Nothing Left to Burn Read online

  I wanted to concoct a plan, a way to make Marrigan pay for what he had done. I began to think of which closets held my father’s guns: the little .410 shotgun, the .222 and 30-06 rifles were in my closet; the .12-gauge pump shotgun and .22 rifle were in my mother’s; and the .32 pistol was in the second drawer of her dresser. I knew how much each one weighed in my hands, knew how to load the shells and bullets. And I knew how to pull the trigger.

  “Do you realize what could have happened?” my grandmother asked.

  I was twelve, old enough to know about rape and to understand it was wrong for a man to force himself on a woman. I imagined coming home to a nightmare of blue and red strobe lights washing over our house from the police cars parked in the driveway. And the tall state troopers, slim in their black uniforms, would tell me a different story, one where my mother’s hands weren’t as strong around Marrigan’s bristly chin, where she didn’t lie about the dog.

  “Does Pap know?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” my grandmother said.

  I looked at my watch, that same Timex Ironman: four o’clock. In another hour my grandfather returned home from the prison.

  “Are you going to tell the police?” I asked.

  “It’d be your mother’s word against that creep’s. I don’t know if they’d help.”

  The image of my mother pushing on Marrigan’s chin glazed my mind. I looked away from my grandmother. Outside the living room window I saw her Jeep. Just six months earlier, the Jeep sat there as my grandmother broke the news that my grandfather needed another hip replacement. He recovered from the surgery, though his gait tensed and he now looked robotic and stiff. I knew he would have to deal with Marrigan — Pap was the only man we had left.

  He sped past our house at a quarter after five. I wondered what he would do, if he’d be like a cop on television and grab Marrigan by the shirt collar, backslap his face, and then work his fists into the man’s chest and stomach. It seemed in character; my grandfather was not always the most rational or patient man. When he lost his temper, his face reddened and gleamed bright with sweat.

  He pulled into our driveway ten minutes later. I zipped up my coat and ran outside and across the yard as though I were his cavalry.

  “That dumb jerk won’t stop here again,” Pap said. “He won’t even look in here again, you can bet on that.”

  I stood on my toes and looked inside the cab of his truck. His polished 9mm pistol lay atop a white handkerchief on the seat. He glanced at the gun and then slyly looked at me, almost as if he expected me to be impressed.

  “Sometimes you need one of these to prove a point.”

  “You should have shot him,” I said.

  “No. He didn’t deserve that. Not for what he did. If he hadn’t stopped —” Pap looked out the windshield of his truck, across fields frosted in snow and toward the gray ridges on the horizon. “You’ll learn all this. You grow to take care of yourself.”

  I nodded, though I wanted to know all of it now; I needed to know it. Who else would defend my mother and me? I matured and adapted just like I was expected to. I yearned for my childhood, yet at the same time I wanted to move forward.

  I walked back inside the house, stripped off my coat, and found my mother curled up in bed. The light outside had dimmed, and the sky and snow looked bruised with purples and blues. I sat down next to her and said, “Pap told me that Marrigan won’t come back.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what I’d do without your grandfather.” I rested my hand on her shoulder but she lay still, silent. Finally, she said, “I wish your dad were still here. He’d know what to do.”

  I knew what he would have done: he would have called his friends, those men at the firehouse who followed their chief into burning buildings. A group of them would have gone to Marrigan’s house, ready to beat him.

  For the rest of the evening, my mother barely spoke, alone in an impenetrable grief that Marrigan had helped cement. She made dinner, tucked me into bed, and then, in the morning, woke me for breakfast. After I left for school she drove to Lewistown, received an estimate for the damage to her car, and made an appointment for the repairs. No one in McVeytown even noticed. No one saw the green paint streaking across her car and no one asked what had happened. No one ever knew about Walter Marrigan or how my mother had lied about an old dog to save herself. As before, we remained invisible.

