The Boy in the Burning House (5 page)

“Someone who
starts
fires,” his mother said. “I like fires, in their place. This Frankie kid, he started all sorts of them in the area. Some of the old-timers could tell you. At first, I guess, it was just mischief, an outhouse or a tumbledown shed. But it got worse. He burned down a chicken shack up at Lar Perkins' father's place and killed twenty layers and fifty meat birds. Then he hit a small barn at Jock Boomhower's with a couple of cows in it. That's when he got caught. Sent off to jail.”

“But he came back?” asked Jim.

“Came back and burned down the house his family had lived in. Can you imagine? Of course, no one was living in it then. His family had moved. Wilf Fisher had bought the property and was using the old place to store hay.”

“In a house?”

“It was a very old house. A log cabin. You know the place. It's in the low field just east of the cut road, below the Fisher mansion.”

Jim knew the field, all right, but he couldn't remember any house.

“It's just a rubble heap now,” said his mother.

“Mostly grown over. Heavens, it must be twenty-five years ago, at least.” He saw her do the math in her head. “1972. New Year's Eve, 1972.”

His mother's eyes glanced up at the clock above the kitchen table and Jim took the hint. He turned back to his homework, but his mind was buzzing. A moment later, his mother scruffled his hair as she passed him on her way upstairs.

“I'm going to take a shower,” she said. But she turned at the parlour door. “I remember now. The family was called Tufts. Francis Tufts.”

As soon as she was gone, Jim sat back in his chair thinking through what he had learned. Did Ruth Rose, who knew everything, know about this fire? And Francis Tufts — it wasn't much of a stretch from that to Tuffy. But what did it have to do with her stepfather or his own father's disappearance?

Nothing. It was ancient history. And he would probably end up as cracked as she was if he started thinking that way.

Snoot suddenly jumped onto his lap and Jim cried out in astonishment, which frightened the kitten who jumped right off, taking some flesh from his leg with her. Her sharp little claws had gone right through his jeans. He rubbed his thigh and settled back to work.

His mother kissed him goodbye on the way out, went over for the hundredth time the business about locking the doors and checking the woodstove and which lights to leave on.

“I know, I know,” he said, submitting to a second and third bone-crushing hug.

“Hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast?” she asked. Jim looked appropriately blissful. The Sunflower Bakery was just firing up when she got off work, and sometimes she would stop by on her way home. She came home stinking like soap. “I'm going to have to rub myself down with a fish,” she had said once. But, no matter how tired she was, she would walk out to the road with him every morning and wait for the school bus.

Jim watched her drive off in the truck, locking up as soon as she was gone. Then he went into the sitting room.

The family photos lay loose in an old, carved wooden box with a hinged lid. It was called a monk's bench and
the carvings on the front were kind of churchy with monks praying. His mother wasn't sure if it had ever really belonged to a monk, but it was supposed to be where one would keep his stuff. Now it was filled with photos and the odd Christmas card, yellowing newspaper clippings.

After a few minutes, Jim stopped rifling through the stuff in a random kind of way and took out a huge armful. Sitting cross-legged on the rag carpet, he started a more thorough search.

Here were his father and mother when they were young, dressed up for some formal, standing beside the Malibu. Here was Jim with Hub at the curling club's annual father-and-son bonspiel. Here was his father pretending to saw Jim's bike in half with a chainsaw. Jim laughed.

He got out a second and a third armful, sorting the older pictures into a separate pile and then studying them carefully.

Finally, he hit pay dirt. A black-and-white snapshot of three boys in T-shirts sitting on the front stoop of an old log cabin squinting into the light. On the back someone had written: “The Three Musketeers.” And under it: “Frankie,'Fish' and little Hub.”

Little Hub Hawkins was in shorts. His bare feet didn't even reach the ground. He looked about twelve. Fish was a teenager, a senior by the size of him. He was leaning against the stoop with his chest puffed out and his arms crossed like Mr. Clean. Frankie was pointing at him and laughing. Frankie was older than Hub and younger than Fish and kind of gawky looking. His hair looked white in the photo — the colour of sunlight on a window. Fish's hair was black, longish with wide sideburns, like pictures Jim had seen from
the sixties. Father Fisher's hair was the same colour now, though not so long.

