Loving Frank (41 page)

CHAPTER
53

F
rank awakens confused about where he is. He is lying on his side, curled into a ball on the hill, his ear on the ground thumping with his heartbeat. He smells the green odor of wet grass, feels the blades that were pressed into his skin pull away from his cheek when he sits up. The arm on which his body has rested during the night is numb. He unbends it and shakes it until it tingles.

Consciousness flows into him like the blood pushing into his arm. He sees Jennie’s house and knows he has slept the night in the pasture nearby. That thought completes itself before another replaces it.

Mamah is dead.

Frank remembers the night before, lying down briefly in his sister’s guest bedroom. Below it, the dining room has become an infirmary where the men injured fighting the fire rest on cots. When he first came into the house last night, he went to Mamah first. Then to Tom and David, who he could see were dying before his eyes. At the cot of each man who had so bravely fought the fire, he knelt down and thanked him for his courage. One neighbor, a man he didn’t know, put his hand out and touched Frank’s shoulder tenderly, as if in benediction.

In the night the sound of their suffering floated up the staircase to his room and drove him from it. It was not only the moans but the knowledge that in the living room below him, Mamah’s body lay on the floor, covered with a sheet. Next to her was Martha, covered as well. When he descended the stairs in the middle of the night, he stood outside the living room, wanting to go in and sit with them. But a terrible fear seized him that if he went into that room, if he saw Mamah again as he had a few hours earlier, he would never again be able to remember her any other way.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror. For the hundredth time, Frank imagines how it might have turned out if he had been there. He sees himself grabbing the legs of Julian Carlton, pulling him over, wresting the ax from his hand as the others run.

The grass’s fragrance gives way to the smell of smoke. It’s in the air, his clothes, his hair. His throat is full of it. He coughs and coughs, then stands up, certain that if he doesn’t put his mind elsewhere, he will smell burned flesh again. He will be retching and useless all day.

People are still asleep in Jennie’s house when he goes in the front door. He climbs the stairs to her bathroom and draws only an inch or two of water. There will be others who will need hot water this morning. Sitting in the tub, he feels the weight of it all like a sack of rocks on his chest. His arms and legs are so heavy, he wonders how he will get out of the bathtub. Yet he must dress and go make a coffin for Mamah.

He pictures himself standing up. He says out loud, “Get up,” and then he does it. In the bedroom he finds a clean shirt, socks, and underwear laid out for him on the counterpane.

Edwin is sitting at the table in the kitchen, his face ten years older than it was yesterday. Jennie’s husband, Andrew, sits quietly with him, along with their son, Frankie, who looks up from his cereal bowl wide-eyed. Jennie was in Madison when the fire broke out. She is asleep now, having worked through the night tending the injured.

Edwin has already announced that he will carry his children back to Oak Park for burial once a casket is built to contain what remains of them.

“We could have a service for Mamah here in the house,” Andrew ventures.

“No,” Frank says. “I will bury her today.”

He does not say aloud in front of Edwin what he thinks, that the idea of an undertaker or a traditional wake strikes him as unholy. He wants no false words from some stranger. There was not a false bone in her body. She would want it simple.

“Frankie and I will go into town and get some wood for the caskets,” Andrew says. “What do you want?”

“Pine,” Frank says. “Clean white pine.”

Edwin nods.

WORKMEN AT THE SITE
are still dousing the rubble with water when Frank arrives. The morning sun comes and goes behind clouds.

These men who have laid brick for him, and carried sand from the river to stucco his walls, come forward now to express their sympathy. They, too, are grieving for their close friends who were lost or injured and for her, whom they had come to respect. They were all here yesterday fighting the fire. They’re tired and haunted-looking, and they want to make sense of what happened. They stand in a loose circle, their hands in their pockets. One of them says out loud what they are all wondering: How is it possible that one man could overpower seven people, four of them strong men, and burn down a house?

Danny Murphy, a carpenter, talked to Herb Fritz and Billy Weston before the two were carried off to a hospital. He has been trying to put together what pieces he knows. “The men was having lunch in their dining room,” he says to the others. “Miz Borthwick and the children was on the porch off the sitting room. Carlton seats and serves everybody like he always does, then he goes to Billy and asks can he clean some carpets. Billy don’t suspect nothin’. He says all right.” Danny sighs. “That’s why the men didn’t worry when they smelled the gasoline.”

He continues reconstructing what happened. Julian went around the house and locked everything shut, except for a window in the workmen’s dining room. Then he went and poured gasoline around the outside walls of the wing where Mamah and her children sat. He lit a match, raced onto the porch, and killed Mamah first with the ax, then John. Martha ran away while he was dousing her mother and brother with gasoline.

Danny is sure it went that way. “He caught up with the little girl. It wasn’t just the fire that got her,” he says softly, “on account of the three ax marks above her ear. How she lived on for those hours…” He shakes his head.

Frank is close to vomiting. He is relieved that Edwin has gone off somewhere.