  On Memorial Day, my middle school history teacher arranged for me to recite the Gettysburg Address at the town square in McVeytown. One of the town’s pastors drove his sedan in the parade and I waved out the window just as I had done with my father. Somehow, though, people seemed less excited than before.

  After the parade, I climbed onto the back of a pickup and stepped up to a microphone. Helen and Lucky stood in the crowd. I had not seen either of them in months.

  I recited Lincoln’s speech and the small crowd applauded. My grandparents walked up, and both patted my shoulders. Helen hobbled a bit and leaned on a cane with each step.

  “That was so special,” Helen said. “It was wonderful, wasn’t it, Lucky?”

  “Not too bad, boy,” he said. It was the first — and only — compliment he ever gave me. Something seemed strange about him. His lips quivered a bit, as if his muscles were starting to fail.

  “I wish your father could have seen that,” Helen said. “He would have been so proud. Do you ever think about joining the fire company like him?”

  “No. I don’t really want to do that.”

  Helen’s smile faded. She nodded and looked at Lucky. “Well, Lucky, I guess we should get going.”

  As they walked away from me, sadness seemed to wash through my body. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the mention of my father. Or maybe it was realizing that both of them had entered their final years. Part of me knew that they were family, bound to me by blood, yet I didn’t miss them and I didn’t love them.

  Later that summer, I turned thirteen and the Odens invited me to vacation Bible school at their church. We sang hymns, memorized Bible verses, and were told that Jesus Christ was our one and only salvation in life. Though my mother and I still went to church each Sunday, I had begun to dread the spectacle — the nice clothes, the smiles, and the handshake hellos. It seemed there was something more to the Sunday morning agenda than just worship; there were appearances to keep. I only went along to vacation Bible school out of boredom and convenience — it gave me something to do, and Ryan lived closer than any other friend.

  One evening, Hartley drove Ryan and me to the church, using arm gestures to signal a coming turn because none of the car’s lights worked. He ignored the blaring air horn of an eighteen-wheeler as he pulled off the road headed toward the church. For the first time I was close enough to see that he was short, with leathery skin aged by summers farming under the sun, and white-haired.

  “You boys learning a lot at Bible school?” Hartley asked.

  “Yeah,” we both answered.

  “That’s good,” he said. “The Lord is a powerful man. He can give you everything and then take it all away. He can cure you or kill you.”

  Or do nothing, I thought, like he had done for my father. As the teachers in Bible school talked about miracles and a merciful God, I wondered why my father had seen none of this. But maybe it was like Rev. Goodman had said: one day I would understand.

  In the fall, Ryan and I again hunted pigeons on the farm. One evening, I convinced Ryan to show me the bloodstains inside Hartley and Anna’s house. As we walked toward the house, we passed an inground swimming pool with cracks extending down the sides. Dead leaves and old tires were spread over the floor of the pool. Inside the house, yellow wallpaper covered the kitchen walls, and what looked to be a week’s worth of dishes sat piled in the sink.

  “My grandmother must not be home,” Ryan said.

  We climbed a flight of stairs and I noticed a cobwebbed chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The house was cold and drafty. Boxes rested along some of the walls, sugges
ting the family had never unpacked, or had simply run out of space. Everything smelled of mothballs and dust. Yet, as we walked down a hallway, I peered into some of the rooms and saw that many were empty.

  “This is it,” Ryan said. “Are you ready to be scared?”

  He opened a door and I followed him inside.

  The light of a gray dusk filtered through the lone window in the room. Ryan flicked on a light switch and then peeled back the carpet. Two faded black blots, each about the size of a quarter, marked the wooden floor.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “My grandmother says that’s the spot.”

  The haunted room in the Oden’s house that I had longed to see was no different from any other room. As I stared at that stain, I thought that most of the story had simply been one of those great local legends that kids tell each other, like Irvin’s Light. The spots on the floor looked old, but they could have been caused by anything — paint, grease, ink, maybe blood. And besides, I thought, could a wooden floor really last that long? Or bloodstains? I wished then that I had never seen that room — it had been more fun to believe.

