Jim blinked. Nothing made sense anymore. He felt three paces behind, trying to catch up.
“Jim, look at me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
It knocked around in his head for a while before Jim could decipher what was being offered to him. A choice, yes or no. That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? The winners write the history. No one hears the loser’s story. That gets buried too.
This is how it is. How it always is.
Jim leaned in to spit but his mouth was dry. “Just like last time.”
“Last time?”
A sharp pop from the fire, timbers falling in on themselves. Sparks roiled up and spun crazily, pinpricks of orange that blushed briefly and then winked out.
They went back to watching the fire and neither man spoke for a long time.
Days came and went, Emma barely distinguishing one morning from the next. She’d shifted down a gear just to cope. There would be so much to do. ‘Sufficient unto the day’, another of her grandmother’s sayings. Impossible to think beyond that. She and Travis had stayed in the hospital that first night. An OPP constable named Hipkiss came and took statements from both her and Travis and later typed it up and left it in Ray Bauer’s inbox. In the morning, Emma’s sister came and brought them home to her house in Exford.
She panicked when she thought of Smokey. The horse left in the paddock, forgotten in the melee. She phoned Norm Meyerside, their neighbour, to ask him to check on Smokey. He’d already taken care of it. Like everyone else along the road, he’d been startled by the sirens and got into the car to see what the trouble was. He had seen the horse but the firecrew wouldn’t let him come onto the property. He’d gone back in the morning and led the horse into the barn. He told her not to worry, he’d look after the animal until she knew what she was going to do.
Emma thanked Norm and hung up the phone. She didn’t have a clue what she was going to do.
The remains of six people were taken to the coroner’s office in London. Following the examinations by a four member team, the Regional Coroner’s Office sent the remains back to Pennyluck. The Ripley Funeral Home was the only undertaker in town, a family run business in operation since 1881. Gene Ripley rallied his son, daughter and daughter in-law and told them they’d have to work overnight to deal with the arrival of so many deceased. Don Moretti of Moretti Funeral Services in Garrisontown drove in and offered his services, for which Ripley was grateful. That’s what community was all about, he told his son as they wheeled the gurneys out of the coroner’s van. Helping one another in a crisis.
The crew from the coroner’s office were unloading the last set of remains when Ripley told them to turn around and load it back into the van. He wasn’t accepting that one.
The driver checked his clipboard and said his orders were to deliver all six remains but the funeral director shook his head and told him to take it back.
The driver scrunched his shoulders up and scanned the inventory list on his clipboard. “What am I supposed to do with Corrigan, W?”
“You can dump it in the river for all I care,” Ripley said. “I won’t take it.”
The remains of William Corrigan were taken back to the Coroner’s office in London and then rerouted to Fairway Funeral services on Westchester Boulevard. Under contract to the city, Fairway serviced the remains of deceased without next of kin. The homeless, the intransigent, the unloved. Corrigan’s remains were wheeled into cold storage and processed. No one came forward to claim them.
In the days following the incident, the town council commandeered the banquet hall at the arena for a temporary office. Patrick McGrath was quickly appointed provisional mayor and the council got to work dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy. Five funerals were combined into one, with a large public service to be held at Saint Mary’s Church. Ideas were discussed about how to honour the tragedy. A plaque in the square or a memorial stone in the fair grounds? No consensus was met and the idea was backburnered while the council dealt with the more pressing matters of rebuilding the town hall and public library.
The property on the Roman Line was folded back into the trust of the town. Renamed Lot 13, concession 5, it was never again referred to as the Corrigan homestead. Bank accounts belonging to William Corrigan, deceased, were also placed in trust to the town. There were two accounts in Pennyluck and one in Halifax, all of the monies held in trust under the oversight of the town council. Before the month was out, funds were already being siphoned off with illegible signatures on banal looking forms stuffed into the back of a filing cabinet. At the rate the monies were being chipped away at, all three accounts would be drained by Christmas.
33
SMOKEY WAS SPOOKED and agitated after the fire. She bristled at the saddle and shied when Emma fitted her toe into the stirrup. Emma spoke softly to the animal, trying everything she could to calm the horse but there was still wariness in Smokey’s eyes. The terror of the fire remained in her bones and wouldn’t shake loose easily.
“I know how you feel.” Emma had barely slept since the incident and startled at any sharp sound. Became anxious whenever Travis was out of her sight. The last two days, it was all she could do to simply get out of bed. Somehow she had managed to move them back onto the farm but the details were all a blur.
And all Emma wanted to do was ride. Riding took everything you had and focused it down to a laser beam. Brains, muscles, senses, all of it consumed with the horse. Finding your seat, letting the horse listen to you while you listened to it. Everything else was left behind at the paddock gates. She needed this.
She led the horse to the field and walked it for a good while, talking quietly to her the whole time. When they reached the creek, Emma tried once more and Smokey shivered but allowed her into the saddle. She walked the horse and got her into a trot but no more.
It was enough for now. Hell, it was a giant leap forward.
Travis poked through the ruins of the house. Stepping over charred timbers and sootblack brick. A tangle of sticks and ash, that’s all it was now. He’d taken the hoe from the barn, using it to pull apart broken studs and curled shingles. Looking for anything familiar, anything useful. Anything of himself that had survived the fire.
There was nothing.
His comic books were gone, along with his music and the hockey equipment and his crappy old computer. It had all incinerated so completely, he figured that none of it could have meant that much in the first place.
The realization of it spun a sickening dizziness in his head. Lost, rootless, orphaned. His stuff was all gone. Was it really so bad? Was his old life so great he should cry over it now? What exactly was he mourning?
Loser. Faggot. Ass bleeder.
Good riddance.
In all the horror movies he had seen, all the monster comics he’d read, the monster was usually destroyed by fire. Stakes through the heart, silver bullets, all that stuff paled in comparison to fire. A one-size-fits-all solution to kill the beast. Why? Because it purified and cleansed. Same way they burn crops to plant new ones.
So, loser boy was lost in the flames. Time for something new. Travis felt a prickly giddiness at the idea of reinventing himself.
His hands were black with soot. He should have grabbed some gloves from the barn. No matter. Maybe dirty hands were part of his new identity. Dirty hands, dirty past. No past at all.