Loren tried banging the wrench handle with a big rock. He only succeeded in snapping off the handle from the box end. Bruce cursed and there was some yelling back and forth, and Doug Sweetland dragged his garden hose over, which got everybody to stop yelling until they realized that we couldn’t fill the buckets fast enough with it, and then Charles Pettie, the town cobbler and bass fiddle player in our music circle, showed up with a yard-long Stillson wrench that must have weighed thirty pounds. Two men pushed and one pulled the long handle until the valve nut turned with a shriek and water started flowing out of the hydrant. Everybody cheered and rapidly formed a bucket brigade. But it was soon obvious that our flung buckets made no impression on the fire.
All this happened quickly, no more than a few minutes. Meanwhile, other women joined Bonnie Sweetland in screaming and pointing up into the end dormer where two figures, Britney and Sarah, were dimly visible huddled together inside. Tom Allison brought over an aluminum extension ladder and threw it against the eaves below the dormer. At the same moment, the needles of a big white pine tree close by the most involved end of the house reached kindling temperature and exploded into flame. Bruce Wheedon yelled at the bucket men to forget the Watling house and start wetting down the Sweetland’s place next door so it wouldn’t catch, and they all rushed to reform the bucket line there. Up on the ladder, Tom smashed the window in the dormer, but Britney remained frozen inside clutching the girl. I tossed my bucket aside, rushed around the back of the house, and slipped in the kitchen door.
My hand sizzled when I turned the doorknob, and there was a smell like grilled meat. The back stairway ran right off the mud-room, and I raced up into the smoke. They were in the little girl’s room, the wallpaper dirty pink through the smoke. Everything happened fast. In the confusion it seemed that Britney was trying to prevent me from helping her. I scooped up Sarah under my left arm like a meal sack and grabbed Britney’s hand so she would follow me out. But she resisted. I hollered, “This way! Come on!” By now, flames were probing into the hallway, and I doubted we could make a run out the back stairs. Tom shouted something from the window, where he stood atop the ladder, his words smothered in the rising roar. To hand Sarah to him, I had to let go of Britney. She slipped out the door back into the fiery hallway. I realized she didn’t want to escape. But the maw of flame deterred her long enough for me to reach out and seize her. She flailed ineffectively. I yanked her back into the pink bedroom and shoved her toward the dormer until I managed to push her out the window. Tom grappled her down with help from the boys below. By then flames had invaded the little room itself. The heat was ferocious. I launched myself through the dormer headfirst.
The next thing I remember was lying in the weeds hacking my lungs out with faces bobbing above me, and then I rolled over and vomited in the grass. Warm blood ran down the side of my head into my eyes. Someone pressed a rag against my scalp and then they were carrying me somewhere. Gray daylight gathered in the treetops as raindrops the size of marbles spiraled down from an infinite height and stung my face.
TWENTY
Jerry Copeland had a small infirmary in the second story above his office and lab where people too sick to be home sometimes stayed so he could keep an eye on them. That’s where I woke up. I was in a fog. My lungs felt heavy. A big bandage like a mitten was swaddled on my left hand. I had a similar bandage around my head. I began to recall what had happened the night before in odd documentary detail, without emotion. I lay there for quite a while in a strange carefree exhausted state of mind, hearing the muffled sounds of Jerry padding around down below, doing whatever he was doing, seeing patients or cooking up medicines. After a while, he came in with a tray of food for me.
“How are you feeling?”
“Pretty stoned.”
“That’s the laudanum.”
“It’s wicked strong.”
“I had to put a few stitches in your head.”
“What happened to my hand?” I said, holding up the mitten-like bandage.
“I’d say you burned it on a doorknob.”
“Where?”
“The Watling house.”
“No, where on my hand?”
“The palm mostly.”
“I need those pads on the tips to play my fiddle, you know.”
“I think they’re okay. Try to sit up.”
As I did, I noticed an impressive pain in my shoulder, but felt detached from it, like it was somebody else’s pain and I was only a casual observer of it. I must have made a face, though.
“You came down pretty hard on that side,” Jerry said. “Nothing’s broken, in my judgment. There would be more swelling. No reason why you can’t go home.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to imagine how I might hold the fiddle with a bum shoulder. I had fiddling on what was left of my brain.
“Eat some,” he said. “It’ll help clear your head.”
The tray had legs on it so a person could eat comfortably in bed without having to balance it on their lap. On it was a plate of scrambled eggs, two squares of corn bread, a little dish of creamed spinach, and a mug of rose-hip tea. I must have been staring at the tray.
“This is beautiful. Your wife makes a lovely breakfast.”
“You’re a hero now, Robert.”
“Huh?”
“Saving those two.”
“Oh.”
“Eat something.”
I picked up a fork. “I don’t think she wanted to be rescued.”
Jerry sat down at the end of the bed.
“What makes you say that?”
“She tried to run back into the fire. I had to catch her and shove her out the window.”
