Town Burning Read online

  Town Burning

  Thomas Williams

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1959 Thomas Williams

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2015 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-90-2

  Cover by Awarding Book Covers

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Man hath still either toys or care,

  He hath no root, nor to one place is tied,

  But ever restless and irregular

  About this earth doth run and ride;

  He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where,

  He says it is so far

  That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

  —HENRY VAUGHAN

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  TOWN BURNING

  CHAPTER 1

  John Cotter stopped beneath the maple trees and turned to look back down the hill at the spruces, dark green and almost black in the shadow. The sun came just over their tops, and crows, gigantic, too loud in the quiet air, circled trembling and crying up into the light and down into the darkness. Under the hill the first shade of dusk had begun to settle in, but here on the height of the land the level sun veined bright maple leaves and made the dark trunks gold. Even from this low hill the long convolutions of the earth were visible and still; the wind had died just at evening, and his home town lay neat and quiet along the riverbank.

  In August the town of Leah was mostly hidden beneath pillaring elms and more angular dark maples; all but the red-brick prison of a woolen mill, the white Gothic steeples of the churches and a white clapboard house here and there. The Connecticut River came down from the north, meandering through the narrow valley, highway following it, the black ribbon of the Boston and Maine Railroad straighter, on the far side in Vermont. The train that had brought him home had long since gone, toward the north and Canada.

  In two months or so the leaves would turn red and yellow and orange in the sudden frosts, give out their own fiery inner light for a week or two before falling to the yards and streets, leaving Leah bare except for the brittle crosshatchings of branches, open to the wind and the eye. Then from this hill, if he were still in Leah, he would be able to see everything—leaning unpainted back sheds, the mill tenements of Poverty Street, the rusty bodies of cars in Shapiro’s junkyard behind the high school, the summer-end gardens full of stalks and rotting squash—all ignored or forgotten things come to light in the season of truth. But now the leaves were kind, and Leah in its little valley was set, cozy and permanent. Leah waited for him below, seeming to have a solid, strict reality about it, as if in Leah, more than in any other place in the world, everything counted. Just by coming back (unwillingly) after so long a time, it seemed to him that some of the vulnerable, oversharp senses of childhood had been restored in him. Here houses were square and sensible, chimneys wide, shutters green against dignified high walls—windows always seemed to look down at him—trees were broader at the base, the earth’s basalt protruded and led the mind back down to the core. Leah stood on no transitory alluvial plain, but on granite scarred by ice.

  The top of the hill, pasture for one straggly cow, was clear of brush except for patches of dark juniper, in spreading flat circles ten feet across. Around the tumbled stone walls tall pines and maples held off an advancing army of small gray birch. At one side, by the bouldery path that had once been a town road, a little family graveyard lay on slightly tilted ground. A deer trail ran right through it, bright and twisting between the slate stones, and a birch had fallen and rotted out of its bark, leaving a print like a white hand.

  John Cotter sat on a familiar granite cornerstone and watched the warm light cross his town and stop against the eastern hills.

  He was a small man, neat and dark, thirty years old, with a precise, quiet way of moving, even of disappearing, that occasionally made people extremely angry. He would watch them as he now watched the dying light, blue eyes deep in his head below brows that grew together across his nose, as if he were watching beneath a hedge, in ambush and unseen. His body was square, tense; yet unless he was deliberately in motion—going from one place to another, or manipulating some necessary object—he remained absolutely still, a characteristic so rare, so shocking to see in an animal obviously human, that most people were irritated by it. He was quite aware of this habit of immobility; and since the original purpose of it, he believed, had been a desire for invisibility, he had tried to imitate the little movements, the ear pullings, the head tiltings of his fellow men. But he was no actor. His imitations always struck him as false, as poor camouflage. When he did move he was quick. His feet landed where he wanted them to, and he was very gentle with physical objects, rarely breaking anything. Now he turned away from the light on the scattered fields toward the little graveyard.

  HUCKINS

  —carved deep on the center stone: a name that had disappeared from Leah. Around the granite center stone thin slate markers leaned according to the patterns of the ground frosts of many winters: Florrie, Zacharia, Mary, Abraham, Ezekiel and Seth. It was Florrie’s stone that always drew him—the only one with a verse, with the youngest age of death except for the babies and for the child Ezekiel, who died at six years. Her stone was straighter, too, mainly because several years before he had straightened it, feeling at the time guilty, remembering the rather unjust fate of the man who tried to support the falling Ark of the Covenant. There’d been no sense of righteousness or of good deed about the act—he remembered the thin edges of the stone in his hands, and the wet earth moving beneath his feet as the stone straightened, then the soft, fleshy feel of the sod as he stamped it tight along the stone’s edge. He hadn’t thought of Florrie Stonebridge’s possibly being grateful, either, but only of the silence of the Huckinses.

