The way to find out about characters was to put them up against circumstances. Heather had just faced the worst thing she could -- for all her loneliness and feelings of being neglected, it looked as though she was going to have to share her dad with someone else, a totally unknown half-sister. In part this was supposed to be about how a slip-up years ago (an unwanted pregnancy) could mess up a family even years and years later. And it was also about secrets and why people keep them and what the consequences are.
But that was all very psychological and theoretical. The class wanted some action. About that time an old building burned down in Browning -- winoes were in it and died. We took the idea and had no problem deciding to kill Che’s mother. We had all seen such fires. In fact, recently (2005) the Mayor of Browning has instigated a campaign to tear down many of the old wooden buildings. No one even remembered who owned some of them. Others were willing to have them torn down if it didn’t cost them anything, so the fire department volunteered to use them for practise without charging.
So we tried our hand at describing a spectacular tragedy and its effect. Also, the boys wanted to be named in the story.
Chapter VI
TRAGEDY
Aching. Cold. Cramped. Where...? Che could hardly understand where he was when he woke up. His head ached and his mouth was full of cotton. Very slowly he unfolded his legs. The beer cans scattered clattering around him. His neck was in a knot. He groaned. It was dark. He must have slept for hours. It was not the first time he had drunk himself into oblivion, so he knew he would eventually recover if he could just get moving, but it got a little harder to get moving every time, he thought.
At last he was up and weaving his way back towards the town. The streetlights showed which way to head but also he half-heard the fire siren--even from this distance. The lights of town seemed strange--flickering and more orange than usual. As he got closer, he began to pick up the smell of smoke. Then he came around the corner across from the store where his apartment was.
It was HIS apartment that was burning. A crowd milled out front, shouting at each other. Hoses snaked in every direction and the hydrants leaked water. Every window shone orange and then little dancing points of flame began to stick through the roof. He was shocked, paralyzed. He stood still with his mouth hanging open, trying hard to get it through his beer-soaked brain what was going on. When he had gotten drunk before he had never hallucinated such things, but he couldn't believe it was real. Some of the seventh grade boys-- Heather's classmates-- were standing in a little group and they turned to stare at Che, knowing it was his house.
"That woman is in there!" someone shouted. Che stared at an upper window. The flames were leaping up the side of the building, spreading and waving like a curtain in the wind, and then it was as though the wall were dissolving into flame: a dark shape seemed to writhe on the other side of the wall-- he could see her and it seemed he could hear her screaming.
"MOOOOOOOM!" The word tore out of him like a long howl. He started to run towards the conflagration.
Galen reached out and grabbed his arm. "Stay here, Che! There's nothing you can do."
"I've got to save my mother!" Che was frantic. He fought Galen off. David, Allan. and Berry all dove for Che to hold him back. There were no grown men close and Che was so strong he was flinging them aside. Emmett shouted into Che's face, "It's no use! Be sensible! You'll die, too, if you go in there!" But still Che went towards the fire with the boys desperately fighting to hold him back. Berry spotted Mitchell and yelled for help. With Mitchell's weight and muscle they could just barely hold Che.
Then the roof began to collapse in great showers of sparks, fire mingling with the spouting water and sending off great clouds of steam. Che, too, collapsed sobbing. His mother, his mother had been burned-- oh, it couldn't be true. He couldn't even make himself get angry. It was as though he were only an infant, only able to cry for his mother. "Mom, Mom, Mom," he sobbed. "I want my mom. Save my mom." In the end all the contempt for her behavior was gone and he remembered only long ago being held and fed. His mother was everything, his life, his comfort, his source. He lay on the cement sidewalk sobbing his heart out.
Heather had spotted him almost as soon as he had come. Now she couldn't stay away from him. Her heart was swollen with tenderness for him. Kneeling alongside him, she put her hand gently on his shoulder. "Oh, Che, I'm so sorry." It was as though he couldn't feel her hand. Others crowded around, some pulling at Che to try to get him to stand up. Heather pushed them away. "Leave him alone. He needs to be left alone. Can't you understand how it must be to lose your mother?" Beginning to cry herself, she put her head down on his back, her cheek against his warmth so that her tears soaked into his shirt. Only the two of them existed there in the midst of all that confusion and conflagration, only the two of them in a lost world.
Once the building had begun to collapse, the water was more effective and the fire began to die into smoke and blackened, jumbled lumber. The firemen ran to and fro, shouting at each other and tinkering with the dials on the pumper truck to keep the water pressure up. People stood in little clusters now, talking softly to each other and shifting back and forth on their feet. The women drew their sweaters around their shoulders and crossed their arms in front of them. The ambulance arrived. but it was a long time before the ruins of the old building had cooled enough for rescuers to search for the body. If there were only one. No one knew what they might finally find.
"...Her little boys. The big boy is over there, but the little boys?" "In the country. Their grandma." "Just went to the bad... not like her sister." "Did you see her? I'm sure it was her." It was too awful to think about too closely, and yet people wanted to know whether they imagined that shape, that woman-like shape behind the curtain of flame. "Those old drunks were always getting in there. Bet they did it." "Building ought to have been torn down long ago." The search for blame had begun.
Heather's parents found the two youngsters before Che's aunt did. "Heather, stand up, honey."
