Town Burning Read online

  “A lot of good meat there.” John made the required, remembered comment upon edible game.

  Billy suddenly braced, mock-serious, his stare barely belied by a smile withheld, and tore his cap from his head as if he were going to throw it like a gage into John’s face. “Cider!” he shouted. “Hard stuff!”

  “You did mention it,” John said.

  “I did mention it, by God, Johnny. I did! Well!” He kicked a floorboard, and it jumped up far enough so that he could get his hand under it and pull it up, and with it came a trapdoor. He climbed down out of sight.

  The lamp gave a silent, smooth light. In the cellar a jug clinked and a wooden spigot squeaked.

  He was nearly home, and as if Billy Muldrow’s place—on the very edge of Leah—were a kind of compression chamber, he waited for the possibly suffocating plunge into the greater pressure of town and family below; into the involvement he had evaded for so long. Leah, this little nub of activity among the low New Hampshire mountains, in spite of all experience was to him the hard center of the world. The center, even though it had always seemed to him that one of the main reasons for growing older had been to escape—and he was not the only one who had tried and been unsuccessful. He had been to all the cities of the common dream of freedom and found them unreal—therefore delightful. He did not want to come home. Leah, however, was the place where life began, where death called and struck. His brother was in the hospital, and it was serious, and they had called him back to the place where everything began.

  He heard a furtive, immediately inhuman scratching in the dark beneath the table, and reacted with uncharacteristic nervousness. He jumped up and away as shyly as a girl, then received the scornful glance of a large raccoon who swaggered out into the light, coughed warningly and picked his nose with a black, spidery hand. The dark eyes, secure and knowing, planted like jewels in the fine mask of his face, took care to examine his possible enemy before he turned to climb upon the table. He found no reason for fear, evidently, and let his glossy fur settle down again along his shoulders. He then sat down upon a plate, picked up the fatter partridge by the neck, and looked into the bird’s dead and gummy eyes.

  “Hey, Billy,” John called softly.

  “Yo! Just a minute, boy, I’m filling a jug!”

  The raccoon looked accusingly at John, and his fur rose a bit.

  “There’s a raccoon on the table.”

  A gallon jug of amber cider appeared upon the floor, and Billy followed. “Oh, that’s old Jake,” Billy said. “He’s all right.”

  The raccoon watched with great interest as Billy filled two tumblers. His nose was twitchy, his little tongue furtive upon his furry chops.

  The cider was light, slightly bitter, with something of the aftertaste of old yellow cheese about it. John thought of the cellars of old houses—white clapboard houses and black earth basements, late fall and the odors of old wooden rain barrels: that wind in the nose was cool and damp.

  “Have some more,” Billy said, and tapped the jug with his palm.

  John reached for the jug, but the raccoon’s sharp teeth got in the way, white and grinding.

  “Ain’t he the cussedest animal?” Billy said, then turned and, without pause or transition from his calm, conversational tone, raged: “God damn it, Jake! This is my house and that’s my cider and I’ll do what I want with it!” The raccoon held his ground, and snarled back. When Billy raised a threatening hand the raccoon backed off a few inches, but with little loss of face. “Here, Johnny, I’ll pour it myself,” Billy said. He scowled at Jake and filled John’s glass full to the brim. “Ain’t no goddam critter going to tell me what to do!”

  Jake sat on the table and watched them drink.

  “Enough people in this town trying to tell me what to do as it is. You know, Johnny, they got me black-listed in Leah.”

  “They got you what?”

  “They got me on the black list. I can’t buy no beer in no grocery store. I can’t ‘enter’ the goddam liquor store. How do you like that?”

  “Is that legal? What did you do, Billy? You haven’t got any dependents.”

  “I don’t know if it’s legal, but Chief Atmon wrote it out on this paper and stuck it up in all the stores. Says ‘blacklist’ on it and my name right next Susie Tercotte and Eightball, Sam Wells, Wallace Widdicomb—all them drunks and a couple old bags live down on River Street. Enough to make a man git mad.”

  “You’re no drunk, Billy.”

