Q Road (25 page)

The swallows of 1999 were already gone from these rafters, headed south for a gentler winter. Though everyone knew the swallows came and went seasonally, nobody had considered that while they were settling in and producing their broods each spring, these birds had been quietly documenting the passage of time. If, instead of lighting that cigarette, David Retakker had climbed into the corners of the barn and crumbled the old swallows' nests in his hands, he might have found some surprising items, such as two ancient silver trinkets: one a disk that said
MONTREAL
, and the other an inch-long section of a silver chain whose links had been pounded flat. Or a patch of buckskin, gummed to softness, cut away from a shirt Corn Girl's mother might have made for Corn Girl's father, this old skin so fragile that it would probably have crumbled when touched. Or a ragged end from a leather thong, left on the site of a wigwam, now woven together with strands of Mary O'Kearsy's hair. Or velvety fur from a muskrat jowl cut away from a jaw by Margo Crane, or even a bit of foil paper from a candy wrapper that a swallow had added to its nest lining this spring after it fell out of David Retakker's pocket.

There was no reason to think that the fire, or the swallows, for that matter, when they returned to sail through empty air where their homes had been, would give a damn about the flesh and bones of one boy, small for his age, even if that boy could have worked this place for a good part of the next century with the devotion that only love can instill, even if the boy had been the person who, along with George Harland and Rachel Crane, could have kept at bay for another generation the builders and real estate agents who wanted to divide this wide fertile tract into unproductive rectangles and smother it with foundations for homes, concrete driveways, and choking lawns. To suppose that a fire, especially one burning as hotly as this one, would bother to spare rather than devour David would be plain foolishness.

TOM PARKS WATCHED GEORGE WATCH THE FIRE. STANDING
there so quietly, George seemed thinner and taller than usual, and his face was almost gray. His attention seemed, to Parks, to be focused around the fire rather than on it, as though birds or angels perched at the edges of the flames, delivering the bad news. Parks sympathized with George losing his old barn, but he also couldn't help thinking George was fortunate for having so much to lose. This slice of the planet belonged to George, and if the barn went up in flames, he still owned the charred land beneath. Surely George would find a way to absorb this loss, and Rachel would inherit the farm, with or without this building.

Nobody other than George looked disturbed. Certainly not the firefighters, for they were just doing their jobs, after all. They had known worse disasters than a barn fire and worse ways and places to spend an October day. Four ladder trucks had arrived, one all the way from Kalamazoo, and the firefighters were probably happy to
be here and not at some downtown apartment building where a guy with a cigarette in his mouth would screech to a halt in front of the building and run up shouting, “My baby is in there! I only left her alone for a few minutes,” and beg one of the firefighters to run through burning doorways, up disintegrating stairs, into a scorched, smoke-filled room where a baby lay asphyxiated. A few minutes ago, George had asked the firefighters about David Retakker, and they said it was unlikely he'd remained in the barn with the door wide open, though by the time they'd gotten there, it had been too late to go inside and check.

“So you figure David got out?” George asked Parks, without turning to look at him.

“A twelve-year-old boy doesn't let himself get burned up in a fire,” Parks said. “He's probably hiding somewhere, ashamed of what he's done, and he'll show up full of regret in a few hours.”

“You're probably right,” George said.

Parks said. “How do you think his ma is going to take this?”

George moved his head slowly side to side. There weren't many of these old barns left, and there was no way a fellow could rebuild one. Recently George had been entertaining the idea that he could get good money selling a one- or two-acre plot beside this barn. Some city person would have paid a premium to build a new house in view of such a monument. The several times he'd mentioned selling property, Rachel had crossed her arms and damned him to hell, said she'd gladly go without food or electricity rather than lose any land. But even she wasn't strong enough to resist the inevitable indefinitely. Today even Rachel would have to see that no matter how tightly you held on to a place, it would eventually slip away. How could it be otherwise, if structures you knew as well as your oldest friends were in reality no more permanent than wigwams? He told himself that they'd had a good run, his family. They'd kept their land as long as anyone, and George'd had a year and a half with Rachel, which was surely more than he deserved.

George lifted his work boot to look at its cracked sole and saw the smashed, furred bodies of two woolly bears. George didn't have any reason not to believe Parks and the firefighters about David, and because anything else was too painful to consider, he believed David got out of the barn. Still, George hated himself for even considering throwing the boy and his mother out of the house on P Road, and he especially regretted not bringing David home for breakfast this morning. Because George still believed in the ultimate justice of the world, he figured the destruction of his barn must be punishment for one of his sins, if not for his considering sending David and Sally away, then for his crime of loving Rachel, for his going into the barn with her the first time, for learning the river smell of her, for feeling her warm muscles against the coolness of loose straw. There were plenty of crimes George might have to pay for around here, but surely none of them merited killing a perfectly decent kid. David was fine, wherever he was. A support beam dropped through the flames and showers of sparks flew up from the back of the barn. Through the doorway, George could almost make out the ancient hay wagon aflame and he thought he smelled rubber tires melting. His thoughts stopped before he completed a picture of David sitting where he had left him, atop the now-flaming stack of hay, for such tragedies did not happen. Except that standing right beside him was Tom Parks, whose brother was killed by a train, whose father died by smashing his tractor against a tree, whose children were a thousand miles away. He had a surge of feeling for Tom Parks, who had lost so much.