“Maybe she was confused.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I lifted a forkful of scrambled eggs, golden and buttery. Jeanette had panfried the corn bread in butter too.
“It’s a good thing we all work as hard as we do around here,” I said. “All the butter and cream we eat.”
“Do you suppose she set that fire herself?” Jerry said.
“Huh?”
“You think Britney Watling torched her own house?”
“It hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Well, now I wonder,” Jerry said. “At first I figured lightning. But now I’m not so sure.”
“I don’t know either. The storms kept me up a long time but they were far off. I fell asleep sometime before the fire broke out.”
“Lightning can strike far from the center of a storm cell,” Jerry said.
“Maybe. I hope she didn’t try to harm herself and her kid. I stopped in on her two days ago with some cornmeal. She seemed mighty glum.”
“She’ll have to put in with someone,” Jerry said. “Sooner rather than later. Maybe with your neighbor Lucy Myles. Lucy could help with the child.”
“Who are they staying with now?”
“Allisons. I think.”
I finished the eggs and turned to the creamed spinach and finally the corn bread. Sandy used to think it was funny that I ate things in sequence off a plate. Never some of this and some of that. One item at a time. Who knows, maybe it was what made me a good organizer in the old days on the job. My head was clearing.
“Last night, before all this happened, I was thinking.”
“About Britney and the girl?”
“No. About the town. We really have to get our act together around here.”
“Yeah? How are we going to do that.”
“I’m calling a meeting of the trustees tonight,” I said after a while. Any of us on the town board could call a meeting. We just hadn’t done it in at least a year. “Can you help get the word out? Ask Loren to send for the farmers, and make sure Dale Murray is there.”
“All right,” Jerry said. “Any particular purpose?”
“For one thing, the water pressure used to be much higher than it is now. We really have to fix it.”
“I doubt it would have mattered last night.”
“We’ll never know, will we?”
“I suppose.”
“You see how we give in? It’s some kind of reflex negativity.”
“We’re conditioned by adversity.”
“We don’t have to surrender to conditioning. Brother Jobe says we’re demoralized. I think it’s true.”
“Since when are you tight with him?”
“I took him over to see Bullock. He’s a cheeky bastard. He put it right to Stephen about taking up his duties as magistrate.”
“Stephen’s a proud man. I don’t imagine he rolled over for him.”
“He got Stephen to agree to help fix our water system. He can cast some concrete pipe for us, he says.”
“Maybe we should all take turns falling out a window,” Jerry said. “It seems to have pepped you up.”
“I’m just sick of sleepwalking through life. Can you take this tray up off me?”
“Of course.”
I got up and out of the bed. Everything felt wobbly, but I stayed on my feet. Sun streamed through the windows. It felt like a new day.
“Also, ask Loren to get Brother Jobe to the board meeting tonight. That new bunch has to be in on this.”
“All right,” Jerry said.
“Tell them eight o’clock at the old town hall, upstairs.”
TWENTY-ONE
The top floor of our three-story town hall, an 1879 Romanesque red sandstone heap, was the old council chamber that had also served for generations as the community theater and civic ballroom. It had a proscenium stage at one end. The seats were not fixed, so they could be arranged for official meetings, shows, dances, banquets, what have you. In the 1950s, they held boxing matches up there. The high coffered ceiling was partitioned into twelve octagons that had been painted long ago to depict the signs of the zodiac. They were so faded and flaked you could barely make out which sign was which.
Back of the stage, a painted flat from the last community theatrical production remained in place: the musical Guys and Dolls. It showed a Times Square scene of the mid-twentieth century. It was startling to be reminded that people had lived in a world of skyscraper apartments, night clubs, neon lights, and taxicabs. I remembered the excitement the week the show ran. We so looked forward to coming here and putting it on each night, no matter how hard we’d worked during the day or how frightened we were about what was happening around the country. Sandy played Sarah Brown, the Salvation Army girl, sweetheart of gambler Sky Masterson (Larry Prager). Loren was Nathan Detroit. Linda Allison was Adelaide. I played violin in the orchestra, of course. My Daniel was in the chorus of Nathan’s gambler chums, with a painted-on mustache. We lit the stage with footlights fashioned out of candles and tin cans dug up from the general supply, and it all looked perfectly enchanting. You didn’t need a thousand watts to put a show on. The people came from all around the county night after night to see it. Many came more than once. The children seemed baffled about the world that the play depicted. Since the flu hit, we hadn’t put on any more plays.
This evening the old wooden folding chairs were arranged in a few concentric circles with twelve at the center reserved for us trustees. I had slept most of the afternoon and felt nearly normal again, mentally. My shoulder hurt, but I had full rotation. The sun still lit the big arched windows when the trustees straggled in at eight. In late June, twilight would last until nine thirty. It was warm up there in the top floor of the old building and the big room smelled faintly of bats.
