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

Chapter 8

        As Kit was following the road into Belle Haven, Rachel was making a salad for her supper and looking back down the gray months that stretched behind her like a leash, to the time before her parents had died.

She hated chopping, slicing, or paring—could not imagine choosing to be a butcher, or a lumberjack, or anyone who wielded a blade for a living—but she loved salads and no longer had anyone to make them for her. Only one thing made the task easier, and that was her anger.

Rachel stood at the kitchen counter, a gleaming knife in her hand, and fashioned a hundred neat coins of celery while she pictured Harry, working his sly choreography, and Paul, weak-kneed, complying.

The image of the drunken truck driver who had obliterated her parents took the ache from her fingers as she washed the lettuce in frigid water. The police officers who had pried the man from his truck had said he could not keep his feet, had vomited on the road, reeking of alcohol. But somehow his carefully siphoned blood had been misplaced, and so there was no proof, later, of his guilt. He had been convicted of nothing more than reckless driving. And Rachel had been left with the task of identifying the broken bodies of her parents, looking into their torn faces, and, unwisely, touching them. That had been the worst of all—the feel of them.

She dried the lettuce and ripped it into pieces, scrubbed a trio of scallions. At the thought of the state official from Community Affairs who had tried to tell her how, when, and where she could bury her parents’ remains, she eviscerated a green pepper with one well-executed twist of its stem.

“We like to keep tabs on where everyone’s buried around here,” he had told her shortly after she’d arrived home. “Anywhere near the fire, we might have to move the remains at some point. It’s a touchy matter. Best to cooperate so things don’t get messy later on, Miss Hearn.”

“Go away,” she’d said, and slammed the door in his face.

Most of the people who lived in Belle Haven were old-fashioned. While they had permitted progress to take its course—in the shape of a better fire engine, new and sometimes alarming books for the library, a free clinic, and a recycling depot—they stubbornly refused to fool with their more deeply rooted traditions. Their grief over the deaths of Frederick and Suzanne Hearn had therefore been shot through with disapproval at the manner of their burial. Rachel had simply refused to consign her parents to the graveyard of the church they had attended all their lives. It was a lovely church that sat out at the edge of town, graced with unfarmed fields, with a graveyard once known for its lilacs. But far below the church was a mine tunnel full of fire, and the graveyard was now surprisingly hot.

It disturbed people to think of the bodies interred there becoming brittle and crisp as they baked. And it frightened them to think of the ground giving way, taking the bodies with it or, worse yet, exposing them to the air. Still, the churchyard was holy ground and people continued to bury their dead in its dusty soil. Folks took the Bible fairly literally in Belle Haven: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Rachel even more so.

“I want them cremated and buried here, on the hill,” she had insisted. But at the last minute, Rachel had changed her mind.

While a hundred mourners plodded up the hill to the Hearn house and quietly gathered in the windy yard, Rachel took the heavy urn that held her parents’ ashes and hurried up to her bedroom. She stood in the middle of the room, clutching the urn to her chest, and looked frantically around until she caught sight of a lopsided crock she’d made in the eighth grade. She’d made it big enough to hold cattails or hollyhocks. It would be big enough to hold the remnants of both her parents.

After dusting it out with the hem of her black dress, Rachel filled the crock with the ashes from the urn. They were uglier than she had supposed they’d be, with hard chunks among the soot. She poured them as gently as she could, but even so a cloud of fine ash billowed above the mouth of the crock, and Rachel was left with the taste of the ash on her tongue and a film of it on her eyes. Then she opened the window and with her bare hands pried chunks of cold soil from the vacant window box. She left the window open, cold air flooding the room. Then she crumbled the soil into the urn, stopped it up again, and went down to join the others.

She found her kitchen full of women. There was an astounding assortment of food on the big harvest table, plates and flatware on the countertop. The women were all wearing aprons. Rachel wondered whether they ever went anywhere without them. The scorn she suddenly felt was diluted, well hidden, but nonetheless shocking, and it took Rachel a moment to collect herself, to remind herself that these were the friends of a lifetime, and to remember what she had come to say.

“If you all don’t mind, I think I’m ready now.” They had not noticed her in the doorway and looked, all of them, ashamed of their chatter, the precision of their cookie trays, the thought that maybe they looked nice, even in black.

“Oh, you poor darlin’,” somebody said. Rachel wasn’t sure who it was. She was looking down at the urn in her hands, thinking of the crock upstairs and its irregular cargo.

Rachel waited for the women to fetch their coats and then led them out and around to the side of the house, past a stand of lilac trees, past the garden going to rot, almost to the