  “I know it! I git drunk, but I ain’t no souse, Johnny. You know that.” Billy took a drink and looked over John’s head into the dark corner where a dusty ham hung on a thong. He cleared his throat. “They just don’t like me. They just don’t like me, that’s all. Shot my dog. Shot Daisy. I lived here all my life and never did no harm to nobody.” He took the jug and poured Jake a drink, first dumping a pile of nuts and bolts out of a soup bowl. The raccoon lowered his delicate black nose into the cider, shivered and began to lap.

  “I never did like this town,” John said.

  “You and me both. I lived here all my life and I never did like the goddam town of Leah. It can wash on down the Connecticut goddam River like it almost did in Thirty-eight, blow away, burn up—wouldn’t bother me none. Like to have one of them big adam-bombs, I’d roll her down Pike Hill bumpity bang bump right down the center of Maple Street, smoking and hissing and all like that. Wouldn’t them little farts run and jump? BOOM! They can have their lousy store-bought beer.”

  “Why did Atmon do it?”

  “It ain’t that I’m poor—I got nobody depending on me. I eat good, don’t charge nothing at the store, make good money in the woods when I feel like it. I got a truck. I register it every time and git it inspected like everybody. Don’t none of them people like me, is all—Atmon don’t like nobody ain’t got bucks up the chute. Them old biddies this side of Bank Street—now I don’t mean your maw, Johnny, she ain’t as bad as the rest—but them big society big-ass biddies with their Women’s Club and all. You know what I mean? Sometimes I wish I’d of stayed in the Army; they want a man to kiss their ass like that. They don’t like the way I smell, they don’t have to talk to me. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do. I had enough of that in the Army. Now I got to drive across the river to git a quart of beer.”

  John shook his head.

  “Now I hear Atmon’s going to try to git me black-listed over in Wentworth Junction, too. Then I’ll have to go clear to Northlee.”

  “What started it with Atmon?”

  “Johnny, I don’t know. Seems they won’t let a man live his own life any more. I’m my own boss and Atmon ain’t. I don’t feel like working, I lay abed or go fishing. Atmon’s got to suck up to them old biddies run this town, the high bloody muckymuck sixty-nine-degree Masons, Rot’ry Club, Elks, Lions, Owls, Mooses, Gooses, Skunks and all that goddam zoo. They won’t leave me be, is all I know.”

  “If you ever want any beer I’ll get it for you,” John said.

  “They can keep their beer, Johnny. But I want to thank you, Johnny. You never was one of them people. You never was a lousy Junior Stevens nor Keith Joubert nor one of them used to pick on me.”

  “They used to pick on me, too.”

  “Latest thing, they sawed out the cross brace on my outhouse seat, hoping I’d fall in. Course I saw it. I seen them going down the hill. I told Junior Stevens next day if I ever caught him in the woods he’d wish to God he never was born.”

  “He and my brother used to make me wish that,” John said.

  “If you’ll pardon my saying it, Johnny, I never could like your brother Bruce.”

  “Neither could I.”

  “Not that I ain’t sorry he’s in the hospital. I don’t like to see no man in the hospital, Johnny. I guess that’s why you come home. Ain’t that right?”

  John put his glass on the table. “I hate to go down,” he said.

  “It ain’t your fault, Johnny. It’s the goddam town of Leah. It’s our misfortune we was b
orn here. It’s funny about a little town can be good or bad. You take Wentworth Junction, for instance. Now, that ain’t a bad town. I always did like Wentworth Junction. Nobody never done me no dirt in Wentworth Junction.”

  John poured himself half a glass. “I hate to go back, Billy. I don’t think I ever would’ve come back at all, ever, if it wasn’t for this happening.”

  “Where was you, anyway?”

  “Paris.”

  “Paris, France? Well, by God, Johnny, I don’t blame you none!”

  “I mean I’d of had to come back to the States, anyway. No money. But I wouldn’t have stopped by at Leah.”

  “Your ma and dad wouldn’t like that, though—not coming to see ’em.” Billy looked him straight in the eye—disapprovingly.

  “I know they’d want to see me. But Bruce always got so upset whenever I was around. They said in the telegram he wanted to see me, but they always say that anyway.” He got up and finished his cider standing. “Thanks for the hooch, anyway.”

