His mom saw him before she shut the door. She waited to herd him inside with a warm hug. There were tears in her eyes.
“What did he want?” Jim asked.
His mother was mopping up a tear with the corner of her apron, but there was a smile on her face.
“He was looking for his daughter,” she said as she cleared the kitchen table of tea things.
Jim hung up his coat, kicked off his boots, stopped himself from blurting out anything.
“Apparently she roams. Lettie Kitchen — you know Lettie down on the Glenshee Road, the one who makes the horrible green Jello with miniature marshmallows for every church social — she phoned Father to let him know she’d seen the girl on the tracks heading up this way.”
Snoot was curled up on the rocker by the wood-stove. Jim picked her up and held her against his face. She was full of woodstove warmth. Jim took the seat and rocked a bit. It was strange to hear his mother so chatty. Obviously, Father Fisher’s visit hadn’t just been about Ruth Rose.
She was filling the soup tureen. Jim should have been helping but the stove and the kitten held him captive.
“The girl’s quite a problem for them, I gather. Poor Nancy.”
Nancy was Mrs. Fisher. Ruth Rose’s mother. She was the kind of person you said “poor Nancy” about. She was in a wheelchair, but that wasn’t the reason. She had lost an unborn child in the car crash that had crippled her and killed her husband. But that wasn’t the reason, either. She seemed helpless in some other way, almost haunted. She was sweet, though. Everybody at the Church of the Blessed Transfiguration liked her a lot, remarked about what a saintly soul she was.
Iris Hawkins carried the tureen to the table. She glanced at Jim and smiled to see him with the kitten on his lap. Then she returned to the counter for bread and butter. Reluctantly, Jim got up and washed his hands at the kitchen sink.
They sat down. Holding his hand, bowing her head and closing her eyes, his mother said grace. Jim didn’t bow his head or close his eyes. As far as he was concerned, there was no God to thank for anything.
Jim had filled the sky with prayers — stood out in the middle of the field on clear days so that no roof, no trees, no clouds could stop his prayers from reaching the ear of the Maker. He had promised the Almighty elaborate penance, a life dedicated to helping the poor — whatever God ordained. But God had done nothing.
So now, Jim sat in respectful silence. The respect was for his mother.
His mother ladled rich corn and potato chowder into his bowl. He cut thick slices of bread, poured them each a glass of water. There was still a smile playing around the edge of his mother’s face. She caught him looking at her and grinned.
“What’s up?” he asked, taking a bowl of soup.
She took a deep, wobbly breath. “The church…” she said, then stopped to compose herself. “The church has decided — well, almost, anyway — to assume our mortgage.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that if everything goes according to plan, they’re going to pay the bank the money we had to borrow this year, and we’ll pay back the church at a lower interest rate and with much better terms. Take as long as we want, was the way Father put it.” Her voice was breaking with emotion.
When Jim didn’t reply, his mother added, “It’s a real blessing, Jim.”
He nodded and ate some soup. He knew they had money problems. It was the reason his mother had taken the job at the soap factory. He wondered if this meant she could stop now. He didn’t ask, didn’t want to seem too eager about it in case she thought her working bothered him.
“So he didn’t just come out looking for his daughter?” he said.
“Oh, he was looking for her, all right. He had wanted to tell us about the mortgage business but he hadn’t wanted to mention it until it was in the bag.”
“And it’s in the bag?”
“Pretty much,” said his mother, crossing her fingers. “We’re lucky, Jim, to have such a caring community.” She paused with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth as if she were going to say something else. Something about him going to church. But she changed her mind.
Jim kept his thoughts to himself. They ate in silence for a moment. There was just the sound of spoon against bowl, the clicking that came from the wood-stove when it was cranking out the heat, and occasionally the sound of the wind blustering outside, shaking the trees, whipping around the tarp that covered the firewood.
“He grew up with Dad, didn’t he?” Jim tried to make his voice sound casual, just table talk.
“Father Fisher? Yes.” She looked at him quizzically, as if surprised that he didn’t know. “Father’s a few years older, but they were pals, I guess. You know the big old brownstone place up the hill this side of the McCoys? That was the house he grew up in. His father Wilfred Fisher was the richest man on the Twelfth Line. The richest man in this corner of the township.”
