The Fire-Dwellers (19 page)

How was church?

Just fine. The text for the sermon was from Psalms. One I always find particularly – well, you know – particularly fine.

What was it?

Matthew smiles and his voice is even, gentle, the almost toneless drone of one accustomed to reading from the pulpit.

Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul

Stacey looks at him, but can find no clues anywhere in his apparently untroubled face. She walks out of the kitchen and goes upstairs. She locks the bathroom door and when she has stopped crying she washes her face with cold water.

T
he kids are in bed, even Katie. Stacey sits on the chesterfield, turning the pages of a magazine. “Salad Days – Here’s How to be Slim in the Swim.” Stacey looks frowningly at the mound of edible vegetation in the color photograph, and quickly flicks the page. “Icings with Spicings.” Flick. “A Nervous Breakdown Taught Me Life’s Meaning.” Flick. Finally she hears Mac’s key in the door. But he does not come into the living room. He goes straight down to the basement TV room. Stacey follows him. He has turned on the set and is already sitting in the armchair in front of it.

Mac?

I’m looking at the news, Stacey, if you don’t mind.

EVER-OPEN EYE A SMILING MAN READS PRINTED DISASTERS IN A VANILLA-FLAVORED WHIPPED-CREAM VOICE

I
do
mind, as it happens. What about listening to a piece of news from me? I didn’t go to bed with Buckle.

So you say.

You still don’t believe me, do you?

Mac’s voice is cool and steady, appraising the situation like a member of the legal profession.

How can I be sure?

Stacey’s anger bursts away like blood from under a torn scab.

All right, okay, you can’t be sure. Even if it did happen, is that the only important thing? Is that all that interests you about me? Not me, or even going to bed with me, but just making sure that I don’t ever glance in any other direction? Because if that’s all

Mac has risen and taken hold of her wrist.

You did go to bed with him, didn’t you?

Stacey pulls away.

No I didn’t but I damn well wish I had

Go ahead then

Mac – this is crazy. Look, can’t we just talk without getting all steamed up?

I’m not steamed up in the very slightest. You’re the one that’s doing all the shouting.

If we could just talk about everything I mean like everything

Mac looks at her from incomprehensible eyes. His voice begins low, then suddenly rises, becomes almost not his voice at all.

Leave me alone, can’t you? Can’t you just
leave me alone?

Stacey stares. Then she turns and runs up the stairs to the hall and up the next flight of stairs to their bedroom. Rapidly, she changes out of her dress and into her dark green slacks. She puts on a green high-neck sweater, grabs her purse and goes quietly down the stairs.

The Chev is parked in front of the house. Stacey turns the key and starts. Before she has driven a block she realizes
she is driving too fast but she does not slow down. She looks in the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see Mac’s car, but there is nothing behind her at all. She has no idea where she is going. She heads into the city along streets now inhabited only by the eternal flames of the neon forest fires and a few old men with nowhere to go or youngsters with nothing to do. Then through the half-wild park where the giant firs and cedars darken the dark sky, and across the great bridge that spans the harbor, past the shacks dwelt in by the remnants of coast Indians and the apartments and garden-surrounded houses of the well heeled. Along the highway that leads up the Sound, finally and at last away from habitation, where the road clings to the mountain and the evergreens rise tall and gaunt, and the saltwater laps blackly on the narrow shore, and the stars can be seen, away from human lights. Only now does Stacey slow down, not because the road is too winding and hazardous to drive swiftly, although it is, but because she can now bring herself to drive more carefully.

  — Does he hate me? If so, how long? Where did it start? Everything goes too far back to be traced. The roots vanish, because they don’t end with Matthew, even if it were possible to trace them that far. They go back and back forever. Our father Adam.
Leave me alone
. And maybe Eve thought
Okay, Sahib, if that’s the way you want it
, and it was after that she started getting crafty. How did Mac get to be that way? How did I get to be this way? I can’t figure it. But God knows we don’t ever make much of a stab at figuring it. What’s the matter with us that we can’t talk? How can anyone know unless people say? How come we feel it’s indecent?

Another car has approached and Stacey edges over to the cliff face just in time. It shoots past, but she is shaken. At the next widened pass point she draws in, stops and lights a cigarette.

  — Stacey, go easy. What if anything happened? What would happen to the kids? Maybe Mac would marry Delores Appleton. I could almost face the thought, and yet I know he wouldn’t. She is too young, too edgy, too somehow battered a long time ago. I don’t give a good goddam who he might marry if I got wrecked, but I don’t want anybody else bringing up my kids. Yeh, you’re such a marvelous mother. Great example to the young, you. A veritable pillar of strength, I don’t think. Listen here, God, don’t talk to me like that. You have no right.
You
try bringing up four kids. Don’t tell me you’ve brought up countless millions because I don’t buy that. We’ve brought our own selves up and precious little help we’ve had from you. If you’re there. Which probably you aren’t, although I’m never convinced totally, one way or another. So next time you send somebody down here, get It born as a her with seven young or a him with a large family and a rotten boss, eh? Then we’ll see how the inspirational bit goes. God, pay no attention. I’m nuts. I’m not myself.

Stacey starts up again. The night is getting chilly and she rolls up the window of the car, wishing she had brought along her dufflecoat.

  — How could Buckle tell Mac that? Why ask? You know why. Mac wasn’t paying enough attention to him. Buckle is
like a kid. Oh? None of my kids could conceivably be that vicious. Buckle, how could you? How do I know? I’d have to know everything that ever happened to him. I think I’m a crumby mother at times, but what about his? Yet she kept him and brought him up somehow. I can only guess, fragments here and there. Mac, can’t I ever say how it was with me or what happened at all? You don’t want to know. You want everything to be all right.
Is everything all right, Stacey?
Yes, everything is all right. Okay. I get the message. If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it’ll be. From now on, I live alone in a house full of people where everything is always always all right.

