Ferris Beach (34 page)

She kept right on talking even though Mama went to open the back door, me right behind her. “It’s a real mess,” Daddy said. A thin film of soot covered his face and shirt. His breath was quick
and shallow, and Mama pulled him over to the table and urged him to sit. Mr. Rhodes followed, Sally Jean pulling him to the chair where she had been sitting and offering him her cup of hot chocolate.

“Did you see Merle?” I asked, causing everyone to look first at me and then at him. He nodded, propped his elbows on the table, face in his open palms.

“Did he say anything?” I waited for an answer, and he just shook his head. I knew that there was more, something had happened. It was just like when Mo died; we all knew and so were afraid to ask.

“That other boy’s dead, though.” His voice was hollow. “Damnedest thing. He was just sitting on that motorcycle on the porch. The man who lived in one of the other houses that burned said that they screamed for him to get off the porch, but he never even moved, just sat there with fire all around him.”

“Oh God.” Mama’s hand was up to her face, a look of horror, but Mrs. Poole was as composed as if she’d just been issued a weather report, light rain.

“What about Gladys?” she asked, stubbed out her cigarette, reached for the pack, and then just held her hand there.

“She’s fine,” he said. “Nobody was home but that one boy.”

“They’re sure?” Mrs. Poole asked. “What about that worthless Beef?”

“He got home stock sober, or seemed sober. Wife and the little girl had been with him all evening.” Daddy took a glass of water from Mama and drank it all the way down, making sooty fingerprints where he gripped the glass. “Said he’d been hunting work in Clemmonsville all day, and they’d stopped to eat supper on the way home. Broke down and cried like a baby when he saw that son of his off to the side and covered in a piece of canvas.”

“About time,” Mrs. Poole muttered, then sat up with a start, as if she’d been talking in her sleep.

“What did Gladys do?” Mama asked, and I realized we were
all charmed by the details, charmed by the voice in the same way that Mama had charmed Sally Jean all those times.

“She was in shock, I believe,” he said. “She just sat there and shook like a leaf, the little girl clinging to her and screaming until Kate’s friend came and picked the girl up and led his mama to the front seat of the truck.”

“Did Merle see you?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t go over where he was. There was another girl there, Perry I believe he called her.” He paused, thinking. “She was all to pieces, and I saw him walking her down the street there when I was coming home.”

“She was supposed to marry Merle’s brother,” I whispered. We asked more questions—Had those people gone to Brown’s Econo? Did they know what started the fire?—but my father didn’t know any of the answers. We just sat quietly, seeing no movement from the dark empty lots behind us. When the phone rang, we all jumped, and I ran into the front hall, grabbed up the receiver to hear Merle’s voice.

“Hey, Kate.” Misty followed and stood in the hall as I sank onto the edge of the throne chair. “Did your dad tell you?” He sounded far away. I could hear a baby crying in the background, and I assumed he was calling from Perry’s house. I imagined her sitting there beside him the same way Misty was beside me.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and then listened, a long pause and a sigh.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Look, I gotta go.” I could hear noise in the background, cries and whimpers, and before I could ask where he’d be, he had hung up, the dial tone buzzing loudly.

I didn’t hear from Merle again that night, but we did have news that the families of the three homes destroyed were staying out on 301 as Mrs. Poole had provided. I imagined the four of them in one room, a phone on the old outdated desk but no privacy for him to call; how hard it would be for him to call me while
his mother was curled on the bed, lips trembling uncontrollably.

The next morning we heard that the fire had been no accident but was set with old rags and gasoline, a can found under the Huckses’ front porch, those other families just suffering the consequences of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the family next door had only lived three houses away, then the manger scene neatly wrapped in newspaper and tucked away for a year’s keeping in their attic would have survived, as would have the baby toys and wedding pictures and family recipes scribbled in the familiar hand of someone long gone.

The most horrifying part of the story came out two days later; Dexter had not died
in
the fire, but before.
That
was why he had sat so stoically in the middle of the flames. Merle told me, many days later when we met in the shed, that he had gone with his parents to identify Dexter, there in the bright lights of the morgue where he had been declared dead on arrival. Though he was badly burned, on his throat was a hairline slit, blackened wine color, where a blade had sliced the pale white skin.

