Tim Wynne-Jones: The Boy in the Burning House

Readers lucky enough to know Perth and its eastern Ontario environs may notice a similarity to the town of Ladybank and North Blandford Township, the fictional setting of this story. That passing resemblance does not, however, extend to the characters, all of whom are completely fictional. I have certainly never met nor heard tell of a man quite like Father Fisher. Certainly not in these parts.

In a windowless room off the kitchen hallway, Father Fisher did his praying. It had once been a pantry but there was no food in it anymore, just food for thought. That’s what Father liked to say. Ruth Rose couldn’t care less about his religious books, his tracts, the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles. The letters she was after weren’t so highminded.

Somebody was trying to blackmail Father.

She wasn’t a complete fool, no matter what anybody said. She didn’t expect it would be easy to find proof and no one was going to believe her without it. So she searched when and where she could, and watched and listened.

It was after midnight. She sat in the broom closet. The closet smelled of vinegar and detergent, of Windex and Pledge. She had the door open a crack. Street light sifted through the back door window. She rocked back and forth, concentrating.

He was in there, across the narrow hall, in his own darkness.

He hadn’t shut the door all the way. She could hear the old oak prayer-stall creak under his weight. How penitent he sounded, with his God this and God that. “I have sinned,” he said. “I come before you, O, God, with a heavy heart,” he said. “Empty me, O, Lord,” he said. “Lighten me.”

He mumbled, snuffled a bit. She tuned him in like a night radio station transmitting from a long way off. His voice, pulpit-tempered and sermon-strong, quivered and quavered around the edges. He was agitated, whining. Good.

“Take me back,” he said. His voice became trancelike. Praying did that to him, sometimes. She had watched him sway in church as if under a spell, but that was mostly holy show for the congregation. It was only in the praying room that he gave voice to his deeper secrets. They crawled out of the cave of his mouth in whispers and groans.

“Help me…”

His voice cracked, changed. Ruth Rose held her breath.

“Tabor, can you keep a secret?”

It was not his voice. Somewhere down inside his massive frame, Father had dug up the voice of a boy.

“Pssst!” he hissed, and the sizzle of it made Ruth Rose jerk her head backwards, hitting the shelf above her. A toilet roll fell onto her lap, then bounced onto the floor, bumping against a washing pail. She swallowed a yelp. Then, grabbing a broom, she readied to fight her way out if need be. Had she roused him from his trance? Was he alert now at the other end of this rope of silence, ready to tug her out of hiding?

He spoke again. “You all right?” he whispered.

Ruth Rose rubbed the sore spot on the back of her head. No, she wanted to answer. But he wasn’t talking to her.

“It opens up farther along,” he said. “Come on. Hoof it, guys!”

There was an urgency to his voice. He called out. “Tuffy? Tuffy, you in there?”

Ruth Rose rocked, soaking up the whispers, her eyes squeezed shut. She knew some of this cast of characters by name only. Tabor, Tuffy, Laverne — she had no idea who they were. Then there was Hub. Hub who was dead now.

Father cleared his throat, startling her again. Her foot had gone to sleep, her head ached, the smell of the closet nauseated her. There had to be a better way.

She needed help. She frowned to herself in the dark, her fists clenched on her knees so hard her black fingernails left halfmoon wounds in her palms. She hated the idea of asking anyone for help. But there was someone. If she could just get him to listen.

From the school bus Jim Hawkins caught sight of the flooded land. The bus was trundling up the cut road.

There were just the two of them: Everett behind the wheel humming a Prairie Oyster tune and Jim at his usual station, halfway back, nose pressed against the window. Not that he was looking for anything; it was just his way of staying far enough from Eager Everett to avoid a conversation.

That was how he noticed the glitter of light on water where there shouldn’t have been any.

The cut road followed the eastern property line of the Hawkins land. It was mostly mixed hardwood down that end, but there was swamp land, fed by a creek. Incognito Creek, his father had called it, because it didn’t draw much attention to itself, didn’t gurgle or splash much. Kind of like Jim himself.

But no stream, however insignificant, could avoid the detection of a beaver looking to start a home. The flood Jim had glimpsed was in a gulch where his father had cut a trail to a high grazing area at the southeast corner of the farm. The pasture was only a few acres but it would be lost to them if the beavers took the gulch. It wouldn’t be the first time they had tried. It was a natural depression, narrow necked and easy to dam.

“Podner, we gotta clear the pass of them varmints,” his father used to say, putting on his idea of a cowboy drawl.

Jim pressed his forehead hard against the cool glass of the bus window. He wasn’t sure he could handle varmints alone.

He and his mother didn’t need the southeast pasture all that much, he tried to tell himself. They’d sold off the beef cattle; could barely keep up with the few head of dairy they still had. But losing his father had been bad enough. He wasn’t about to see the land stolen out from under them. It had been Hawkins land for five generations. Hadn’t his father said that enough times?

The cut road came to a T-intersection at the Twelfth Line, and Everett turned west. Jim gathered up his stuff and made his way down the aisle. Everett caught his eye.

“Corn look in’ good there, Jimbo. No blight. Lar Perkins, he’s got the blight. And him with his bum knee. No Geritol hockey for him this season, eh.”

Eager Everett. Eye contact was all it rook to flip his switch. Jim smiled in a polite way, and the bus pulled to a stop at his driveway. Everett cranked open the doors.

“My best to your mother,” he said, tipping his Blue Jays baseball cap. He was like a jay himself once he got squawking.

The bus rumbled on up the Twelfth until it was swallowed in its own dust. Jim stood at the end of his driveway swallowed up by a memory. His father waiting right here for him with a pickaxe in one meaty hand and a long-handled spade in the other.

“You up for some counterinsurgency manoeuvres, son?” Not cowboys this time but some kind of SWAT team.

Jim had slipped off his backpack right away. “The beavers again, huh?”

His father had nodded. “Let’s take ’em out, Jimbo.”

It had been a day not unlike this, early fall. The year before his father vanished.

Jim crossed the yard and opened the back door before his mother’s shout caught up with him. He looked over towards the driveshed. She was standing in the doorway in coveralls and rubber boots, with a baseball cap on backwards and a paper mask pulled down under her chin. She held a spray can in her hand.

She made her way towards him across the yard. Behind her in the shadows of the shed stood his father’s car, a ’65 Chevy Malibu, Yuma yellow. She was touching up the bodywork. She was going to sell it, Had to.