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

reply he stopped suddenly and turned again to face her. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

Ahead of them stood a huge old black walnut tree with a trunk as big around as a barrel. It spread its great, heavy branches out in all directions as if it wanted a partner.

“I’d like your permission to build Rusty a house in this tree,” he said.

Impatient with this diversion, she barely looked at the tree. “Way up here? Why not closer to the Kitchen?”

“There aren’t any trees like this down there. None that I could build in, anyway. This is a nice patch of woods. And besides,” he said, “this place is far enough from home to give the kid a thrill but close enough to you to be safe. What do you say?”

“I say ‘Of course,’ of course.” She looked at the walnut tree carefully for the first time, looked at Joe looking at the walnut tree, saw him planning the house he would build for Rusty, and thought she had her answer. She was thrilled by it. To be thinking of tree houses, of building something that would last, he had to mean what he’d said. Belle Haven had become his home in the best sense of the word.

But she was wounded by this answer, too. Undone. For if she had anything to do with his decision, so did Rusty, and Angela, and Ian, and, for all she knew, the taste of Belle Haven’s corn, the music of its birds. Much as she valued her self-reliance, Rachel wanted to be at the center of someone’s world. At the center of Joe’s world. But she was not yet ready to make Joe the center of hers.

She did not know that he, too, was torn. That he prized his hard-won independence as much as he yearned for a bond that would not erode it. That he was wary of trusting too much. In these things, they were alike. But while Rachel was still somewhat cautious about Joe, he was reluctant to put all his faith in a town that could one day be swallowed by flames. He had made it his home, and he was prepared to invest in it his labor and his love, but he would not expect too much of the future.

He would simply stay as long as he could, for all the reasons he had given Rachel, and others, too. One of which lay concealed in a pocket of trees on the far side of Ian’s fields, where the fire had made its indelible mark and Joe, just as clearly, was carving his.

Chapter 21

        By the time he discovered his sister’s gold, Joe had spent nearly a year in Belle Haven, riding the bicycle Rachel had lent him or hitchhiking to a dozen farms out of the fire’s range, harvesting whatever the ground yielded: strawberries, corn, cauliflower, beans, apples, pumpkins, fresh, fragrant Christmas trees. When snow flew, he shoveled it. When the breeze warmed, he pruned a thousand apple trees and cleared the brush from unkempt orchards, acre by acre. With time, his speech became more like that of his employers: soft, mumbled, loosely strung with a subtle, northern twang. And with the money he didn’t spend on his food and keep, he bought from Earl a sheaf of sandpaper in various grades and a small collection of carving tools, including a hatchet and a tiny plane.

The Schooner had taught Joe how to take care of the things he owned. The tools taught Joe how to cherish those few possessions that bridge the gap between the thinking mind, the prismatic idea, and creation: tools like the pen, brush, harp, camera, forge, or blade. His most valuable tool was the knife Rusty had given him for whittling. Joe had spent the winter and the spring carving litter from the woods—small branches, broken sticks, even logs—until he began to realize, like Michelangelo, that a sculptor or a carver discovers as much as he creates.

On the day that Joe had fled from Holly’s gold through the fields and into the forest, he had come across a graveyard the likes of which he had never seen. Here the fire had arched upward, scratched the surface with a blackened fin, and left behind not a crater but a small plot of dead trees like tombstones among the ferns. There were perhaps a dozen of them, quite perfect without their leaves, dead from the roots up, bloodless, not yet brittle. A single dead tree might have gone unnoticed, but a dozen, surrounded by their verdant neighbors, caught Joe’s attention. When he stumbled upon them on the day that he opened the box of gold, he saw, in those trees, what he might never have seen before Rusty’s knife had made him into a carver.

From the moment Joe had read Holly’s letter, his memory of her face had become as clean and clear as a reflection. And when he saw the murdered trees splintering the sunlight with their black shadows, he once again saw her face reflected. As he approached the trees, he took Rusty’s knife from his pocket and opened its blade as if he were breaking bread. He walked past the first of the trees, and past the second, stopped at the third, and with scarcely a pause, lifted his blade.

It was not nearly as easy as he needed it to be. He needed it to be quick and faultless, and when it wasn’t he had to struggle not to hack at the wood and ruin both the tree and the knife. He forced himself to go slowly and not to mind the delay. He convinced himself to stop often and catch his breath, blow on his blistering palm, and walk the blood into his legs. When it became dark, he wiped his knife on his pants, closed it, put it back in his pocket, and left the woods.

Early the next morning he got out of bed wearing