Tim Wynne-Jones: The Boy in the Burning House

“He grew up with Dad, didn’t he?” Jim tried to make his voice sound casual, just table talk.

“Father Fisher? Yes.” She looked at him quizzically, as if surprised that he didn’t know. “Father’s a few years older, but they were pals, I guess. You know the big old brownstone place up the hill this side of the McCoys? That was the house he grew up in. His father Wilfred Fisher was the richest man on the Twelfth Line. The richest man in this corner of the township.”

Jim nodded. He knew the house. It was boarded up like a lot of places on the line. But it was much more imposing, set on a hill with a long circular drive. There was even a stone wall along the road and the remains of a wrought-iron fence. People around these parts didn’t go in for such showiness — didn’t have the money for it.

“How come Father Fisher doesn’t live there?” Jim asked.

“Probably couldn’t afford to on a minister’s salary. Anyway, what would Nancy do in a cavernous place like that? They’d need ramps and…Lord, can you imagine the heating bill…”

Jim was only half listening. He was busy trying to imagine Father Fisher as his father’s pal.

His mother started talking about farm stuff — some problems they were having with the milk separator, how she thought maybe one of her hens was going broody, how someone might phone tonight about seeing the Malibu and what to say if they did. “I was going to sell it as is, but Orm McCoy convinced me that with a little body work, we could get a really good price on it. An antique. Imagine.”

Jim listened up, put aside his resentment about selling his father’s car, put aside the incident in the woods.

At first he had hated it when his mother started talking to him about grown-up things. There was always stuff breaking down, needing parts, needing attention. When his father had been alive this had been exactly the kind of thing his folks had jawed over at the supper table, and it had been fine as background noise while he thought his own thoughts. Now he had to pay attention. His mother had never said it in so many words, but she expected him to figure out what jobs he was supposed to do.

“How do you expect me to fill his shoes?” he wanted to say. But he kept it to himself.

His mother cleaned up while he sat at the kitchen table and did some homework. But it was hard to concentrate. He kept getting flashes of Ruth Rose’s face hovering over him, ready to bite his nose off.

“There were other kids, too, weren’t there?” he said, out of the blue, trying to sound conversational.

“What’s that?”

“Other friends. Dad and Father Fisher and some others?”

His question met with a stony silence. Then the sound of water and a scrub brush working hard.

“I’m surprised your father would have told you about that.” She didn’t sound especially suspicious or alarmed. Just surprised. Jim dared to go on.

“Why?”

He listened while his mother rinsed the soup pot and put it in the drying rack. “Well, it was somethinghe didn’t much like to talk about, that’s all.”

Jim swivelled around in his chair. “What happened?”

His mother glanced at him over her shoulder. She was frowning a bit, and part of him wanted to say forget it, but he couldn’t make himself.

“Francis,” she said. “That was his name.” Jim’s interest deflated a little — Francis wasn’t one of the names Ruth Rose had mentioned — but he nodded for his mother to go on.

“Well, it was long before I arrived on the scene,” she said, “when Hub was young. Francis died. A terrible death. Hub was around seventeen, I guess. It hit him pretty hard. He was in the eleventh grade, never did finish his year.”

Iris Hawkins went back to washing. Jim didn’t want to push her too far but, as it turned out, she was only collecting her thoughts.

“Died on New Year’s Eve. In a fire — a fire he started himself.”

“You mean it was suicide?”

His mother shrugged. “At the inquest they called it death by misadventure. At least, I think that’s what it was called. I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know your father then but he talked about it from time to time. It troubled him.”

“Does death by misadventure mean it was a mistake, kind of? Like he was playing with matches and it got out of hand?”

Iris nodded and went back to her work. Then she dried her hands and turned to face him. “Since you’re so morbidly interested, the boy was a known arsonist. A pyromaniac. Do you know what that is?”

Jim nodded hesitantly. “Someone who likes fire?”

“Someone who starts fires,” his mother said. “I like fires, in their place. This Frankie kid, he started all sorts of them in the area. Some of the old-timers could tell you. At first, I guess, it was just mischief, an outhouse or a tumbledown shed. But it got worse. He burned down a chicken shack up at Lar Perkins’ father’s place and killed twenty layers and fifty meat birds. Then he hit a small barn at Jock Boomhower’s with a couple of cows in it. That’s when he got caught. Sent off to jail.”

“But he came back?” asked Jim.

“Came back and burned down the house his family had lived in. Can you imagine? Of course, no one was living in it then. His family had moved. Wilf Fisher had bought the property and was using the old place to store hay.”

“In a house?”

“It was a very old house. A log cabin. You know the place. It’s in the low field just east of the cut road, below the Fisher mansion.”

Jim knew the field, all right, but he couldn’t remember any house.

“It’s just a rubble heap now,” said his mother.

“Mostly grown over. Heavens, it must be twenty-five years ago, at least.” He saw her do the math in her head. “1972. New Year’s Eve, 1972.”

His mother’s eyes glanced up at the clock above the kitchen table and Jim took the hint. He turned back to his homework, but his mind was buzzing. A moment later, his mother scruffled his hair as she passed him on her way upstairs.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. But she turned at the parlour door. “I remember now. The family was called Tufts. Francis Tufts.”

As soon as she was gone, Jim sat back in his chair thinking through what he had learned. Did Ruth Rose, who knew everything, know about this fire? And Francis Tufts — it wasn’t much of a stretch from that to Tuffy. But what did it have to do with her stepfather or his own father’s disappearance?

Nothing. It was ancient history. And he would probably end up as cracked as she was if he started thinking that way.

Snoot suddenly jumped onto his lap and Jim cried out in astonishment, which frightened the kitten who jumped right off, taking some flesh from his leg with her. Her sharp little claws had gone right through his jeans. He rubbed his thigh and settled back to work.

His mother kissed him goodbye on the way out, went over for the hundredth time the business about locking the doors and checking the woodstove and which lights to leave on.

“I know, I know,” he said, submitting to a second and third bone-crushing hug.

“Hot cinnamon rolls for breakfast?” she asked. Jim looked appropriately blissful. The Sunflower Bakery was just firing up when she got off work, and sometimes she would stop by on her way home. She came home stinking like soap. “I’m going to have to rub myself down with a fish,” she had said once. But, no matter how tired she was, she would walk out to the road with him every morning and wait for the school bus.

Jim watched her drive off in the truck, locking up as soon as she was gone. Then he went into the sitting room.

The family photos lay loose in an old, carved wooden box with a hinged lid. It was called a monk’s bench and the carvings on the front were kind of churchy with monks praying. His mother wasn’t sure if it had ever really belonged to a monk, but it was supposed to be where one would keep his stuff. Now it was filled with photos and the odd Christmas card, yellowing newspaper clippings.