Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

her silence, to pardon his mistake. It was, more than anything, this silence, this distance, that finally convinced Rusty he had something to fear.

In the morning, toting eggs and home fries to early risers, Rusty heard about the trench. A sentence here, there, and, later, straight talk from Joe told Rusty what his mother had not. The talk startled him, silenced him, sent him out in search of Mendelson and his crew.

Like many children, Rusty believed that Saturday mornings were the most tangible, most reliable embodiment of freedom. To spend one in pursuit of a man he despised so he could talk about a situation he deplored seemed a lot to ask. But to wander through the day without voicing his objections seemed worse still. So he packed a pear, a meat-loaf sandwich, and a thermos of milk into his bike basket and set out toward Fainsville. He saw plenty on the way to make him glad he’d come: a penny-colored horse; a black snake that crossed the road ahead of him, as long and liquid as a whip; a fat hawk after mice in the grain.

It didn’t take Rusty long to reach the region where Mendelson meant to dig his trench. The boy assumed that the land they had chosen would be pasture or cropland, since digging up trees would make for much harder work. He wondered about the farmers whose land was to be sacrificed, whether they had sold their land willingly.

Rusty left his bike at the edge of the road and walked into the fields. He didn’t really know where he was going. He didn’t really know if he should expect to find anyone out here. He wasn’t even sure, suddenly, why he’d come. Perhaps he had come out here too soon. Perhaps they would not start to dig for weeks yet. He looked for flags, stakes, markers of any sort, but saw none. He saw no machines. There was no one around, not even a farmer, not even a dog out trotting.

He lay down on his back in the tall grain. The patch of sky above him was shaped vaguely like his shadow, edged with the neat heads of the grain. On every side he saw the stalks of the grain, heard the movement of grasshoppers and birds. He sat up, ate his sandwich and his pear, drank some of the milk and capped the rest. He had waited long enough. It was clear that Mendelson was not out in these fields.

He did not feel as if he were sitting on top of so much coal. He had expected to feel it from afar, as if it were alive, as if it were moving. Set afire, it would send up signals. He was sure that it would. He did not believe that a massive fire, even one deep underground, could pass unnoticed. He was sure that he would know when the fire worked its way into town. Lying back again in the golden grain, warm and drowsy, he was simply not so sure that it ever would.

When his mother asked him, later that day, where he’d been, he told her that he’d gone out looking for arrowheads.

Rusty let a few days go by and then returned to find the fields of grain shorn down to stubble yet much as they had been. He smiled, turned to go, and that was when he saw, farther south, a bit of smoke rising, heard the grunt of machines, felt a trace of something disturbing the ground beneath his feet. So he rode farther along the road to where it sloped slowly down and turned before flattening out through a nice stretch of bottomland where black cows were known to graze. It was here that Rusty found Mendelson, the earth all in a shambles, the machines already digging, and not a cow in sight.

He had intended to talk to the man when he found him, to register his protest, probe for a soft spot. But when he saw the long, black incision they had made in the flat belly of ground, he knew that nothing he could say would make any difference at all. Not to Mendelson. And if he had anything important to say, if he wanted to speak his mind, bare his soul, expose his heart, he would, he decided, do better with someone who loved him.

He went back to Belle Haven, straight to his mother, and told her about the trench.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. “We’re not leaving, are we?”

Angela was mixing up a vast bowl of tuna salad. Dolly sat at the far end of the counter, rolling quarters. She looked up, listening.

Angela gazed at her son for a moment, turned back to the bowl. “You don’t want to leave?”

He pulled up the bill of his cap, scratched his forehead with the back of his thumbnail, pulled the cap back down. “No,” he said. “ ’Course I don’t want to leave. Do you?” He looked at his mother, at Dolly, at his mother again.

Angela dug at the salad with a massive spoon. Her forearm was as muscled as a farmer’s. “I don’t think this is something you have to worry about just yet,” she told him. Dolly set aside a roll of quarters and began the next. “There’s time for us to decide what to do. The fire’s not here yet. It may never come this far,” she said.

Rusty grinned. “That’s just what I was thinking,” he said, then he kissed his grandmother and headed for the door.

Chapter 38

        It couldn’t have been Ian, or Rachel, or Angela. They were the only three people who had fed Joe, in those early days after he’d arrived in Belle Haven, but they were also the only three who knew why he had come. Even if they had not believed his story about a bad father and a disfigured sister, none of them was the sort to sneak away from the supper table with a dirty