oliver—each of them had an individual black-and-white shot—he is leaning against a pillar of the lodge with a dog, a large, black, Lablike dog, a mutt belonging to the photographer, who insisted that Oliver was the sort of man to have a dog, especially a large one.
“Do you like what they say about you?” Oliver asked.
“They didn’t say much,” Sam said. “I like that.”
“They describe you as handsome.”
Sam laughed.
“And difficult.”
“I expected that,” Sam said.
“I suppose the reporter thinks that your career as a juvenile delinquent makes you more exciting than the rest of us.”
“It wasn’t exactly a career,” Sam said. He checked his watch. “It’s after four. They’re late.”
Sometimes Noli’s mind tripped, but she’d usually catch herself before she fell. It happened as Charlotte and Julia were walking with her in the late afternoon, early dusk, the wind picking up behind them.
“Some people in Grand Rapids go to Florida in the winter because it’s too gloomy and cold to stay in Michigan,” Noli was saying, walking between her granddaughters, her arms slipped under theirs for warmth.
“I don’t like the gloom, but the cold here isn’t too bad, so I’m staying,” she said.
“Staying where?” Julia asked.
“In Grand Rapids,” Noli said.
“But we’re not in Grand Rapids, Noli.” Charlotte took the path that led to the cottage where Noli and William stayed.
“Why did we leave?” she asked.
“Because of Sam,” Julia said. “Isn’t that why we left?”
Noli stopped on the path, letting her thoughts shake into place, and then, hoping to conceal her embarrassment, squeezing Charlotte’s arm, she said of course she remembered. She and William lived in Washington, D.C., and had for years, and they’d been forced to leave Grand Rapids because of Sam’s trouble with Ranier Moore.
“It was entirely unfair,” Noli said. “Sam did nothing at all to that poor boy, whatever his name is, I forget, but the one who got beaten up behind the shed. Ranier Moore did that.”
“I remember,” Charlotte said.
Their grandfather was already back at the farmhouse, still in his coat, tossing wood on the fire.
“It’s too cold to take my coat off,” he said when they came in the door.
“So cold I thought we were in Grand Rapids.” Noli laughed, rubbing her mittened hands together.
“Well, we’re not in Grand Rapids,” William said. “We’re here.”
“That’s right. Here is wherever we are,” Noli said, kissing her granddaughters.
Charlotte and Julia headed back to the barn, late for the meeting, darkness settling in, the taste of winter.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that they left Grand Rapids just because Sam was accused of something he didn’t do?” Julia asked.
“I think Sam was marked as bad by whatever happened and they thought they had to leave,” Charlotte said.
Julia pulled her wool hat down low on her forehead and drew her bare hands up into the sleeves of her winter coat, looking over at Charlotte. She very seldom complained about Sam, not that her sister wouldn’t be sympathetic. But complaining about Sam made her nervous, as if he could always overhear what was being said.
“Does Sam drive you insane lately?” she asked finally.
Charlotte had taken a flashlight out of her pocket and turned it on to light the path.
“Not insane,” Charlotte said. “He’s a little overinvolved in everything we do.”
“I can’t even breathe in my own house,” Julia said.
“He worries about us,” Charlotte said. “He feels a lot of responsibility.”
“Worrying would be okay.” She pushed open the door to the barn, heading upstairs to the viewing room. “But he controls us.” She turned back to look at her sister, who was just behind her on the steps. “Doesn’t he?”
Charlotte shook her head, put her finger to her lips. “He can hear us,” she said.
Sam and Oliver were sitting at the long table, their feet up, papers strewn across the table, watching the video of Saturday’s show.
“You’re late,” Sam said.
“We were taking Noli home,” Charlotte bristled.
“This isn’t a military drill,” Julia said, flopping down on the couch.
“So,” Oliver began quickly, changing the subject to keep peace, “we have the idea for the next episode.” They took their places at the table. “Sam got it from the last lines in the article.”
“Read it,” Julia said, collapsing on a chair next to Oliver, putting her small, stockinged feet on the table next to his.
“Exile seems to be the fundamental nature of Sam McWilliams’s character and the condition at the heart of Plum & Jaggers comedy.”
“And that’s funny?” Julia asked.
“It can be.” Sam organized his notes in a measured way, lining the stacks of paper in front of him, then handed out pencils and yellow pads.
Later, after dinner, after the rest of the family had gone to bed, Sam went upstairs to the viewing room to work.
It was his favorite time, sitting at his desk at the highest point of land on Bluemont Farm, the barn silent, a wind stirring in the woods beyond, the night cave-black, lights out in the house, his kingdom safely sleeping.
At midnight he checked his watch, turned off his computer, his lamp, and was just picking up a flashlight to go to bed when he heard a rustle outside the window, a kind of sizzle loud enough to penetrate the glass, and suddenly the room was lit as if a multitude of floodlights were pointed at the sky.
