Tim Wynne-Jones - The Boy in the Burning House

“I’ll tell your mother,” she shouted after him. “About your tree jumping.” He didn’t stop. Those days were behind him.

“I need your help, Jim,” she said.

“You need somebody’s help,” he muttered to himself. He glanced back to see if she’d heard. He had only walked twenty paces or so, but he could hardly see her. In her black clothing, she was lost in the shadow of the pine tree. Now that he had opened some distance between them, he felt a little sorry for her.

“I’m sorry I can’t help,” he shouted.

“You will be,” she hollered back at him.

He shuddered at the fury in her voice, but was far enough away by now to laugh to himself at her threat.

He was heading down the hill towards the creek which flowed by as sly as a rumour, when she called out to him again. He looked up and she was standing above him at the lip of the hill, silhouetted against the light — dark and mysterious like a cut-out.

“Jim Hawkins,” she shouted, trying to catch her breath. “Fisher killed your father.”

He wanted to hit her. “Shut up,” he said. “I don’t know how to shut up,” she said, advancing down the hill.

“Go be crazy some place else.”

She stopped, leaned against a tree. “Okay,” she said. “I guess that means you buy what they say about him committing suicide.”

There was a stick near Jim. He picked it up and charged at her like a wild man. She jumped back and the stick, punk to the core, snapped against the trunk of a tree.

“You don’t believe it, do you!” she said. “Hub Hawkins wouldn’t kill himself. So why won’t you help me?”

Jim gritted his teeth. He felt his blood surging. It frightened him.

“If you know so much,” he said hoarsely. “You tell me.”

She sat down on the hillside, just beyond his reach. “Father prays for him a lot. I hear him. He has this room with his own little altar in it. He goes there. He doesn’t know I’m listening.‘O, Lord,’ he says. ‘In thy great mercy, guide the soul of Hub to your side.’”

“That’s his job” Jim said, spluttering with anger. “He’s a pastor .”

“True,” she said. “But how come he’s the only one who seems to know for sure your dad is dead?”

“Shut up!”

Jim tried to leave. It was best not to argue. What he believed about his father’s fate he had wrapped up tightly in a mourning bundle he carried around inside him. He knew what the outcome of the official inquiry had been — that his father had been mentally unsound, nuts. “It was his nerves,” Jim’s mother had tried to explain to him. “His nerves snapped on him.” But that didn’t explain him disappearing without a trace. They called it paranoid delusions, a persecution complex. They said it had been there for a long time. They said that he reached a point where he could no longer bear it.

Jim didn’t believe a single word of it.

He tried to leave. He turned his back on Ruth Rose and started down the hill.

Which is when she blindsided him.

They rolled clear down the slope through drifts of dead leaves and they would have ended up in the creek if they hadn’t smacked up against a rotting stump. It knocked the wind out of Jim, made his eyes roll around in their sockets. Then, before he could catch his breath, she rolled right on top of him, pinning his arms to the ground with her knees.

She growled in his face.

“Nobody listens to me,” she said. “Nobody believes me.”

He didn’t move, not sure she wouldn’t bite him, she was that close, that ferocious. Then she rolled off him, brushing the flaky leaves off her sweater and pulling them from the tangle of her hair.

“I’ve got proof,” she said.

“Where?”

She tapped her skull. “Right here.”

Jim lay with his arms akimbo, his knees up, working out the pain in his side. He turned his head. She was sullen, brooding.

He propped himself up on his elbows. He spoke very quietly. “You ever thought people might listen to you if you didn’t knock them over?”

It was hard to tell in the gloom, but he thought he saw a smile flicker across her face. It gave him courage.

“Why don’t you go to the cops?” he asked.

“Ha! With what I know about the cops?”

“Oh, right,” he said and lay back quietly on the ground. But she didn’t look like she was going to jump him again. So he edged himself up.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

“Didn’t I tell you? I have a life,” he said.

She parted the curtains of her bangs with her white fingers. “That’s more than your daddy’s got.”

For a split second, he was too stunned to react. Then the tears came. They surprised him as much as they surprised her. He thought he had cried them all months ago. But he had only been damming them up, it seemed, for now they flowed out of him and dripped from his face onto the hillside. He made no attempt to stop them or mop them up. He sank back down to the ground and cried and his tears fell on the earth where they would eventually find their watery way through the loam to Incognito Creek.

“They were friends,” she said. She didn’t look at Jim. It was as if she were talking to herself. “Your daddy and Eldon, except he was Fish in those days. When they were kids. There’s others — someone named Tuffy, someone else named Laverne. He talks to himself — Father, I mean. Well, it starts off like praying and then he drifts off and sometimes he sort of ends up a kid again. Like he’s way gone. There’s someone called Tabor, too. He says, ‘Tabor will look after him,’ or, ‘O, God, vouchsafe that Tabor can keep our secret.’ He uses words like that — Bible words.”

She looked at Jim expectantly. He wasn’t crying anymore. He was watching her closely, wondering if the things she was saying were from a dream or if she was just pulling them out of thin air.

“All I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who these people are. Something happened. A long time ago. I need to know what.”

Jim didn’t say anything. He was all talked out.

“Oh, yeah, and try to find out about a secret club or clubhouse,” she added. “Can you do that? It’s important.” It was like she was a classmate asking him what their homework assignment was.

“I’ll see,” he muttered finally.

“We’ve got to put him behind bars,” she said, “or else…” She looked at Jim eagerly. “Don’t you want to know or else what?”

He shook his head.

“Or else he’ll kill me,” she explained.

“Oh,” said Jim.

Ruth Rose looked at him peevishly. Then she looked curious. “You knew that about your daddy and Fisher, didn’t you? Them growing up together?”

Jim didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure. As close as he had been to his father, he couldn’t remember him talking much about his childhood — not about friends, any way. He had talked about the farm and his folks and school — stuff like that. Jim, if he had ever thought about it at all, had just assumed that his father had been like him — alone a lot, satisfied to be that way for the most part.

As long as he could remember, Father Fisher had been around. At church, obviously, but at home, too. He had been a regular visitor. But Jim had never thought of him as a family friend. Friends stayed for supper or an evening of cards now and then. Father Fisher was never that kind of a visitor. He had never sat with Hub on the deck drinking a beer. But then he was a pastor. Hub used to go for walks with him. Towards the end, when Hub’s nerves were going on him, he had seen a lot of the pastor.

Had they grown up together? Wouldn’t Jim know something like that?

“Can you do it?” said Ruth Rose.