Q Road (26 page)

She watched the skeleton of the barn's frame rise out of the disintegrating wooden siding. The fire was translucent and weightless, but more powerful than anything she'd known. The fire trucks were spraying streams of water at the sides of the barn, repeatedly dousing the sugar maples on either end, but the yellow leaves on the larger tree were nonetheless curling and disintegrating against the heat, and Rachel doubted the flesh of the wood could resist much longer. Since her mother left, nobody had tapped those trees for sap, and they must have been ready to burst—perhaps the heat inside those trees had been the source of the fire. Then she noticed, in the doorway, the spokes of a bicycle wheel bathed in flame.

“David!” she shouted, and moved toward the fire, but her voice was drowned by a noise, a whomp, as a vertical post collapsed, dragging the roof of the building down. Sparks flew out, and the bicycle wheel was gone along with the barn's entryway.

“You'll have to move away, miss,” a thick fireman shouted above the roar.

“Where is he?” At this range the fire was so loud she could hardly hear herself.

“What did you say, miss?”

“Did anyone see David?” Rachel yelled. “I saw his bicycle.”

“Yes, irreplaceable,” the fireman shouted, as though in agreement, over the noise of flames and engines. “They don't build this kind of barn, nowadays. You'll have to step away from the fire.” He stepped back alongside her, and she could hear him more clearly. “Except the Amish, of course.”

“The Amish?” Rachel said. Did the man not want to tell her David was dead?

“The Amish still build these barns,” said the firefighter reassuringly. “Down in Indiana.”

“What happened to the boy who was here?” Rachel said. “His name is David.”

“By the time we got here, it was impossible to go in. Fire marshal seems to think the neighbor boy who set the fire got out.”

“David set the fire?” She asked it as a question, but she already knew it in her bones. Had known it the moment she saw the fire.

“According to Officer Parks, the boy was probably smoking.”

The firefighter shook his head but he seemed to Rachel as much comforted by the fire as disturbed. She supposed that such men lay at home staring at the ceiling hour after hour, waiting for a fire the way Rachel waited for plants to grow. She supposed such men imagined flames like these while they made love with their wives, while they looked into those wives' cool, watery faces. Of course, the firefighter didn't know anything about David, knew even less than Parks did, about David's asthma and his freakish love for George, a love large enough to keep him in the barn trying to extinguish the fire rather than getting himself to safety. The fireman was looking at her.

“David has asthma,” Rachel said. “He probably couldn't breathe in there.” She wanted to say David was not the kind of person
who would run away from responsibility, that he was likely too weak from hunger to fight his way out. Or maybe that son of a bitch Todd came up here with his friends and locked David inside and set it afire. Except of course that the door had clearly been open. The firefighter was staring wholesale into Rachel's face.

“Stop looking at me!” Rachel said.

“I'm sorry,” he said, but he didn't look away.

“That's my barn on fire.”

“So that's your dad over there?”

“That's my husband.”

The fireman looked away finally. “We did pick something up, near the entrance. Do you want to see it?” Rachel followed him away from the fire, back to a new four-wheel-drive truck with a long bed and good ground clearance, the kind of truck George ought to own. When they stood behind the open truck door, the noise of the fire was muted. The man held out a plastic bag containing a grubby white inhaler. “This was lying on the ground in front. It doesn't look like it was there long.”

“It's David's,” Rachel said.

Another firefighter, a woman with a walkie-talkie, motioned to the man. Rachel stood back while he replaced the plastic bag and closed the truck door. Could David's asthma inhaler have started the fire? Rachel wondered. It was a stupid thought, she knew, but she wanted to believe that David hadn't started the fire with a damn stupid cigarette. She wanted one reason to think he'd safely escaped, but she knew better than even to hope David was alive.

After the fireman moved away, Rachel did not want to stand there in awe of the fire that had just devoured her best friend. Instead she would get David's inhaler away from the people who had no right to it. Rachel tried the door of the truck but it was locked, as was the passenger-side door, so she climbed into the back of the truck, keeping low, and opened the sliding window to the cab. She reached down to the seat, grabbed the plastic bag, and
stuffed the inhaler in her pocket. Rachel would make sure they had no evidence to use against David after he was gone, and that meant she also had to get the cigarettes from Parks. After she slipped out of the truck bed, Rachel moved through the cornstalks, toward the road, to get behind the police cruiser. She crept out of the field on hands and knees, trying to move slowly and invisibly the way her mother had taught her to hunt. Rachel had not mastered the skill well enough to sneak up on an animal, but everyone here was focused on the fire. Parks's driver-side window was open and she pressed herself against that door and kept her head down as she reached inside. She grabbed the cigarettes off the dashboard and put them in her pocket along with the inhaler, then crawled on hands and knees back into the corn. She crept back around to the west side of the barn to study George, who still watched the fire opposite her.

When George had said he'd left David at the barn this morning, Rachel should have run right down here and gotten him, never mind her eggs and bacon growing cold. She was the one who understood David, and she should have been protecting him. George, with his inherited buildings and his machines, his long straight rows of corn, and his never-ending patience, couldn't know what desperation she or David felt about this place, which had in no way been destined for them. David was the only person likely to farm these acres after George was gone, after George burned up like this barn or else deteriorated and crumbled away, two years from now or twenty years or forty. She held on to David's inhaler inside her pocket as if it were the last living part of him.

