Burn, p.16
Burn, page 16
He backed away. Whatever he needed from both women was somehow strangely present at that table, and inaccessible, as if behind bulletproof glass. He climbed back to his room, ate a power bar he found in the CamelBak he wore on long runs, and curled up on his bed.
* * *
Collie was asleep when they passed through Randall, thank God. They found another marina wagon on the second dock and they padded it with her blanket. Jess rowed a dinghy out to one of the nicer weekend sailers and found the hatch unlocked and he fetched some foam pillows from the V-berth. They made her a rolling nest as shockproof as possible. They barely spoke. Each understood what needed to be done. A little over an hour until sunset, and they did not need a conversation to know that they had to get the scorched town behind them and beyond her sight, and that when they got over the first hill they would look for water and a place to camp. They got her into her child’s sleeping bag, which had some kind of polyester fill—good, it would keep her warm enough if it got wet—and they nestled her into the cart. She whimpered, brow furrowed, and Jess thought he heard her murmur “Crystal,” but she curled on herself and stuck her thumb in her mouth and Storey took up the handle to her wagon and they climbed away from the ashes and the lake without waking her.
Forty minutes later, they came over a wooded hill and looked down on what once must have been the prettiest farm.
Below them were pastures the farmer had let go: the grasses and clover were tall and golden and flecked with Indian paintbrush and wild pea flowers and black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace, fireweed. The road followed a stone wall, and in places the rocks were grown over with wild mint and the heady scent wafted up the hill. Jess stopped and let the wagon bump his legs. For a moment he just inhaled the fragrance and let his eyes rove over the reds and magentas and yellows, the soft tawny golds, and he untethered. For a moment he felt he was in a painting and remembered the sudden and uncontested peace of looking through a Bonnard doorway to a country garden. That a place like that existed, a life—in France or anywhere else. The sense that simple beauty might hold so much of what was needed, and that it was just as true as all the shadowy architectures of thought.
It was beautiful now. Below—in the pocket of a little valley, through which he could see the silver thread of a brook—were fenced pastures and a hayfield on which the windrows of the last cutting lay waiting to be tedded and baled. He could see the spot where the farmhouse had stood, now burned but offset with islands of flower beds, and a pond with a red sugarhouse on its bank, intact. In the meadow behind it was a leaning outhouse. Jess counted a dozen Guernseys and four horses grazing, heads down. If he were ever to have a farm—which he wouldn’t, because he knew from summer jobs how much work it was—it would look like this. It might be right here. It could be. Nobody was coming back to claim this. The courthouse at the county seat, wherever that was, would no longer have record of deed, because the courthouse and the clerks who tended it would no longer exist. The thought raised the hair on his arms like a cold wind.
Why had they left the sugarhouse standing? Maybe for the same reason they had left the boats. Because the attackers were capricious, or had a malevolent sense of humor. Or simply that whatever was recreational wasn’t worth the effort.
Jess stood in the road as Storey stepped past him, his wagon and the girl bumping over the frost heaves. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” he said as he passed.
“Yes.”
“Unless it’s booby-trapped, the sugarhouse looks good to me.”
“I don’t think it’s booby-trapped. As far as they’re concerned, there’s no one left.”
“Right.”
Jess followed Storey down the hill, pulling his own wagon.
* * *
Storey knew his way around a sugarhouse. His father, Daniel, had built a small one on the bank of Sawyer Brook. Before they had children, he and Hannah had gathered the maple sap together and made enough syrup for themselves and their friends. They did not run plastic tubing like everyone else in the country, they tapped the old trees with steel taps and they hung metal buckets. The buckets had peaked metal lids that gripped the lip of the pail and flexed free when you banged the top. Daniel and Hannah walked tree to tree and unhooked the brimming pails and popped off the tops and dumped them into five-gallon pickle buckets, which they carried down to a tank on the back of a four-wheeler. They were in their twenties and they were tough and strong. Hannah could carry two buckets at a time, each no more than two-thirds full to prevent sloshing over rough ground, but still weighing almost thirty pounds apiece. They parked the ATV on a rise above the shack and let gravity empty the tank into the storage cistern. They didn’t make a ton of syrup, usually around twenty gallons, enough for them to sweeten everything they could think of, from coffee to pies, and to give away to neighbors and friends and send a couple of gallons to Hannah’s parents in Annapolis. Her mother had been a career diplomat and they had always lived, when they were in the States, near D.C.
When Storey was old enough to carry a single half-bucket of maple sap he began to help his father. Hannah had stepped away from sugaring a few years before, and Daniel welcomed the extra hands. And Storey enlisted Jess, of course. Who would have worked for free, because he loved doing any project with the Brandts, but Daniel insisted he get paid two gallons of finished syrup a week and all the bratwurst he could eat. Jess was crazy about grilled bratwurst and he could never get his parents on board. His mother cooked it a few times, with evident distaste, either fried in a pan on the stove or boiled, and it was not at all the same.