  One of his own damaging ideas about himself had to do with the fact that he would certainly have died at birth if it hadn’t been for some medical inventions fairly recent in terms of the age of Leah—the incubator was one. And it seemed to him that he was somehow artificial, out of the stream of evolution and survival, as if he really belonged here with the babies under their little stones all in a row in back: John, aet. 5 days; Mary, aet. 1 day; Nathaniel, aet. 1 month, 17 days. They had to take their chances and he had not.

  Florrie had lived to be 25 years, 7 months and 3 days old, and died on the nineteenth of February, 1806. The verse beneath the carved skull and wings was startling on the grim slate:

  Her load was heavy.

  Her back was slim.

  Her heart was merry.

  Rest her with Him.

  Zacharia Calvi
n Huckins lay at the right of his three wives. His stone, the size of a brick, bore only three letters, Z. C. H. His full name appeared on the center, granite stone, but over him only the little one rode the frost heaves. The little stone—John had pulled it up one time with a gooseberry bush, the plant’s roots having grasped it loosely, and had been a little shocked at the ease with which he kicked it back into its depression in the earth—it should have been turned under by frost and roots long ago. He was always impressed by Zacharia—the man had evidently chosen his own marker, after a lifetime of rolling and carrying the cragged monsters to the walls. Well knowing the weight of stone, he probably didn’t want to have a big one pressing down on him. Or maybe his children deliberately chose the small marker—but this didn’t follow, hadn’t at least in the case of his own grandfather, that frightening man who lay encased securely in an expensive cement vault in the town cemetery, below the ground in a casket, the casket in the vault so that the ground would not slump in when the casket rusted through. They had planted him expensively and finally. No, Zacharia had probably said, “By God, I’m sick of stones,” being a New Hampshire farmer. But was he responsible for the verse on Florrie’s slate? She had been his second wife, and he had outlived three wives and several children, according to the carved date, and had lived until 1843, seventy-eight years of fighting behind him. Such discipline might easily have tried the sentiment out of Zacharia, but John had seen old hill farmers who had some small touch of humanity left—not much, but some, when there was time for it.

  But even in his own lifetime, in the time he could remember, the hill farms had mostly all gone back to dark, the farmers dead or gone South and West or gone to the mills. This farm had long since gone, except for the pasture on the town side of the hill, where the juniper and birch were slyly creeping in. In a few years it would be jungle like the rest.

  A chipmunk had been watching him, and suddenly it jerked up straight, then ran, clattering dry grass and leaves. It stopped on the wall, quivering, tail snapping just at the tip, and looked beyond John to the pines. Something had come up behind, and he turned his head slowly, not really startled, but still feeling himself to be a stranger here. He had been away from Leah and the woods for two years.

  At first he saw nothing but the shadows growing toward him, edges long and broken by the disappearing sun. As the sun went down, the wind came on again and the pine boughs sighed and moved. Something watched him, he knew, and he would stay motionless and carefully cover the area with his eyes, up and down, then on a few feet, then up and down again until he had marked each tangle of bush—then back again—and he would perhaps see what it was. If it were a man he would see him soon enough when he moved. If it were an animal he could only wait and hope to see it. In the woods again where there were no straight lines and no arbitrary edges and squares, where every leaf and twig waited to be crushed or to catch and crackle, he sat still and continued his examination of each shape, feeling himself to be invisible as long as he moved nothing but his eyes.

  Then he saw the tall man standing in the darkness under the pines, very near, as motionless as he was himself. A long gun partly hidden beside his leg, the man stared straight into John’s eyes. Knowing at once that he had been seen, an uncontrollable smile suddenly appeared across the man’s long, narrow face, shortening the face by inches. It seemed to turn from its original dark oval to a circle, and John saw long yellow teeth. The shotgun swiveled up and over his shoulder as he came out of the shadow, and the brush under his feet crackled and zipped across his overalls.

  “Hi, John!” he said. “Didn’t know who it was, straight off.” He came and stood, grinning at John and then at the chipmunk, who still snapped his tail. “You seen that striped squirrel when he seen me!”

  “You gave me a start, there, Billy,” John said.

  “Not so as you’d notice. Anyways, so did you me. I figured you looked kind of natural, except for them clothes you got on. I knew you weren’t no game warden, anyways, and I got a couple pa tridges hung in my crotch. Didn’t know as it might be somebody’d tell on me.” He twisted the visor of his cap that had once been white and that now, molded greasily to his head, the words Duco Enamel barely legible across the front of it, was the indistinct woods color of animals. He grinned, his large brown eyes sinking back among red wrinkles, blackheads and stray hairs on his dark cheeks, deep wrinkles black across his forehead. His lips thinned and shrank back away from his gums as he grinned, so that the long teeth were as bare as those of a grinning dog that might be snarling except for the slim evidence of a wagging tail. Billy Muldrow’s grin had frightened people in Leah, as had the strangling, paroxysmal laugh that usually accompanied it. A big man, somewhere in his forties, he was known for his great strength.

