Surrender (10 page)

The fire was quenched suddenly, as if the water had succeeded in puncturing a vital piece of its fiery being. It retreated, simmering, into the dark, taking with it its heat and color, its spectacular noise. In place of the grandeur stood the dripping shell of the car, the ugly, undevourable bone. Its ruined wheels sat in pools of dark liquid; it waved flags of limp white smoke. The lawn was crushed, the rosebushes bedraggled. I moved my hands from my ears to my face, and felt the heat driven into my skin.

Our neighbors were jovial; they had achieved something; they invited themselves into the house. They knew that, in this moment of goodwill, my parents wouldn’t dare turn them away. I lingered outside, watching the sky clear. Charred leaves dropped from the overhanging ash. I plucked strands of singed hair from my eyes. The Wolseley continued to drip. I scoured the darkness for Finnigan, but couldn’t find him

In the loungeroom my parents were being plied with whisky. Neighbors were milling around. Few of them had ever breached the privacy of the house, and they meant to remember what they saw. They searched the room for photographs and heirlooms, for anything that told tales. They scanned for sign of Vernon, our little tragedy. They took mental guesses at the value of everything on the sideboard. I supposed we disappointed them — there were no photo frames, no silver or crystal, no shrines to the lost child. My mother and father were not the type to unnecessarily decorate their lives. I hung about on the edge of the crowd, leaned against the door. Father stood in the center of the room, freakishly chipper. He clapped men on their shoulders and heartily shook their hands. “It had to happen sooner or later!” he bellowed. “I was starting to feel ignored!”

Later that night, when everyone had gone home, I heard him reminding my mother that he’d been starting to feel ignored.

The cold light of day chilled the effervescence from my father. There stood the Wolseley, destroyed. The prize-winning roses along the front fence were cooked, the lawn was a puddly quagmire. The weatherboard flanks of the house were scorched, licked by a dragon’s sooty tongue. My father, having inspected the wreckage, marched down the road to the police station. Thunder rolled and lightning clashed in his furious wake. Finnigan saw him coming and dropped from a tree, skipped ahead to take up position under the station-house floor. McIllwraith was reading the newspaper at the counter when my father barged through the door. He listened in silence while Father shot questions as if from a gun. Where had the Constable been when the Wolseley was splashed in petrol last night? When Tool’s outhouse burned, when Nightingale’s hedge flared, when Bunkle’s horses galloped off, when Torquil’s barn collapsed to the ground; when the flower shop, the library, Lowe’s vehicle, the town hall, when all of these had come to grief, where had the Constable been? The fires had blighted Mulyan for three years yet the Constable, miraculously, had never found himself where he was needed: at the right place, at the right time.

McIllwraith considered this question. “Are you saying I had something to do with the fires, Harry?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” My father laughed loudly. “Anyone could see you haven’t the brains to light a campfire! I’m saying you’re incompetent: nothing more, nothing less. I’m saying that the next time something burns in this town, you’ll find yourself sweeping the streets.”

Finnigan could mimic Father’s voice well. He paused in the story and chuckled. We were sitting together in the chicken coop at home, and a white hen was eyeing us uneasily. “He’ll do it, too,” I said. “He always does what he says. He’ll get McIllwraith thrown out of his job.”

Finnigan was driving a needle of straw into the bed of his thumbnail. He twisted the straw counterclockwise and winced, not looking at me.

“We can’t let that happen, Fin.”

He slid a sheltered glance at me, as if I wearied and annoyed him. I shifted my seat on an upturned fruit box. My life revolved around the twin secrets I kept: Finnigan and McIllwraith. When I was alone, or tormented at school, the two secrets gave me pride. I did not want to lose one of them. “He trusts us. He’s useful. You said it yourself.”

Finnigan’s attention was on his thumb. A petal of blood lay under his nail. The hen kept her eyes on us. “You have to stop burning,” I said. “You must.”

Still he said nothing. I could feel him contemplating throwing McIllwraith to the wolves. “Don’t,” I breathed. “Don’t.”

He snarled suddenly, flung the straw away. “Who cares?” he snapped. “I don’t care.”

I glanced aside, loath to anger him. Through the wired window I saw parrots grazing on the lawn. The hen hiccuped, studying Finnigan’s thumb. “So you’ll stop?” I dared to say.

“Who cares?” he repeated. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing left to burn.”

He kept his word, as he always would; after the Wolseley, there were no more fires. Weeks, then months, went by unburned; the last vigilantes wandered home. All of Mulyan understood that the end of the attacks was not due to some victory on our part. The arsonist was simply gone: he’d died or moved on or grown bored. The gangland days of the burnings looked, in peacetime, like an unspeakable nightmare. Mulyan was critically wounded, soaked in accusations and shame. Ancient friendships had been destroyed. The town was no longer the same. And everyone looked for a place to lay the blame for all that had been and was gone.

In the past my father had been disliked; now he was purely resented. The women pressed their lips and turned away from my mother in the street. And their children, who were my schoolfellows, brought the guilt and grief and ruined friendships to school, and visited them upon me.

Life, it seemed, had returned to normal.

Except for one thing.

Days after his beloved Wolseley was destroyed, my father, still addled by the attack, did something starkly uncharacteristic of his granitelike character. He allowed himself to be talked into the adopting of a dog.

