Burn, p.20
Burn, page 20
“What?” Storey said.
“The town is Grantham.”
“I can see that.” He was now also behind Jess, looking down.
“I remember. I saw it in a photo at Collie’s house. A photo of her dad with his own mother.”
Collie’s hands were gripping Jess’s back, her head beside his. He twisted back a little, said, “Col, is that where your grandma lives?” And he felt her nod against his beard. “Ghee lives in Grantham,” she said.
* * *
Well, it was south and east. What they had decided minutes ago would be the smartest direction. And Jess felt for the first time in what seemed like days the glimmer of a small win. He stood and stretched and turned. He caught sight of three of the bodies sprawled in the meadow on the far side of the burn pile and he quickly turned back and the glimmer died.
* * *
They slept all together in half-wet sleeping bags, crowded under the tarp. They slept in their damp clothes, and despite the intermittent sweeps of rain they all slept hard. At dawn there were fleets of dark flat-bottomed clouds skimming the ridges—moving fast, like raiding longboats—and no frost. In another half-hour the clouds had broken up and now, sailing, came the outliers, the sweeps, plying a dark-blue sea, an endless stream, and then the sun broke over the hills and fired the flotilla and lit the fog lying over the fields. Jess was peeing at the edge of the cinders and charred beams, which was all that was left of the sugarhouse. Timbers and the wreck of the long steel boiling pan, tipped and blackened. Whoever had boiled syrup here would never have imagined this end. But, then, any end always surprises us, doesn’t it? he thought. No matter how much we think we are prepared, the end is always a shock.
He tipped up his face. The mobile clouds moved swiftly, and the sun, and the warmth of it, were intermittent. Still, it felt good. He could feel in his stiff bones the rising pressure. By noon, he bet, they would have more clear sky, and, tonight, stars.
Today they would head for the coast. It was over a hundred miles as the crow flies, much longer following the drainages, winding down the lakes and tributaries to the bigger rivers that flowed into the sea. They would backtrack, then head farther west, try to pick up Route 15, and follow it southeast down through East Corinth to Bangor. No. That would be very exposed. It would be a major corridor out of this country and patrolled, or fought over, by both sides. They couldn’t walk it safely, not for a minute. So? There were old logging roads all through this region. Many disused, grown over, populated by tall grass and saplings of spruce and poplar. But passable, still. On foot, or on an ATV like the crazy old man’s. They might find a track that headed generally east. The problem was that, as in so much of the northern U.S. and Canada, the glaciers of the last ice age scoured the land north to south and back again as they retreated, and the valleys and lakes and rivers—and roads—mostly ran that way. Going west to east across the corduroy of ridges was tough. And so they could work their way south, as they had tried to do when this was all only a moose-hunting trip. And when the road was interrupted by a blown bridge and a substantial stream, they could wade across, or swim, or fashion a raft. Work south, get close to the coast, and edge over. Suss it out as they went and angle over to Grantham. Were the towns safe? After dropping off Collie, could they find a boat? A real lobster boat this time, and make their way down to Massachusetts, which was surely stable and solidly federal?
Daunting. That’s what it was. The more Jess thought about it, the more he thought their odds were slim to zip. What was the point if it meant almost certain—
“You want coffee?”
He turned, almost ashamed of his thoughts. Storey was behind him, holding the girl’s hand. He looked sullen and grim. Hungover. Collie’s hood was down and her hair was disheveled, tangled, and sticking out in all directions, her own true mane. She blinked at Jess.
“Sure,” Jess said. “I’ll start a fire.”
Storey gestured. “I got up a few times, kept it going. We still have coals, believe it or not. Probably some under all that mess, too.” He lifted his chin to the burn. “Anyway, they didn’t burn down the outhouse, so we’re taking a trip.”
“ ’Kay.”