Jim nodded. He knew the house. It was boarded up like a lot of places on the line. But it was much more imposing, set on a hill with a long circular drive. There was even a stone wall along the road and the remains of a wrought-iron fence. People around these parts didn’t go in for such showiness — didn’t have the money for it.
“How come Father Fisher doesn’t live there?” Jim asked.
“Probably couldn’t afford to on a minister’s salary. Anyway, what would Nancy do in a cavernous place like that? They’d need ramps and…Lord, can you imagine the heating bill…”
Jim was only half listening. He was busy trying to imagine Father Fisher as his father’s pal.
His mother started talking about farm stuff — some problems they were having with the milk separator, how she thought maybe one of her hens was going broody, how someone might phone tonight about seeing the Malibu and what to say if they did. “I was going to sell it as is, but Orm McCoy convinced me that with a little body work, we could get a really good price on it. An antique. Imagine.”
Jim listened up, put aside his resentment about selling his father’s car, put aside the incident in the woods.
At first he had hated it when his mother started talking to him about grown-up things. There was always stuff breaking down, needing parts, needing attention. When his father had been alive this had been exactly the kind of thing his folks had jawed over at the supper table, and it had been fine as background noise while he thought his own thoughts. Now he had to pay attention. His mother had never said it in so many words, but she expected him to figure out what jobs he was supposed to do.
“How do you expect me to fill his shoes?” he wanted to say. But he kept it to himself.
His mother cleaned up while he sat at the kitchen table and did some homework. But it was hard to concentrate. He kept getting flashes of Ruth Rose’s face hovering over him, ready to bite his nose off.
“There were other kids, too, weren’t there?” he said, out of the blue, trying to sound conversational.
“What’s that?”
“Other friends. Dad and Father Fisher and some others?”
His question met with a stony silence. Then the sound of water and a scrub brush working hard.
“I’m surprised your father would have told you about that.” She didn’t sound especially suspicious or alarmed. Just surprised. Jim dared to go on.
“Why?”
He listened while his mother rinsed the soup pot and put it in the drying rack. “Well, it was somethinghe didn’t much like to talk about, that’s all.”
Jim swivelled around in his chair. “What happened?”
His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. She was frowning a bit, and part of him wanted to say forget it, but he couldn’t make himself.
“Francis,” she said. “That was his name.” Jim’s interest deflated a little — Francis wasn’t one of the names Ruth Rose had mentioned — but he nodded for his mother to go on.
“Well, it was long before I arrived on the scene,” she said, “when Hub was young. Francis died. A terrible death. Hub was around seventeen, I guess. It hit him pretty hard. He was in the eleventh grade, never did finish his year.”
Iris Hawkins went back to washing. Jim didn’t want to push her too far but, as it turned out, she was only collecting her thoughts.
“Died on New Year’s Eve. In a fire — a fire he started himself.”
“You mean it was suicide?”
His mother shrugged. “At the inquest they called it death by misadventure. At least, I think that’s what it was called. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know your father then but he talked about it from time to time. It troubled him.”
“Does death by misadventure mean it was a mistake, kind of? Like he was playing with matches and it got out of hand?”
Iris nodded and went back to her work. Then she dried her hands and turned to face him. “Since you’re so morbidly interested, the boy was a known arsonist. A pyromaniac. Do you know what that is?”
Jim nodded hesitantly. “Someone who likes fire?”
“Someone who starts fires,” his mother said. “I like fires, in their place. This Frankie kid, he started all sorts of them in the area. Some of the old-timers could tell you. At first, I guess, it was just mischief, an outhouse or a tumbledown shed. But it got worse. He burned down a chicken shack up at Lar Perkins’ father’s place and killed twenty layers and fifty meat birds. Then he hit a small barn at Jock Boomhower’s with a couple of cows in it. That’s when he got caught. Sent off to jail.”
“But he came back?” asked Jim.
“Came back and burned down the house his family had lived in. Can you imagine? Of course, no one was living in it then. His family had moved. Wilf Fisher had bought the property and was using the old place to store hay.”
“In a house?”
“It was a very old house. A log cabin. You know the place. It’s in the low field just east of the cut road, below the Fisher mansion.”
Jim knew the field, all right, but he couldn’t remember any house.
“It’s just a rubble heap now,” said his mother.
“Mostly grown over. Heavens, it must be twenty-five years ago, at least.” He saw her do the math in her head. “1972. New Year’s Eve, 1972.”
