ONLY THEN, the fire department and the ambulance got there. With Bud Sealy, Holt County sheriff, in tow. Because the fire department and the ambulance and the sheriff all pride themselves on speed and dispatch. Besides, it is only a short seven-mile drive from town, and Mavis called them at my instruction almost as soon as we understood why the dog was howling. Call town, I said. And she did. So it was within fifteen minutes — no more than that — after Mavis made that hurried call from our house that the local boys in the red trucks arrived. Long before they raced into the yard I could hear the trucks out on the blacktop, the sirens in full alarm.
So I tried to keep them away. That’s true — I tried to prevent them from entering that burning house. Not that I blamed them; it was their job. But I fought them anyway on the porch in that flickering, waltzing light with the roar of burning timber above us, and they thought I was crazy when I hit Irv Jacobs as hard as I could in the face when he ran up onto the porch. He stumbled back off the steps.
“Goddamn it, Sandy. What the hell you doing?”
“Get out of here,” I yelled. “All you sons a bitches.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Get out of here.”
“We’re coming in.”
“Like hell you are. You miserable—”
They rushed me. I was hitting anything I could, Bob Williams in the throat and Tom Crossland over his eye, somebody at the side of his head, then they had me lifted off my feet and my boots up in the air, kicking somebody in the chest before they slammed me against the wall of the house and then carried me off the porch in a rush with my arms twisted behind my back, and somebody was hitting my ear to stop me kicking anymore, and I was shoved hard into the back seat of the county cop car, where Bud Sealy watched that I didn’t get any other wild notions while I sat there sweating with the doors locked and that protective grille between Bud and me. The weight of that badge of his was tugging at his shirt pocket.
“By God, Roscoe,” Bud said. “You just about done it this time. I ought to take you in for obstruction.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “That’s right.”
He was turned around in the front seat talking to me through all that iron grillwork. His heavy gut was squashed against the steering wheel.
“That’s the ticket,” he said. “But you keep it up and I’m not going to give a good goddamn how long we’ve been knowing one another — I’ll take you in.”
“You can take and fuck yourself too,” I said.
“Just keep it up,” Bud said.
So he went on talking, saying something official to me from the front seat, but I couldn’t hear much of it for the ringing in my ears where somebody had hit me, and any way I was more interested in what they were doing to the oak door with axes, making the oak kindling fly, and now they had it smashed open and the smoke was boiling out, and they went in through the smoke and brought Edith and Lyman out of the house in blankets, carrying them down the steps and across the yard to the ambulance. They were both unconscious, their arms dangling loose like rags. The ambulance roared away towards town.
The rest of us stayed there until the house was gone. They couldn’t save it. In the end they managed to contain the fire by soaking the well house and the outbuildings and the nearby trees with their hoses, but the house burned down to the old square limestone-block foundation. When the roof caved in, the sparks exploded into the sky like fireworks and then were shot away in the updraft into the dark. After that they unlocked the cop car and let me out.
AND SOMETIME that same night Lyman died. He never regained consciousness. After his sister fed him pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top and after she laid him down on his bed in the living room for the last time, Lyman went off to sleep and never woke again. The next day, at the hospital, they told me it was due to severe smoke inhalation. They said it was not possible to save him. For my part, I believe there must be worse ways to die.
Two days later, on January third, a Monday, I helped bury him. I was one of the pallbearers. He was still dressed in his good dark suit, and we lowered him in his silver coffin into the frozen ground beside his mother. I had instructed John Baker to dig the hole in that place. It seemed fitting to me. There would be at least that much distance — the width of his mother’s grave — between him and the old stump-armed man that Lyman had spent a good fourth of his life running away from. I figured Lyman would appreciate the head start, in case he ever had to run again.
Edith didn’t attend the funeral or the graveside rites, though. She was still too sick. In fact, she almost died. They had her in an I.C. unit with machines attached to her everywhere they could think to attach them, monitoring her round the clock, and I admit to you that there were times, particularly in that first week or two afterwards, when she was lying there with that damn tube shoved up her nose, when she was still unconscious and coughing, her thin throat wracked with the awful effort and the yellow spit brought up and bubbling on her cracked mouth — there were plenty of times when I wished she would die. I wished that she would just give up. But she didn’t. Edith hung on and hung on, like she didn’t know how to let go or stop even yet.
And now I’m afraid she’s getting better. I’m afraid Bud Sealy and these imported lawyers will be able to drive her over to the courthouse after all and make her endure a trial for something they insist is murder. There is not one son of a bitch amongst them that understands a goddamn thing.
SO, IN THE PAST three and a half months, I have gone up to see her almost every day. Of course, Mavis and Rena have gone with me. We went up there last night. Because of that front page Denver Post newspaper article a week ago, they have begun to position a deputy sheriff outside her room in the hallway. And the hell of it is, I don’t for a minute believe that anything would have come of it if it hadn’t been for that damn newspaper kid poking around. Bud Sealy had forgotten any notion he had of charging me with obstruction, and folks were calling the fire itself just an accident. At least in public, for the record, that’s what people were calling it. But then, somehow — I still don’t know how — those Denver people got wind of the thing, discovered a wild hair up their ass, and sent their kid out here to sniff around. He talked to enough of the wrong people, and now it’s all gone to hell. Last night they even had a new guy stationed at the hospital, somebody I never saw before. He had a cop’s revolver on his hip, and the son of a bitch wanted to frisk us before we went in. I told him to keep his damn hands off us.
“I’ll have to call Bud Sealy,” he said.
“Call him then, goddamn it,” I said. “But you ain’t touching us.”
We walked past him on into that white room. Inside, as usual, there was nothing but quiet and pulled blinds and some flowers on a bedstand. Edith was asleep. One arm was outside the covers with that steady flow of liquid still pumping sugar water through a needle into her hand. She woke up when she heard us enter. Rena went over and sat down on the edge of her bed and cocked her feet on the bed rail.