The two walked hand in hand to the slab-sided shed with the half-moon sawn out of the door. Jess headed down across the meadow through the sopping grass, and through the swift cloud shadows that swept over it. Something satisfying in brushing through the wet clumps of wild rose and milkweed, shaking off the sun-dazzled droplets, feeling them whisk against the legs of his rain suit, staying dry. Or only damp. He walked to the edge of the woods and broke off fistfuls of feathery dead twigs from the bottom limbs of a spruce, and gathered an armload of ground-strewn sticks and broken limbs, and came back. He knelt and blew on the dusted embers, which glowed to life, and he added the crumpled tinder and smaller sticks and built up the fire. He found the can of Folgers under the sailcloth of the wagon, and the saucepan, and he made a pot of cowboy coffee.
When they returned, he poured it strong and black into their stainless-steel mugs, and then he found a box of powdered milk and mixed it with purified brook water and gave Collie a full plastic cup. “I was gonna make pancakes,” he said to her. “Sound good? With maple syrup?” She blinked and nodded and rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand. She had not said much since the raid. Was it a raid? No. It was a simple massacre. Why did they burn the sugarhouse, then? Not to hide any evidence of a war crime; they didn’t even pull the bodies back into it before they fired it. Made no sense. He shook himself and drank the hot coffee, which tasted like crankcase oil.
* * *
So the only structures left untouched were: dock, riding ring and jumps, outhouse. There was a poetry in that, Jess thought as they walked past. They got to the end of the driveway and turned right, east, and backtracked up the road, climbing the good tarmac in stripes of running shadow. A warm morning. They were now a practiced team of draft animals, each pulling his wagon, and Collie curled to sleep again and jostled on her nest of blanket.
They rolled back down to the lake before midday and loaded into a rental skiff and started the outboard. They motored around the point of land, which to Jess was picturesque—a black rock outcrop crowned by a single gnarled cedar, could have been the coast of Japan, could have been four hundred years ago—any other day, he would have framed a photo with his cell phone—his cell phone…
“Hey,” he said over the puttering engine, “just occurred to me that when we get to Grantham we can use the GPS on my phone to find the house or whatever. I’ve got the Gaia app and I know it gives coordinates down to fractions of a second.”
Storey nodded without comment. Since the massacre he seemed to be on autopilot. He certainly wasn’t saying much.
“I’ve got half a charge and the extra battery pack,” Jess continued. Storey didn’t respond. He turned his face into the breeze, shut his eyes.
They came around the point and angled into the dock where the Newsboy was tied. The cove was black and glassy, the only movement the swell from their wake and the scattered rings of fish rising like very slow drops of rain. Lake trout, probably. The Newsboy felt the waves and bumped gently against her bumpers, as if she’d been waiting. They tied up and transferred their stuff, including the carts. It took a few minutes. Storey heaved Collie over the rail and tossed in the lines.
“Are we going to find Juniper?” she said.
“Juniper?” Storey said. “Was she in the boat with you?”
“Juniper is a man, silly.”
“Oh, right. Well, we might find him.” Thinking, If he was in the boat, the sonofabitch tried his hardest to kill me. We came in peace.
Jess went to the helm, turned the key that still dangled, pressed the starter. She coughed twice and came to life with a diesel chortle, and he backed her out into the cove.
* * *
They hugged the shore. Jess steered in as close as he could; he didn’t want to tear open the hull on a sleeper rock in some shallows. They had no sonar or chart. The tanks were over three-quarters full by the gauge, he could probably motor for days if he kept her slow. They slipped along at something like five knots, a slow jog. They weren’t in any hurry. In a few hours they’d hit the southern end of the lake. The gazetteer showed the lakeside road they’d been on diving due south toward Four Corners. There was another long lake a couple of miles to the east, linked to the one they were on by a thread of blue. It ran farther south. Were the two connected? Was it navigable? Boating south on the lakes could spare them miles of walking. Then another lake to the south looked to be about ten miles long, maybe twelve. Little by little. There was no road skirting either shore, at least not on the map. Was that good or bad?
