* * *
In Minna’s room, Claire avoided the shrouded figure in the middle of the floor by the brazier. She laced the floorboards with the noxious liquid, splashed the walls, regretting that the artwork was a necessary sacrifice. She doused the contents of her own room, bloating the mattress, creaking the floorboards. Fumes stung her eyes, burned her hands, wet her nightgown to an opaque where liquid had spattered. She fought with the swollen window and banged it open, as a noxious cloud of chemical swept stinging her eyes, burning her nostrils.
She ran through the hallway, wetted the Persian hall runners, lacquered a carved-oak finial at the head of the stairs. There was music in her head, she was humming Minna’s song, one she did not even realize she had learned, a rhythm from far away, and she danced the liquid in time to it. In the living room, she sat on the returned yellow sofa, all thick, down pillows and heavy damask cloth, and looked at the golden, floor-length silk curtains that framed the windows, the golden velvet piano scarf draped over the used stand-up Lucy had found. History turning and replaying itself over and over, and she, Claire, determined to take it off the spindle once and for all. No place for her in such a room — it was cold and beautiful and empty as a hotel. Upstairs slept the guests, some temporarily, some permanently, and she was the arthritic porter, there long past her useful tenure.
She sat in her white nightgown on the yellow couch in the golden room and had never been so sure what needed to be done. A madness masquerading as sanity, or sanity as madness. A rescue fifteen years delayed. That moment it felt as if Minna were inside her, as close as the air in her lungs, the blood in her veins, the thoughts in her brain, so unlike how alone she had felt long ago. Minna who was already in the throes of escape.
It took minutes that seemed to stretch into hours to empty the last of the cans, and she chided Minna in her excess zeal. Where at first she had been careful and miserly, now she grew sloppy and profligate in the abundance. The kitchen towels drooped soggy. What temperature would it take to melt the copper sink, the ceramic faucets with their antiquated lettering of HEIβE and KÄLTE? The daybed in the den reeked like a swamp; the coats in the hall closet dripped like laundry on the line; still there was splashing in the can. The wood floors grew dark and oiled, the grain magnified and lustrous; the doors, wet, groaned heavily on their frames. Claire had never loved the house so much. It was not so much a destruction, but a leave-taking, like sending off grown children, like burying one’s parents; an accomplishment necessary in its time, though painful. Its dignified accomplishment a thing greatly to be desired.
The air in the house had become so acrid, so fume-laced, that if she had lit a match, her lungs would have ballooned into flame. She could have blown them all into a high-treeing cloud that would be seen through the whole length of the valley. She stated the obvious to herself so that it would be clear what she did not do. Did not blow Lucy or Minna or even herself up. Later, there would inevitably be the character assassinations, the I always figured and She seemed funny and the rest. But what she was determined to do at that moment was to save what had value, in the only way she thought how. What she did do, in sound mind and body, was scream to Lucy to quickly leave the house.
Lucy stumbled out in shorts and a T-shirt, hair rumpled. “What happened?”
“A leak — gas. Get out now!”
Bewildered, Lucy had the milky breath of childhood as Claire led her down the stairs and outside.
Minna was nowhere to be found.
* * *
Claire struck the match in Minna’s room first, to pay homage. Overturned the brazier onto the shroud. Out of the most unlikely hands sometimes salvation could be delivered. A gold blaze licked across the floor, stopped and puddled in dense places, burst into blue, then gold again, and moved on. The beautiful figures on the wall began to erase themselves. The single-breasted warrior curled and went black. Claire had to fight a terrible urge to stay inside the room. She closed the door, too enamored of it to witness its passing.
Glancing out the window, she saw Lucy at the end of the driveway on her cell phone. Time was running out. Soon the sirens would begin. Soon the fire engines and the police cars and the great suck of public attention would come to rest on the ranch once more. Claire dumped the entire box of matches on the sofa. The whole went up in a great swell of flame like sunburst. Past due to leave, she couldn’t tear herself from the surreal beauty of the room — walls warmed by flame, curtains blazing, the soft sofa in the center now a burning coal. The down feathers swirled like black snow in the wind created by fire. A strange, alternate universe. A piece landed on her arm, crystalline like a black, skeletal snowflake. How had these objects, this building, acquired such a hold on her?
Clearer in its destruction that all that she had held on to so tightly had been mere illusion. Did one fight for a sofa, or a house? Even the land was strangely indifferent. Later they would accuse her of being crazy, the madwoman in the orchard, but she would have been crazy only if she had forgotten the people. If they had ever accused her, she would immediately have pleaded guilty, for so many past things it didn’t matter what she was charged with in the present. But that never came. The story of the new foreman, Jean-Alexi, drunk, setting the house on fire in anger, then asphyxiating from carbon monoxide fumes from the brazier, came so easily to one as adept at untruths as Claire had become, was readily accepted by those shocked at her previous poor choices. One only had to look as far as the state of the farm to know she was unhinged. Lucy unknowingly corroborating the untruth by saying she heard Minna and him fighting.
The piano screamed and groaned, chords possessed as if played by a madman — the room had an eerie feeling of life. The floorboards upstairs thrummed like the bleachers at a racetrack when the horses went thundering by, struts popping after the unbearable climaxing pressure. With a gentle sigh, they sagged through, an avalanche of fire and board, the convention of division, of upstairs and downstairs, rendered false. It was now inside versus outside, heat and light and creative destruction against the cold, indifferent blackness of the world.
* * *
She stayed as long as she could. As if the heat and flame, by eating up the house, were releasing its secrets. And she still thirsted to learn more. She didn’t feel the loss of one thing, simply the gain of knowledge pouring into her. A rocking chair became a fiery throne, the spokes glowing hot orange before the whole crumbled to ash. “So that’s the way it is,” she said, feeling that she knew the essence of the chair at last before it disappeared.
She heard the sluggish wail of sirens in the distance. For a long time, the farm had become a nuisance, an eyesore, to the planned communities around it. The Baumsarg ranch was living out of its time, an anachronism, and as with all things not of their time, there would be a sigh of relief at its passing. The world broke what it could not change. But for a beautiful moment, she had returned the place to its sacrosanct emptiness.
Behind her there was the tinkling of glass as each upstairs window burst out. She stood on the edge of the orchard, holding her arms around trembling Lucy (saved!), and beheld their former home, now lit up like some macabre jack-o’-lantern, the windows and doors like swelling eyes and mouth, the fiery shingle roof like a shock of electric hair.