“Ten cents a bag if it’s Lipton, twenty for something better,” he mumbled. “Get enough of that spirit strength and you become immortal. Yes, and still better than that, if you talk in a cemetery every single day after school, then your mother will be known as the most wonderful woman alive.”
“Really,” she said, and shook her head, looked with pride at her pan of baklava. “Well then, I’d be a fool to complain, wouldn’t I?”
“Depends on the price of tea,” he said, and came over, grabbed her around the hips; it was Jack Sprat and the Mrs. at their best. “Our whole life depends on the price of tea in China.”
“I hope not,” she said, and gently pushed him away. “That price is constantly changing.”
Twenty-two
The night the Huckses’ house burned down, everyone gathered in our backyard to watch. The small blue house was no longer visible, only the huge orange flames and dark black smoke that hung over the neighborhood like a fierce thundercloud. Merle had been at my house when it started, the two of us sitting on the front steps and shining a big flashlight onto the sidewalk, where Misty practiced her baton routine for the upcoming majorette tryouts. By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had spread to the back of the house; Merle was there, screaming for his mother and Maybelline, but several men held him back, kept him from going closer. The pickup truck wasn’t in the driveway, and he didn’t know if his mother and sister were with his father or not. Dexter’s motorcycle wasn’t there either.
“I never thought I’d be thankful for that field of kudzu and all those old junky car parts,” my mother said, and held onto my father’s arm, her face yellow in the reflection that lit up the night sky. “But I sure am. It’s at least slowed it down a little bit.” Well, Lord forgive me when I whine, I wanted to say. But I just stood and watched Merle still standing at the edge of his yard, Perry Loomis suddenly beside him with her thick blond hair waving down her back, sparkling in the light of the fire. Mrs. Poole was standing beside Mama; she was fully dressed as if going to a social, and I noticed that Mama kept fidgeting with the collar of her green robe, wishing that she, too, had taken the time to dress for the fire.
“Is anybody in the house?” Mrs. Poole asked.
“Well, we know Merle is okay,” my father said. “He was over here when it started.”
“He’s always over here lately, isn’t he?” Mrs. Poole asked. “He seems like a nice boy but you might should watch it. You know they say the apple doesn’t fall far.” She turned and smiled a wry smile at me as if to say I didn’t know anything. “Poor Gladys Hucks. You know, she is a simple, simple soul. Might’ve done it cooking.”
“I’m surprised it didn’t happen back at Christmas with all those lights and wires,” Mama said. “I’ve always said it was going to happen.”
“Well, thank goodness it didn’t happen at Christmas,” Mrs. Poole said. “Wouldn’t that be sad to have your house burn down at Christmas?”
“Oh, yes,” my father said and stepped over, hugged me up close as I watched Merle frozen there, the firemen still holding him back. “It’s so much better that the house is burning now instead of at Christmas.”
“Now, Fred,” she began, but he turned to me before she could finish.
“Go on over there if you want,” he said and nodded towards Merle. “I’m going to be right here.”
“Okay,” I said, but then hesitated again after taking several steps.
The ambulance came, and people stepped closer to the edge of the yard, hoping to be able to tell what was going on. “Old man Hucks probably passed out with a cigarette,” one of the men said, and several others nodded.
“The boy smokes,” Mrs. Poole said. “I’ve seen him. Marlboros, I believe.” I knew that if she had a little umbrella over her and could sit those long crooked bones down that she’d have one herself. “There’s just the three children living there now,” she continued. “I took them a few canned goods back at Christmas, and Gladys told me how the boys had near about run her crazy. You know that oldest one is off somewhere and that one next in line is headed the same route. Then there’s that one that has taken up here at your house and the little girl.”
“Thanks for the live report,” my father said, and stepped closer, pulling me with him.
“Fred,” my mother said in a reprimanding tone. “Merle seems like a nice boy.” She turned to Mrs. Poole. “He’s polite.”