George said, “I'm glad you came back from Texas, Tom. It's nice to have you here.”

Parks said, “I'm going to miss this barn of yours.”

“Me too.”

When Rachel appeared on the other side of the nearest fire truck, she looked dark in comparison to the flames, wild-eyed, angry-eyed, so beautiful it made George's own eyes water. At the
sight of her standing with her arms crossed, glaring at the fire, George's heart became larger and more liquid, filling more of his chest. Rachel had been more or less pissed off from the day he met her, and today her anger finally made sense.

George watched Rachel uncross her arms and then disappear around the side of the barn. When he saw a bird flit from the building and pursue her, as quick and blue as a barn swallow, he knew it must have been a titmouse or a puff of smoke, for the swallows were long gone and wouldn't return to this place until spring. George would get enough money from the insurance company to construct a pole barn with the same floor area, but by no means with the same capacity for storing hay and straw. It would make no sense to build way out here in isolation anyway, so far from his own house, and wherever he put up a pole barn there wouldn't be cracks between boards or at the roof line, through which the birds could enter and build nests. Next spring, birds would circle above this burned-out foundation with nowhere to land. Such a pathetic creature was the barn swallow, that it required the preservation of a human ruin on the verge of crumbling or bursting into flame. George pitied any creature who relied so heavily on human beings for its survival. Any creature who relied on things to stay the same was hopeless.

BEFORE RACHEL LEFT THE HOUSE TO RUN TO THE FIRE
, she'd grabbed her rifle from the mudroom and slung it over her shoulder. In her hurried carelessness she kicked the head off a pur-ply ornamental cabbage that had risen out of the ground near the fence line on a spiny alien neck. She bent to slip through the strands of barbed wire and raced south through the pasture, paralleling Queer Road, and before she'd gotten a hundred yards, Martini the pony, the ex-wife's llama, and the donkey were thundering toward her and then slowing to run alongside. The donkey bumped Rachel with his forehead, and she swatted his wobbly ears but kept on going. Martini screamed excitedly and threw his head up. The blaze seemed to gain fury as she and the animals approached the south fence. Rachel climbed through the barbed wire to get out of the pasture and felt a loss at leaving the animals clustered behind her; she felt the cold at her back the way she had upon leaving George the first night they'd spent together in the dusty room with
the maps of the Indian gardens. Such stray and ragged feelings nipped at her as she approached the fire, on her path between rows of drying cornstalks, in a field beneath which somebody's dead undoubtedly were buried.

When she reached the end of the cornfield, the fire that appeared before her was huge, hungry, too powerful to believe. She stopped and stared, the way everybody else was staring, but she failed to get any sense of it. She moved around the barn to glimpse the barnyard below, to see the cows milling and snorting restlessly at the creek, as far from the blaze as they could get within the fence she'd repaired with bedsprings. One female jumped on the other, as though the fire had triggered her to go into heat. Rachel sympathized with those dumb animals—she would like to run to George, jump on him, demand to know what the hell had happened, but George was on the other side of the barn, talking to Parks and to a yellow-and-black-clad firefighter. What Rachel knew for certain was that this barn she had always known was disappearing, turning to dust before her eyes, and she wished that she'd paid attention to the way the beams had supported the weight of the structure. She wished that, as she'd lain in the barn all those mornings, she'd noticed how the foundation had settled and shifted. Rachel had watched her mother kill a man in this barn, but she'd never bothered to wonder how the walls resisted blowing apart in high winds, or why the roof had not given way beneath year after year of lake effect snows.

Rachel walked away from the cows, back up the incline. On the other side of the fire, Parks looked solid and ruddy, but standing next to him, George seemed delicate. Until recently Rachel had only rarely looked at George, perhaps because he was so often looking at her, or around her, taking her into his vision along with the weather. Lately, though, she'd felt curious about him, and she'd taken to hiding in her garden at dusk to watch him split wood. As George watched the fire now, she knew he must be thinking about
all the work he had to do, figuring that, whatever happened today, he still had to finish the oats and straw and fix his machinery, and he had to be ready by Friday to begin harvesting. Maybe it was because they talked so little that Rachel remembered every single thing George said, even the things she pretended not to hear. Parks kept moving his body as though he was motioning George to look away from the fire, but George would not. The structure began to hiss as though deflating. Rachel closed her eyes and tried to remember how the barn had surrounded her while she slept, but instead she felt weighed down. Maybe the fire was altering local gravity or maybe Johnny's ghost had flown out of the barn and was perched on her shoulders. Johnny had stood behind her that night, and Rachel hadn't known there were better men, and she had ignored the rough-hewn beams supporting the planks above her, the beams covered with chop marks from the adze, each mark in the wood a separate effort expended by some ancestor.