By the time the boys were fifteen they were each swinging two buckets of sap down the snow-patched hills, and stoking the firebox with cordwood, and helping Daniel boil. That was one job Storey’s dad would not hand over. Daniel often boiled all night, riding herd on the long, open evaporator as the steam poured out of the vented cupola in the roof and dissipated among the stars. The puddles of snowmelt in the tire tracks reflected the cold constellations and froze over. Daniel liked to smoke a cigar and drink black tea and eat pickles—which cut the sweetness of the near syrup in the pan, which he had to sample continually—despite having a hydrometer that told him exactly when the liquid reached the right consistency.
One March night, Jess couldn’t sleep. It was senior year and he and Storey were on spring break and helping Daniel sugar. There was a lot of snow that year, and though it was melting fast the woods were still mostly covered, and after a day of gathering sap the boys had clipped into cross-country skis and raced through the woods and up the flank of Putney Mountain. They contoured the ridge in a rolling rhythm, switching leads, and swooshed down the cut by Banning’s and flew over the log bridges and the swollen brook. It was dark when they skied out into the field above Storey’s. The snow-covered clearing gave off its own light, as bright as a shaded lantern, and they skied right into the yard, slaloming around patches of mud, and they kicked out of the skis and leaned them against the outside of the barn. They were soaked with sweat, and the freezing night and the downhill run had chilled them, and they pushed inside gratefully to the warmth of the house, the popping woodstove and the smells of baking bread. Jess always ate dinner with the family—it was part of his pay—and he slept most nights in his room in the barn, and he would remember those three weeks as some of the happiest of his life. He and Gwen had broken up just before Christmas and he was surprised to find that he was okay with it. He and Storey had grown so close, matching strides through the daily rhythms of school and work, that they might go several days barely saying a word.
So that night, after working the sugar bush, after skiing, after a big meal, Jess lay awake for hours. Through the window of his bunk room he watched Orion rise over the trees, flexing his longbow toward the Bull, which he would never kill. Jess felt deeply uneasy. He was doing fine in school; he loved the days of this spring break and he could think of no better way to spend time and he wanted for nothing. But he lay on his back and drifted. What it felt like—like he was on a raft that rocked over an ocean swell—and he wondered if this was what life offered. Just this. Days of good hard work, a friend, a sense of family, a winter constellation rising late in the infinite silence of an early-spring night. Why, then, did he feel sad? A hollow ache he could not name? And why, though his belly was full and his best friend slept yards away, could he not shake it off?
He pushed off the duvet and pulled a thick sweater over his long johns, stepped into his work boots, and pulled open the door. He stepped outside. Delicious shock of cold. He could see his breath. He walked across the muddy yard, breaking the thin glass over the standing puddles, and took the track into the trees and down to the brook. Only two hundred yards and he could see the clearing by the stream and the sugarhouse bulked against the leafless woods and the thick plume of steam pouring from the cupola. There was no wind, and the steam boiled and rolled straight up into the current of the Milky Way. He could see light in the window, and he walked on and pushed through the heavy door. Daniel was sitting on his high steward’s stool at one end of the evaporator pan. He wore a red union suit with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and a battered Brattleboro Art Museum cap. It was not a big room and Jess was close and he could see that Daniel was not smoking a cigar or eating a pickle—he was staring at the bubbling sap and he was crying. He turned his head to the opening door and did not have time to hide or wipe his tears. And Jess saw on the plank bench beside him a torn envelope and an unfolded sheet of stationery, and he recognized the hurried script of Hannah’s hand.
He thought maybe his heart might have stopped. The unshielded sorrow on Daniel’s face, this man he loved as much as anyone on earth, the tears that sopped into Daniel’s ginger beard, the usually spirited eyes that most often sparked with mischief or humor—they may have broken his heart. Daniel registered Jess, and tried to smile but could not, and Jess hurriedly mumbled a lame “Sorry, I thought I left my Leatherman,” and backed out of the door and let the heavy spring swing it shut.
He did not mention it to Storey the next morning, or ever, and Daniel never spoke of it, but in the last week of April, Hannah sat the family down and told them that she was moving to Dummerston.
She was taking the horses. She told them that Annie would be with her during the school year and Cecily would live with her half the time and Storey could of course stay wherever and whenever he wanted, he was a young man now. Jess was there for dinner that night and Hannah had asked that he stick around for the talk, as he was part of the family.
Afterward, he walked home up the good dirt road, the road mostly covered with the reaching limbs of big old trees, and he smelled the first apple blossoms in Darrow’s orchard and heard the brook drumming in its bed, and he let himself sob all the way home. Sometimes he had to stop walking, he was crying so hard. And he never knew if what had happened had anything to do with the afternoon in the barn, but Hannah had the consideration to call him a week later—the caller ID on his phone surprised him—and she told him firmly that the separation had not a shred to do with him, that it was a long time coming. She made him repeat twice that he understood. But always after that, for the rest of his life, he suspected that he did not know how to properly read the emotional landscape of those around him, and that what seemed solid and eternal probably wasn’t, and that love could run very, very deep and also end.