Before the meeting got underway, the trustees and some observers stood around in knots. They all stopped gabbing when I came in. Many acknowledged me with a nod, I supposed because of what happened at the fire. But then I realized it was because I was the one who’d called the meeting, and they were looking to me to explain why. The trustees were Ben Deaver, Ned Larmon, and Todd Zucker, all farmers; Cody DeLong, who still pretended to be a banker at the Battenkill Trust but barely survived off the big garden in the back of his house; Jason LaBountie, the veterinarian; shopkeeper Terry Einhorn; Rod Sauer, the mason; Victor Gasparry, the tinsmith; Loren, Andy Pendergast, and Dale Murray, the mayor. All the trustees were men, no women and no plain laborers. As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we’d thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody called them peasants, but in effect that’s what they’d become. That’s just the way things were. Shawn Watling, rest his soul, had called it clearly.
Jane Ann was among the few women there. She and Loren had an understanding that she always stood by him in public, whatever went on in private life. She explained to me more than once when we were together, as if she needed to explain it to herself. The idea was to reassure those whose families had been blown apart by catastrophe that the minister and the minister’s wife remained a continuing presence for them, like a father and mother in the greater household of the town, and that therefore some kind of benign order still prevailed in our little corner of the universe. Jane Ann cast a haunted gaze at me when I came in, and I realized that we’d failed to get together that week.
Loren bustled over to me with Andy Pendergast. I’d taken that awkward head bandage off at home and they admired the stitches that Jerry had left in my scalp.
“Where’d you learn how to leap out of a burning house like that?” Andy said. “You looked like one of those old Hollywood stunt men.”
“Self-preservation is a great motivator,” I said.
“We’re all proud of what you did,” Loren said.
“It could have been anyone,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
“Well, you’re our hero,” Andy said, “so, hey, when are we all going to get together?” I knew what he meant by that. It was his code for prompting our music circle to meet. It had become his job to get the rest of us to make it to practice, especially this time of year when there was so much else to do.
“I’m not sure if I can play,” I said, showing my bandaged hand.
“Well, you better heal up. It’s important to keep things going, especially the way things are now.”
I supposed that he meant Shawn Watling getting killed.
“It does keep the morale up around here,” Loren said.
“It’s more than that,” Andy said. “It’s light in the darkness. And I wonder if I’m alone thinking there’s ever more darkness around us.”
“You’re not alone,” I said.
“Uh-oh,” Loren said.
Just then Dale Murray sauntered over, as though he still had the liveliest law practice in Washington County. He was actually wearing a necktie—the only one in the room. It was red silk foulard patterned with golden crests of some long lost fraternity or civic organization, and had a dark stain on it. His shirt collar was all nubbly too. His face had that flushed look, so I assumed he’d been drinking.
“Evening, gentlemen,” Dale said. You could smell the liquor now, poorly made corn whiskey with a lot of fusel oil in it. “What’s this all about, Robert?”
“It’s about running the town’s affairs.”
“Anything about them in particular?”
“I have a whole list of particulars.”
“Any you’d care to share before things get underway?”
“No.”
He flinched theatrically, the way a drunk will, as though to register an insult when he can’t quite put the words together. The fact that he was a genuine clown made it seem less comic.
“Should I take that as unfriendliness?” he said.
“Since when were you and me friends, Dale?”
“I’m everybody’s friend.”
“And I expect you’ll stay that way,” Loren said.
Brother Jobe suddenly emerged at the top of the stairs with two cohorts, Brother Elam and Brother Seth, who might have been defensive backs in the Nati
onal Football League. Next to those two, with his hat on, Brother Jobe looked like a cookie jar. All eyes in the room went to them.
“There’s your next mayor, if you ask me,” Dale said.
“You’re a little off on that,” I said.
“See if you can stop him.”
“Evenin’ all,” Brother Jobe said, doffing his hat with a flourish.
Some of the others mumbled “good evening” back.
Brother Jobe came directly over to us.
“What’s up, old son?” he said.
“You’re going to commence your civic duties tonight,” I said.
“That a fact?” he said with something like genuine glee and he turned to Dale. “Howdy-do there, Mayor?”
“I was just telling Robert here, I expect you’ll be mayor yourself here before too long,” Dale said.
“Oh Lordy,” Brother Jobe said. “I don’t know that I can fill your shoes.”
“A fellow like you could do this job barefoot,” Dale said.
“Maybe so,” Brother Jobe said. “I hear you’ve been doing a fair amount of it in your sleep.”
Brother Jobe cracked up at his own joke. That got Loren and Andy cackling. Dale Murray seemed to grasp that the jokes would continue at his expense, so he cut his losses and called the meeting to order.
TWENTY-TWO
Naturally enough, the first order of business was a call for an account of how the New Faith Brotherhood happened to buy the high school, and how it was paid for exactly, and that was when Dale Murray disclosed that Brother Jobe had signed a contract to buy the school on a ten-year option term at five thousand dollars per year on an eventual purchase price of five million dollars.
World Made by Hand Page 10
