Archer Mayor - St. Albans Fire

Bobby Cutts lay on his bed, watching the bedroom ceiling, its shadowy surface painted by the downstairs porch light in a pattern he’d known forever. This room and the barn across the road had always been his sanctuaries-places of private celebration during high times, as when Beverly Cable allowed him a kiss in the eighth grade-and harbors to which he retired in pain, as now, when Marianne had once again suggested that they should try seeing other people.

He hated that euphemism, knowing too well what it meant. Marianne and he had been dating for a year, and it had happened twice already, counting this one. In fact, he’d been the one being “seen” when they first met, as she was dumping Barry Newhouse. He remembered the groping at the drive-in, the more serious stuff on her uncle’s office couch one afternoon, and finally those hours in complete silence in her bedroom as her parents slept down the hall. Recalling that night-the smells of her, the taste of her kisses, her willingness at last to let him remove all her clothes-ran at odds with his frustration now, lust interfering with indignation.

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, staring moodily out the window, his anger back on track, ignoring the winter chill radiating off the glass before him. He wondered who she was with right now, since sneaking boys into her bedroom had become a moot point, she being eighteen and her parents no longer caring. He ran a catalog of possibilities through his mind-from high school friends to some of the young men who worked on her father’s farm. No one fit. Everyone fit. His own mother had told him she’d seen Marianne kissing a boy in the front seat of a car in the supermarket parking lot. In broad daylight. He’d asked if his mom had recognized the guy. She claimed not to have, but he had his doubts.

He got up abruptly and reached for his jeans, the room suddenly too tight to breathe in. The barn beckoned to him with its panoply of distractions. He’d been on this farm for all his seventeen years, making the barn as natural an environment to him as a ship might be to a man raised at sea.

And right now he needed every distraction he could stand.

Bobby made his way along the short, dark hallway to the narrow stairs leading down, the wall of framed photographs beside him a celebration of the lives sleeping all around-his smiling parents, his sister, Linda, and her husband and two children. Also, himself as a child, and later posing for the yearbook in his football uniform, crouched down, knuckles on the turf, ball tightly tucked into the curve of his other arm. A life of rural Vermont, spent on a dairy farm, as snug as that ball in the crook of a culture dating back a hundred and fifty years. Bobby Cutts, for all his present anxieties, had that if nothing else. He was a young man as firmly ensconced in his society as farming was in the only world he knew.

He paused in the kitchen to add a log to the wood stove, losing himself for a moment in the red embers at the stove’s heart, the eddies of hot air reaching up for him as from the heart of a chunk of lava.

In the cluttered mudroom beyond, he removed his insulated coveralls from the hook on the wall, paying no attention to their pungent odor, and stepped into his equally soiled barn boots, all of which were banned from the rest of the house.

Encased in warm clothes, Bobby shoved the outer door open and stepped into the freezing night air, the shock of the cold a comfort to a boy who welcomed its biting familiarity.

By the porch light, he walked across the snowy yard, the soles of his boots creaking as he went, enjoying how his breath formed a cloud around his head with each exhalation.

Despite his dark mood, he paused halfway between the house and the hulking barn to take in his surroundings. His father had taught him this: Never just walk from one place to another. Take notice of what’s around you. The beauty you find there is God’s gift to the observant.

The full moon above him proved the old man right. Its colorless iridescence imbued the snow with an inner glow and touched the ridgepole of the barn ahead with a near electrical intensity. To the southeast, over the pale and featureless field next door and the trees barely visible beyond, the blackened smudge of a distant ski mountain was pinpricked by the tiny quivering of crisscrossing snow-grooming machines, crawling through the night like earthbound fireflies.

Try as he might to keep his anger stoked against Marianne, Bobby felt it dying down. If she was that eager to do all that seeing of other people, did it make any sense for him to want her for himself?

But then the image of her in the arms of some anonymous other flared up in him again. He resumed walking toward the barn across the dirt road dividing the property.

The entrance they used most was down the far embankment and through a tiny door into the milk room, an oddity given the size of the overall structure. This was technically a bank barn, built against the lower edge of the road to allow direct access to the second floor. It towered forty feet at its apex, ran ninety feet in length, and included a hayloft so vaulting that Bobby’s father, Calvin, had made room for a small, rough-floored basketball area to accommodate the occasional pickup game.

Bobby stamped his feet out of habit as he entered the sweet-smelling, warm milk room, although no fresh snow had fallen in over a week. Winter was on the wane, even in these upper reaches of Vermont’s northwest corner, and tonight’s cold notwithstanding, he knew from long experience that the year’s first thaw was not far off, and with it the accompanying flurry of the region’s fast and furious maple sugar harvest-along with the gluey mess of mud season.

By the glow of one of the night-lights placed throughout the barn, Bobby glanced at the glimmering steel milk tank sitting like a rocket’s spare part in the center of the room. This was nothing new-the use of milk cans and individual deliveries to the local creamery were long gone-but Bobby still found the holding tanks and their tangle of umbilical tubing disconcerting. In contrast to the rest of the barn, filled with livestock, hay, insects, and the smell of manure, the milk room was representative of a faintly menacing future-the tank looking more like an alien incubator than a simple repository.

Bobby quickly passed into the long, low stable where he spent most of his time, his nostrils instinctively flaring in the damp, cloying atmosphere. In the half-light, he could make out the rows of cows, tied in their stalls, many of them settled on their flanks, back sides overhanging the full and gleaming gutters running down each aisle. A cheap battered radio played softly on the far wall, soothing the cows with an endless cycle of innocuous love songs.

Bobby unconsciously let out a sigh at the sight of the room, its floor permanently wet with urine, near-liquid manure, and the water used to routinely wash it all away. Everything was encrusted with manure and/or mud, administered from floor to ceiling by the flickings of cows’ tails and the rebound splashings from their round-the-clock voidings. Had it not been for the almost seductive nature of its odor, this whole place by rights would have smelled like a sewer. Instead, to Bobby as to so many others, it ran from being almost unnoticeable to pleasantly familiar.

He glanced over his shoulder at the several portable milk suction units hanging beside him, designed to be moved from cow to cow with a minimum of fuss, and made sure they’d been properly stored. Bobby Cutts might not have been directly in line to inherit all this-his sister and brother-in-law, Jeff, were before him-but he still had a family member’s proprietary interest in making sure things stayed shipshape.