His mother’s eyes glanced up at the clock above the kitchen table and Jim took the hint. He turned back to his homework, but his mind was buzzing. A moment later, his mother scruffled his hair as she passed him on her way upstairs.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. But she turned at the parlour door. “I remember now. The family was called Tufts. Francis Tufts.”
As soon as she was gone, Jim sat back in his chair thinking through what he had learned. Did Ruth Rose, who knew everything, know about this fire? And Francis Tufts — it wasn’t much of a stretch from that to Tuffy. But what did it have to do with her stepfather or his own father’s disappearance?
Nothing. It was ancient history. And he would probably end up as cracked as she was if he started thinking that way.
Snoot suddenly jumped onto his lap and Jim cried out in astonishment, which frightened the kitten who jumped right off, taking some flesh from his leg with her. Her sharp little claws had gone right through his jeans. He rubbed his thigh and settled back to work.
His mother kissed him goodbye on the way out, went over for the hundredth time the business about locking the doors and checking the woodstove and which lights to leave on.
“I know, I know,” he said, submitting to a second and third bone-crushing hug.
“Hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast?” she asked. Jim looked appropriately blissful. The Sunflower Bakery was just firing up when she got off work, and sometimes she would stop by on her way home. She came home stinking like soap. “I’m going to have to rub myself down with a fish,” she had said once. But, no matter how tired she was, she would walk out to the road with him every morning and wait for the school bus.
Jim watched her drive off in the truck, locking up as soon as she was gone. Then he went into the sitting room.
The family photos lay loose in an old, carved wooden box with a hinged lid. It was called a monk’s bench and the carvings on the front were kind of churchy with monks praying. His mother wasn’t sure if it had ever really belonged to a monk, but it was supposed to be where one would keep his stuff. Now it was filled with photos and the odd Christmas card, yellowing newspaper clippings.
After a few minutes, Jim stopped rifling through the stuff in a random kind of way and took out a huge armful. Sitting cross-legged on the rag carpet, he started a more thorough search.
Here were his father and mother when they were young, dressed up for some formal, standing beside the Malibu. Here was Jim with Hub at the curling club’s annual father-and-son bonspiel. Here was his father pretending to saw Jim’s bike in half with a chainsaw. Jim laughed.
He got out a second and a third armful, sorting the older pictures into a separate pile and then studying them carefully.
Finally, he hit pay dirt. A black-and-white snapshot of three boys in T-shirts sitting on the front stoop of an old log cabin squinting into the light. On the back someone had written: “The Three Musketeers.” And under it: “Frankie,’Fish’ and little Hub.”
Little Hub Hawkins was in shorts. His bare feet didn’t even reach the ground. He looked about twelve. Fish was a teenager, a senior by the size of him. He was leaning against the stoop with his chest puffed out and his arms crossed like Mr. Clean. Frankie was pointing at him and laughing. Frankie was older than Hub and younger than Fish and kind of gawky looking. His hair looked white in the photo — the colour of sunlight on a window. Fish’s hair was black, longish with wide sideburns, like pictures Jim had seen from the sixties. Father Fisher’s hair was the same colour now, though not so long.
That was when the phone rang.
Jim nearly jumped out of his skin. He got up awkwardly, his legs filled with pins and needles. He hobbled into the kitchen to the wall phone above the table. Glancing at the clock, he saw that it was almost midnight.
Who would be phoning so late? The phone rang again, too loud in the silent house.
Dad.
The thought made his knees buckle.
He’s phoning to tell us where he is, why he left so suddenly, why he didn’t even say goodbye.
On the eleventh ring, it suddenly occurred to Jim that it might be the factory to say his mother had been injured. That broke the spell. He snapped up the phone and spoke into the receiver breathlessly, as if he had run a mile.
“Hello?”
The voice at the other end of the phone whispered, “Did you talk to him? Did you tell him anything?”
Jim didn’t speak. He guessed who it was, but he was too stunned to say a word.
“What’s the matter? Is there someone there?”
Jim didn’t answer.
“Say’you’ve got the wrong number’ if there’s somebody there and I’ll get back to you some other time.”
Jim swallowed and took a deep breath. “You’re scaring me,” he said, sounding like a six-year-old.
Now it was her turn to go silent, and in the silence Jim heard a man’s voice. The voice said, “Ruth Rose?” Then there was nothing but a sharp click and a dial tone.