Surrender has always been mine. Before he was born, when his dam was a pup, when his sire ran youthful on streets and on hills, Surrender was already mine. I was whelped and raised owning him; laying eyes on him was like meeting an old old friend. He was a yearling then, a circus of limbs, his coat the color of clay. His tail hooked up to the sky, his eyes showed a half-moon of pink. He came already named, in honor of me:
surrender
. The angel thought
he
stopped the fires; he didn’t. It was only Surrender.

Anyway, that’s enough. It’s not my job to look back: I go forward.

It’s late afternoon. I’m on my way to see Gabriel. But first I take a detour.

I’d thought I’d find McIllwraith mooching around the bones but he wasn’t, and now I’m searching. With cold evening coming to bulkily snow on the ranges and ice-muzzle the cows, the policeman’s probably holed up at home. I slip like air through Mulyan’s streets, which are already dim. From the houses that line the dirt road float strangulated smoke signals. My feathery friend, calling out to me. People are behind the walls, curled around news of the bones. Not since the burnings has Mulyan seen such excitement, and probably it won’t ever again.

Constable Eli McIllwraith is still a young man, although not so young as he was. Country living has taken its toll on him. When he first arrived in town he was fresh and fuzzy as a peach, as pretty and innocent as Rapunzel. They sent him here, out of harm’s way, because there’s a widespread belief that nothing of interest ever happens in the country.

That is wrong.

In Gabriel’s father, during the years of the fires, McIllwraith made for himself a vile enemy. No one gives Surrender credit for dousing the fires, but some people gave it to McIllwraith. He was the law, after all, and the firebug was now obeying it. In the eyes of some people, McIllwraith’s reputation was raised. But never in the eyes of Gabriel’s father, and never in the eyes of McIllwraith, either. Both of them knew that it wasn’t the policeman who’d snuffed out those flames.

People have come to the bones like vultures do. They’ve brought cameras and notepads and questions, questions. There is a lady sitting in McIllwraith’s loungeroom, a notebook lying on her lap. McIllwraith sits opposite her, crossing and recrossing his legs. Surrender and I watch all this from a hole we’ve dug into the ceiling.

You must feel vindicated, now the grave’s found.

I’m happy things can move on, yes.

The lady writes that down.

How well did you know the boy?

Anwell. Not particularly well.

So what caught your attention about him, that day?

Various things. My instincts.

She smiles, writes that. He’s not being much help.

What about you, Constable? A country town can’t be too challenging for a young policeman. Will you move on too?

He shuffles. He hopes so, but doesn’t say. The lady seems to guess. She lowers her pen.

I’m sure they’ll realize they can make better use of you. They won’t leave you here to rot. Not now.

McIllwraith shuffles, shrugs, coyly smiles. He hopes like hell so.

Mulyan. The lady thinks. Isn’t this the place that was terrorized by a firebug, a few years ago?

She has lifted her pen.

We had a few incidents. We weren’t terrorized.

Remind me how that panned out? The arsonist was caught, I assume?

No. We never identified him. The fires just stopped.

She is surprised. Just stopped? Know why?

I suppose he realized that sooner or later he was going to get caught.

The lady flips the cover of her notebook. Thank you for your time, Constable McIllwraith.

He sees her to the door. On the threshold she pauses, looking out to the hills. She turns and gives him a pursed-lip smile. I hope they let you out of this place. I’ll cross my fingers for you.

He watches her walk away down the path; he closes and leans on the door.

I cast a glance around the roof space. From a cracked ceiling beam I break off a wooden spike. McIllwraith doesn’t hear the sound of timber splintering. He crosses the room and stokes up a fire, disappears from my view while he adjusts the TV. I hear him peel off his shoes and when I see him again he is shoeless, on the couch, lying down.

The cheerful sound of cartoons rises to the sky.

Evening always finds me at my illest, most ill: Sarah writes on my chart that I’m
fretful
. And why shouldn’t I be? It is not nice to die.

It’s getting dark: I must hurry. My illness and I are running a race to the end, and it is the swifter of us.

My father was ignorant of dog flesh: he never saw that, in Surrender, he was being sold a pup. The dog was charged with guarding the house and yard but it soon became apparent that Surrender stood aloof from material concerns. His thoughts, by and large, lay with himself. He did have guarding instincts — he guarded his privacy. He minded his own business and expected others to do likewise. When they did not — when a delivery boy woke him, when a passerby laughed aloud, when a pat on the head rubbed him the wrong way, when insultingly encouraged to fetch a ball — the perpetrator would find themselves fixed with a cold copper stare. If this warning went ignorantly ignored, Surrender would not hesitate to bite. Between my mother and father he became known as Useless Animal, but I admired his determination not to be told. He feared nothing, was the slave of no one. Another owner might have shown him the business end of a gun, but Surrender’s life was saved by my parents’ inability to admit to mistakes. It was vital that they appear perfect — though their first son was blighted, their second son mulish, though they’d managed to alienate themselves from everybody they knew; though their lives had foundered in a crumbling country town and though their twenty years of weddedness were years as airless as lead — because only perfection would allow them to condemn everything else as faulty. Surrender stayed, despite his contrariness, because getting rid of him — or of Vernon, or of me, or of their wedding vows — would be a public admission of error, and that would be unendurable. Finnigan smiled when I put this to him, wrinkling his nose at the sky. “They were made for each other,” he said. “It would be cruel to separate them.”