Summer climbed as Patch stripped off his shirt and began hauling furniture out into the front yard. The sofa and bookcases, small dining table and sideboard. It took less than an hour to rid the ground floor of their lives, his mother entwined in each object, the shape of her in cushions, the smell of her in the kitchen cabinets.
He boxed utensils, dragged the refrigerator through and onto dead grass.
Upstairs he stripped bedding, bagged clothes and towels and makeup and perfumes. A bottle of something fell and smashed, and memories the scent carried blazed at his throat as he worked.
In his bedroom he boxed the pirate memorabilia. He was not a pirate. He was a thirty-year-old man with a criminal record.
At lunch he fetched Saint’s grandmother, who stood in the front yard as a small van came and collected what could be used. Norma talked of housing projects and charities.
She lit a cigarette and watched as Patch returned from Monta Clare Hardware with a sledgehammer and began to swing it. He tore doors from frames, ripped out baseboard and rolled up carpet. His muscles tight as he ran roughshod through the old house, heaving it up and down with brutality; knocking banisters from posts; splitting the kitchen counter to a dozen fractures. He smashed the porcelain bath and sink, took aim at himself in the large mirror and swung.
The old house fought back, an errant nail catching his shoulder and tearing the skin, the drywall coughing out so much dust that by the time he walked back out into the afternoon sun he was gray.
He stood there sweating and bleeding, caught his breath then headed back inside for a second round.
Saint joined her grandmother.
“I think he’s gone mad,” Norma said.
“You’re implying he was sane to begin with.”
That night Rosewood Avenue glowed with flames as smoke rose from the yard of the old Macauley house. Patch sat on what was left of the porch and watched the timbers he had stripped charr and soot.
Misty and Charlotte walked down from the tall hill and watched the show, along with Sammy, who wandered from Main Street, decanter in hand, offering slugs.
“Château Léoville—Las Cases Saint-Julien Deuxième Cru,” he managed.
“She’s a child,” Misty said, slapping Charlotte’s hand away as she moved for a glass.
Patch stood before the flames and watched his daughter. It was not only the heat from the old house warming him that night.