* * *
Tonight they walked through the farmyard past the charred ruin of the house, past flower beds blooming with cosmos and shrub rose and purple asters, the colors pulsing in the early October light. Past a training ring with rail jumps still standing, waiting for the ground thud of horse and rider, the knock of a hoof, the heavy breathing of the two living animals conjoined in the rush. The red-and-white-striped rails would wait now for a version of eternity in which days would follow nights and the paint would fade, and a winter storm or a spring gale would knock them off their posts one by one and the snow and mud would cover them.
They pulled their wagons to the pond and around it, past a dock with a life ring mounted on a piling, to the sugarhouse. Collie still slept. The trauma of the past couple of days had caught up with her. They would wake her before dark and feed her a full meal, which Storey knew she needed.
He set down the handle of the wagon as quietly as he could and pushed through the door of the shack. Jess was right behind him. Like the rest of the farm, it was well kept and had been designed with an eye for the long view: a row of muntined windows faced the pond side, and from the boil master’s chair on its low platform the windows looked over the water and the climbing fields to the ridge. Jess noticed for the first time the spreading of color up there, hues of vermillion and blood orange and ochre bleeding through the tender greens and yellows of the woods.
The shack was one open room. The concrete floor had been recently swept and no spiderwebs shimmered in the corners. Enough space to lay out the sleeping pads and bags. A full half-cord of wood was stacked against the unwindowed wall and they could start a fire under the evaporator. They could heat food in a pot on the long pan itself, for that matter. The pan was a heavy steel rectangular tub with a firebox beneath it, and they would not warp it by burning it empty of sap. Probably. If they did, who would be upset? Who would come into this country again? With no towns to support them? Still, Jess thought that tonight they would be careful not to stoke the fire too much, not to damage anything; a sugarhouse this well loved should not be wrecked.
He was thinking that and surveying the placement of the storage tank, the shelves of canning jugs and tools, admiring the layout, when he heard Storey whistle. Long and low, a whistle of approval. Jess turned. “What?”
Storey stood from a cupboard by the slat-backed chair and said, “Look what I found.”
He held up an orange plastic radio with a heavy analog tuning dial and a crank handle. “Just AM/FM, but still. If the batteries are dead it’s got this crank.”
“Nice.”
“Maybe someone will let us know what the hell is going on. And not in French. Also, there was this deck of cards.”
* * *
They fed her half asleep. When they gently woke her she blinked open limpid brown eyes and gazed from one to the other and past them, as if not remembering, and she called for her mother and father and for Crystal. The fire cricked the dry boiling pan, and wheezed, and cast an orange glow through chinks in the plate steel. It warmed the shack, so they stripped to their light wool T-shirts. Storey gently told her that they were looking for her parents now, they would journey till they found them, he promised, and that Crystal would probably come after them soon, once she had a rest, and she, Collie, needed to eat. Jess watched her take in the words, watched her chest heave once, and she made a decision or was completely cried out, because she compressed her lips and nodded and let Storey spoon the reconstituted freeze-dried beef Stroganoff into her mouth. She ate two bites, and pushed his hand away. “I can do it myself,” she said.
So the three of them sat on upturned sap pails—there was a stack in the corner from the olden times before tubing—and they ate their dinners in silence, she in her lion pajamas with the hood pulled up and ears erect and the full mane shagging her head and neck. When they were done Storey took her hand and they went outside to pee under the stars, and Jess took the pot and bowls to the dock and washed them as the frost thickened on the grass of the bank.
They made her nest again against the shelves with pad and blanket and her pint-sized sleeping bag and she fell asleep instantly.
“Whew,” Storey said. He glanced at the glowing evaporator. “We’ll let it burn down. It’s too hot in here.”
“We could prop open the door.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.” Storey rose from his bucket and swung the door and with the toe of his boot he slid a heavy iron boot-scraper against it. The fresh current of cold air was a relief. “Shall we go out onto the dock and have news hour?”
“Sure. I want to and I don’t.”
“I know. Me, too.”
Jess picked up the radio and Storey checked on Collie one more time. “She’ll be okay for a few minutes,” he said. And Jess thought that, after what she’d survived, he’d bet she could hold her own for much longer.
* * *
They sat on the dock side by side, legs swinging over the water, as they used to do when they were boys on Mean Beaver Pond. What they called it. It was in an old abandoned orchard just off the ridge, a brook-fed swimming hole below a neat cabin, owned apparently by a professor at Amherst, but she rarely came up. The derelict gnarled trees still blossomed and still fruited with apples, but they were never pruned or sprayed, and the apples were scarred and small and mostly worm-eaten. The clean ones were firm and delicious, as if the wildness had distilled their sweetness. The boys loved to run there and swim, and one summer afternoon they were surprised by the owner. They heard the car door slam just above them, and had not time to put on any clothes before a slender young woman in a cotton skirt and linen sleeveless top came over the bank and burst into generous laughter. She propped her sunglasses on her loose cinnamon hair and declared, “Gracious, what do we have here?” They must have been about twelve then. They looked in panic from her to their shorts piled at the head of the dock and without a word both toppled into the pond, which was freezing. They treaded water.