  “Everybody knows you half live off the woods, Billy.”

  “Cheaper than the town feeding me!” Billy yelled, and let his head fall back to laugh, a piercing clatter. Then he shook his head, pretending to be out of breath. “How come you ain’t been up to see me, Johnny? You used to like my brand of cider, as I remember.”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Now, that’s right! Seems I heard that. How long you been away, now?”

  “Two years.”

  “Two years! What’d you do, Johnny, go back in the Army?”

  “No, I’ve been traveling around, going to school some.”

  “Seems you’re a little old to be going to school, ain’t you?”

  “I know it, Billy. I’m too lazy to go to work.”

  “You and me both! I don’t suppose you been home yet,” Billy said, looking at John’s clothes. When he turned around to listen to something in the woods, his overalls followed just a little behind, and then fell swinging to catch up. “Nothing,” he said. “How about having a snort—won’t keep you long, Johnny. I got a new house now. Come up and see it.”

  He waited for John to decide, and as he waited his face, that seemed to have been beaten and weathered by the same forces that had acted upon a gnarled pine bole behind him, grew nervous to the point of fright. Billy Muldrow, on the edge of Leah’s containing, demanding grasp of everyone who lived in Leah’s valley, had always, and with reason, feared the answer to any question. Impatience was entirely unconvincing in him; now he tried to be sternly disapproving, and achieved a poor parody of Leah’s common attitude toward himself. “Seems to me you been away for two years you can wait fifteen more minutes.”

  “All right, Billy.” John had his own reasons for waiting. He might have gone straight home from the station instead of taking this procrastinating long walk—a scouting trip—up Pike Hill and around in back of Leah, where he could see everything at once, and from a safe distance.

  He turned his back upon Leah and followed Billy through the pines to a small clapboard building, surprisingly neat, painted bright yellow. On the side, stenciled in black, were the words NEW HAMPSHIRE HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT.

  “How do you like my new house?” Billy asked.

  “Fine. Do they know you’ve got it?”

  “Sure do. It’s one of them traveling offices, like. Washed into the river this spring and I paid twenty dollars for it, put her back together and hauled her up here behind my truck. Now I got two houses.”

  The other house lay on its side in the brush where Billy had rolled it, silvery boards nail-shot and bent, large red hens hopping in and out of it.

  Billy, with a proud and proprietary flair, pulled out his key ring and selected, from a pound of brass keys strung like a sunburst upon it, the right one for the little door’s padlock.

  “My new house!” he said, and showed John in. In the dusty brownness, in the old-clothes stink—an odor hardly human and therefore not too sharply unpleasant, as if Billy Muldrow were as inoffensive in his filth as a hooved animal—he pulled out his only chair for John, tucked his shotgun into the spindly, dust-icicled rafters and lit an oil lamp. The two windows, under the dark pines, let in very little of the dying light.

&n
bsp; As the warm lamplight grew in the glass, Billy’s furniture, moved from the slightly bigger and draftier shack John remembered, came to view: black woodstove, oilcloth-covered table covered again from edge to edge with nuts, bolts, pipes, dishes, wrenches, interesting steel, brass and copper things that were angled, bent, joined, worn—Billy’s collection to be gleefully explained: “That’s a sliding spline and a Spicer U-joint from a GMC 1950 three-ton truck. That’s a needle valve from a thirty-gallon water heater.” Billy’s truck was smaller and older, and he hadn’t running water, but he knew the names and uses of all his metal pieces. “Sometimes they come in handy.” They never did. No handier than the treasures of a lepidopterist, they were no less accurately and lovingly designated.

  In the corners of the shack, stacked and hung, were the supplies and tools of the woods—rifles, cant dog, a pyramid of turnips, a five-gallon can of kerosene, the immense links of a rust-brown logging chain, great rubber boots polka-dotted with cold-patches.

  Billy turned to John and spread his arms. “A mite smaller than my old house, Johnny, but it’s tight’s a drum, and cozy. Don’t take nothing to heat.” He sat on his brown hammocky bed and lit his pipe, his long face thinning to a V as he sucked. Then he jumped up. “Jesus!” he shouted, feeling his pants, “I forgot them pa’tridges!” The wild laugh clattered as his body bent backward—a banshee fit, scattered tears and explosive hisses, screams beyond mirth. Then it all stopped short. He leaned toward John, who watched calmly, remembering that no response was necessary, and blew his cheeks into chipmunk balloons; a moment of silence to commemorate the fantastic humor of forgetfulness.

  The moment over, he undid his overall straps, reached into his pants and pulled out the partridges. “One’s pretty fat,” he said, and squeezed it delicately with huge thumb and forefinger. “Pretty little bastards, ain’t they?” The birds lay ruffled upon the nuts and bolts, brown and black, plump breasts and skinny necks.