“Jim, stop it. Stop!”
He heard the urgency in his wife’s voice but the words made no sense to him. Why was she talking? Couldn’t she see he was busy? There was work and it needed doing.
He kept swinging. A blacksmith at the anvil. Again and again until that peculiar anvil pulped into soft pieces. The bludgeon now slippery with blood, spattering his arm to the shoulder. Pieces of the man’s head were flying, landing on the dirty floor. Bone and flaps of red tissue. Teeth.
Something wet hit Emma’s cheek and stuck there. She wiped it off like it was poison and screamed at her husband to stop.
But Jim didn’t stop until his arm went numb. The screaming voices no more than bees in his fevered head. Heaving like a dog, he looked up at his family. Wife and child begging him to stop, their dishpan faces struck in ways he’d never seen before. Revulsion, nausea, fear?
No. It was horror. Writ loud and plain in their eyes.
The pipe slipped and clattered across the floor. His arm hung dead like it would unlatch and fall from the socket.
Their faces became hazy and opaque and Jim thought he was going blind. Had buckshot snagged his eye? He blinked and blinked until he realized it was smoke, the flames eating their way into the basement.
32
RAIN CAN KILL, as well as, save a farmer. If the ground hadn’t been soaked by the rain, the fire would have spread to the fields and the barn and devoured everything. As it was, only the house was ablaze. The barn and outbuildings were safe, the horse hazed out to the paddock. Of the goats there was no sign.
The fire was immense and powerful, its orange flames rippling a hundred feet up to heaven. The timbers popped and the asphalt shingles curled up into noxious lumps of tar. The sheer heat of it all held everyone back.
The fire trucks had taken forty-five minutes to respond, their second call that night. With no water mains to tap into out here and their tanks run dry, there was nothing to do but watch the house burn. Hook and drag away the burning timbers that fell too close to the barn.
Emma sat on the tailgate of the ambulance with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Unable to take her eyes off the fire. Her heart had clenched and boiled a hundred times over until she couldn’t cope and simply shut down. Watching the flames with dull eyes like it was cookout, waiting for someone to pierce a marshmallow onto the end of her stick. She didn’t even notice the paramedic slipping the oxygen mask over her nose.
Travis slouched inside the bus, misting the plastic mask on his face. His hair was singed and still smoking. Prodded and bandaged up. Shellshock glassed in his eyes and his jaw banged into a mute stupor. Unsure of what the hell had just happened but pretty damn sure he didn’t want to remember.
“You okay, son?” The EMT shone a penlight into Travis’s pupils, waved his hand. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
Travis looked back at him at the uniformed man like he was simple. Everything hurt. Couldn’t he see that? “Is my mom okay?”
“A little smoke in her lungs like you.” The EMT slipped the penlight back into a shirt pocket. “But she’s all right. Your dad too.”
Travis wiped his gaze to where his dad stood in the grass and looked away. He hadn’t asked about him.
The witchgrass was sopping with rainfall but all Jim wanted to do was lie down in it and not move. Not think, not feel. Everything hurt and the paramedic wrapping his bloodied ear just kept at him with questions he could barely hear, let alone comprehend. He shooed the man and his nonstop questions away. The EMT grumbled something about just doing his job and moved on.
It hurt to even walk. He crossed the grass stiff-legged like Frankenstein and eased down onto the bumper next to Emma and they watched the house burn. His eyes had nothing left to show, blank as burned-out bulbs. Foggily aware that he needed to say something. Something was required of him as he and his wife stood mute witness to the razing of their home. Five generations of Hawkshaws had thrived under its protection there but still it went up in a flash, incinerated to a carbon husk like a hobo’s shack.
What was there to say?
Nothing.
“It’s gonna be okay now.” The effort of a few words was exhausting. It took all he had left just to reach out and touch her hand. “We’re gonna be fine.”
Emma didn’t move. She had nothing to say and no strength left to speak if she did. Her eyes fell to the weight of his hand on hers. It was filthy, caked in dried blood. Blackened to a dark jelly over the knuckles. Flecked all the way to his elbows in gore. It flaked and fell from the skin like dark ash.
“Just a house,” he said. “Wood and brick. We’ll build a new one.”
She pulled her hand away and folded it into her lap.
A silhouette stepped into her sightline, blocking the fire. A dark uniform with a distinct blue stripe down the trouser leg. OPP Constable Ray Bauer looked down at them. He took off his cap and wiped his brow and fitted the cap back on. He squared it up and levelled his eyes to Jim.
“Guess we need to talk, huh?”
Emma and Travis were taken away in the ambulance. The taillights shrank to red dots as the bus turned out onto the road. No flashing lights, no siren.
Constable Bauer spared Jim the indignity of sitting in the back of the patrol car. They leaned against the cruiser’s quarter panel watching the ambulance roll away. When it was gone, their eyes drifted back to the fire.
The inferno’s fury had drained off, the flames no longer reaching to heaven. Most of the roof had fallen in, taking with it the north and west walls. A lattice work of blackened beams angled in a tepee over the embers, all of it crowned by a mushroom cloud of black smoke.
“We found Brian Puddycombe and Bill Berryhill where you said they’d be,” Constable Bauer said. “Doug Hitchens we found at the house. The other body, well that will have to be identified but we’ll just assume it’s Kyle Parker.”
Jim nodded then broke into a coughing jag that doubled him over. The taste of ash seared down his throat and no amount of water would wash it away.
Constable Bauer twisted open another bottle of water and held it out to Jim. “I don’t mind telling you, I have never seen anything like that.” He let off a low whistle and shook his head. “I mean, Jesus, what happened?”
Jim stayed bent at the waist, hands on his knees, spitting into the grass. He took the water from the police officer and rinsed and spit again. Not purposely avoiding the question, it simply hurt to talk.
“Looks like Mr. Corrigan went crazy on you.” The constable said. “Is that what happened?”
“We went there to kill him.”
“And then what?”
“He killed us.”
The officer made no reaction. He folded his arms over his belly and waited for the rest of it.
“I need to make a confession, Ray. A big one.” Jim kicked at something in the grass. “About what happened tonight and what happened a hundred years ago.”
“Looks like it’s dying down.” Bauer nodded at the fire. “Hell of a thing, losing your home like that.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
The constable turned and looked at him. “You’ve been through a hell of a shock, Jim. Things like this, well, people get the details mixed up. Don’t remember everything exactly.” He swatted at a mosquito on his neck and looked at his palm. “Everybody knows Corrigan was a loony tune. From what I can tell, it looks like you guys went up there to talk some sense into him and Mr. Corrigan just went crazy. Attacked you for no good reason. From
