I throw the ax. The two lovebirds propel me into the house. I am like a wild man clutching through my briefcase. I find the letter to Marie and I take it out, read it once, then anchor it on the table with the jar of sugar. I cram the letter to Lulu in my pocket, and then I go.
All I can see, as I gallop down the steps and off into the woods, is Lulu’s small red tongue moving across her teeth. My mind quivers, but I cannot stop myself from seeing more. I see his big face nuzzle underneath her chin. I see her hands fly up to clutch his head. She rolls her body expertly beneath his, and then I am crashing through the brush, swatting leaves, almost too blind to see the old deer path that twists through the woods.
I creep up on her house, as though I will catch them together, even though I have heard he is back in the Cities. I crouch behind some bushes up the hill, expecting her dogs to scent me any moment. I watch.
Her house is fresh painted, yellow with black trim, cheerful as a bee.
Her petunias are set out front in two old tractor tires painted white.
After a time, when the dogs don’t find me, I realize they have gone off somewhere. And then I see how foolish I am. The house is quiet. No Beverly. No boys in the yard, either, fixing cars or target practicing.
They are gone, leaving Lulu alone.
I put my hands to my forehead. It is burning as if I have a fever.
Since the Nash I have never taken off Lulu’s clothes in the daylight, and it enters my head, now, that I could do this if I went down to her house. So I make my way out of the dense bush.
For the first time ever, I go up to her front door and knock.
This feels so normal, I am almost frightened. Something in me is about to burst. I need Lulu to show me what this fearful thing is.
I need her hand to pull me in and lead me back into her bedroom, and her voice to tell me how we were meant for each other by fate. I need her to tell me I am doing right.
But no one comes to the door. There is no sound. It is a hot, still afternoon, and nothing stirs in Lulu’s dull grass, though deep in the trees, to all sides, I have the sense now of something moving slowly forward. An animal that is large, dense furred, nameless. These thoughts are crazy, I know, and I try to cast them from my mind. I round the house. The backyard is the one place where Lulu’s tidiness has been defeated. The ground is cluttered with car parts, oil pans, pieces of cement block, and other useful junk.
No one answers at the back door either, so I sit down on the porch.
I tell myself that no matter how long it takes Lulu to get here, I will wait. I am DOtgoodatwaiting, like my brother Ell, who can sit without moving a muscle for an hour while deer approach him. I am not good at waiting, but I try. I roll a cigarette and smoke it as slow as possible. I roll another. I try to think of anything but Lulu or Marie or my children. I think back to the mad captain in Moby Dick and how his leg was bit off. Perhaps I was wrong, about Ishmael I mean, for now I see signs of the captain in myself. I bend over and pick up a tin can and crush it flat. For no reason! A bit later I bang the side of her house until my fist hurts. I drop my head in my hands. I tell her, out loud, to get back quick. I do not know what I will do if she doesn’t.
I am tired. I have started to shake. That is when I take out the letter I have crumpled in my pocket. I decide that I will read it a hundred times, very slowly, before I do anything else. So I read _J it, word by word, until the words make no sense. I go on reading it.
I am keeping careful, concentrated count, when suddenly I think of Marie.
I see her finding the other letter now. Sugar spills across the table as she sits, crying out in her shock. A ‘ar of apples explodes.
j The children shout, frightened. Grease bubbles over on the stove.
The dogs howl. She clutches the letter and tears it up.
I lose count. I try reading Lulus letter once more, but I cannot finish it. I crumple it in a ball, throw it down, then I light up another cigarette and begin to smoke it very quick while I am rolling a second to keep my hands distracted.
This is, in fact, how the terrible thing happens.
I am so eager to smoke the next cigarette that I do not notice I have thrown down my half-smoked one still lit on the end. I throw it right into the ball of Lulu’s letter. The letter smokes. I do not notice right off what is happening, and then the paper flares.
Curious and dazed, I watch the letter burn.
I swear that I do nothing to help the fire along.
Weeds scorch in a tiny circle, and then a bundle of greasy rags puffs out in flames. It burns quickly. I leave the steps. An old strip of rug curls and catches onto some hidden oil slick in the grass.
The brown blades spurt and crackle until the flame hits a pile of wood chips. Behind that are cans of gasoline that the boys have removed from dead cars. I step back. The sun is setting in the windows, black and red. I duck. The gas cans roar, burst. Blue lights flash on behind my eyelids, and now long oily flames are licking up the side of the house, moving snakelike along the windows of the porch, finding their way into the kitchen where the kerosene is stored and where Lulu keeps her neatly twine-tied bundles of old newspapers.
The fire is unstoppable. The windows are a furnace. They pop out, raining glass, but I merely close my eyes and am untouched.
I have done nothing.
I feel the heat rise up my legs and collect, burning for Lulu, but burning her out of me.
I don’t know how long I stand there, moving back inch by inch as fire rolls through the boards, but I have nearly reached the woods before the heat on my face causes me to abandon the sight, finally, and turn.
That is when I see that I have not been alone.
I see Marie standing in the bush. She is fourteen and slim again. I can do nothing but stare, rooted to the ground. She stands tall, straight and stern as an angel. She watches me Red flames from the burning house glare and flicker in her eyes. Her skin sheds light. We are face to face, and then she begins to lift on waves of heat. Her breast is a glowing shield. Her arm is a white hot spear. When she raises it the bush behind her spreads, blazing open like wings.
I go down on my knees, a man of rags and tinder. I am ready to be burned in the fire, too, but she reaches down and lifts me up.
“Daddy,” she says, “let’s get out of here. Let’s go.
F1 ESH AND BLOOD r.J (1957)
MARIE KASHPAW
There was surely no reason I should go up that hill again. For days, for weeks after I heard Sister Leopolda was dying, I told myself I was glad. I told myself good riddance to her puckered mind. Boiling jars that morning, pouring syrup, I told myself what she deserved. The jars were hot. She deserved to be packed in one alive. But as soon as I imagined that, I pitied her in the jar, balled up in her black rag, staring through the glass. It was always that way. Through the years I had thought up many various punishments I would like to commit on the nun who’d cracked my head and left a scar that was tight and cold in my palm, a scar that ached on Good Friday and throbbed in the rain. But every time I thought of her damned, I relented. I saw her kneeling, dead faced, without love.
I stood in my kitchen packing apples in jars, pouring the boiling syrup and cinnamon over them. I knew what I knew. She had gone steadily downhill. In the past years of her life it was canes, chairs, confinement. They said she prayed to herself twenty-four hours at a stretch. There were some who touched the hem of her garment to get blessed. As if she were the saint. Bag of bones! I knew the truth.
She had to pray harder than the others because the Devil still loved her far better than any on that hill. She walked the sorrowful mysteries one year with bloody feet. There were those who kept the gravel stones she bled on. I wouldn’t. I knew the Devil drove her toward grace with his persistence. She got famous. Like Saint Theresa, she lived for many weeks on Sacred Hosts.