by Robert Price
Chapter Forty-One
At some point during the height of the fire, it stopped raining. A three quarter moon was now pushing out from behind the clouds. The firefighters rigged up several large floodlights. Their halogen bulbs illuminated the smoldering rubble inside the remaining walls of the farmhouse. Because the roof had collapsed, the place looked like it had burned from the inside out. The two far sidewalls and much of the kitchen remained. But the front and the back walls above the first floor were gone. Remarkably, the chimney stood alone in the middle.
On Quinns Way, returning to the Hubbard’s to pick up Neil, whom he was to drive to the airport, Ted Dorsey was blocked by the arrival of several television news crews.
Drivers were moving vans forward and backwards before aligning with the side of the road to park. A fire truck pulled out of the driveway. Its headlights blinded Ted before passing him on his driver’s side. A police officer waved him on and he drove past a line of idling vehicles. A bright wall of light stretched above them.
It was as if he’d stumbled upon a carnival. He stopped a little further up the road in the darkness and parked in the same spot he had earlier in the day, just behind Father Hilliard’s car. As he looked up at the commotion, a sickening tension pulled at the back of his throat like a sob. Tom Hubbard’s house had burned down. He sat still for a moment and, folding his hands together, prayed to God that no one was hurt in the fire. Once out of the car he started across the street.
The police officer in the road recognized Ted from their children’s kindergarten programs and shouted, “Not a time to be visiting.”
Ted waved a hand over his head and shouted back, “I’m picking someone up.”
His voice weighed heavy with the guilt he felt at having left Neil Bingham behind at the reception. He had only gone home with Shelly to help put their children to bed. He had planned to come back all along. The thought that something might have happened to Neil, or anyone at the reception, made Ted tremble.
In the driveway, Ted walked past more fire trucks and an ambulance. Disbelief challenged him again when he reached the demarcation of yellow police tape. The remnants of the house were bathed in bright light. Like a heart patient on an operating table, the chest of the house was split wide open.
To his immediate left, two rescue workers prepared to enter the smoldering ruins. They fixed breathing apparatus to their backs. Next to them, an ambulance attendant anticipated the worst and readied a stretcher.
Off to the right of the driveway, Ted spotted Billy and Jeannine Quinn and, with some relief, Neil Bingham. Beyond them, at the edge of the floodlight’s reach, he saw Tom’s family. They were huddled together, Melanie, Tony, Jon, Elizabeth and Mrs. Hubbard. He noted that the boy, the black man and the boy’s mother were with them as well.
“What happened?” Ted asked when he got within speaking range.
Billy and Jeannine Quinn, although once in the thick of the fire, shrugged their shoulders as if duped by a master illusionist. They knew that the family was safe, so their reason for staying was concern for the unaccounted, Father Hilliard. Each of them loved the man; he had baptized them both and their children as well. Like the others, they prayed silently that Mrs. Hubbard had been wrong and that Father Hilliard had returned to the rectory instead of napping on the second floor.
Neil approached Ted and shook with excitement as he spoke. “The place just went up. It was amazing. I stepped outside to wait for you, and suddenly there were flames shooting out of the chimney. So I gambled and ran back in through the house to evacuate it before the fire took over. Then I—”
Ted cut him off. “Did everyone make it out? Is everyone okay?”
“Well—” Neil paused, “Tom’s mother says that your friend, the priest, might have been asleep upstairs. So …” Neil let the thought hang. He wanted Ted to get the gist of what he was saying without having to go through the discomfort of actually saying it.
“Where is he, though?” Ted missed Neil’s point. “I just parked behind his car again, so he’s still here, right? I mean, is he okay?”
Ted had no idea he had just confirmed Father Hilliard’s death.
Jeannine Quinn overheard Ted and erupted into tears. Billy pulled his wife tight to his side. His own eyes swelled with tears as he looked into the bright crest of light above the house.
Neil and Ted looked at one another as the knowledge of Father Hilliard’s death sunk in.
“How could God be so unkind?” Mrs. Hubbard dropped to the ground when Elizabeth told her Father Hilliard’s car was still parked on the road. “In one day,” she sobbed and curled into a fetal position, “all in one day—”
She heaved, rolled onto her side and let out a moan that was so deeply rooted in her soul that it paralyzed those around her and prevented them from reaching down and lifting her up off the damp ground.
“My God,” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Jon, do something.”
However, a strange sensation resembling a déjà vu or a recurring dream had drifted over Jon—It’s like I’ve witnessed these events before, cleaning out the house, hiring a caterer, the funeral, the limousine rides, the burial ceremony, the crowd at the reception. Even watching his mother-in-law as she curled into a ball on the ground, weeping like an injured animal, seemed oddly repetitive.
But there was a new element, not congruent with his awkward feeling of dreamy familiarity. It was a sense of satisfaction stemming from the new knowledge that Tom had lived a full life. Ezekiel, Carrie and Tommy, whether they knew it or not, had introduced him to his brother-in-law. Jon knelt down beside Mrs. Hubbard and placed a hand on her shoulder.
Melanie stepped back from the family, hugging herself tight against a chill that seemed to come not from the night air but from inside. She felt nothing for the priest. And why should I? After all, the man had groped me, tried to rape me. She had only managed to stop him after kicking him in the balls. But watching her aunt wilt into the ground, Melanie didn’t know what to do. She needed her aunt’s strong, supportive attention—she even relied on it. The constant phone calls, including the ones she ignored, and the knowledge that her aunt was thinking about her even when not around—these things had comforted Melanie and made her sober loneliness tolerable. Now, the idea of playing the opposite role—of supporting her aunt—terrified her. Her breath quickened. And, watching her aunt’s grief from a distance, she started shaking.