  Ryan turned off the light when we left and led me back out of the house the way we had come in. We were ready to go back outside when Ryan stopped.

  “I have to ask my pap a question,” Ryan said. “Follow me.”

  He opened a door to the basement and we creaked down the bowed wooden steps. Hartley’s machines lined the walls. LED lights flashed, needles wagged as wild as a dog’s tail, and red digital readouts counted numbers. I thought of the respirator that clicked and pumped my father alive those last days of his life. Computer printouts rolled like carpet across the cement floor, reels of secret statistics.

  Hartley stepped into the doorway of what looked like an office. He wore green work pants, a white T-shirt, and a black and white train engineer’s cap. People throughout the town talked about Hartley and his machines, yet no one I knew of had ever seen them. Most everyone had heard that Hartley claimed the machines could cure my father. They thought he was crazy or suspected that he practiced witchcraft. But this was the man who had driven Ryan and me to vacation Bible school and talked of God, miracles, and faith.

  Ryan asked his grandfather a question about milking cows and then we left. Hartley walked back into his office and never said a word to me.

  “What are those machines for?” I asked as we walked toward the barn.

  “Farming,” Ryan said. “They compute how to help crops grow better. But they can also help people.”

  “How can they help people?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But it’s got something to do with science, mathematics.”

  Before ninth grade started, Ryan Oden and his parents were forced to leave the farm and moved away from McVeytown. We still went to the same high school in Lewistown, but like most of my old friends, Ryan entered the vocational-technical program — they spent the first few periods of the school day at Lewistown High School and were then bused to the vo-tech school where they learned how to saw wood and dismantle engines. We still said hello when we passed each other in the hallways or cafeteria, but the games of basketball and the pigeon shoots stopped.

  At home, my mother and I continued to work like men. We ranked firewood, mowed grass, and shoveled snow. In the summer, I rode next to Pap inside his little truck as we drove over dirt roads on my uncle’s farm, looking for dead trees to cut down and then split into firewood. Then we threw the wood onto the bed of his truck, drove back to my mother at the house, and unloaded it. While we cut and split the next load, my mother ranked the pieces into clean, neat rows. When the weather finally turned cold, my mother still wore those old flannel shirts of my father’s; they seemed to swallow her like a child wearing adult clothes.

  My mother and I rarely spoke about my father. His death almost became a taboo subject, something neither of us wanted to acknowledge. Even at school, I never wanted to mention it to friends. It would be just another thing that set me apart from everyone else. When it did come up, after a classmate or teacher casually mentioned something about my father, I spoke in a hushed voice, as if his death was something to be ashamed of. My teachers offered condolences. My friends looked at the ground, said that they were sorry, and then sat silent, as if waiting for a cue to continue normal conversation. I couldn’t imagine how they would react to news of my arsonist grandfather and his jail time. My mother had told me never to mention Lucky’s past: “You don’t want people to know what your grandfather did, do you?” And so I never spoke of him to anyone but my mother.

  In the evenings, I sat at the dining room table and calculated answers for my math homework. My mother turned on the oldies radio station and we listened together. That music seemed to unlock all that remained unspoken between us, a catalyst to get through the pain.

  My mother said that the Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” reminded her of that stuffy smell of smoke that clung to my father’s clothes when he returned from a fire. When the soaring opening strings of Diana Ross and the Supreme’s “Someday We’ll Be Together” played, my mother rushed to the radio and turned up the volume. I knew that Diana’s promise of reuniting with a lover gave my mother hope. And when my mother listened to Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” a pensive look washed over her face, as she gave the lyrics serious consideration. “All that’s left is a band of gold …”

  The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was our all-time favorite song. When we heard the surging organ chords at the beginning of the song, we looked at each other and smiled.