That was when the phone rang.

Jim nearly jumped out of his skin. He got up awkwardly, his legs filled with pins and needles. He hobbled into the kitchen to the wall phone above the table. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was almost midnight.

Who would be phoning so late? The phone rang again, too loud in the silent house.

Dad.

The thought made his knees buckle.

He's phoning to tell us where he is, why he left so suddenly, why he didn't even say goodbye.

On the eleventh ring, it suddenly occurred to Jim that it might be the factory to say his mother had been injured. That broke the spell. He snapped up the phone and spoke into the receiver breathlessly, as if he had run a mile.

“Hello?”

The voice at the other end of the phone whispered, “Did you talk to him? Did you tell him anything?”

Jim didn't speak. He guessed who it was, but he was too stunned to say a word.

“What's the matter? Is there someone there?”

Jim didn't answer.

“Say'you've got the wrong number' if there's somebody there and I'll get back to you some other time.”

Jim swallowed and took a deep breath. “You're scaring me,” he said, sounding like a six-year-old.

Now it was her turn to go silent, and in the silence Jim heard a man's voice. The voice said, “Ruth Rose?” Then there was nothing but a sharp click and a dial tone.

Jim was tired all the next day but after school he dropped off his backpack at home, changed into his grubby clothes and set off for the beaver dam, bent on recovering the shovel he had left behind and undoing whatever the beavers might have gotten up to overnight.

Ruth Rose beat him to it. He could hear her singing to herself good and loud.

There was nothing to stop him from heading back home. But as he stood listening he realized she was straining at something as she sang. So he made his way soundlessly through the sopping wet grass until he caught sight of her.

She was hacking away at the dam, the same cavity he had worked at the day before. But she wasn't using his shovel. It was leaning against a tree along with Gladys. She was using a pickaxe, and she wasn't squeamish about it, either.

She swung it high above her head and brought it down into the guck up to its hilt. She had muscle, all right. She hauled at the axe and brought up a great gob of putrefied vegetation. The water spilled into the crevice and on through the busted dam but not with much force. By now, it was good and low.

She stopped singing. Without looking back, she
said in a good clear voice, “You might as well come out. You're not going to catch me giving Gladys a soaker.”

Jim blushed. He stood up tall, stepped out into the open and made his way towards her. Her red T-shirt was stained with sweat and splatters of mud. He looked out across the flats where the water had been so high just the day before.

“You did a good job,” he managed to say.

She scrinched up her nose, rubbed it, looking a little flustered, as if she wasn't used to compliments. “The beavers didn't do any building last night, as far as I could tell. I guess Gladys deserves some of the credit.”

Jim laughed nervously.

Ruth Rose came down off the dam and made her way towards him with her pickaxe over her shoulder like one of the seven dwarfs, but which one? Grumpy? Dopey? Crazy?

“Did you carry that all the way from town?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “There was a work crew on the tracks. They gave me a lift.” He wondered, from the hesitant way she said it, whether maybe she had stolen the pickaxe.

She put it down and went to get Gladys, planting her in the spot at the mouth of the breach where Jim had placed her the day before. She made Gladys wave to him. Jim gulped. Waved back.

“Care to give her another dousing?” Ruth Rose said. “I won't peek this time, promise.”

Jim turned red.

“It's your call,” she said.

There was something altogether different about
her manner today. She joined him again and they walked up the lane a bit, found a dry log and sat down.

“I'm on my medication,” she said, as if she had been reading his mind. “Bummer, eh? Just when it looks like I'm a human being after all, it turns out I'm a real nut-case who has to be drugged.”

He looked at her and there was a glassy look in her eyes.

She looked down, picked up a small branch, broke it twig by twig.

