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

to think. He did not eat any of the food or disturb the careful arrangement of the blankets. Not yet. There might come a time when Rusty’s preparations would serve a good purpose, but they were not meant for casual consumption or for play.

If Joe arrived at the tree house and found Rusty there, the two of them were content to pass the time together. They did not speak of the supplies Rusty had gathered. They behaved as if he had instead stocked the tree house with the more traditional trappings of boyhood: comic books and Cracker Jacks, muddy bottles, arrowheads.

Sometimes Joe stayed there alone with Pal, carving, reading, writing to his sister, sleeping when night came on before he’d noticed.

Eventually, when the gold was spent, when his clothes once again became somewhat threadbare and his hair untamed, neither Angela nor Rachel seemed to notice. Each of them was stricken with Belle Haven’s dismantling. Each waited in single-minded suspense for the time when they would all leave town. But as long as they were still there, often separate but always close at hand, none spoke to the others of leaving. Not yet.

It was strange how nothing had burned. The gases came up steadily, and the smoke pouring out of the boreholes was thick and grainy. But not a single house had actually burned. Perhaps that was the one thing that kept many of those still in Belle Haven from going.

Perhaps they had forgotten about the house in Caspar’s Hollow.

Chapter 42

        It was early October. More than a year had passed since the incident in Caspar’s Hollow, since Mendelson had begun his new trench. Rachel had been to Angela’s for an early supper and was hurrying home through the twilight. She thought of stopping in at the hardware store to see Earl and buy some lightbulbs, maybe spend some time at the Schooner, but Joe had not come to Angela’s for supper and was, perhaps, enjoying his solitude. The street was nearly empty. Rachel, who so rarely came down from her hill these days, was the only one there when it happened.

As she approached the lot where Joe lived, Rachel heard Pal barking and, turning, saw her through one of the Schooner’s windows, saw her head snapping as she barked. Rachel figured that Joe would be lacing up his boots, buttoning his coat, coming out in a moment with Pal at his heels for their evening walk, so she waited where she was. She’d walk with them as far as her hill.

Then, as she watched Pal becoming frantic, Rachel heard a new noise. It was something like the sound of a huge wind coming, or perhaps a train, but strangely distant, as if heard through a thick wall. She stood still and listened to it, tried to place it, found herself leaning toward the Schooner, when the asphalt beneath it buckled, a geyser of smoke shot upward, and the Schooner disappeared straight down into the earth as if it had never been.

For a moment Rachel stood unmoving, staring at the place where the Schooner had been and hoping that she was simply dreaming. In the next second a powerful wave of thick, hot air hit her in the face, choking her, minutely wounding her cheeks. As she ran across the street, bright flames snarled up through the crevice, something down below exploded, and the sides of the pit caved in. When Rachel sank to the sidewalk she could feel, through her knees, a distant rumble.

And then nothing.

When people began to run out onto the street, they smelled the terrible stench of the fire. And when Angela ran down the block in her apron to where Rachel knelt on the sidewalk, the smell was so bad that she gagged.

“Come on!” she yelled, dragging Rachel to her feet. “Come away from there. Rachel! Come on!” But Rachel could not stand up. So Angela and Earl picked her up between them and helped her back to the Kitchen.

Angela sobbed, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn,” as she fed Rachel brandy and rocked her fiercely in her arms.

Rachel was shivering. “This can’t be happening,” she said, bent at the waist as if she’d been halved, hinged, swung shut. “He said we should all go before somebody else got killed.” She clenched her fists. “I want him back.” And she began to cry as if nothing on earth could stop her.

There were other people all around them, huddling together as if expecting bombs from below. The two women, unaware of Rusty sitting across the table from them with his head buried in his arms, unaware of the sound of a siren in the distance, unaware of the earth tumbling toward its own eventual demise, suddenly felt themselves wrapped in a cold embrace and heard the sound of Joe’s voice: “I’m all right. Hush now,” murmuring into their hair. “I’m all right. I’m all right …”

As Joe held them, they cried even harder and clung to him so tightly they left bruises on his arms.

He already knew about Pal. “I … I had some things I had to do this afternoon. And the Schooner didn’t want to start. So I borrowed Frank’s pickup. You know Pal,” he said, the tears pouring down his cheeks. “I begged her to come, but she wouldn’t go near the truck. And it was damp and cold. And Rusty was still at school. And I thought I’d only be away for a couple of hours. So I left her in the Schooner. I left her in the Schooner.” He tipped his head way back, squeezed his eyes shut, and the tears rolled into his hair.

When Angela brought him a mug of hot, sweet tea, he opened his eyes, shook his head, could not help panting.

“I wasn’t going to go away today,” he said. “I didn’t feel like it, and I should have been digging potatoes instead. But if I’d stayed home I might have been in the Schooner, having supper. I should have been in the Schooner.” He