Ordinary Love and Good Will (24 page)

I am slow. It is hard to tell what time it is with this weather, and the utter relaxation of my nap still grips me. I throw some wood on the fire, pausing to stare thoughtlessly at the glowing coals. Liz groans and sighs, throws out an arm. Her eyes still closed, she says, “What time is it? Was that the bus? God, I feel lazy.”

The snow has slacked off. When I step to the window, I
see that the cloud cover has lifted off the valley. My guess is it will be clear tomorrow.

“Where’s Tommy?” She is sitting up straight. “It’s going to be dark soon.”

The sudden wedge of panic leaves me breathless. All at once we are groping for socks and overalls and boots, but I have no thoughts, unlike Liz, who realizes that he must have come in, seen us asleep, and headed for the woods behind the pond, intending to investigate the pony foal. She runs there while I check his room, the barn, and the workshop. We call, but it is frustrating in the muffling snow. Truly it is late. The goats are bleating in the barn to be milked and fed. By the time I join her at the pond, it is real twilight. The snow around the mound of the foal is undisturbed, as is the surface of the pond. He is nowhere near here. And now our faculties click in. The page of snow is revealing. It reveals that no child’s boots have made a path of any sort from the head of the lane, that Tom is nowhere on the place.

More faculties click in. We make a plan—I will ski to town and make some calls, after checking at the school. She will wait here and do the milking. If he can’t be found, I’ll get Martin Summerbee to drive me around, and I will also call the police. The plan forestalls panic. I stand on the porch tying my tassels and then locking on my skis. I shake the right ski. It holds. I shake the left. The door slams as Liz goes inside for the milking basin. As I stand up from readjusting my gaiter over my boot, I see the sinuous, living yellow light of a huge fire down the valley, and I know at once that it is Lydia Harris’s house, and that this is the last time I will ever look outward and see it beckon.

I ski directly for it. The snow is fluffy and light on top, damp and slushy underneath, not the best skiing snow. Rabbits, deer, and pheasant flee my approach. More than once, I have to stop and wipe the ice off my eyelids and
mustache. At the bottom of my land, it takes me a while to get through the barbed wire in the dark, then to make my way over the running creek at the bottom of my neighbor’s land. Moreton isn’t far, and it is a big blaze. I do not lose sight of it. It shifts its shape—boxy first, tall and wide as the house, then low, then suddenly tall and narrow. When I stop shushing my skis, I can hear windows pop. There is no yelling or screaming. I would have expected yelling and screaming. The Moreton Volunteer Fire Department plays lights upon it as well as hoses. Even after the hoses are quiet, the lights continue to scan the blackened framework. Then I come to the bottom of the wooded hill below the house, and the whole scene is hidden from view. I take off my skis and clamber across that brook, then push through the new snow, up the steep hill. It is tiring work, this cross-country trek from my place to Lydia’s, harder than I had thought it would be. What is my state of mind? Suspended. Expectant. Annoyed at the effort. I haven’t as yet considered Lydia or Annabel. When I crest the hill, the first thing I see in the scanning light is the arch of the satellite dish beside the garage. The second thing I see is Paul Tillary, the chief of the volunteer fire department. His hands are gripping the shoulders of Tom Miller, my son, and he is speaking to him in deadly earnest.

6
.
November

The fact is, though there have been police and welfare investigators and lawyers and fire investigators and tax assessors and real-estate and insurance people and perhaps other nameless officials as well, the first time I see Lydia Harris after the fire isn’t until a few days past Halloween. I am on a bus in State College, heading for work. It stops for a light as the door to a pleasant brick house opens. It is a long light, so I can watch Lydia check that the door is locked, secure the strap of her bag over her shoulder, and descend the front steps. She is wearing a red coat, long and generously cut, with blue high heels. At the curb, she crosses with the light that is against us; then the light changes and I lose sight of her.

Tom, on the other hand, has seen Annabel twice, though they go to different schools. At the end of the summer he saw her inside an ice cream parlor he was passing, and in September she performed in a citywide talent show that gave assemblies at each grammar school. She played a clarinet solo.

At the university, I set concrete forms for the new biotechnology center. I make twelve dollars an hour, and the job will last through the winter. In the spring, the foreman says, they will put me on interior carpentry. Though the
building will be concrete from top to bottom, they have decided to include woodwork—floorboards, window trim, benches in alcoves. Liz works in the university bookstore as a clerk. She makes six-fifty an hour, and since she works for the state, she has good benefits. When we first moved into State College, she worked as a waitress at a very nice restaurant, and sometimes brought home a hundred dollars in a night, but she didn’t like the work. Tom has a paper route. We have found it hard, at times, to keep busy enough. Tom sees a counselor three times a week, we see her once a week. The state welfare department pays half the cost. The terms of our continued custody of our son demand that he pursue the counseling until the counselor dismisses him, and that he be gainfully and regularly employed. The children at his new school may or may not know about the Harrises’ house. The teacher, Miss Donohue, does, as does the principal, Mrs. Griffin, and the school counselor, Mr. Searls.