“Then the bastard comes over to where the men was and sets that wing afire. One after another, they come out that door and window, and he got ’em. It was a shingling ax he had, and Billy said his strength was more’n three men’s. Tom Brunker was right ahead of Billy when he finally busted down the door. Julian just stove in Tom’s head…” He stops here, a whimper wheezing from a deep place. “By luck”—he shakes his head—“by God’s luck, Billy stumbled when he come runnin’ out, so the devil hit him, but he ain’t dead, is the main thing. Outside, he finds David all cut up but on his feet still, and they run together over to the next farm. Then I guess David just…” He shakes his head sadly and wipes a tear. “He just fell down. Couldn’t go no more.”

Another of the workmen picks up the story. He tells with awe how Billy Weston came upon his son, Ernest, dead in the courtyard. “Billy was howling and crying, Herb said. And then you know what he did? He got the hose and fought that fire alone until people came.”

There is silence for a while before the men puzzle out loud over Gertrude. She was found yesterday in her best Sunday clothes, walking down the highway. “She told the sheriff that Julian was sleeping with his ax on his pillow for three nights before he snapped. Said she was scared to death of him.”

“But why was she dressed like she knew ahead of time what he was going to do?” someone asks. “She could of stopped it all.” They’re glad she’s in jail with Carlton.

They shake their heads and talk of why it happened. Because Mamah fired Julian. Because he thought people picked on him. Frank’s mind is troubled by his own questions. He wonders how one man can be transformed over three days from a mild-mannered servant to an assassin. He wonders if the unstable man was set off by some preacher at his church sermonizing about wickedness, about people living in sin. Did he believe, in his madness, that it was a righteous slaughter he was about to carry out as he locked the doors?

“He was insane,” Frank says to himself aloud. The men turn to him, surprised by his voice suddenly entered in the conversation.

Danny concurs. “Before he died, David told Billy that the night before, Carlton come into the gardener’s shack with a big butcher knife, talkin’ crazy.”

If only David had told Billy about the knife. If only Gertrude had come forward and told someone about the ax. The men scuff the ashen muck with their boots, working and reworking the possibilities, thinking of the ways by which the thing might have turned out differently.

“What use is it?” Frank mutters.

The men stop then. One asks, “Can we start to cleaning up, Mr. Wright?”

“No,” he says. “Don’t touch anything. Not yet.”

Edwin appears, walking over a hill toward them. When he reaches the house, he asks where the porch was that his son and daughter had been sitting on when the fire started. Frank shows him the area, now just a sunken hole, where small plumes of smoke still rise.

Frank steps away, out of respect, as Edwin begins digging through the rubble.

BY THE EARLY AFTERNOON,
Edwin has carried his son’s bones back to Jennie’s house. When Andrew returns with the wood, the men begin constructing the pine boxes. Frank looks down and sees that he is wearing boots that are not his own. He has no recollection of putting them on. Under his feet, there is still blood on the limestone terrace.

He walks through the rubble, searching. Here and there, small shards of pottery glint in the sun like shells on a beach. He gathers up what is still recognizable, though nothing is in one piece, not even the things that were rescued. His piano was thrown out a door and has no legs. Someone has put it in his studio and propped it up with wood blocks. A few salvaged chairs have landed there, too, and a couple of blackened metal urns from China. Only thirty of the 500 copies of his monograph stored in the basement were saved. All the rest—just gone. Even the children’s dog has vanished into thin air—incinerated, he assumes, like everything else.

Frank searches through the afternoon while Danny Murphy hammers in the background. He finds a thumb-size chunk of diary with fragments of words in Mamah’s elegant handwriting….
so glad that
…He looks for a complete thought and finds only fragments.
I love the idea of it…
What idea did she love? What prospect was she contemplating so happily when she wrote those words?

Someone brings him a box, and he fills it with the pieces he finds.

HOURS PASS.
Frank is brought food that he does not eat. Uncle Enos appears during the afternoon to tell him it’s all right to bury Mamah in the family plot near the Lloyd Jones chapel. Frank looks at old Enos, as wrinkled and hoary as his grandfather was right before his death. He thinks of the generations who made these hills sacred family ground. It is an act of loving generosity for the clannish old man to allow a stranger into the family churchyard.

“Thank you,” Frank says.

He watches as Danny and the others finish the two pine boxes, one for her, one for the children. When they are done, he and his son John ride back to Tan-Y-Deri in a truck and stand outside while the men take the small box to the parlor. A car is waiting to ferry Edwin and the remains of his children to Spring Green.

Edwin emerges from the house, dressed in the suit he wore yesterday, his eyes swollen and red. They all wait together silently until the little coffin is loaded into the automobile. Then he turns to Frank and extends his hand. Frank grasps it with both of his. The two men stand together in this way for a long moment. Frank wants to say,
They were wonderful children. I loved them, too.
But such words coming from his mouth would be profane to the other man’s ears.

“Goodbye, Frank,” Edwin says finally.

“Goodbye, Ed.”

They look into each other’s eyes once more, and then he is gone.

WHEN THE WORKMEN
carry the larger pine box into Jennie’s house, Frank and John follow them. Father and son gently lift Mamah’s charred and battered body into it.

“Meet me back at the house,” Frank tells John.