She had once considered equipping herself with a canary or two and had even gone so far as to visit the pet shop over in Randall. BUDGIE BLOWOUT said the sign in the window, BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE. Inside, she had followed the bird sounds to the cages at the back of the shop.
Some were awhirl with parakeets: lime green, purple, yellow, spring sky blue. They had black-and-white wings, small white faces, black eyes. The bigger parrots, spotting Rachel at their cages, stuck out their tough little tongues. One had zebra stripes around his eyes, white, leathery cheeks, and a long, blue, lady’s-hat tail. Another had a white cowlick and a blue-rimmed eye, his partner a green cap and a black beard. The canaries were a feeble yellow. The jungle-colored lovebirds in the cage next to them looked as if they were dying.
The last cage Rachel came to held two Mollucan cockatoos. They were big birds, white with bright yellow underwings. They were cleaning each other and ignored her as she stepped before their cage. They didn’t seem to notice the din around them. It was as if they were sitting in a clean and wonderfully distant rain forest. The sign on their cage said they’d been marked down from $799.00 to $699.99. Rachel left the store without a canary. She would never have a bird for a pet. That much she knew.
Instead, Rachel had dozens of spider plants, which had grown plump and juicy on their diet of tainted air. At least as many spiders roamed unchallenged through her house, kept the plants free of pests, and, said Rachel, brought her luck.
“Never kill a spider unless it’s as big as a Buick,” she had once told Ed, the mailman, when he arrived on her front porch to find her rescuing a sack of baby spiders from her mailbox, just in time.
She felt equally protective about all of the more vulnerable creatures with whom she shared her patch of ground. After a heavy rain she’d don slicker and rain boots, grab her worm spatula, and head for her front walk. She’d scoop up the half-drowned worms that were dragging themselves raw across her walkway and put them in a nice, dry, loamy place in the lee of her compost heap. Rachel Hearn had the richest compost in Belle Haven. In the springtime, when young frogs filled the twilight with their unearthly song and insisted on crossing the roads, cars notwithstanding, Rachel never drove on country lanes after sundown. And in the summer, loath to spill poison into the ground or spew it into the air, she relied on ladybugs to keep the aphids from her roses.
For only seven dollars and fifty cents, Rachel had once ordered a thousand ladybugs from a catalogue. When they’d arrived, stunned and angry, Rachel had sat down and cried over her complicity. A thousand ladybugs packed into a mesh bag, folded up into a cardboard carton, and sent tumbling through the postal system had been delivered into her hands, and she was nearly sure that she could hear them weeping. She had waited until the cool of the evening and then set the open package among her roses, but when she returned in the morning she found that the box was still nearly full of ladybugs. It took hours of careful prodding before they began to leave of their own accord, and then the exodus began in earnest. They stumbled out in their endearing way, so perfect, the kind of bugs Disney might have invented, and took refuge in her incredible garden.
If they were confused by the fact that every single plant in this garden—from tulip to lilac—was cradled in its own spectacular pot, they never let on. Perhaps they were charmed by the pots, which Rachel made with her hands, her wheel, and her kiln. Most were wrapped in brilliant ribbons of color, glazed to gleam in all kinds of weather, and fashioned with such care that they never toppled, not even in storms. Rachel had been told that the hill on which her house stood was relatively safe, for there were no mine tunnels directly below her, no coal to speak of, not that anyone knew of, right close by. But Rachel had come to be a skeptic of sorts and was loath to plant her flowers where the fire might, on a whim, bake them black.
“And what do you plan to do if things heat up too much around here?” Joe had once asked her as she filled the back of a huge ceramic turtle with nasturtiums. “Those pots will turn right into ovens, Rachel.”
“That day may never come,” she had replied, her eyes on her work, “so why think about it now?”
In much the same way, Rachel had never liked to think about the monitor in her cellar, the changing configuration of the fire, the parents who bundled up their pallid babies and put Belle Haven behind them, sorrow and resignation clear in every step they took away from town. But eventually the fire had given her no other choice but to look straight into its face and admit the very things she had fought so hard to deny.
As she climbed the front steps of her hilltop house this Halloween night, Rachel turned to gaze for a moment at the cauldrons that had laid claim across the northern fields. Whenever the fire climbed close to the crusty skin of the earth, whenever it broke through, it made an angry sore that oozed and bubbled and pulsed. Rachel forced herself to stay a while longer, to watch the fire burning until her eyes began to ache. Then, chilled by the sight and by the impartial autumn air, Rachel went inside her beloved house, trembling with prayers, searching for but not finding a