"I can't leave him, Mom. He needs me."
"Here comes his aunt. She'll take care of him."
The sheriff's deputy was with Che's aunt and he helped her get Che to his feet and walking. Heather and her parents were left standing together, unacknowledged and uncertain what to do. Finally her dad said, "Let's go home. This is a terrible scene."
"Where will they take Che's mother?" asked Heather.
Her father moved his shoulders without quite shrugging. "The morgue, I guess. What's left of her."
"Will there be a funeral? Will it be Catholic?"
"I suppose so." Heather's mother put her arm around her shoulders and guided her along. Their pickup was parked just outside the crowd of gawkers and the tangle of rescue equipment. Now that the fire was about out, it was dark. The three got in stiffly, as though they had aged or had been walking for a long ways. Their muscles were tense from the emergency and the unresolved emotion. It would take a long time to lose the stiffness and relax enough to sleep.
They needed to talk among themselves, to turn it all over in their minds. Heather's mother made hot chocolate and they sat at the dinette table holding their mugs, drinking very slowly and looking at the curls of steam coming off the top. "Oh, I just HATE fires!" Heather's mom almost spilled her chocolate. "One of the things I hate most about this damn trailer house is thinking about what might happen if there was a fire. These flimsy things burn so fast..."
"That's why we got all those smoke alarms. I'll check the batteries before we go to bed."
"Dad, can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"What happens when a burned person goes to heaven? Does God give them a new body?"
"Yes, I think so, Chipmunk."
"Will she look the same? I mean, when Che goes to heaven some day will he recognize his mother?"
"Well, uh, sure."
"Will she be the age she is now?"
"I suppose so."
"And will God fix it so she's not an alcoholic anymore? So she doesn't even look like an alcoholic anymore?"
Her mother interposed. "God can do anything, Heather. That's why he's God. Don't ask silly questions."
"Well, if God can do anything, then how come He let Che's mother become an alcoholic in the first place? How come He let her burn up?"
"We never know why God does things. We just have to handle them the best we can and hope it's good enough."
But somehow in that moment the idea took root in Heather's mind that God had removed Che's mother because she drank and so that Che would need her and so that she, Heather, could save him with her love. She would make his life warm and beautiful. In her concern for Che, she forgot all about her own unhappiness and loneliness. She also forgot that Che had never said anything about wanting her to save him. So far, he had only dropped in for a while and kissed her a little bit.
Still, she went off to bed full of emotion and her night swarmed with dreams, some of them terrifying scenes of burning alive and others intense moments of golden, redeeming love. Through all of them ran the memory of her cheek against Che's back, the rhythm of his sobbing. It wasn't until she was awake and clear-headed the next day that it occurred to her that he had smelled of beer.
Che's aunt was numb with the tragedy. In the same bright sunlight as the day before, she sat at her kitchen table with coffee and cigarettes but she couldn't think of anything. She couldn't remember how she got home. All she knew was that there was a lot that needed doing, but that she couldn't get started on it. Her robe didn't seem warm enough and her bare feet were cold for once. She lit another cigarette, forgetting the one that lay in the ashtray sending up a long plume of smoke through the sunlight even though she was staring right at it.
There was a knock on the door and someone came in. "Priest," she thought, but when she looked up, it was her husband.
"You look pretty rocky," he said, and pulled up a chair to sit across from her.
"Yeah." She was glad to see him. They had been through bad times together and they used to have really good times together. Before he got to drinking, they had been each other's best friends. She thought to herself, "It could just as easy been you going to sleep with a cigarette as her."
He got himself a cup of coffee by reaching with his long arms over to the counter. "They found out who started the fire."
"Yeah?"
"Couple of old winoes broke in downstairs and got cold. Too rum-dumb to remember you got to have a stove to start a fire in. They just started it in the corner. Sure scared them when it took off."
"I'll bet. I 'spose THEY never got burned up."
"Nope." There was a long silence. "I'm gonna quit drinking."
"What?"
"I'm gonna quit drinking. I'll go to treatment if you want me to."
For a long time she didn't say anything. Then, almost too softly to be heard, she said, "Maybe something good will come out of this after all." Then she looked up into his eyes, looking as deep as she could for some kind of evidence that he really meant what he said.
Reaching across the table, he took her hand in his. "I DO mean it. I will."
There was another knock on the door and this time it really was the priest. There was a lot to do. More relatives would be coming soon. Che was asleep downstairs. He'd done a lot of screaming and moaning in his sleep so she had moved the kids around to put him in a room alone. What to do with him? Send him out to his grandma's? Probably she could use the help, but could she handle him? Still, it was better out there than in town. Maybe they could get him a horse to break-- keep him busy.
She was afraid to think about her sister. She was afraid to think of what it was like to burn to death. "Probably too drunk to feel anything," she thought, trying to be tough and angry. But this was her sister, the girl she grew up with, the girl who used to comb her hair, the girl whose hair she had combed and braided. She thought of her sister as a child, laughing and rolling around on the sofa. What went wrong? Why did things turn out to badly for her? God damn booze anyway!
As she put her head down and began to sob, her husband and the priest exchanged glances over her head. She was not a woman you often saw crying.
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