“This isn't the real me,” she said. “But the thing is, the fiend you met yesterday wasn't the real me, either. I'm a mess, okay? I hate the drugs, but if I don't take them like a good girl…”

She didn't finish the sentence.

“I didn't talk to Father yesterday,” said Jim. “Honest.” He told her about the pastor being at the house when he got back. “Did you get in trouble?”

She smiled a kind of loopy smile. “I'm always in trouble.”

Jim looked sideways at her. “Does he hit you?”

Then she really laughed. “It's much worse than that. You know what he does when I'm being
recalcitrant
, as he puts it?” Ruth Rose leaned up close. “He prays for me.”

She seemed to enjoy the surprise on his face. “He just drops to his knees, right there — wherever it is — and folds his hands in front of his face and he starts in praying for my
recalcitrant
soul. That's what he did last night. Once he did it in the middle of a supermart. In the canned vegetable aisle.”

Jim shook his head in astonishment, “That must be awful.”

She nodded and was silent. “He prays all the time.” Then she smirked. “Like a hawk.”

The sky was plugged up with clouds, the temperature was dropping. Jim noticed that now that she wasn't working anymore, Ruth Rose was shivering, her narrow shoulders up high, her shoulder blades sticking out like wings.

“I'll get your jacket,” he said.

Her black leather jacket was hanging from a poplar bough. Something on the lapel glittered with reflected light. A mirror the size of a campaign button. She had been watching for him.

He looked at himself in the mirror. The pimple on his nose said he was fourteen. The bewilderment in his eyes said he was going on four.

“Don't you go to school?” he asked, when he got back.

She shook her head. “I'm home-schooled.”

Poor Nancy, thought Jim.

“Before the accident, Mom taught public school. We work all morning and then I have the afternoon off. I'm not stupid, you know.”

“Didn't say you were,” said Jim.

“I know you didn't,” she said. “But you were thinking it. You were thinking what kind of dumb chick spends her spare time snooping around trying to prove her stepfather is a murderer.”

Jim looked at her. “Actually, I was thinking what kind of a maniac goes around doing that.”

She smiled in a maniac kind of way. Then she thrust her hands into her jacket pockets and dug out two slightly battered Hershey bars. She offered one to Jim.

“I owe you this for yesterday,” she said. “I didn't know how to talk to you.”

“That,” said Jim, taking the candy, “is the biggest understatement of the year.”

“It's just that there didn't seem an easy way to start. You know, it's a pretty tough thing to try to tell someone. So I kind of used the Ruth Rose Way.”

“You mean roll over somebody like a freight train?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “I was thinking more of the track than the train. The Ruth Rose Way goes straight to where it's going, cuts through people's yards instead of going around, cuts across roads wherever it wants. Cars stop. People stay clear.”

Jim wasn't sure what to say. “Well, thanks for helping with the dam.”

She bit off a mouthful of chocolate. “Hey, I'm asking you for help so I figure I should return the favour.”

The chocolate in Jim's mouth tasted unpalatable all of a sudden. He had been enjoying sitting on a log sharing some candy with her, like ordinary kids. But nothing about Ruth Rose was ordinary.

“Did you find out anything?” she asked.

Jim swallowed and wrapped up the rest of the bar.

He started to hand it back to her but a flicker in her eyes stopped him.

Everything was quiet for a moment. Then he told her about the photograph of the Three Musketeers, about Frankie, the boy with the white hair. Francis Tufts.

Her eyes lit up. “Tuffy!” she said. Jim shrugged, but he was proud of himself nonetheless.

“Could be,” he said. Then he told her about Francis dying in the log house on New Year's Eve of 1972.

“Holy cow,” she said. He watched her try to incorporate his news into her plot.

“I didn't find out anything about the others,” he said.

“That's okay,” she said. “You will. I know it.”

Jim took no pleasure from her encouragement. “It's all ancient history. I don't know how it's supposed to help.”

“I don't know how, either,” she replied. “But I know why. Because a life might depend on it.
Mine.
”