Fire Burning Bright
by Brendan DuBois
The first thing I did when the phone rang was to check the glowing red numerals of my bedroom clock radio, which told me it was four in the morning. Some people take a while to wake up when a loud noise — like a telephone — disturbs their sleep. Not me. Any loud noise at night is like a hand grenade rolled underneath my bed — it quickly gets my attention.
I swung around and switched on the side lamp, and by the time the third chime had rung. I had picked up the receiver and had a pen in the other hand.
It was Norma Quentin, night dispatcher for Franconia County. She didn’t bother apologizing for waking me up. She knows me too well.
“Thought you’d be interested,” she said, as she always does. “Purmort volunteer just responded up on Timberswamp Road — looks like a fire, suspicious origins and all the rest.”
“Jesus,” I murmured. “Tate Burnham?”
Her voice hesitated, just a bit. I’ll always remember that. “Don’t know, Jerry. They’ve been gone about ten minutes — it’ll take a while for you to get there, even if you hurry.”
I heard the crackle of static and I imagined her, sitting in a darkened cubicle, in the basement of the county courthouse, linked by telephone and radio to the rest of the county, the console lights making her skin look bloodless. I was sure her two stainless steel crutches would be there, at her side, along with a .38 caliber revolver.
“Gotta go,” Norma said. “Calls coming in.”
Soon I was dressed and in my Ford pickup, driving north along Route 3, my reporter’s notebook and camera bag on the cold and hard vinyl seat. The center of Purmort looked quiet enough — the few stores and two service stations darkened and empty — and in a few seconds I was back on Route 3, passing the small wooden building that held Justin’s Plumbing Supplies, and the offices of the weekly Purmort Sentinel (Jerry Auberg, editor).
It was cold, very cold for October, and the lights from the truck caught the bright colors of the foliage of the trees along Route 3, which each fall enticed tourists to drive for hours. On both sides of the two lane road, up beyond the trees and forests, were the ridgelines of the Purmort range. The mass of the mountains was impressive, like distant battleships sailing silently and without lights. I wondered what creatures lived up there at night and I shivered.
I missed the turnoff for Timberswamp Road and had to make a sloppy U-turn farther down. Timberswamp was a town-maintained road, unlike Route 3, which is maintained by the state. Purmort being Purmort, the road was cracked and bumpy and there were no streetlights at all. The few homes were set far into the woods, and all of them had bright and powerful yard lights on. I drove a mile and six-tenths by the truck’s odometer before I saw the flashing lights of the firetrucks and police cruisers. I pulled up behind another pickup truck — one belonging to a volunteer firefighter, no doubt, since it had a slap-on red strobe light on its roof — and stepped out, swinging my camera bag over one shoulder. The cold hit me like a wet towel against my face, and I saw my breath in the frigid air.
There were lights everywhere, blue ones from the two Purmort police cruisers and red ones from the two fire engines from the Purmort volunteer fire department. There was the loud crackling of radio static coming from the vehicles, and I walked along the road, nodding and looking at the huddled groups of volunteer firefighters, many in their nightclothes and wearing bunker jackets and heavy boots. It was then that an odd thing happened.
By that time, after all that had gone on over the summer, most of them had begun to at least accept me, if not quite trust me. But as I walked by none of them looked my way. They turned their backs and talked to one another, like tiny herds of animals in winter turning among themselves, protecting one another from an outside threat.
I walked up the road, a slight embankment of dirt and grass on the right, and that was when the smell of smoke and something else struck me, and I held onto the camera bag strap very tightly.
It began in spring, and innocently at first, with a few grass fires along some of the farms that dotted the outlying areas of Purmort. At first the firefighters and the chief of police, Randy Parnell, blamed the fires on kids smoking cigarettes or raising hell in preparation for summer vacation. Being the editor and sole reporter — and owner — of the Sentinel, I put the stories inside the paper. No cause for giving the kids publicity, I thought.
It was my fifth year in Purmort, and by the beginning of that fifth summer, I was beginning to feel that at long last Purmort was coming around to my presence. I don’t blame them much for resenting me when I started there — I had come from that great hedonistic state to the south, and I was well-educated and a newspaperman, always a doubtful combination in a small town. But I came in with a large reserve of smiles and a willingness not to be pushed around, and in a while the Sentinel did all right. I didn’t ignore the petty crimes and drunk driving arrests that every town offers, but neither did I go on investigatory rampages if the town road agent plowed out a few family driveways for free when times were tough in the winter.
The fires that spring meant nothing, and I was looking forward to another round of Town Meeting stories, until a warm May weekend when a summer cottage on Lake Arthur and a barn on Swallow Reach burned down. Then the state came in, with state police detectives and experts in arson, and in a while, through a tersely-worded press release, it was announced that the grass fires and the fires at the cottage and barn were connected. There was an arsonist at work in Purmort.
For the moment, at least, I found that hard to believe. I had come to Purmort after thirty years of banging around in newspaper work in some of the larger cities in Connecticut and Massachusetts, eventually reaching the top levels of editorial staffs. And one warm spring day, as cliche-ridden as it may sound, I decided I didn’t want to be the top editor of one of those large dailies any more. I had gone to too many funerals of my fellow editors and writers, and I decided I didn’t want to be remembered and then forgotten at a similar service. By then I was by myself. My wife Angela had left me some years back, after deciding she wanted to discover herself, and every now and then she sends me an oddly-written postcard from some small community in New Mexico, where she makes pottery. Our only son moved out to California, working in an esoteric field of physics and computers I could never fathom, and twice a year — as regular as elections — I get cards from him for Father’s Day and Christmas, each enclosing a hundred dollar check.
With that spring decision, I eventually made it to Purmort, buying a failing weekly newspaper in the process. Now, five years later, two parts of me reacted when I heard about the arsonist: as a newspaper editor interested in a story, one more exciting than anything else going on in the area, and as a resident of Purmort, wondering if my home would be there when I got home late from a selectman’s meeting or county fair.
I liked Purmort, and I liked my home. It was small and sturdily-built, with two woodstoves and a tiny barn, set on a well-wooded lot on the Sher River. In the house and barn I had thirty years of newspaper clippings, mementos and memories, over a thousand books and years of color slides from trips all over Canada and the West, and Lord, how I didn’t want to miss that. For the very first time I thought of my past arrogance as an editor, spiking stories about house and apartment fires, or burying them far inside the paper. “Not news,” I would say. “Happens all the time,” and I never suspected then the gut-wrenching feeling of coming home with all of your thoughts and hopes and wishes of a quiet evening, and seeing only a blackened pile of rubble where your den used to be.