  “That’s right!” Billy said, laughing. “Ain’t that batch strong, though! Jake won’t drink of the other barrel, but by God he loves that one!” He looked around. “Where’d that critter go, now, anyways.” The raccoon was gone, but both partridges were still on the table. “Now, you come up anytime you want, Johnny. Anytime. If you want, bring me a case of beer sometime. I’ll pay you for it.”

  “I will. And I’ll find out why Atmon shut you off.”

  “Yeah, sure, Johnny.” He didn’t seem too interested in that. “But you be sure to come and see me, now. You do that.”

  John was at the door, and opened it.

  “Misery loves company, you know,” Billy said. “You can find the way.”

  John left Billy standing in the little door against the lamplight, filling the door and stooping over in it, chinks of yellow light coming out around him.

  And still he didn’t want to go home. He should never have stopped, should have let the momentum of the thousands of miles take him straight into Leah. He walked forward, letting his feet in the thin city shoes slip on the pine needles, toward the Huckins graveyard. The west still had color; the sky was bright as day, but the ground was dark. The stones in the little square graveyard tilted darkly against high pale grass, and the birchbark hand lay phosphorescent against the swallowing ground. Florrie Stonebridge Huckins lay in her moldering bed, her bury-hole. My back is strong, he thought, but how do I know it?

  When he was a little boy and first saw the stones, they meant graveyard, to stay out of, to be afraid of, and later on he could read the verses and the dates. Then it didn’t seem too bad that Florrie Stonebridge had died at the old age of twenty-five. But she had grown younger every year. Now he had lived five years longer than Florrie, and she had died too young. Her heart was merry—they loved her. Her back was slim—they pitied her—old Zacharia did, anyway, with his stiff spine and horny hands and a sea of stones to carry from the fields, the dwarfish apple trees to keep alive.

  The pine boughs sighed. Nearer, a single dry leaf clicked. Suddenly it seemed possible that Florrie Stonebridge, whose slim back wasted among the stones and roots, might come swaying up as a ghost, like thin cloth pulled under water. Or a moldered hand might reach out and feel his ankle. He walked stiffly to the wall, deliberately slow, stiffly moving each foot as if cold bones would touch him if he ran.

  He could see the neglected road he must go down, vague among the advancing birch, and at the bottom houses, visible as warm yellow windows among trees. Maple Street, a tunnel under elms, led to his home.

  As he walked slowly down Pike Hill, the town came up to meet him. He could not escape its enfolding arms and a warmth that seemed to flow out of the houses and touch his skin. Lamps shone from windows onto lawns and lilac bushes. Thick tree trunks led up into the dark over his head, arching out to form the ceiling of a cave. A smudge of random August leaves smoldered in the gutter—leaves from the maples and one great beech he remembered as if it were a resident person on this street. He could tell the odor of the beech leaves from all the others. Beside the smudge, a wooden wheelbarrow and a wooden rake caught the light as the red hole in the middle of the pile grew bright and faded. He knew the names of the people who lived in the houses, even remembered the bulges and cracks in the sidewalk where roots passed beneath, could name the tranquil faces inside in the light of bridge lamps, in rooms he had been in himself. He remembered evenings after supper on Maple Street, and could hear, eerily as if through an old radio, the cries of children—Aing going in aing tell maing mama! ‘Fraidy cat! You don’t play fair, you don’t play fair! And the last cry was probably his own as he once again found out how unfair things could be. And yet the town held him close, folded itself around him. He remembered this tunnel of a street in all seasons, in all weather—spring days of warm air above melting snow, the first odor of thawing earth; sweet, entirely new and strange after winter, late fall and a horizontal sun at four o’clock; red against the red clapboards of an old square house, the dusty umbrella of a tall elm in bonfire smoke, the same elm upside down in a summer rain puddle; down, down as it climbed to a summer sky and white clouds, lilacs around the kitchen doors, springy and sweet, dog days, mosquito days, the hours after supper when it was getting dark and blue and the children ran smack through the hedges to get away, calling to each other around the corners that were new and dangerous in the dark. The tunnel shut softly behind him. He was home, and sober as a child. He passed the Baptist Church, all dark. The town hall bell rang eight o’clock, each dang of the bell wavering on the wind.