The barn faced the Rappahannock, on a high bluff over the river. Beyond the river was a vast field kept in high grass where the previous owner had horses. Beyond the field was a dense, dry wood, parched after a long season of drought.
What lit the sky was fire. Gradually Sam could see that the fire had a shape, an extraordinary light beginning just on the other side of the river, where bone-dry grasses, flattened by weather, were bending into winter.
The fire was moving as if it were in the process of igniting before Sam’s eyes. A wide curve, a kind of inverted arch, and then a long strip of blaze across what must have been the center of the field, and perpendicular to that line, a shorter one, so what he saw was an inferno, almost glorious in its brilliance, taking the shape of the letter J.
CHAPTER TEN
BY THE time the volunteer fire department arrived, the J had spread from a curled half-moon at the bottom of the field, closest to the river, to a circle, the clear lines obliterated, so what the firemen discovered when they drove up to the farm not long after Sam’s call was a shapeless conflagration ignited by gasoline.
“Do you
have any enemies?” the sheriff had asked.
“In Rappahannock?” Oliver shook his head. “We’re new to the neighborhood.”
“But people know you,” the sheriff said.
“I know you,” the fire chief said. “Your show isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I watch it because we’re neighbors.”
“I watch it, too. It’s pretty funny.” The sheriff put a hand on Sam’s shoulder, assuming a kind of intimacy. “We’ll be back in the morning when it’s light enough to look around. In the meantime, consider your enemies.”
They sat on the long worktable by the window, pressed together like stockade fence posts, watching the darkness over the back field beyond the river where the fire had been.
“Why would someone write a J?” Charlotte asked softly.
“Noli says the J is for Jew. Did you hear her?” Oliver asked. “She thinks it was Nazis.”
“The article says we lived on a kibbutz in Israel,” Charlotte said. “Noli’s getting loopy.”
“The article is just out,” Oliver said. “No one could have read it yet.”
“But someone must have known about us and decided to set our field on fire,” Julia said, expecting the worst, suggestible by nature, trusting her intuition.
“We’ll have to think about our enemies.” Oliver turned on the overhead lights.
“Your old girlfriends?” Charlotte asked.
“Real enemies willing to find out where we live and come after us,” Oliver said. “Not bad.”
“Maybe one enemy,” Charlotte said. “Not enemies.”
“The show could have made someone angry,” Oliver said.
Julia drew her knees up under her chin, her earlier anger at Sam giving way to fear.
“I don’t like the idea of floating enemies,” she said.
A familiar sense of dread crept through Sam like infection, and he stopped listening, staring into the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, a form was beginning to take shape, like a woman, sliding across the charred field.
He closed his eyes, rubbing them hard, as if the application of pressure could eliminate the projection of bad dreams, but when he opened them again, she was still moving in his direction, holding a long cloth which flew behind her like a sail.
“What’s going on?” Oliver asked, aware of Sam’s peculiar agitation, the little choking sounds in his throat, as if he had something caught there.
“Do you see anything in the field?” Sam asked.
“Where the fire was?”
Sam nodded.
“Zero,” Oliver said. “It’s pitch black out there.”
“Maybe I see something,” Charlotte said, but when she narrowed her eyes to focus, the field was a black sheet hung outside their window, the sky insufficiently bright to illuminate the trees.
“Someone,” Julia said quietly. “Not something.”
“You guys must be going crazy.” Oliver pressed his face to the window, squinting to narrow his focus. “There’s nothing to see out there.”
Sam put his head in his hand and shut his eyes. With his eyes closed, the shape like a woman wasn’t there. But when he opened them, she was close enough for him to see that her head was covered with a hood, like a Muslim woman in her discreet purity.
“Maybe the enemy is someone from the Cage,” Charlotte was saying.
“That was years ago. If there’s an enemy at all, it’s more likely a stranger,” Oliver said.
“Someone who doesn’t like Plum & Jaggers,” Charlotte said.
“Or doesn’t like Anarchy.”
“Or me,” Julia said. “I play such creepy roles.”
She pulled a blanket across her shoulders and hugged herself.
Just after midnight, Charlotte fell asleep, as she could always do, even sitting up, and Oliver dozed in and out of consciousness, occasionally leaning against Charlotte. Finally, he lay down on the couch, sleeping until dawn.
Sam couldn’t sleep at all, aware that Julia’s eyes were fixed on the middle distance, where he had seen the woman.
“What was it you thought you saw in the field?” she asked, leaning into the window.
“A woman,” Sam said. “It may be that I’ve been staring at the darkness for too long, but she’s there now and she seems to be wearing a long dress.”
Julia cupped her hands around her eyes.
“I think I see her, too,” she said.
