by Jane Smiley
Tom, on the other hand, has seen Annabel twice, though they go to different schools. At the end of the summer he saw her inside an ice cream parlor he was passing, and in September she performed in a citywide talent show that gave assemblies at each grammar school. She played a clarinet solo.
At the university, I set concrete forms for the new biotechnology center. I make twelve dollars an hour, and the job will last through the winter. In the spring, the foreman says, they will put me on interior carpentry. Though the building will be concrete from top to bottom, they have decided to include woodwork—floorboards, window trim, benches in alcoves. Liz works in the university bookstore as a clerk. She makes six-fifty an hour, and since she works for the state, she has good benefits. When we first moved into State College, she worked as a waitress at a very nice restaurant, and sometimes brought home a hundred dollars in a night, but she didn’t like the work. Tom has a paper route. We have found it hard, at times, to keep busy enough. Tom sees a counselor three times a week, we see her once a week. The state welfare department pays half the cost. The terms of our continued custody of our son demand that he pursue the counseling until the counselor dismisses him, and that he be gainfully and regularly employed. The children at his new school may or may not know about the Harrises’ house. The teacher, Miss Donohue, does, as does the principal, Mrs. Griffin, and the school counselor, Mr. Searls.
We have reconstructed Tommy’s actions of that afternoon. The key, in my view, was that school was called off for the afternoon, on account of snow conditions. When Marlys Tillary asked where Tom was, Sam MacDonald, a third-grader, volunteered that Tom was skiing home with me, which was what Tom had told him. Tom had no trouble finding the Harrises’ house, having heard Liz and me discuss exactly where on Laurel Creek Road it was. The walk, in the whirling but peaceful snow, took him about forty-five minutes. Lydia was still in State College, and Annabel had gone to her regular after-school care-giver. Tom had plenty of time, and he looked things over pretty carefully, including the satellite dish, Annabel’s playhouse, the sleds and cross-country skis leaning against the back porch, the open garage. He tried the doorknobs, but the doors were locked. The storm windows prevented that sort of entry. I think at this point he was in an investigative mood, maybe nothing more. He went back to the garage a second time, and that’s when he found the kerosene the Harrises kept for heating the upstairs on especially cold days. He was perfectly familiar with kerosene. He took it out to the satellite dish and began pouring it at the base of the stand, then, spying the cable from the dish to the house and hoping, somehow, to set fire to the TV, he poured kerosene all along the cable to where it entered the house beside the back porch. He carried the can up onto the porch, where he stumbled in his too-large boots and spilled the kerosene over the porch floor. It dripped over the edge onto the latticework around the foundation of the porch. He left the can on the porch.
There were also safety matches in the garage, for lighting the workshop heater. Tom returned to the garage and took them from their spot on the shelf (neatly labeled “matches”). He lit the satellite dish. The state arson investigator counted this out for me. “Ten feet of cable?” he said. “Twelve? One banana two banana three banana four banana five banana six banana it’s on the porch. By ten banana, with all that kerosene, it’s established in the siding and moving into the eaves. Once it gets into the attic, then the house is fully involved.”
A car inches along Laurel Creek Road, the driver peering into the blizzard. His ventilation system carries to him the smell of burning. He checks his gauges. His engine is not overheating. He ignores it, then looks in the rearview mirror. Black smoke is pouring upward from Lydia Harris’s house. Flames can be seen, shooting from the roof. A little boy is standing at the edge of the yard, just where the creek flows under the road, his hands in his pockets. Seven minutes later, when the Moreton volunteers arrive on the scene, there isn’t much they can do.
When I expressed surprise at the speed of events, the fire investigator laughed. He said, “Every house-fire has the same potential. Not every one achieves it, but a wooden residential structure can become fully involved within ten minutes.” He also said, “I’m not saying it happens every day, but with juvenile arson you’ve got to look at the envy factor.”
I said, “Juvenile?”
He said, “Little boys. If it were a girl, you’d have something really to worry about.”