Jess had to put a hand on the frame of the starboard window; he felt vertiginous, and it was not just the steady rocking of the boat. The lake tipped and wheeled. He was hovering. Between water and sky, north and south, morning and evening. His friend seemed to be drifting, too, and as helpless as he felt.
Chapter Fifteen
Jess and Storey graduated from high school on a warm, overcast day in early June. They had to listen to an alum who had made a career out of being an eco-pirate. The speaker went on about smashing whaling ships on the high seas and our responsibility to other species. Preaching to the choir, really. But they leaned forward when she said that they had big speakers on their all-black attack ship, and that they blasted Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” at full volume as they bore down on the harpoon vessels, just like the choppers in Apocalypse Now, and it scared the crap out of the illegal whalers. One big tender was so terrified it sailed straight back to Japan. He and Storey sat up, a little nervously—they couldn’t help themselves—when she said that if every other species on the planet had a vote we would all be kicked off the lifeboat. A ripple of laughter went through the seniors sitting stiffly outside in their folding chairs. She said that God would blow her whistle and say, “Everybody out of the pool!” They knew it was true. “I can tell by your response,” she said approvingly, “that you are all biocentrists. Exactly what we need in the world. Not just to protect the ones without a voice, but to save ourselves. Congratulations.” Pretty cool.
Then there was a big late lunch out on the newly mown field at the top of the hill, and then most of the class bade goodbye to their gathered relatives and said, “See you tomorrow morning!” and took off to the traditional keg party on the High Forty. The understanding was: Don’t get alcohol poisoning and don’t drive drunk and the school and the local parents will turn a blind eye.
The day student Jeremy Fine had not had a single sip when he rolled his Jeep on the way to the party. He was just in high spirits. His girlfriend, Alyssa, by all accounts adored him, they were going to colleges in northern Vermont, an hour apart, he had bought the twenty-year-old Wrangler he was driving with his own money, money he had earned working in a Brattleboro printmaking studio on the weekends, and he had a summer ahead of him with Alyssa, working on a trail crew in the White Mountains. He was a sweet, self-deprecating kid who could never keep his unruly curly hair in line, and seemed always baffled by his good fortune, both of which made everyone around him want to help him more. The two were climbing the rough road to the field and the party with a box full of chips and jalapeños and trying to tune in the Bellows Falls pop station when his front tire slipped to the wrong side of a wet rock and missed the edge and they tumbled down a steep eight-foot bank into the brook.
Jess was the one who found them. He was urging his Subaru, Sue, up the track with a keg in the front seat and eight students everywhere else, talking to her as to an old horse as the springs groaned and the engine lugged: “Old one, you sweet, you can do this, you can, you can!” When he encountered the same rock and steered carefully around it, he glanced down into the dreaded streambed and saw the white Jeep on its back, muddy wheels to the sky. It took all nine of them, in shin-deep water, to rock the car enough to pull out their classmates, who were already unresponsive. The coroner later reported that Jeremy had died probably instantly of head trauma, she of a broken neck.
The entire class followed the ambulance to the hospital in Brattleboro, a convoy thirty cars long mustered by local students and their parents. After the two were pronounced dead, Storey pulled Jess’s arm and they walked out of the ER and down the hill to the river, and, silently, everyone followed. Storey had not spoken, and Jess had no idea where they were going. But Storey turned in at the Congregational church. The sign out front said, “Be Curious, Not Judgmental.” They went up the steps. The door was open. They walked in. Not a soul was there, but candles burned in the dim chapel, and Storey slipped into a pew and Jess slid beside him. The whole class filed in and filled the benches silently, and not a word was spoken, but Jess felt the power of his classmates at his back. They sat for who knew how long. He could hear sobbing and an occasional cough, and the crick of a hassock as someone kneeled, and the groan of a breeze against the high, colored windows. That was it. They sat until night fell.
