In the dark and frozen woods, it seemed clear that setting fire to a few houses served no real purpose. It was only a way of turning the rage into something he could see and touch and measure, a way of setting it apart before it burst into flame within him and burned him out.
When he thought of the three houses strung out along the Parade in front of the dry pine wood, the one he kept thinking about was Fayette’s. He didn’t want Fayette’s to catch. He counted on the firemen to work on saving Fayette’s because it was the post office. Adeline Fayette was as old as his mother, yet still she climbed onto the high stool at five-thirty every morning and sorted the mail. If you came in early you would find her blowing from the corner of her mouth at the wisps of straight white hair that fell on her face. She was almost completely deaf. She might never hear the high cracking of the pines, the fire alarm, the last commotion. The firemen might not save the post office. Perly might direct them to the deputies’ houses instead. To the James place, its pink paint weathered and a battered sign out front that said, “SAWS SHARPENED, APPLIANCES FIXED.” He thought of James sitting on the edge of the bandstand with Cogswell, swinging his legs and sharing his coffee, waiting for Perly to come and sell the stolen children. He remembered that James had had a little girl who died of polio. That was a long time ago. Perhaps he had forgotten what it was like to lose a child. Or perhaps, like Cogswell, he was only scared.
John always came back to the auctioneer. If it weren’t for Dixie straining at the gate, the window, the leash, he would have gone in and set fire to the old Fawkes place itself. But, for all the times hed patted Dixie, he wasn’t sure of her. Still, it was the auctioneer who had to be destroyed before everyone could settle back and live again. Before he himself could plant new corn, bargain somehow for a heifer and a milker, and go on living. But the fire... it was too much to expect the fire to understand, to shoot a long sentient tongue straight across the road at Perly Dunsmore.
Even if it did, Perly would spring up at the first whisper of smoke, cheerfully taking an interest, offering suggestions, making sure things went his way.
John came to the opening in the wall, turned off the flashlight, and let his pupils widen to the darkness. The road was filled with juniper and sticky sumac and raspberry brakes, but the thinning through the woods was still distinct enough to follow. John lifted the gasoline onto his shoulder and pushed through brush too thick to walk around. Even if the old Fawkes place should burn, Perly wouldn’t be in it; he would be leading the search party, crashing through the woods behind the clever Dixie, his eyes alight in the dark, tracking down John Moore.
All Mim would know was that he had walked out on her while she was putting their daughter to bed. All Hildie would know. In a year or two, after everything was back to normal, hunters might find his bones—his bones gnawed by foxes, a rusted wrist-watch, and the can of gasoline. Such things had been happening for less. Such things had been happening and nobody was taking any notice.
John stopped. That was the worst part. Nobody was taking any notice. He felt a coldness at the base of his spine that was like an illness. It should not be left to him to make the move. It should be somebody moneyed, or educated—somebody that lived in town.
Then he remembered Sonny Pike. Somebody had shot Sonny. John started up again, the gas sloshing in the can. Somebody had gone after Sonny Pike, and Cogswell, at least, didn’t seem to know who.
Perhaps he too could beat Dixie home and be gone. He and Mim and Hildie and Ma. By the time they got there, dogs barking, blue lights flashing, the Moores would all be gone. Then it would be a matter of simple hiding—from radios, television warnings, pictures in the post offices, all-points alerts, blockades on all the roads—a thousand black-and-white images of cops and detectives and star-breasted sheriffs. Yet surely, the woods, the wild stretches of woods that the trailers hadn’t found yet, could hide a man live as well as dead.
Clearly though, it was much easier to hide the dead.
He thought about Mudgett and kept going. Mudgett sitting in the last row of the schoolhouse, laughing at the little kids with his twisted mouth, Mudgett crossing wits with the teachers and coming off with all the prizes, Mudgett grinning over his spotted hound as it retched blood onto the beaten ground of the schoolyard. Mudgett at the auction sitting on a beach towel with his new wife, jaws working angrily, gun bulging. Mudgett collecting up the hammer and the handsaw, the brush and dustpan, the rakes and hoes and the scythe-the simple things without which the most routine chores become almost impossible. Mudgett taking the wrenches he needed to repair the truck, the can of tar he needed for the roof over the kitchen-tossing them into the back of the truck with a clank. Mudgett knocking Ma over with her own television set.
There was no reason why any of them should ever have trusted Perly. He was an outsider with big talk and they should have been more wary. But Mudgett was one of them. Mudgett should have been one of them. And Mudgett’s was the closest house of all to the pines he had in mind.
And John began moving more forcefully through the brush on the old road, his right foot warming up and the sweat starting beneath his shirt and woolen hunting jacket. Even with the brush and the weight of the gas can and his plan, he felt freer than he had in months. The point was not so much to accomplish anything as that it had become necessary to do something. That he must not be pushed to abandon everything without leaving some mark.
John knew that he had entered the stand of pines from the sound of the wind combing the needles, the silence of his footsteps, and, even in the cold, the fragrance of the pitch. Under the pines, the wind at his back was so strong that he never heard the traffic on Route 37, so the lights from Mudgett’s house caught him before he was quite ready. He stopped.
He was there, standing thirty yards back into the woods, staring out past the pines and the abandoned apple orchard at Mudgett’s house. Though it must have been nearly eleven, every light was blazing and the spotlight under the eaves threw long ropes of light into the woods.
To the left was the James place, too big for Ian James and his wife and their one grown son. There was a light on in the ell, probably in the kitchen. The son would be watching television. The house loomed through the dark the color of driftwood, dry as driftwood.
And to the right, Fayette’s, all dark. Adeline must be in bed already. Over the chimney he could see the pale outline of the tower on the old Fawkes barn. Standing still and listening, he could hear, when the wind hushed, the sounds of the town—a distant motor, a door slamming, a cat crying.
John put the gas can down. He would have to build a fire about a hundred feet long; he hadn’t much reckoned on the actual work of it. He began to act, moving stiffly, unconvinced, now that he was about it, that he could do what he had planned. He picked up dead branches from the ground and tossed them into an elongated heap. When the pile was five feet high and six or seven feet long, he stopped, restored by the rhythm of work to a sense of normalcy. He broke two green branches off one of the smaller pines, and using them as a rake, gathered in layers of nearby pine needles and sprinkled them over the top of the dead branches. Then, putting his makeshift rake down where he would recognize it again, he moved back into the woods and began collecting more dead branches to continue his pile. Bending and straightening, bending and straightening, it was like pitching hay or drawing water or splitting firewood. He worked now without weariness, strong in the faith that the long funeral pyre he planned would be complete in time, just as the raked piles of hay ended up in the loft of the barn each year before the weather cooled.