At dawn, the sun climbing the horizon striping the black sky silver, a half-moon over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the air damp, promising snow, Sam left the lodge where the others were finally sleeping, walking along the shoreline of the Rappahannock, examining the water as if this walk were a ritual with him. He was interested in the way the light fell in patches on the slate gray turning the water olive, the way the sound of the water changed stone to stone as it rushed over the rocks.
The woman he had seen the night before was gone. He couldn’t even reimagine her in his mind and wondered now whether she had to do with the night’s darkness, his sense of dread.
He believed in signs. Not from the outside world, or God, or some rearrangement of the spirits or quirk of nature—but signs from within capable of projecting the image of a Mennonite woman on the black horizon. Had he been older on the trip to Rome, more certain of his instincts, his notion of dread, he would have said to his parents, “We don’t need lunch. We can wait until we get to Rome.”
The river was at its widest where he was walking, feeling vaguely uneasy, imagining an arsonist in the woods above the riverbank, although he knew the perpetrator had most likely fled. He wasn’t exactly afraid, but occasionally startled by a sudden sound, he moved along more quickly, thinking that he heard someone. Then a bird would fly out of a bush, the light wind rustle the bare limbs of a beech tree, a stone dislodge in the river.
At first Sam thought that the splash of bright red bobbing in the middle of the river was a winter cardinal dipping into the cold water, but it didn’t take flight, and as he walked closer, the red grew, its shape changing, until he was walking opposite a large red can with a nozzle—odd to find such a thing in the river as far back as they lived and off the beaten path. He took a long stick and went into the freezing water, knee-high, icy on his ankles, sloshing over his hiking boots. When he got closer, he saw it was a gasoline can, the ordinary kind dispensed at gas stations or purchased at a hardware store, a five-gallon jug, with the smell of gasoline sharp in the winter air. He grabbed the handle, walked out of the water, his jeans freezing in the cold, numbing his legs as he went up the hill to the promontory behind the lodge, where the firemen had gathered with his family.
“This was in the river,” he said, handing the can to the sheriff.
“Exactly what I expected,” the sheriff said.
As the sun filled the horizon, flooding the large east window of the viewing room in the lodge, there were ten people, the sheriff, three firemen, the McWilliamses, Noli, and William, all drinking coffee at the long worktable where Plum & Jaggers scripts were read and eating leftover apple pie.
“You know the original blaze was in the shape of a J?” the sheriff asked.
“I saw it,” Sam said. “It was a J.”
“And what do you make of that?” he asked. “Does a J mean anything to you?”
“Nothing,” Sam said. In the light of day, he was already beginning to doubt himself, thinking he could have imagined a J—its shape had been so swiftly obscured.
“To any of the rest of you?” he asked.
They shook their heads.
But later, after the sheriff had taken down the information and the fire department had crossed to the other side of the river to examine the damage and determine that yes, the fire had been started by gasoline, and they were all standing in the vestibule saying goodbye, Julia followed Sam back upstairs ahead of the others.
“I know what J stands for,” she said.
“What do you think it stands for?” he asked.
“For me,” she said.
“It was probably an accident. Just the way the wind blew the fire last night,” Sam said.
“I don’t think so,” Julia said, and, passing him, ran up the steps ahead of the others.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ON THE Tuesday morning after the fire, Sam drove to New York City, dropping Noli and William off in Washington at the house on Morrison Street.
“We’ll be busy for the next few weeks so I don’t know whether we’ll get back to the farm until late February,” he told his grandparents.
“That busy?” Oliver asked, as they drove north on Connecticut Avenue to the Beltway.
“We have too much work,” Sam said.
But it wasn’t the work that alarmed him.
Just after the Delaware Memorial Bridge, it began to snow, large-flaked wet snow falling in silence on the windshield, and Sam slowed down. In the backseat of the blue van Charlotte and Julia were chattering. Beside him, Oliver slept, his head resting on his chest.
“Put your seat back so your head doesn’t fall off.” Sam reached over and straightened his brother’s head.
He was careful of the road, attentive to the dangers around him, the trucks bearing down the center lane in spite of the increasing slickness of the highway, the darkening sky obscuring the winter sun, an occasional screech of brakes, a hatchback fishtailing into the slow lane, his family sleeping, the wondrous sounds of their syncopated breathing.
Usually he loved the long trips back and forth from the farm to New York. He was always the one to drive, and by Philadelphia the rest of them were sleeping. He did his best work in the quiet interior of the van, whole episodes of Plum & Jaggers surfacing, as if a birthmark on his brain had split open, spilling stories.
On this Tuesday, however, midday, driving under 50 on the snow-slick New Jersey Turnpike, Sam wasn’t inventing stories. He was thinking about the fire and what Julia had said to him. Of course, it could have been nothing personal. Unspecific arson, a fire set by a couple of kids in a dry field for the fun of it.
Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 12
