Nobody knew where it was headed. It wasn’t until much later, at the picnic out by the Methodist church, when they’d all had their fill of chicken and potato salad, baked beans, corn bread, five-bean salad, red Jell-O mold with white marshmallows and blue gumdrops on top, lemonade and punch, and sparklers nearly invisible in the afternoon glare, that they heard about the fire in the mine pit.
“But it’s out now. Took no time hardly at all to put it out.” George Spade, one of the volunteers, was the first of them to shower and come looking for his lunch. Rachel was watching his paper plate to see what would happen when George put it down on his knee. There was so much food on it that beans were falling off the side. “But there’s such a mess of garbage in that pit that we had to give it a good soaking, you know. It’s been so dry we didn’t want to leave any stray sparks behind.” He nodded, satisfied. Everybody was watching for the other firemen to arrive so they could be fed, settled in the shade, applauded.
It was not until a good week later that someone noticed smoke spilling from an old mine shaft out by the pit and figured that the Fourth of July fire had not been put out after all. Nobody figured that it would still be burning thirteen years later.
For the first few years the fire seemed little more than a nuisance. Even when the contractors who were sent in to contain it botched the job, even after the fire began to wander down along the mine tunnels out under the fields around Belle Haven, everybody decided that it was a distant threat at best. There were maybe a dozen houses and a church scattered out along the western edge of the town, directly above the tunnels that ran north more than a mile before they hit the fire. Nobody living out there seemed too worried.
Most of them agreed with Henry Buck, who had a three-bedroom on an acre right smack above a tunnel. “I say, come on in. Cut my heating bill in half, I bet. Maybe cure Sandra’s rheumatiz.” He shook his head, took off his cap, fingered a seam. “What’s it gonna do, come right up through all that dirt and singe my butt?” He had a laugh like an old car, all wheeze and hiccup.
To Rachel, too, the fire seemed at worst a minor threat. She had begun to learn the truth about the world, to recognize its many perils: all manner of holocausts, crimes beyond comprehension, extinction, plague, anonymity. In comparison, the fire seemed little cause for concern. Like others her age, Rachel also felt somewhat invulnerable. If, at night, she thought of missiles arcing up over the pole, by day she felt as if she would live to do great things, accomplish all of her dreams, survive any disaster.
And because she approached adolescence in the safety of a small, close-knit, law-abiding, sweet and peaceful town—where there was no real poverty or menace to distract her—Rachel surrendered to an irresistible preoccupation with which no distant fire could compete. She spent a great deal of time thinking about herself. She thought about the kind of person she was and how she might evolve.
Without a brother or sister to loosen her hold on her parents and theirs on her, Rachel had spent her earliest years thinking that there was nothing in the universe to compare with their lives together. Keeping house with her mother, marching down the hill to do the marketing, spending long hours in the garden, popping the jaws of obliging snapdragons while her father tended their tomatoes … for Rachel these were labors of love, proof that her parents were better off with her than without.
If her mother became upset with her—for smearing her clothes with egg yolk, breaking something forbidden, talking back—Rachel would simply drag her down by the hand, grab her around the neck, and kiss her. Bring her a glass of water. Brush her hair. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she would say. Her mother would smile and hold her, hum with pleasure as Rachel brushed out her long hair, and play Rachel’s favorite games, even though she was really too busy and might easily have said so.
Rachel thought that she had won her mother over with her penance and her charm. She didn’t know that, even had she been endlessly difficult, rebellious, and vain, her mother would not have loved her less.
When her mother suddenly collapsed one morning to lie gasping in the garden, it was six-year-old Rachel who ran to a neighbor for help, who told her father how the blood had spread across her mother’s old gardening slacks, who stayed near her mother for many days, until she was finally back on her feet again. The following week, when she saw her weeping mother unravel a tiny yellow sweater, Rachel crept off to the kitchen, made her own lunch, and did not ask for a single thing that whole day. She had seen enough of patience and kindness to practice them, and so she did.
In those early years, no one thought twice about Rachel’s eagerness to please, to be whatever she thought her parents wanted her to be. But as she matured, it became obvious to everyone, and to Rachel herself, that she was far less prone than her friends to the mild rebellion that all parents expect from even the sweetest of their daughters.
When her friends began to wear makeup—too much, and poorly—she joined them with great misgivings.
“Ah,” her mother sighed when Rachel came home from her friend Estelle’s house one day, her lashes clotted with bottled tar, cheeks as red as friction burns. “So soon.” She shook her head. “I was just as anxious, when I was your age, to grow up. What a shame.”
Other mothers, Estelle’s among them, scrubbed their daughters clean, forbade such experiments. But Rachel’s mother
