This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in Those Who Favor Fire is based on an actual person and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 1998 by Lauren Wolk
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY SOCIETY: “Dirge Without Music” from Collected Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (HarperCollins). Copyright © 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, Literary Executor.
FAMOUS MUSIC CORPORATION: Excerpt from “Moon River” by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini. Copyright © 1961 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1989 by Famous Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Famous Music Corporation.
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC., AND JONATHAN CAPE, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE UK: “Fire and Ice,” the final stanza of “Reluctance,” and title usage of one line from “Fire and Ice” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1951, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1923, 1934, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Rights throughout the British Commonwealth are controlled by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House UK. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc., and Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House UK.
POLYGRAM MUSIC PUBLISHING: Excerpt from “Midnight Train to Georgia” by James D. Weatherly. Copyright © 1971 by Polygram International Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Polygram Music Publishing.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolk, Lauren.
Those who favor fire: a novel / Lauren Wolk.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56062-9
I. Title.
PS3573.05652T48 1998
813’. 54—dc2I 97-39827
Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Book Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Book Three
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Dedication
About the Author
Book
One
When a spider plunged from a fixed point to its consequences, it always sees before it an empty space where it can never set foot, no matter how it wriggles.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, from Either/Or
Chapter 1
Halloween was hellish in Belle Haven. It hadn’t always been that way, except in the minds of its small children, who could not imagine that the world had been any different—that there had even been a world—before their own momentous arrival in it. But the year that Mary Beth Sanderson died, Halloween was, at best, impure, corrupted by its cavalier association with the dead and dying both. Less than a week had passed since the earth had opened up and taken Mary Beth, and the town was still in mourning. But Halloween was Halloween, and the people of Belle Haven went about the whole thing with the last of their resolve.
It was as if they couldn’t pass up the chance to polish Belle Haven’s silver lining, to flash it one last time in the cool light of an indulgent moon. Despite misgivings, those who had not yet left Belle Haven carved their jack-o’-lanterns with exceptional precision, decorated their trees with elaborate ghouls, and chose their candies with care. Then they entrusted their children to the uncertain dusk, warning them to beware not of child snatchers or rapists or bullies but of the very ground they walked on.
Living on top of a fire makes people cautious. It makes them wonder whether a flaming tentacle is at this moment winding its way toward the root cellar. It makes them walk softly and sniff the air for sulfur like a species of strange, two-legged deer. It makes them fight amongst themselves when the conversation turns to the tired old question, now nearly moot, of whether they should pack their bags and leave or stay and, quite possibly, die.
Rachel Hearn had listened to such arguments for a long time now—in the grocery store, at the post office, on the radio, in the street. She understood the urge to go as well as the resolve to stay. She even understood the really stubborn ones who saw the boreholes spouting their plumes of yellow smoke, who watched litter turn to ash as it blew across the hot ground, who had known Mary Beth Sanderson for every one of her thirteen years and still refused to take the fire at its word.
“It’ll never get us,” they’d say. “The fire’s nowhere near my house.” But they all owned canaries and kept one eye on the ground.
Rachel Hearn thought there were simply too many pianos.
“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Joe. Most people knew him by this name alone. Just Joe. “What in blazes have pianos got to do with the fire?” (Fire puns, intended or not, were an accepted and rarely acknowledged part of conversation in Belle Haven.)
Joe was sitting on a tree stump this Halloween night, dressed as a troll, eating a huge, tight-skinned MacIntosh and watching a handful of children sneak slowly down the street toward him. To cross the old and narrow bridge that took Maple Street over Raccoon Creek, the children had to first pass close to the stump where Joe sat, collecting his toll. Rachel, done up as a witch, perched on the rail of the bridge, swung her feet in their tall boots, and absently stabbed her own palms with her sharp witch’s nails.
She said, “I once heard someone say that the reason more Jews didn’t try to escape Nazi Germany before it was too late was because they couldn’t