“Yes, well, let’s hope he doesn’t take a turn.” Mrs. Poole turned one way and then another to see who all had gathered.
“Could be it was an electrical fire,” my father said. “Faulty wiring. All those houses down there are in bad need of repair.”
“Not anymore,” Mr. Rhodes said. “I just heard it’s spread to that house next door, front of that house is gone. If they don’t get it out soon, the whole stretch will go like a stack of paper.”
“We do need rain in the worst way,” Sally Jean said. Just that week, mid-March, they had come and sodded her yard and she had faithfully watered it every day for fear that it might die. In the distance, beyond the flames, I could see the baby Jesus family, father and mother and two children, as they watched all of their belongings disappear in the thick black cloud, years of collecting lights and ornaments and carols, gone in a flash of flame.
“Well, there’s going to be plenty of work for me over the next week or two,” Mrs. Poole said. “We better start right now gathering up some clothes and food. I wonder if we might be able to rent out Brown’s Econo Lodge again.”
Merle was still talking to Perry, her hand clutching his arm; I kept waiting for him to turn around, but he never looked away from that house. A lot of the neighbors started getting restless and headed back home, asking others to call and let them know what happened. Finally I walked over and stood a couple of feet behind Merle. Perry was crying, a hand up to her face as she leaned into Merle, his arm draped around her back. A fireman was axing down the back door, beside which the kitchen window was a bright, blinding orange. I glanced up in our yard to where my parents stood and then back to the cemetery, where it was so odd to see the dogwoods in full bloom against the ugly black smoke and strange yellow sky. Something was going on in the front yard, where two more police cars had come down the road and screeched to a stop. I stepped right up beside Merle, reached and took hold of his hand. He squeezed back, fingers gripping mine, and took a step away from Perry, his arm dropping away from her. “Have you seen ...” Before I could finish my thought, the pickup truck was rounding the corner, stopping when it was unable to pass the police cars gathered there, and we saw them, Merle’s parents, the little girl in Mr. Hucks’s arms, as they ran towards the house. “I gotta go.” He turned to me. “They’ve got to let me go over there now.” I heard his mother calling for him, and then he was gone, running along the edge of the yard, waving his arms and yelling back to her. I saw him get to her and then together the four of them stepped closer to the house. Perry and I were standing silently together, so close I could hear each labored breath and sniffle. “I hope Dexter’s okay,” I said, and she nodded, turned to me with a blank stare. “We’re engaged,” she said, and then walked in the same direction Merle had gone. I wanted to follow her, but I also felt that I didn’t belong there right then. I heard a shrill scream like a siren, but then I realized it was Mrs. Hucks; I could see her in the strange light, kneeling forward, head in her hands, Mr. Hucks squatting beside her while Merle stood with his arms around his sister. Perry was right behind him, hands up to her face.
“Do you want me to walk over there with you?” Misty was there, still holding her baton, still wearing those old white go-go boots of Mo’s that she used for practice. “I will if you want me to.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s wait.” Again I felt torn, wanting to go, but also feeling that I might see more than Merle would want me to see or want me to know. Now he had disappeared behind one of the fire engines with his parents, and Perry was left standing alone in the yard. The
firemen were asking people to step back as they sprayed the whole field on the chance that there were any stray sparks.
“It’s getting cold.” Misty tugged on my arm. “Come on. We can watch from your house.” I followed her back up through the yard, past my mother’s gazebo, the greenhouse. Within the hour there were just sparse flames remaining, and the black cloud had lowered, leaving a fine mist of soot to cover our yard. It was hard to see, but as far as I could tell there was nothing left. My father and Mr. Rhodes walked over there with some other men, crossing the field and then disappearing around the fire engine and into the blackness. Misty and I had wanted to walk with them, but my father suggested we wait until they got back.
Mrs. Poole used our phone in the kitchen to call Brown’s Econo Lodge out on 301 and reserve several rooms. Then she called the emergency number, asked for the police department and then asked for the officer’s name, and then gave him his orders to go and pick up the homeless and carry them to Brown’s, to tell them that somebody would be bringing around some clothes and food the next day.