  “This remind you of anyone?” she asked.

  “Maybe he sang this while he burned down those houses,” I said.

  During my freshman year of high school, Lucky sold his pigeons, and the coop he built for them now sat empty. Not long after, he moved into a nursing home near Lewistown. One of Helen’s sisters told my mother that Lucky’s mind had begun to fade and that he now sat most of the day in silence. I wondered if he had put up a fight or was simply resigned to spending his time in a nursing home.

  My mother and I never visited him — we had enough to remind us of him. The pile of rubbish from the hole still sat untouched, covered with weeds. It had been years since his last fire, but the remnants of his sparks remained visible. The thought of Lucky rotting inside a nursing home pleased me — he deserved to spend his final years alone, thinking about all he had destroyed. Yet I knew that this feeling would have most likely disappointed my father. He never spoke about Lucky with any anger, only that of a loving, obedient son.

  Helen continued to visit us now and again. Sometimes, usually on a Sunday afternoon, she pulled her big Buick into our driveway. Rather than coming inside, she laid on the horn and waited for us to walk outside and talk to her. She sat inside her car with the door swung wide open, her cane resting on the passenger seat.

  “How’s school going?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Do you know where you want to go to college yet?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend yet?”

  “Nope.”

  She hiked up her dress and massaged her thighs with her fingertips. Aside from her questions, I don’t remember much of what she talked about. Usually it was the latest gossip around town. Mostly, her visits were filled with awkward moments of silence. Without my father as a buffer, it felt as if Helen had little interest in us beyond any gossip she could spread.

  One summer, she offered to take my mother and me to Hershey Park for the day.

  “Of course Lucky won’t be able to go,” Helen said.

  “How is Lucky?” my mother asked.

  Helen smiled. “Oh, you know how he is.”

  “I do,” my mother said.

  “He’s hanging in there,” Helen said. “He gets confused sometimes. But I told him about Hershey Park and thought it’d be a lot of fun. He wishes that he could go. He always enjoyed places like that.”

  “He did?”
I asked. It seemed impossible that he would truly enjoy anything.

  “Oh yes,” Helen said. “I think we used to take the boys to Raystown during the summer.”

  “Dad never mentioned that,” I said.

  Helen squinted and lowered her head. She thought for a moment and nodded, “Yes, I’m pretty sure we took them. But I’d love to take you and your mother to Hershey. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “Actually, I think Jay’s going with some friends,” my mother said, lying. I wanted to hug my mother at that moment — she had read my mind. A trip with Helen to Hershey would have been unbearable. I imagined that she would spend much of the day stopping at the food stands. And of course she would interrogate me the whole time.

  Helen’s eyes brightened. “Oh, you have some friends? Who are you going with?”

  “Just friends from school,” I said, following my mother’s lead. “I don’t think you’d know them.”

  Helen smiled. “That’s just so wonderful. Oh, I hope you have fun.”

  After Helen drove away, my mother rolled her eyes. “Was that what was wrong with Lucky all those years? He was just confused?”

  I laughed. “I thought you’d want to go along with Helen. It’d be so special. Just the three of us together.”

  My mother shuddered. “I’d rather go to the dentist’s office for the day.”

  Each time Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-in-Law” played on the radio, my mother laughed and said, “Oh, I love this one.” She always sang along. “The worst person I know …”

  In the early spring of 1995, I sat under the raining pink blossoms of Pap and Nena’s cucumber tree magnolia and watched the front-end loader emerge from where the Odens kept their cows. I was too far away to see the driver but suspected it might be Dan, Ryan’s father, who still worked on the farm. The loader sped across the highway and then bounced over the freshly cut alfalfa field. The small and stiff legs of a calf stuck out of the loader’s bucket. I saw the black hooves bounce with each bump and rut until the carcass was dumped onto the ground. And then I watched the burial. I saw a man dig a shallow grave with the loader and then drag the calf into the hole and cover it with dirt.