The school counselor, Mr. Searls, said, “Now, who was more different from the others than Tom? A little black child, that’s who. I’m not surprised.”
We have a two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen is fairly large, and the landlord has given me permission to set up my workshop in the basement, but I haven’t had, or made, the chance.
Insurance and real-estate people decided in the spring that our place was worth over seventy-five thousand dollars, especially since the barn was in such good repair. The Harris house, including all the furnishings, clothing, computer hardware and software, and sundry other equipment, was worth $140,000, replacement cost. Her insurance company is suing me to recover some of their loss. They are making their case on the basis that Liz and I knowingly lived in a negligent way, that, had we owned a telephone, more than one clock, a car, we could have had our son under greater control and prevented the arson. My lawyer says that the case is not as clear-cut as the insurance company makes it out to be. He is intrigued. We will talk about the fee later, he says. I suppose that a precedent could be set that might refer only to me, since I am the only person anyone knows who lives this way. Or lived this way.
We have a telephone, three clocks, and, as of a week ago, a car, a 1983 Dodge Colt, one owner, forty-seven thousand miles.
I would be happy to give them the place, but my lawyer and my counselor are against it. The lawyer says that, the way State College is growing, I could get much more for it in a few years, not to mention the fact that the insurance company should not be allowed to bully me; the counselor says that I should make no life-changing decisions during the first year of counseling.
We have a television. When we were arguing about buying it, Liz took a moral stand against trying to live separately from the general culture. In the heat of anger, she called me a “megalomaniac.” Later she apologized and took it back.
On the day we bought the car, Tina’s book arrived in the mail, forwarded from Moreton. The chapter about me was one of the shorter ones, and though she didn’t call me a genius there, she did say, in the introduction, “and Bob Miller shows what must be a variety of genius in the single-minded way he has transformed his valley, and his life, to an expression of ideals that are often extolled, but almost never realized.” Liz read the chapter and wept. The next day she took the book to our counseling session (we drove), and it came out that she was angry with me for not weeping, for reading with greater interest the much longer chapter on prehistoric varieties of corn. The counselor reiterated her view that I have not participated in the grieving process, and said that, while Liz’s anger wasn’t entirely justified, since we all own our own feelings, it was understandable. I took the book in my hands again, leafed through the chapter, looking for what has been lost. I wished there had been pictures.
I haven’t wept since a few days after the fire, before we even knew what would happen to us. I was standing in the barn, currying the pony, and I knew that I had reached the utter empty-handed end of knowledge about how to raise this child. I dropped the curry comb and walked to the barn door, where I looked at the house and the winter-ravaged beds facing it, and all my habits of thought presented themselves simply as varieties of pride. Even the love I had been so sure of—for Tommy and Liz, for the valley, for this work, this soil, this air—was primarily self-inflating. I stood paralyzed at the doorway, blinded by tears. That was the only time.
It is without question too soon for the truth. In the meantime, it will be nineteen years in May since I got out of the army, since I bought the land. That June, while I was gat
hering materials to build the house, I lived in a tent down by the pond. I cooked over a fire that I built on a flat rock. Mostly I grilled trout and drank water. I walked into town for supplies, and one day I bought a trowel and a five-pound bag of mortar. The next day I built a little fireplace out of stones. I laid the stones and mortar over an old cardboard box, and into the top, what would become the floor of the fire compartment, I set thick sticks in a grid, about two inches apart. When the mortar had set but not hardened, I pulled the sticks out, carefully, leaving ventilation holes for the fire. Then I peeled the box away. I built ten-inch walls around the fire floor, and that night walked back into Moreton and strolled the alleys. I knew I would find an old grill in someone’s trash, and I did, perfect size and shape, exactly what I had imagined. I was not surprised.
When I look back on the succeeding eighteen years, I see someone, neither boy nor man but a nameless intermediate form, who has received as a gift an endless number of wishes. The only rule governing these wishes is that they must be specific. And of course they are, because particularity is his genius (inclination, prevailing spirit). But the moral of all wish tales is that, though wishes express power or desire, their purpose is to reveal ignorance: the more fulfilled wishes, the more realized ignorance.