Jess thought later that it was the most powerful service for the dead he had ever been to. Not a single word. And for years afterward, for the rest of his life, he thought of Jeremy and Alyssa on some continuing parallel journey in which all their potential was not thwarted but they were twined and excited, as they were on that day, and would explore the possibilities of the world together, delighted and bemused by their own luck. He kept them there, just beyond arm’s reach, as sort of spirit guides who could show him how lives could work—but, it seemed, never did.
Why didn’t they? He thought this as he fought down the dizziness and nausea and steered the Newsboy off a stretch of marsh-grass shallows. Why was everything, always, so fraught? The hammer had dropped so often in his life that when there was peace, when there was enough love, when he was cradled by it—the love of a friend, a wife, a dog—he knew that sometime around the height of his joy or contentment—right at the apex, when it seemed life might right itself like a ship in a cross sea, and turn, and sail smoothly—just then lightning would strike. A rogue wave would rise up and blot out the horizon.
Was it him? Or the nature of the beast? Born squalling, die retching, and in between tossed every which way like a chunk of broken Styrofoam. Wind and tide.
Why people seek God, of course. Why a church had been built for them to walk into on that June afternoon. Why candles burn. Why a cold stone floor echoes the footfalls and the sobs of the stricken. If Jeremy had been bewildered by the blessings in his life, by his uncooperative hair, by the love of a strong, joyful girl, then so are we all. And equally bewildered when it all falls apart.
It was falling apart now, big-time.
“You all right?” It was Storey behind him, hand on his arm.
“No. You?”
“Not really.”
Jess edged the throttle forward with the heel of his right hand, to raise the volume of the motor so she wouldn’t hear them, and to change the tempo. Maybe that would help. Maybe he was just feeling seasick. He raised his voice a little and said, “I can’t see how we can make it to the coast without encountering either side. And we have no clue who is actually waiting there or if they’ll be glad to see us.”
“No.”
“No meaning ‘no,’ or ‘yes’?”
“I mean, yes, we don’t know shit.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, we’ve gotta drop her,” Storey said. “At Grandma’s, at a safe house, wherever the location is. Maybe then we steal a boat and run.” He put a hand beside the binnacle to steady himself. “South. None of it’s very far. I helped my cousin Ted move his sloop once from Brunswick to Gloucester. We motored at, like, ten knots, and it took us one long day.”
Jess didn’t answer. He was thinking about the girl in her rowboat and the chopper. And Clawdette burning all over the water. “What about staying?” he said finally.
“Staying?”
“Wintering over. Somewhere up here. Waiting for it to cool down?”
“Cool down?”
“C’mon. We could raid whatever more we can get out of the boats, the houses in Beryl, maybe other villages, get a moose, hunker down. Then take her back. It’s not gonna do her or her family any good if we all get shot up trying to get there.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No place is safe. The sugarhouse. Any town. One day they’ll show up. Either side. And we’ll be cooked. We need to drop her. Then get to a safe zone, wherever that is. Massachusetts, maybe. Then I can work north, home.”
Home. That was Storey’s true north, Jess thought. That’s where Storey took his bearings. Where did he? Was home home anymore? No. Not, really. It was nothing more than a shell with a roof now.
Storey had said “I”: “Then I can work north…” To Vermont. What about him, Jess? He, it seemed, was always the one left to fend for himself. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll tr— We’ll go to the coast.”
The sun was near its zenith, midday, and broke apart the clouds that ran against it. Still cool enough for a jacket, and the afternoons would bend colder and colder until, one day, a light rain would flurry into the first snow. Now they saw the headlands at the end of the lake. The forested shore dark with spruce curved eastward and dipped into coves backed by marsh grass. No town here ever, too rocky on the spurs and too marshy in the bottoms for the first settlers, Jess thought. In a shallow bay he saw a broken-down dock, silvered by weather and leaning over its own reflection, puzzling itself out at the end of days. The map had not shown a road, but if there was a dock, there would be a road. Some semblance.