  He stopped across the street from his own house, still not wanting to go in. But now the windows were all dark and the garage doors were hooked open. I can’t get in, he thought, knowing at the same time that there were several ways he could get in the house, even if it were locked, and it never was. The dark windows looked down at him, the house solid among thick bushes, framed by two blue spruce, the lawn barely green in the streetlight. Above the broad wooden panels of the front door the fanlight’s narrow triangles of glass winked in the streetlight; shadows of leaves moved up and down across the white boards. The house was clean, the paint spotless flat white that seemed to be slightly fluorescent against the dark shutters and small windowpanes. The house neither pulled him toward it nor rejected him, but sat there on its own ground with a solidity, an everlasting solid reality that made him suddenly shy, nearly afraid. He had no protection, none of the objectivity that he had been able to depend upon in foreign places. He wished for another tumbler of Billy Muldrow’s hard cider, then turned toward the town square, having decided quickly and, he thought, rather clinically that he had better get a drink.

  Bruce must have had a car, and since there were no cars at all in the double garage, his father and mother had gone separate ways—most likely his mother to the hospital in Northlee and his father to the office. He would go to the office and see his father, but first to Futzie’s Tavern, if Futzie’s was still there, if anything outside of Maple Street was still there as it used to be.

  He came out into the Town Square, store windows and neon shining across the green below the tall elms, and walked along the dark side where the great old houses stood. On two sides of the square were gaunt Victorian blocks with Roman arches for windows: Tuttle Block 1901, Masonic Hall 1893, Cascom Savings Bank Bldg 1907. On the other two sides of the square the houses of the wealthy, the little round library, the Congregational Church and the colonial-style post office (1937) gave the square a settled, cozy New England look. On the business side the ground floors of the red-brick blocks contained F. W. Woolworth, the familiar red and gold sign hung against brick arches, Follansbee’s Hardware, Strand Theater, Fire Station, Trotevale’s Department Store—shoes on the left, dry goods on the right, plumbing and mistakes in the basement. People were just coming out of the first show at the Strand, and he circled the dark side, walking among the trees and vacant wooden benches so that he would meet no one. Lights were on in the t
ourist information booth beneath the wooden bandstand, and inside he saw one of his high-school teachers, Miss Colchester, stacking folders and sharpening pencils, making things neat, fussing busily as she always did.

  He managed to reach the comparative darkness of River Street without speaking to anyone, knowing that he had been seen and noted by three people, knowing also that the three were aware of his having seen them and of his deliberate avoidance of their eyes. He approached Futzie’s carefully, then walked quickly past, trying to see who was in the dim room below the bluish television set. He saw enough—a broad black leather jacket and the back of a familiar head. Junior Stevens, who would most likely not be there without some of his friends. Although no motorcycles leaned against the building, he decided not to take a chance on it, and continued down the crooked little street toward the railroad spur and his father’s office.

  The lights were on, and the yard light shone on the familiar black-and-white sign:

  Wm. Cotter & Son, Building Contractors

  Bldg. Materials, Paint, Lumber

  Cement & Cinder Blocks

  Lehigh Coal

  His father’s Buick was parked beside the low clapboard office. Paint cracked and peeled on the office trim and on the sign; weather had warped and separated some of the clapboards, shooting the nails. Frost and rain had gullied the cinder driveway, and the old storage buildings sagged. But the huge padlock on the main gate was shiny, as were the tracks of the railroad siding that entered the yard beside the gate. All wood touched by hands was smooth and clean on gates. and railings.

  Still scouting, although he had nothing to fear from his father, he went to the office window. His father sat at Bruce’s desk in the outer office, his large head cocked sideways in order to keep the smoke from his cigarette out of his eyes, staring with a puzzled, humorous expression at a sheaf of forms. In his brightly checked sport jacket, striped shirt and bow tie, his gray slacks with their thin and elegant folds, he seemed the personification of the adorned male—the pheasant cock, the bright strutter of his glaring virility. He was, John sadly knew, afraid, as any cock would be, of the two sons he must consider, alien as they were to his open nature, dark and silent weasels.