“Who did it?” My voice was a whisper as we sat side by side and stared straight ahead at the blank wall of the shed, our fingers locked tightly.

“Probably some old
club
member,” he said. “Probably one of
his friends”
I didn’t ask him anything else, just sat there, listening to the rise and fall of his breath, and trying to shake the picture from my mind.

“Where are you all going to live?” I asked Merle, turning towards him, feeling his breath warm on my cheek.

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, then playfully tied a piece of yarn around my finger and left it there, turning it around and around as if it might be a ring. “My dad says we might have to move. Says he was thinking about taking a job in Clemmonsville anyway. In the meantime, I guess we’re in that old rotten motel.”

It was not long after the fire when Mrs. Poole said that she felt she ought to buy a leg of lamb and smear a bit of the blood out on
her storm door. “First Mo Rhodes, and then the fire. That child murdered, though he was mean as a snake, murdered nonetheless.” She paused while in thought, her thin lips stretched in a straight tight line. “Seems like I’m forgetting something else bad that happened.” She held up one finger. “Thomas Clayton died, though of course he didn’t live on this street.” She sat forward. “But his barber shop is not far. Just down there and around the corner. It’s like a plague of some sort, isn’t it? I believe it all started with the split-levels.”

“Mr. Clayton was a sweet man,” my mother said, to change the subject, and stared out at her greenhouse, where ferns covered the rafters. My father was at the edge of our yard with spade in hand planting canna lilies. He had said that they would bloom all summer, getting real tall like a fence to block out that blackened field and those cinderblock pilings like tombstones. “They’re sort of Victorian, Cleva,” he had explained when he came home with bags of the bulbs. “I know how you like Victorian things. You know those Victorians weren’t so quiet and prim as you might think. Get them out of those long, cumbersome clothes and they were free spirits.”

“I hear you,” she said.

“Yes, they reminded me of you, these canna lilies.” He grinned at her and then began plotting how he’d plant them. “I decided to go for the bright red ones. Come July they’ll be six feet high.”

“Thomas Clayton was all right,” Mrs. Poole was saying, “though he could be hard to get along with.” We both knew that Mrs. Poole had never quite gotten over the “Bo Poole School” comment.

“I thought he was a fine man,” Mama said, and turned back to her orchid catalogue, causing Mrs. Poole to ask why on earth she would want to grow orchids, and why, why,
why
was she letting my father plant
canna lilies.
She spat the name as if it were poison, probably sorry that she had not thought of the fast tall hedge herself. My mother was watching him like a hawk, noting every
time he stopped working and stood there mopping his flushed face. In her hand she held a letter addressed to him in Angela’s tiny printed letters, the return address simply the Ferris Beach Post Office. The last time my father had talked to her, he had suggested to us that maybe all was not
perfect in paradise,
that he couldn’t understand
how
she had the lousy luck and poor misfortune to keep winding up with men who changed like chameleons as soon as the marriage vows were spoken. “I guess they just learn they can take advantage of someone like Angela, you know, because she’s so trusting and generous.”

My mother opened her mouth, one eyebrow raised sharply, and then as if having a second thought, swallowed, spoke softly. “Do you think that maybe
she
fits into the pattern? Maybe the men don’t change but are all just alike.”

“What? You mean you think she
chooses
this?” he asked. “You think she
asks
for it? Only a fool would ask for such.” And she just looked at him, eyebrows raised as if to say, /
rest my case,
but then again, with a change of heart, said, “I think I see what you’re saying.” I had seen my mother with several self-help books recently, and I knew it was a struggle for her to practice these bits of positive thinking. “What I’m hearing from you is that Angela is being taken advantage of. You’re suggesting that Angela keeps giving people chance after chance and the benefit of every doubt there may be, and they all just keep slapping her down, poor thing.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s
exactly
what I’m saying.”

Now she was watching as he knelt there in his clean white shirt and planted bulb after bulb. Mrs. Poole was tapping a cigarette on the edge of the table, still declaring her distaste for the flowers. “I
love
canna lilies,” my mother finally said, a fierce expression on her face as she turned in her chair. “There’s nothing on this earth that I love more than a big bed of bright red canna lilies.”

