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

pull immediately away. It shocked him deeply to feel how thin she was, how hard her muscles, and how strong the shudder that ran the length of her. But then he felt her relax, her head grew heavy on his shoulder, and he found that he was gently rocking her, and she him, and that he, too, was comforted.

By the time Rusty came home with the trout, Joe and Angela were laughing, and neither of them ever mentioned the absent Buddy again.

“You have a good knife?” Rusty asked Joe as they picked their way through Ian’s pumpkin patch the day before Joe’s first Halloween in Belle Haven.

“I guess,” Joe said, turning over a nice pumpkin, looking for rot. “Want to carve it at the Schooner?”

“Sure,” said the boy. “It’ll be easier to cart home that way. We can carve one up for you, too.”

But it turned out that Joe did not have a proper knife. Nothing quite sharp enough or small enough for pumpkin teeth or fragile pumpkin brows.

“Here,” said Rusty, pulling a whittling knife from his pocket. It was very sharp. “My grandma taught me how to carve walking sticks out of sumach when I was a kid. Sumach looks like deer antler, has real velvety sort of bark, comes off smooth as you like. The stick’s no good for anything but a day’s walk. After that it dries up. Warps. But it’s a pleasure to carve.”

Joe sat and looked at the boy, found it hard to believe he was just ten. It must have been the talk of knives and carving. Men talked of such things. Yet these things were foreign to Joe. The knife was heavy in his large palm. He snapped it open on its capable hinge. There were no notches in its blade. It was a good knife.

They spent an hour on the pumpkins, scooping out their pulpy meat, saving their seeds for the oven, and making elaborate faces in their rinds until the light began to fail.

“That’s a good knife,” Joe said, wiping the blade on his pant leg and snapping it home. He held it out to Rusty.

The boy looked at the knife. He looked at Joe’s face. Perhaps he was remembering how little Joe had brought along with him from wherever he’d been.

“You keep it,” Rusty said, wedging his pumpkin into the basket of his bike.

“Don’t be silly,” Joe said, holding out the knife. “I can get another one.”

“I’m not being silly. I know you can get another one. Have this one,” Rusty said, turning his bike so it faced the lane and home.

Joe remembered the small apartment above the Kitchen, Rusty’s tiny room, how neat it was. (“I thought kids’ rooms were supposed to be messy,” he had said the first time he’d gone upstairs. It was only later that he realized Rusty did not own enough things to make a mess, or to neglect them.)

“Thanks,” Joe said, slipping the knife into his pocket. It was the first thing Rusty gave to Joe and perhaps the most important gift he would ever receive.

“Whittle something and you’ll see for yourself how nice it is,” Rusty said as he left. “It makes you nice and sleepy if you do it on a doorstep. Especially if the lightning bugs are out.” And Joe breathed in relief to hear Rusty speak like the boy he was and ought to be for some time to come.

There were no lightning bugs out that night, for they were all mated by now and content. But there were still crickets out flexing their harplike legs, spiking the night with raspy love songs, and no one believed that snow was mere weeks away. Joe sat on the steps of the Schooner with a narrow trunk of sumach and Rusty’s smooth-handled knife. The sun had set but not departed. The sky was nearly green. Birds in flight were black against it. The blazing trees stood still, barely breathing. One star appeared. Another. The knife’s silver blade stroked the wood. The flesh underneath the bark was soft, cool, and very white. Ribbons of bark fell at his feet like garlands. And the moon came calmly up into the sky. Rusty was right. Joe had never felt more solitary. Or more content.

When the cold finally came to Belle Haven, Joe spent his spare hours wandering through the woods and fields, collecting stones as big as grapefruits. He lugged them home in a satchel, a few at a time, and piled them in the middle of the clearing. When he had enough, he made some mortar and built a fireplace of sorts, big and deep enough to shield a fire from the wind and the snow. He topped it with a chimney, capped that with a vent to keep out the wet, let out the smoke, encourage an upward draft.

On many cold winter nights, Joe built a beautiful blaze in his fireplace and sat bundled before it, whittling and wondering what went on in other places he had been. When it snowed, he stayed indoors, listened to his small transistor, read book after book after book. He did not own a calendar and tried hard not to think about his approaching birthday. Or about Christmas. Or about the twin he would now never know any better than he knew Angela. Not even that well. Not nearly as well as he knew Rachel.

Something had happened to them on the night back in May when he’d called his father. She had sat beside him on his bunk for a long time, stroking his hair, holding his hand for the last hour of darkness and long into the dawn until he finally fell asleep. He had opened his eyes to find her sleeping in a chair beside him, their hands locked, Ian and Angela gone. He had barely moved for an hour or more, afraid of waking her. Had watched her face, studied the way her thick, cinnamon hair coursed down her neck, marveled at