Her brother Tony knelt next to Jon and her aunt, delicately touching, comforting the old woman. Melanie wanted to do the same; wanted to show that she cared. But where she hoped to find compassion inside herself—and a willingness to go to her aunt—she found instead … nothing.
How does Tony do it? Who in our lives taught him to do that—to touch like that? I want what he has—to feel sadness, grief, love, happiness. Hating that she was drunk, numbly drunk, she closed her eyes to shut everything out, and there, in slow motion, she saw fragments of metal fly through the air and crack the shell of a sandy-brown soldier’s helmet. Her cousin Tom’s eyes burst wide open with surprise. She gasped aloud.
Jon,” Elizabeth demanded, “help her up. Tony, can we bring her to your house?”
Mrs. Hubbard wrestled free of Tony and Jon’s clutches and pressed herself to the ground.
This earth was hers. Her family had tilled it for generations. The soil belonged to her—it had nurtured her sufferings and now it yielded to her sadness. Like the dense root system of the hay-grass in these old fields, her family, too, had once been embedded into, and thrived on, this piece of land. In desperation, she grasped onto the scraggily wet grass, dug her fingernails into the soil and pulled at the roots. Tom was gone. Father Hilliard was dead, too. She had carried the burden of Tom’s origin throughout his whole life. Tom was unexpected; Father Hilliard had forced himself upon her. Afterwards, when she discovered that she had become pregnant; she sought him out at the church and told him about the child. Unsurprised by the news, he calmly explained that God, through his actions,
provided for her what her husband was unable—a child. She was to keep his role in the conception a secret and allow her husband to take responsibility. If she agreed, the child would live under Christ’s protection—Father Hilliard promised.
She agreed.
They knelt together before the altar, the same altar before which Tom’s casket had lain that very morning, and he blessed her and the unborn child, and, in God’s name, made an agreement with her: If she vowed silence, Christ would watch over the child. For almost four decades she justified her denial of the truth by hiding behind this agreement. Now, with Tom and Father Hilliard’s deaths, she saw that both her vow of silence and her agreement with God proved worthless—it was a sham. There was no protection. No one had watched over her son. Father Hilliard had deceived her, and his death here was God’s punishment for his actions.
God, in his wrath, had punished her as well. He’d taken Tom and burned down the house. Now she needed to purge in order to save her soul. She needed to turn herself fully over to the Divine and accept responsibility for her part in the deception.
The two Hubbard brothers, who earlier had lurked at a distance, appeared at Mrs. Hubbard’s side as if on cue to hear the confession. Like evil archangels they leaned over the old woman.
Ezekiel, seeing himself as the dutiful son-in-law, took a position next to the two old men and prepared to intervene at the first sign of contention.
“What do you want?” Elizabeth, too, wanted to protect her mother from the men’s torment. “Jon, get her up!”
“Easy does it, girl,” Peter Hubbard grinned. “We just want to help.”
Carrie held her son close and moved him around behind the brothers. She felt compelled to stay, although on the surface, none of it—not the priest, the land, the fire—had anything to do with her. It was more than she had ever wanted to see of Tom’s life.
Her son clung to her, speechless, motionless, watching it all. She could only hope that by staying she had not damaged him in some way. She should have left, picked up the boy and run down the driveway, gotten into her car and driven back to Boston. But she stayed. Stayed because as absurd as it might seem, the sobbing old woman on the ground, the two men on their knees comforting her, the daughter barking orders, Ezekiel playing protector and the two old brothers hovering like vipers were all part of her son—they were his family. She positioned herself and Tommy at a safe distance from the brothers and readied herself for whatever would come next.
Mrs. Hubbard raised her head off the ground. “Do you see? Do you see what’s happened? It’s all been taken away from me … all of it. Because of my actions. Because of what I did to my poor Tom, my son. Why did I ever let him do that to us? And him, he’s dead as well—punished for our sins. And he said nothing would come of it. That God would forgive us. Even this afternoon, sitting across from me, he assured me that God approved, that we had done the right thing. But it’s not true. Tom’s dead and now he’s dead, too.”
“Mother? Jon, what is she saying?”
“Don’t you see, Elizabeth?” Mrs. Hubbard lifted herself higher and Jon helped her roll onto her side. She had banged her nose when she dropped to the ground. Blood trickled from one nostril.
“I’m gonna get an ambulance.” Tony jumped up and ran toward the fire trucks and rescue personnel.
The television news crews had made it up the driveway to the line of yellow police tape. They were in front of the house, jockeying for position: Tragedy strikes soldier’s memorial reception. House of hero burns on burial day. Stay tuned, full coverage at 10:00.
“No!” Mrs. Hubbard yelled after her nephew.
“Mother, something needs to be done. You can’t stay here. Look at you, you’re bleeding. Jon, help me. And you, you, too.” Elizabeth motioned to Ezekiel and together they leaned down to lift up her mother.
“No, Elizabeth.” Mrs. Hubbard struggled against their combined strength.
The three managed to lift her up while she cussed and protested, determined to say what she needed to say. “Just listen to me. That man, Elizabeth … Father Hilliard. He was your brother’s father. It is true. Your uncles are right, I lied. I lied Tom’s whole life. I thought it would help him. I thought it would protect him. Father Hilliard said it was what God wanted me to do and I believed him. But he was wrong, and this, today, this is God’s punishment.”
Relief washed over her after she spoke. She had nothing left to hide. Her body relaxed for the first time in years; it became fluid, lighter. Exhausted, she clung to Ezekiel’s arm.