We have reconstructed Tommy’s actions of that afternoon. The key, in my view, was that school was called off for the afternoon, on account of snow conditions. When Marlys Tillary asked where Tom was, Sam MacDonald, a third-grader, volunteered that Tom was skiing home with me, which was what Tom had told him. Tom had no trouble finding the Harrises’ house, having heard Liz and me discuss exactly where on Laurel Creek Road it was. The walk, in the whirling but peaceful snow, took him about forty-five minutes. Lydia was still in State College, and Annabel had gone to her regular after-school care-giver. Tom had plenty of time, and he looked things over pretty carefully, including the satellite dish, Annabel’s playhouse, the sleds and cross-country skis leaning against the back porch, the open garage. He tried the doorknobs, but the doors were locked. The storm windows prevented that sort of entry. I think at this point he was in an investigative
mood, maybe nothing more. He went back to the garage a second time, and that’s when he found the kerosene the Harrises kept for heating the upstairs on especially cold days. He was perfectly familiar with kerosene. He took it out to the satellite dish and began pouring it at the base of the stand, then, spying the cable from the dish to the house and hoping, somehow, to set fire to the TV, he poured kerosene all along the cable to where it entered the house beside the back porch. He carried the can up onto the porch, where he stumbled in his too-large boots and spilled the kerosene over the porch floor. It dripped over the edge onto the latticework around the foundation of the porch. He left the can on the porch.

There were also safety matches in the garage, for lighting the workshop heater. Tom returned to the garage and took them from their spot on the shelf (neatly labeled “matches”). He lit the satellite dish. The state arson investigator counted this out for me. “Ten feet of cable?” he said. “Twelve? One banana two banana three banana four banana five banana six banana it’s on the porch. By ten banana, with all that kerosene, it’s established in the siding and moving into the eaves. Once it gets into the attic, then the house is fully involved.”

A car inches along Laurel Creek Road, the driver peering into the blizzard. His ventilation system carries to him the smell of burning. He checks his gauges. His engine is not overheating. He ignores it, then looks in the rearview mirror. Black smoke is pouring upward from Lydia Harris’s house. Flames can be seen, shooting from the roof. A little boy is standing at the edge of the yard, just where the creek flows under the road, his hands in his pockets. Seven minutes later, when the Moreton volunteers arrive on the scene, there isn’t much they can do.

When I expressed surprise at the speed of events, the fire investigator laughed. He said, “Every house-fire has the
same potential. Not every one achieves it, but a wooden residential structure can become fully involved within ten minutes.” He also said, “I’m not saying it happens every day, but with juvenile arson you’ve got to look at the envy factor.”

I said, “Juvenile?”

He said, “Little boys. If it were a girl, you’d have something really to worry about.”

The school counselor, Mr. Searls, said, “Now, who was more different from the others than Tom? A little black child, that’s who. I’m not surprised.”

We have a two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen is fairly large, and the landlord has given me permission to set up my workshop in the basement, but I haven’t had, or made, the chance.

Insurance and real-estate people decided in the spring that our place was worth over seventy-five thousand dollars, especially since the barn was in such good repair. The Harris house, including all the furnishings, clothing, computer hardware and software, and sundry other equipment, was worth $140,000, replacement cost. Her insurance company is suing me to recover some of their loss. They are making their case on the basis that Liz and I knowingly lived in a negligent way, that, had we owned a telephone, more than one clock, a car, we could have had our son under greater control and prevented the arson. My lawyer says that the case is not as clear-cut as the insurance company makes it out to be. He is intrigued. We will talk about the fee later, he says. I suppose that a precedent could be set that might refer only to me, since I am the only person anyone knows who lives this way. Or lived this way.

We have a telephone, three clocks, and, as of a week ago, a car, a 1983 Dodge Colt, one owner, forty-seven thousand miles.

I would be happy to give them the place, but my lawyer
and my counselor are against it. The lawyer says that, the way State College is growing, I could get much more for it in a few years, not to mention the fact that the insurance company should not be allowed to bully me; the counselor says that I should make no life-changing decisions during the first year of counseling.

We have a television. When we were arguing about buying it, Liz took a moral stand against trying to live separately from the general culture. In the heat of anger, she called me a “megalomaniac.” Later she apologized and took it back.

On the day we bought the car, Tina’s book arrived in the mail, forwarded from Moreton. The chapter about me was one of the shorter ones, and though she didn’t call me a genius there, she did say, in the introduction, “and Bob Miller shows what must be a variety of genius in the single-minded way he has transformed his valley, and his life, to an expression of ideals that are often extolled, but almost never realized.” Liz read the chapter and wept. The next day she took the book to our counseling session (we drove), and it came out that she was angry with me for not weeping, for reading with greater interest the much longer chapter on prehistoric varieties of corn. The counselor reiterated her view that I have not participated in the grieving process, and said that, while Liz’s anger wasn’t entirely justified, since we all own our own feelings, it was understandable. I took the book in my hands again, leafed through the chapter, looking for what has been lost. I wished there had been pictures.

I haven’t wept since a few days after the fire, before we even knew what would happen to us. I was standing in the barn, currying the pony, and I knew that I had reached the utter empty-handed end of knowledge about how to raise this child. I dropped the curry comb and walked to the barn door, where I looked at the house and the winter-ravaged beds facing it, and all my habits of thought presented themselves
simply as varieties of pride. Even the love I had been so sure of—for Tommy and Liz, for the valley, for this work, this soil, this air—was primarily self-inflating. I stood paralyzed at the doorway, blinded by tears. That was the only time.

It is without question too soon for the truth. In the meantime, it will be nineteen years in May since I got out of the army, since I bought the land. That June, while I was gathering materials to build the house, I lived in a tent down by the pond. I cooked over a fire that I built on a flat rock. Mostly I grilled trout and drank water. I walked into town for supplies, and one day I bought a trowel and a five-pound bag of mortar. The next day I built a little fireplace out of stones. I laid the stones and mortar over an old cardboard box, and into the top, what would become the floor of the fire compartment, I set thick sticks in a grid, about two inches apart. When the mortar had set but not hardened, I pulled the sticks out, carefully, leaving ventilation holes for the fire. Then I peeled the box away. I built ten-inch walls around the fire floor, and that night walked back into Moreton and strolled the alleys. I knew I would find an old grill in someone’s trash, and I did, perfect size and shape, exactly what I had imagined. I was not surprised.