April May's Buick approached from the direction of George's house, and Rachel watched her negotiate around the parked cars and trucks to pull into the driveway across the street. Gray Cat, who'd been sitting on the porch steps, sped away from April May and the barn bird feeder and back to the fire side of the road, where he slunk into the drainage ditch, making it clear he was
nobody's pet. April May got out and leaned against the back end of her Buick to watch another crash send up a wall of fire beside the bigger maple, on which all the remaining leaves dried, curled, and burst into flame. Then walking up the road came the salesman and his little blond wife, hand in hand as though chained together for all eternity. He seemed rosy and ready, eager to reach out and shake with that free hand, while the wife seemed small and hesitant. They approached the fire, and the blonde positioned herself on the far side of the salesman in such a way that Rachel couldn't see her at all.

Milton Taylor didn't keep going along the road as the fireman in the driveway indicated he should. Instead he backed up his old truck and cut into George's field, driving over the drainage ditch, and even when there came a terrible wrenching sound that had to be his exhaust system tearing loose, he just kept coming, his crocheted pink-and-lime crucifix swaying back and forth from the rearview mirror. He mowed down about a hundred cornstalks before stopping near Parks's county cruiser. He got out and walked with his hands in his pockets and stood beside Parks and George. His shirt read
LOVE IS JESUS
in loopy cursive, with a reddish cartoon heart over his belly. Behind him, running up the road, out of breath, came George's punk nephew Todd and one of the Higgins kids, their eyes and mouths wide open. They stopped alongside Milton and stood awestruck. The kids and grown-ups, and the cows and Gray Cat, formed something like a three-quarters circle around the fire, and Rachel felt those bodies calling out that all of them had lost David, not just her. The heat at the center of this fire, Rachel thought, must be phenomenal, and her desire to speak to these people and hear their voices was a cool place inside her. She resisted moving toward any of them, though, telling herself that nobody had known David the way that she had.

“Fucking fire!” she said, and squatted down so that her rifle clunked the ground behind her. She cooled her hands on the earth,
then reached out and touched the fuzz on a woolly bear crawling nearby. She was all the while watching George, thinking she didn't like his looking so thin. She didn't want to feel he needed protection, and she didn't want to think of him dying, even though it would mean the land was hers. Really, she didn't need all the property. She would use the edges, along the road and the river, the windbreaks, the woods, some gardens—that was how the Potawatomi had intended to live with the farmers, she was sure. She was staring at the side of George's face, thinking he should keep tilling his damned flat fields forever, when he turned and looked at her. From this distance she could see what she hadn't seen up close: the ghost of Johnny showed in his face, and the ghost of David, who'd loved George way more than George could have known. Even the ghost of Tom Parks was there, though the living Parks stood right beside him. By staying on his farm, George had taken on the spirits of all the people who had farmed here, his grandfather Harold and grandmother, and Rachel didn't know who else. As she kept looking at him, she saw a reflection of fire there too, flames consuming not just this barn full of straw and hay, but other barns and other houses and acres of crops and woodlands. For the first time she wondered if George might have secrets as terrible as her own.

George was looking back at Rachel as though she were the only thing that could sustain him. Rachel no longer saw or heard anything else, but stared past the fire trucks, into George's eyes, in a way she'd never done before, as if she too needed this liquor, which might have been too strong were there any less distance between them. Rachel felt more solidly planted than ever, as though a complex of roots was connecting her to George under the topsoil. For a year and a half, she'd told herself she meant only to outlive the man and make his land her own, but now he was turning into land before her eyes. When Parks yelled something Rachel couldn't hear, George blinked, and Rachel blinked, and it was over. This was not love as Rachel had imagined it might feel—this was an emotion as
complicated as a garden, beneath the surface of which roots stretched in all directions to fill a fertile square mile. This was like the fusing of skin and dirt, the coming together of mineral and muscle, something like eternity sped up so that the decay of bones into calcium-rich grit occurred in fast motion. After George looked away, Rachel felt too full of life, like trees that needed to be tapped, like a cluster of seeds ready to burst out of their shells into the stink and decay of rich soil. She dared not look at George again, or even in his direction. Nobody noticed as she left the fire, except Gray Cat, who followed her for a while at about twenty human paces.

OLD HAROLD HARLAND HAD ONCE BURNED A BARN TO THE
ground, behind the house George and Rachel now occupied. Harold had not been able to bring himself to look across the flames at his wife, however, so he did not know whether the fire made her appear beautiful. There was no cigarette-pilfering neighbor boy to blame, only himself. Henrietta's family had already farmed here a hundred years, so she had felt within her rights to warn Harold repeatedly against putting damp hay in a barn. When an August rain threatened, however, he could not bear the possibility of losing all that fine hay, and so he had gone ahead and loaded it onto wagons and hauled it to the barn. Even as he and Enkstra pitched the hay into the west end of the loft, Harold heard his wife's voice in his head and chose to ignore it. The great blaze two months later would serve to remind the whole community of the danger of damp hay, for inside the alfalfa and grass grew mold, and that mold swelled the mounds the way yeast
swelled bread, though with a good deal more heat. People said the hay deep inside was probably smoldering for weeks, before the pile collapsed and flames erupted.

With everyone in Greenland sharing stories about the barn and calculating the cost of Harold's stupidity, shame hung around him like a weighted collar. If he had been a drinker, he would have turned to drink, but he was a working man, so he just kept on harvesting that fall, and he endured the bitterness of his wife, hoping he would eventually be forgiven. Maybe Harold took a liking to Mary O'Kearsy simply because she showed up in town the following year with no knowledge of the barn fire. She was a young widow, a distant cousin of one of the members of the school board, and everybody liked the idea of having an elementary teacher from back east, as though such a woman were necessarily more capable of providing the rules of multiplication and English grammar than a local person. Her being from the east also meant she had a place to return to should this Michigan town tire of her, as it did less than two years later.