“That’s very nice of you, Theresa,” Mama said, Sally Jean nodding, a mug of hot chocolate cupped in her hands.
“It’s all a part of being who I am.” Mrs. Poole sat down, propped a black patent pump on another chair, a position I’d certainly never seen from her, and lit a cigarette. “I sure hope the boy didn’t start it,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke upward.
“He didn’t,” I said. “He was right out there on the front porch.” I felt my voice crack as it got louder, as I stood and pointed toward our front door.
“Might’ve left a cigarette, honey, that’s all I meant.” She smiled that wry smile again. “I mean everyone is not as careful as I am. Why, Mr. Bo was so careless about his cigars, and do you know what I did?” None of us responded. “I said, do you know what I did?”
“No.” Mama shook her head, pulled the collar of her robe up around her chin as she stared at the empty stretch where homes had been, maybe saying a prayer of thankfulness that it was not us, maybe regretting her many wishes that those houses did not exist. Misty nudged me with the toe of her boot and crossed her eyes, stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth as a gesture of Mrs. Poole’s craziness.
“Well, every night I’d collect the ashtrays and I’d put them inside of my washing machine for the duration of the night.”
“Hmmm.” Mama was watching Daddy cross the yard now, her hand lifting to him, though he made no response. “Hmmm,” I echoed her voice, wishing that I’d see Merle. Was he beyond that empty lot waiting to go to Brown’s Econo Lodge, standing there with the other family, children shivering in the night air? I imagined him crouched and curled in the cemetery shed.
“Yessir, I put them in the washer because I knew they’d never start a fire there.” She paused, lit another cigarette off the old one, another thing I’d never seen her do. “A refrigerator might work, too, dishwasher. I suspect any major appliance would work.”
She kept right on talking even though Mama went to open the back door, me right behind her. “It’s a real mess,” Daddy said. A thin film of soot covered his face and shirt. His breath was quick and shallow, and Mama pulled him over to the table and urged him to sit. Mr. Rhodes followed, Sally Jean pulling him to the chair where she had been sitting and offering him her cup of hot chocolate.
“Did you see Merle?” I asked, causing everyone to look first at me and then at him. He nodded, propped his elbows on the table, face in his open palms.
“Did he say anything?” I waited for an answer, and he just shook his head. I knew that there was more, something had happened. It was just like when Mo died; we all knew and so were afraid to ask.
“That other boy’s dead, though.” His voice was hollow. “Damnedest thing. He was just sitting on that motorcycle on the porch. The man who lived in one of the other houses that burned said that they screamed for him to get off the porch, but he never even moved, just sat there with fire all around him.”
“Oh God.” Mama’s hand was up to her face, a look of horror, but Mrs. Poole was as composed as if she’d just been issued a weather report, light rain.
“What about Gladys?” she asked, stubbed out her cigarette, reached for the pack, and then just held her hand there.
“She’s fine,” he said. “Nobody was home but that one boy.”
“They’re sure?” Mrs. Poole asked. “What about that worthless Beef?”
“He got home stock sober, or seemed sober. Wife and the little girl had been with him all evening.” Daddy took a glass of water from Mama and drank it all the way down, making sooty fingerprints where he gripped the glass. “Said he’d been hunting work in Clemmonsville all day, and they’d stopped to eat supper on the way home. Broke down and cried like a baby when he saw that son of his off to the side and covered in a piece of canvas.”
“About time,” Mrs. Poole muttered, then sat up with a start, as if she’d been talking in her sleep.
“What did Gladys do?” Mama asked, and I realized we were all charmed by the details, charmed by the voice in the same way that Mama had charmed Sally Jean all those times.
“She was in shock, I believe,” he said. “She just sat there and shook like a leaf, the little girl clinging to her and screaming until Kate’s friend came and picked the girl up and led his mama to the front seat of the truck.”
