Tim McGregor - Killing Down the Roman Line

The fire trucks had taken forty-five minutes to respond, their second call that night. With no water mains to tap into out here and their tanks run dry, there was nothing to do but watch the house burn. Hook and drag away the burning timbers that fell too close to the barn.

Emma sat on the tailgate of the ambulance with a blanket draped over her shoulders. Unable to take her eyes off the fire. Her heart had clenched and boiled a hundred times over until she couldn’t cope and simply shut down. Watching the flames with dull eyes like it was cookout, waiting for someone to pierce a marshmallow onto the end of her stick. She didn’t even notice the paramedic slipping the oxygen mask over her nose.

Travis slouched inside the bus, misting the plastic mask on his face. His hair was singed and still smoking. Prodded and bandaged up. Shellshock glassed in his eyes and his jaw banged into a mute stupor. Unsure of what the hell had just happened but pretty damn sure he didn’t want to remember.

“You okay, son?” The EMT shone a penlight into Travis’s pupils, waved his hand. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

Travis looked back at him at the uniformed man like he was simple. Everything hurt. Couldn’t he see that? “Is my mom okay?”

“A little smoke in her lungs like you.” The EMT slipped the penlight back into a shirt pocket. “But she’s all right. Your dad too.”

Travis wiped his gaze to where his dad stood in the grass and looked away. He hadn’t asked about him.

The witchgrass was sopping with rainfall but all Jim wanted to do was lie down in it and not move. Not think, not feel. Everything hurt and the paramedic wrapping his bloodied ear just kept at him with questions he could barely hear, let alone comprehend. He shooed the man and his nonstop questions away. The EMT grumbled something about just doing his job and moved on.

It hurt to even walk. He crossed the grass stiff-legged like Frankenstein and eased down onto the bumper next to Emma and they watched the house burn. His eyes had nothing left to show, blank as burned-out bulbs. Foggily aware that he needed to say something. Something was required of him as he and his wife stood mute witness to the razing of their home. Five generations of Hawkshaws had thrived under its protection there but still it went up in a flash, incinerated to a carbon husk like a hobo’s shack.

What was there to say?

Nothing.

Still.

“It’s gonna be okay now.” The effort of a few words was exhausting. It took all he had left just to reach out and touch her hand. “We’re gonna be fine.”

Emma didn’t move. She had nothing to say and no strength left to speak if she did. Her eyes fell to the weight of his hand on hers. It was filthy, caked in dried blood. Blackened to a dark jelly over the knuckles. Flecked all the way to his elbows in gore. It flaked and fell from the skin like dark ash.

“Just a house,” he said. “Wood and brick. We’ll build a new one.”

She pulled her hand away and folded it into her lap.

A silhouette stepped into her sightline, blocking the fire. A dark uniform with a distinct blue stripe down the trouser leg. OPP Constable Ray Bauer looked down at them. He took off his cap and wiped his brow and fitted the cap back on. He squared it up and levelled his eyes to Jim.

“Guess we need to talk, huh?”

Emma and Travis were taken away in the ambulance. The taillights shrank to red dots as the bus turned out onto the road. No flashing lights, no siren.

Constable Bauer spared Jim the indignity of sitting in the back of the patrol car. They leaned against the cruiser’s quarter panel watching the ambulance roll away. When it was gone, their eyes drifted back to the fire.

The inferno’s fury had drained off, the flames no longer reaching to heaven. Most of the roof had fallen in, taking with it the north and west walls. A lattice work of blackened beams angled in a tepee over the embers, all of it crowned by a mushroom cloud of black smoke.

“We found Brian Puddycombe and Bill Berryhill where you said they’d be,” Constable Bauer said. “Doug Hitchens we found at the house. The other body, well that will have to be identified but we’ll just assume it’s Kyle Parker.”

Jim nodded then broke into a coughing jag that doubled him over. The taste of ash seared down his throat and no amount of water would wash it away.

Constable Bauer twisted open another bottle of water and held it out to Jim. “I don’t mind telling you, I have never seen anything like that.” He let off a low whistle and shook his head. “I mean, Jesus, what happened?”

Jim stayed bent at the waist, hands on his knees, spitting into the grass. He took the water from the police officer and rinsed and spit again. Not purposely avoiding the question, it simply hurt to talk.

“Looks like Mr. Corrigan went crazy on you.” The constable said. “Is that what happened?”

“We went there to kill him.”

“And then what?”

“He killed us.”

The officer made no reaction. He folded his arms over his belly and waited for the rest of it.

“I need to make a confession, Ray. A big one.” Jim kicked at something in the grass. “About what happened tonight and what happened a hundred years ago.”

“Looks like it’s dying down.” Bauer nodded at the fire. “Hell of a thing, losing your home like that.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

The constable turned and looked at him. “You’ve been through a hell of a shock, Jim. Things like this, well, people get the details mixed up. Don’t remember everything exactly.” He swatted at a mosquito on his neck and looked at his palm. “Everybody knows Corrigan was a loony tune. From what I can tell, it looks like you guys went up there to talk some sense into him and Mr. Corrigan just went crazy. Attacked you for no good reason. From where I’m standing, this was clearly self-defence on your part.”

Jim blinked. Nothing made sense anymore. He felt three paces behind, trying to catch up.

“Jim, look at me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It knocked around in his head for a while before Jim could decipher what was being offered to him. A choice, yes or no. That’s how it goes, doesn’t it? The winners write the history. No one hears the loser’s story. That gets buried too.

This is how it is. How it always is.

Jim leaned in to spit but his mouth was dry. “Just like last time.”

“Last time?”

A sharp pop from the fire, timbers falling in on themselves. Sparks roiled up and spun crazily, pinpricks of orange that blushed briefly and then winked out.

They went back to watching the fire and neither man spoke for a long time.

Days came and went, Emma barely distinguishing one morning from the next. She’d shifted down a gear just to cope. There would be so much to do. ‘Sufficient unto the day’, another of her grandmother’s sayings. Impossible to think beyond that. She and Travis had stayed in the hospital that first night. An OPP constable named Hipkiss came and took statements from both her and Travis and later typed it up and left it in Ray Bauer’s inbox. In the morning, Emma’s sister came and brought them home to her house in Exford.

She panicked when she thought of Smokey. The horse left in the paddock, forgotten in the melee. She phoned Norm Meyerside, their neighbour, to ask him to check on Smokey. He’d already taken care of it. Like everyone else along the road, he’d been startled by the sirens and got into the car to see what the trouble was. He had seen the horse but the firecrew wouldn’t let him come onto the property. He’d gone back in the morning and led the horse into the barn. He told her not to worry, he’d look after the animal until she knew what she was going to do.