“Well, I never knew you felt so strongly.” Mrs. Poole lit her
cigarette and breathed in, one eye twitching slighdy, a tick she’d recently acquired to replace the memory she was beginning to lose. “Canna lilies, caladiums, it’s nothing to get miffed over.”

“And I
hate
caladiums,” my mother said, folding the letter over in her hand. “I had some once and I
hated
the way I had to dig them up and store them year after year after year.”

“Well, why did you replant them?” Mrs. Poole was asking. “There’s no reason to get hostile, to berate a poor little plant just for growing when you’re the one who planted it. You’ll have to dig up those cannas just the same way.”

“It’s not always that easy,” my mother said. “You can’t always just dig up what bothers you. You dig it up here and it jumps up over there, doubling and tripling and spreading like a virus.”

“Are we talking about the same thing, Cleva?” Mrs. Poole crushed out her cigarette and lit another. She had begun smoking only half of her cigarettes, convinced that the tar and bad stuff were in the second half. “I thought we were talking about canna lilies and caladiums.”

My mother turned away from the window and looked at Mrs. Poole, studied her a full long minute before slipping Angela’s letter under a magazine and saying, “I thought we were talking about kudzu and bamboo and wisteria and things that are hard to control, things that take over if you let them and choke everything in sight.”

“Really?” Mrs. Poole sat forward, elbows on the table as she narrowed her eyes. “I think one of us got way off track.”

Much to everyone’s relief, Misty made majorette try-outs that spring, and I spent many hours counting off marches as she practiced her routines. It seemed she had grown half a foot in the past year and now was much thinner, her legs long and shapely as she kicked and marched. Her hair was long and Sally Jean had taught her how to French-braid it; they had spent one evening streaking it with Sun-In, just as Angela had recommended almost two years before. “Who would have thought?” she asked me so many times, a dreamy look on her face. “You with a steady boyfriend and me a majorette.”

Now we were in my kitchen, with Misty stripped down to her underwear as I helped take her measurements so she could order her uniforms. “You should be ashamed to undress here in broad daylight,” Mrs. Poole said, and shook her head. Mrs. Poole
had begun spending more and more time at our house, and it was starting to get on my mother’s nerves. “Why doesn’t that step-mother of yours measure you?”

“Sally Jean has a job,” Misty said, and turned to the side to thrust her chest toward Mrs. Poole. “Or she’d be glad to help me.” Mrs. Poole settled back in her chair, one of my mother’s prize needlepoint pillows crushed behind her back. Every day when Mrs. Poole left, my mother returned the pillow to the sun-porch and rearranged them all so that this particular one, most of it petit point which took my mother years to do, carefully hidden; then Mrs. Poole came back the next day and rooted through until she found it and carried it into the kitchen.

“Mrs. Burns,” Misty said while I was measuring her hips, her voice very grown up and serious. “What do you think happens to somebody’s body when he dies?”

“Oh my.” Mama closed the cookbook she had been studying, voice stammering as she avoided any mention of Mo. “Well, let’s see...”

“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” Mrs. Poole said, and thumped her own ashes into the ashtray. I came very close to finishing our high school cheer, “Hate to beat you but we must, we must,” but didn’t when I saw how very serious Misty was.

“Well, these Mormon boys stopped by yesterday and I let them in,” Misty continued.

“Hush,” Mrs. Poole said and inhaled. “You had boys in while Sally Jean was at work?”

“Not
boys”
Misty said, and I made her take her hands from her waist so I could measure. “Mormons.” She held her arms out so I could measure them. “We were talking and seeing what we agreed about and what we didn’t and they said that they do not drink coffee, tea or soda or alcohol, or smoke, or do anything bad for them because they’ll get their bodies back in the afterlife and want them to be in good shape.”

“Well, I’d like to know if they’re allowed to wear a color other
than orange.” Mrs. Poole ran her finger between the spokes of the Windsor chair beside her and then inspected to see if there was dust. “Any time I’ve ever seen them trying to sell a carnation in the Clemmonsville Mall, they’re all covered in orange.”