“Did Merle see you?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t go over where he was. There was another girl there, Perry I believe he called her.” He paused, thinking. “She was all to pieces, and I saw him walking her down the street there when I was coming home.”
“She was supposed to marry Merle’s brother,” I whispered. We asked more questions—Had those people gone to Brown’s Econo? Did they know what started the fire?—but my father didn’t know any of the answers. We just sat quietly, seeing no movement from the dark empty lots behind us. When the phone rang, we all jumped, and I ran into the front hall, grabbed up the receiver to hear Merle’s voice.
“Hey, Kate.” Misty followed and stood in the hall as I sank onto the edge of the throne chair. “Did your dad tell you?” He sounded far away. I could hear a baby crying in the background, and I assumed he was calling from Perry’s house. I imagined her sitting there beside him the same way Misty was beside me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and then listened, a long pause and a sigh.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Look, I gotta go.” I could hear noise in the background, cries and whimpers, and before I could ask where he’d be, he had hung up, the dial tone buzzing loudly.
I didn’t hear from Merle again that night, but we did have news that the families of the three homes destroyed were staying out on 301 as Mrs. Poole had provided. I imagined the four of them in one room, a phone on the old outdated desk but no privacy for him to call; how hard it would be for him to call me while his mother was curled on the bed, lips trembling uncontrollably.
The next morning we heard that the fire had been no accident but was set with old rags and gasoline, a can found under the Huckses’ front porch, those other families just suffering the consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the family next door had only lived three houses away, then the manger scene neatly wrapped in newspaper and tucked away for a year’s keeping in their attic would have survived, as would have the baby toys and wedding pictures and family recipes scribbled in the familiar hand of someone long gone.
The most horrifying part of the story came out two days later; Dexter had not died in the fire, but before. That was why he had sat so stoically in the middle of the flames. Merle told me, many days later when we met in the shed, that he had gone with his parents to identify Dexter, there in the bright lights of the morgue where he had been declared dead on arrival. Though he was badly burned, on his throat was a hairline slit, blackened wine color, where a blade had sliced the pale white skin.
“Who did it?” My voice was a whisper as we sat sid
e by side and stared straight ahead at the blank wall of the shed, our fingers locked tightly.
“Probably some old club member,” he said. “Probably one of his friends” I didn’t ask him anything else, just sat there, listening to the rise and fall of his breath, and trying to shake the picture from my mind.
“Where are you all going to live?” I asked Merle, turning towards him, feeling his breath warm on my cheek.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, then playfully tied a piece of yarn around my finger and left it there, turning it around and around as if it might be a ring. “My dad says we might have to move. Says he was thinking about taking a job in Clemmonsville anyway. In the meantime, I guess we’re in that old rotten motel.”
It was not long after the fire when Mrs. Poole said that she felt she ought to buy a leg of lamb and smear a bit of the blood out on her storm door. “First Mo Rhodes, and then the fire. That child murdered, though he was mean as a snake, murdered nonetheless.” She paused while in thought, her thin lips stretched in a straight tight line. “Seems like I’m forgetting something else bad that happened.” She held up one finger. “Thomas Clayton died, though of course he didn’t live on this street.” She sat forward. “But his barber shop is not far. Just down there and around the corner. It’s like a plague of some sort, isn’t it? I believe it all started with the split-levels.”
“Mr. Clayton was a sweet man,” my mother said, to change the subject, and stared out at her greenhouse, where ferns covered the rafters. My father was at the edge of our yard with spade in hand planting canna lilies. He had said that they would bloom all summer, getting real tall like a fence to block out that blackened field and those cinderblock pilings like tombstones. “They’re sort of Victorian, Cleva,” he had explained when he came home with bags of the bulbs. “I know how you like Victorian things. You know those Victorians weren’t so quiet and prim as you might think. Get them out of those long, cumbersome clothes and they were free spirits.”
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