T. Boyle - The Women

He’d just gone to the bedroom for something — the book he’d been reading, his glasses — when the phone began to buzz. He picked up the receiver and the line went dead. Mystified, already irritated, he went down to the kitchen, only to find that the buzzer there wouldn’t switch off no matter how many times he depressed the button. And where was the screwdriver? He was going to need a screwdriver to take the thing off the wall — and a pair of pliers too. For a minute he just stood there, the buzzer rasping in his ears, looking round him vaguely for a tool — anything, a butter knife, the thin edge of a dime — and he rifled the drawer and actually had the knife in his hand when a gust thumped at the windowpane and he glanced up to see smoke leaking out of the bedroom windows.

Smoke. Dark tongues of it, torn by the wind and flung down into the courtyard. It was as if the steam locomotive had left the station, sailed out over the countryside and lodged itself there, in his bedroom, the stoker all the while feeding coal to the glowing mouth of the furnace. But that was impossible, that was absurd, the delirium of a disconnected mind — the fireplace, it must have been the fireplace, sure it was, the flue flipped shut by a gust of wind, that was what he was thinking, and yet even as he heaved himself down the corridor, he knew there’d been no fire laid because it had been warm all day, too warm for the season, the air heavy with the coming of the storm and no reason to waste good oak that had to be sawed, split and stacked. 27

By the time he got to the bedroom the wall behind the bed was riotous with flame, the curtains there come to life in red snapping ribbons and the bedclothes leaping up to join fire to fire. Two seconds, that was all it took, and then he was back down the corridor shouting “Fire!” and here was Olgivanna with her shocked eyes and blanched face and Kameki running mad in the wrong direction and would the hose in the courtyard stretch that far? — no, no, not even close. There were buckets in the stables and now Mel was involved, a bucket brigade, up the corridor to fling water at the wall to the shush of steam and the stink of incineration and then the next bucket and the next and no time for the taps or the hose bib, just plunging into the garden pool again and again and up the corridor and down the corridor to the long alliterative shush of steam. .

No thought for anything in those first minutes, no thought of the art treasures below or the specter of the first fire, the one that had raked the heart right out of his chest and baked it hard, no thought for Olgivanna or Svet — and here she was, straining under the weight, Daddy Frank, another bucket — or of his own safety or anything in this world but the flames on the wall and the bed and the curtains. After the first bucket flew from his hands he leapt to the casement windows and pulled them tight and latched them even as the wind beat at the roof and the lightning flashed over the hills and the flames climbed the wall. “The flue!” he shouted to Olgivanna, and she was right there, slamming it shut with a sharp grating of the hinges, starving the fire of air till the twentieth bucket, the thirtieth, he’d lost count, began to sizzle in a different way, the soft dying hiss of a snuffed campfire, and the flames fell back on themselves and collapsed.

“There,” he shouted, his lungs heaving, his hair wild, his shirtsleeves blackened and his hands burned red where he’d folded the flames into the bedclothes and flung them to the floor beneath his stamping feet, “there, it’s done.” Olgivanna came surging through the door then, a bucket in each hand, and she barely glanced at him before heaving first one, then the other, at the dead black wall and the charred bedstead, two more buckets for good measure. He put a hand out to restrain her even as the water ran down the wall and into the cracks between the floorboards. “We got it, Olya, we got it,” he said. “I think we—”

It was then that he became aware of a new sound, a ticking or scratching in the ceiling above the bed, as if the slats there had developed an itch or a squirrel had gnawed its way in and now wanted out, Svet and Mel and Kameki crowding into the room behind him with superfluous buckets and looping eyes and the wind skreeling over the roof and beating at the panes. Kameki, in shirtsleeves and galluses, breathing hard, let out a low exclamation: “What in God’s name? — ” The scratching grew louder. No one moved. And then there was a long trailing whoosh, as of the gas in an oven reacting to the stimulus of the match, and he knew that the worst had come: the fire was in the dead space between the ceiling and the roof and the wind was feeding it through every crack and sliver. “The roof!” was all he could say before he was down the hall and out the door, shouting for a ladder, more water, the fire department, somebody call the fire department!

The wind was like a hurricane and it tore the door from his hands and hurled grit in his face as he flung himself across the courtyard for the ladder in the garage, Mel and Kameki at his heels. “No,” he roared, “no— water! Fetch the water!” And he had the ladder in both hands, running again, running still, and now the ladder was against the roof and he was scrambling up it, the roofing breached in half a dozen places, cedar shake going up like tinder — and it was tinder, shaved thin as bark and ten years dry. And this was the nightmare: leaping atop the shingles from one emergency to the next, the soles of his shoes seared with the fury of the heat, the water buckets coming up and down the ladder — pitiful, nothing at all, he might as well have been flinging teardrops into a volcano — and within minutes the roof over the bedroom collapsed with a roar onto the doomed bed and the condemned floor.

Overhead, the sky darkened toward night, the storm running on the wind, squeezing closer, the lightning playing over the trees. He fought the flames, driving them back here as the wind seized them there, and his eyebrows were gone, his socks smoldering, shoes scorched, and though people were coming now, neighbors, coming at a run to help and gossip and gawk, he had to retreat, backing away from the living part of the house to the rear, where the working part was — his studio and the rooms for the apprentices and guests — and that was going to go too, he could see that now, no hope, none at all. The flames were gaining. He couldn’t breathe. The smoke thickened and the fire surged, hotter than any Fourth of July bonfire and fed on everything he held precious. “Get away, Frank!” somebody was shouting. “It’s no use! Get away!”

Was it a judgment? Was it the God of Isaiah, the fateful, vengeful God, striking at him yet again for his hubris, his too-perfect creation, the spark that made him godlike himself? He couldn’t have helped wondering, if he’d had time to reflect, but he didn’t have time, not then, not till it was over, and by then he’d let it pass and accounted himself lucky. Because at that moment, twenty minutes into the ordeal, with the house an inferno and temperatures so intense the windows were reduced to puddles of molten silica and all his furnishings and peerless art destroyed, a blast of thunder sounded overhead, the wind suddenly shifted and the rain came like forgiveness.

For days the ruins smoldered, a thin stench of incineration hanging on the air, a sour smell, as if it were a thousand barrels of vinegar that had gone up and not the heart and soul of the place she’d come to love as if she’d built it herself. That smell would haunt her as she lay beside Frank in the too-narrow bed in the guest quarters, everything shifted now to accommodate the new life, the building life, the night fast with the density of darkness absolute and the blankets binding like tourniquets, and she would drift off to the sourness and awaken to it in the first light of dawn. Even the smell of the morning’s bacon rising out of the confines of the temporary kitchen was overwhelmed by it, the sweetness of the turned earth spoiled, the flowers driven down. She felt sick in the mornings now, sicker than she’d been with Svetlana, but she forced herself out of bed and into the kitchen to negotiate the space with Mrs. Taggertz and make good and certain that Frank’s breakfast was delivered to him in the studio because now more than ever he had to keep up his strength.