Tom likes it in town. He has a group of friends on our block and the next one, four boys who ride bikes, read comic books, play endless wavelike games of territorial defense. They have quickly filled him in on who’s who in the superhero universe, and he is saving part of his newspaper money for a hipper bicycle, one with solid metal spoke covers.
Liz, too, is more naturally attuned to this life, though she has cried and suffered over the change, over our loss and shame, over my present “aimlessness.” Still, she eats lunch with friends she has made at work, and also does something I remember my mother doing—traveling around the kitchen, sink to stove to refrigerator, telephone receiver wedged between cheek and shoulder. We have a bathtub. She spends a lot of time there. She goes to the Episcopalian church.
As for me, I think often of Lydia Harris, her dignity, her slender but muscular hands, the very African shape of her head, the grace that she never failed to express. I think of her, and Annabel, too, with what seems like love. Once in a while, I think that if I could talk long enough and eloquently enough, I could make Lydia understand, but I don’t know what I would have her understand, and events have carried us beyond communication, anyway. For a long time, I looked for some kind of judgment at her hands. Now I can imagine what it would be, and anything I might say would sound, at least to me, like excuses.
Liz and the counselor have a program mapped out aimed at “recovery.” One of the counselor’s handouts pictures this as a ladder, with a man climbing steps labeled “denial,” “anger,” “bargaining,” and so forth. I am loitering at the bottom of the ladder, I suppose. But it seems to me that what they want of me is to make another whole thing, the way I made a whole of my family, my farm, my time, a bubble, a work of art, a whole expression of my whole self. No, I say, though only to myself (the counselor has real power over our custody arrangement). Let us have fragments, I say. Let the racial hatred that has been expressed through us lie next to the longing I feel for Lydia Harris; let Tom’s innocence lie next to his envious fury; let Liz’s grief for the farm lie next to her blossoming in town; let my urge to govern and supply every element of my son’s being lie next to our tenuous custody; let the poverty the welfare department sees lie next to the wealth I know was mine. If these things are allowed, if no wholes are made, then it seems to me that I can live in town well enough, and still, from time to time, close my eyes and feel a warm, wet breeze move up the valley, hear the jostling and lowing animals in the barn, smell the mixed scent of chamomile and wild roses and warm grassy manure, and remember the vast, inhuman peace of the stars pouring across the night sky above the valley, as well as the smaller, nearer, but not too near, human peace of the lights of Moreton scattered over the face of Snowy Top.
New
from
Jane Smiley!
TEN DAYS
IN THE HILLS
A novel
A sparkling, funny, and provocative novel about love, war, sex, politics … and a group of friends and family who gather for the transformative days in the Hollywood hills.
“A sharp-edged comedy of manners.”
—The Denver Post
Available in hardcover from Knopf
978-1-4000-4061-2 • $26.00 (Can: $32.00)
PLEASE VISIT WWW.AAKNOPF.COM
ALSO BY JANE SMILEY
DUPLICATE KEYS
Alice Ellis depends on the companionship of a tightly knit circle of friends. At the center of this circle is a rock band struggling to navigate New York’s music scene, and an apartment/practice space with fifty key-holders. One day, Alice enters to find two of the band members shot dead. Soon it occurs to her that she is not the only person with a key and may not get time to change the locks.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-7602-4
GOOD FAITH
Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts. But it’s 1982, and even in Joe’s small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends—and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-385-72105-9
A THOUSAND ACRES
When the aging patriarch of a farm in Iowa decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm, the gift makes good sense—a reward for years of hard work. But Caroline, a lawyer, rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out of the will. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear, this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.
Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3383-6
ALSO AVAILABLE:
The Age of Grief, 978-0-385-72187-5
The Greenlanders, 978-1-4000-9546-9
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, 978-1-4000-3318-8
A Year at the Races, 978-1-4000-3317-1
ANCHOR BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