Ahead, the road is coming close to the shore of the Sound. Stacey pulls across the road and draws up on a flat stretch of grass. She climbs out, not bothering to lock the car, and looks around. She wants to go to the shore but is uncertain how to get there. A stretch of sparse forest is in front of her, and she can see the dim lights of several shacks or houses. She goes back to the car and gets the flashlight from the glove compartment. When she shines the subdued light, she can see a muddy trail, overhung with grass, leading at right angles from the road and towards the beach.

  — Hell. All private property, no doubt. Can I get past those houses? I’m freezing. It can’t be mid-June. I’m scared. Where am I and what am I doing here? Okay, take it easy, Stacey. Where is the flask of Scotch you so providentially stuck in your purse? Here. Little tin flask. It was my dad’s. Yep. Niall Cameron carried it with him in the First World War. Meant to be a water flask. When I went back for the funeral, it was with his things and she was going to throw it out.
I’ll have that
, I said, and she looked at me with rank suspicions, all completely justified. Okay, Dad. Here’s looking at you. You couldn’t cope, either. I never even felt all that sorry for you, way back when.
Nor for her. I only thought people ought to be strong and loving and not make a mess of their lives and they ought to rear kids with whom it would be possible to talk because one would be so goddam comprehending and would win them over like nothing on earth, and I would sure know how to do it all. So I married a guy who was confident and (in those days or so it seemed) outgoing and full of laughs and free of doubts, fond of watching football and telling low jokes and knowing just where he was going, yessir, very different from you, Dad. Now I don’t know. Perhaps it isn’t that the masks have been put on, one for each year like the circles that tell the age of a tree. Perhaps they’ve been gradually peeled off, and what’s there underneath is the face that’s always been there for me, the unspeaking eyes, the mouth for whom words were too difficult.
No. No. No
. I can’t take that. I won’t. Hush. How to get through, just this minute, to the shore? What if there are dogs? Alsatians. Dobermans. Come on, Stacey. (I’m scared. What am I doing out here alone?)

Her feet squelch in the rain-wet earth of the rutted track. She walks slowly, brushing aside the thorned tendrils of blackberry bushes, past the dwelling half-concealed in the undergrowth, the light glowing uncertainly from one window. She makes her way slippingly to the shore.

The beach is not a proper beach. It is at most three feet wide, and the sand is pebbled over, knotted with rocks and with shells which crisp underfoot. The trees do not come down quite this far, but heavy-leafed bushes bend almost to the water’s edge. Driftwood has been washed up, gnarled branches and fragments now seen as sea-bleached dead-bone grey in the glim of the flashlight. A log strayed from a boom is grey-white on the outside rounded edge but on the circular cut-through it is a water-deepened rust color. The log is half
as high as Stacey, but she clambers onto it. She is wearing rubber-soled canvas shoes and her feet are wet. The log is only slightly damp on the surface, although sea-soaked at its core. Stacey opens her purse and gets out a cigarette. In front of her, the black water dances lightly, glancingly, towards the shore, sending the little stones skeltering down in thin ridges after each retreating wave. Out deeper, the water is more rough, breaking in wind-stirred crests. No night clouds, and the sky is as black as the water, but shot through with stars which one instant look close, earth-related, lights provided for us, small almost cozy night-lights to keep us from the dark, and the next instant look like themselves and alien, inconceivably far, giant and burning, not even hostile or anything identifiable, only indifferent. Stacey smokes and lets the silence exist around her. The sounds are only the underlying steady ones of the water and wind, and the occasional pierce of water birds.

  — How good to hear nothing, no voices. I thought you were the one who was screaming about nobody wanting to talk. Yeh. Well. How good it feels, no voices. Except yours, Stacey. Well, that’s my shadow. It won’t be switched off until I die. I’m stuck with it, and I get bloody sick of it, I can tell you. Who is this
you?
I don’t know. Shut up. I’m trying to be quiet and you won’t let me. If only I could get away, by myself, for about three weeks. Joke. Laugh now. The only time I can ever get away is when all the kids are in bed. And this period of rationed time is rapidly diminishing. It’s because we had the kids over so many years. Jen’s there all day, and so okay she’s in bed by seven, but then the boys and Katie are home and Katie doesn’t get to bed until halfway through the night now or so it seems. You can’t tell a fourteen-year-old to go to bed at seven. I don’t have any time to myself. I’m on duty from seven thirty in the morning until ten thirty at night. Well, poor you. Let’s
all have a good cry. What would you do if you weren’t on duty, bitch? Contemplate? Write poetry? Oh shut up. I would sort out and understand my life, that is what I would do, if you really want to know. You would, eh? Well, you’re alone now. You’re off duty. Start sorting, brain child.

A water bird cries, a far eerie ululating.

  — There
isn’t
any place that far north, that far anywhere. There must be. That’s where I’d like to go, very far away from all this jazz. If only the kids could be okay.

The lake is not large, but in the daytime it shines a deep oil blue. It is somewhere in the Cariboo. The Cariboo country. Up there. Somewhere. The barns are made of logs (Mac has told her,
so she knows; he has been there). The boat she owns is only a rowboat, but she can manage it very well, skillfully in fact, and Ian and Duncan are good with it, too. The house is made of logs, but tightly chinked so that it is extremely weatherproof. It is an old converted barn. Two floors. With careful planning, she has organized five bedrooms. One for each of the kids, and one for herself. She teaches school. It is a small community, and naturally everyone knows everyone else, but the farmers and Indians and (? etc.) are glad that at last a teacher has come who wants to settle here and