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

the clothes he’d gone to sleep in, gathered up his carving tools, and walked through the soaking fields to the woods. The light was different now, and for a moment he could not see Holly in the monument of dead wood. But then yes, there she was, waiting. And he took up exactly where he’d left off the day before.

By the third day, Joe had lost his job as a bag boy at the A&P. Rachel, when she came looking for him, found Ian instead, sitting under the Schooner’s awning, smoking his pipe.

“There’s something the matter with him, Rachel,” he said. “He keeps going off into the woods, and he won’t talk to me.”

“Maybe he’s having second thoughts about all this,” she said, her belly lined with dread.

“I don’t think that’s it,” Ian said. “I think maybe he’s staking some sort of claim.”

She thought about this for a bit and then said, “Tell him that I was by, Ian. He’ll talk about it if he wants to.”

At the end of the third day, Joe came out of the woods and found his way home, slept the night through, and then went back out into the world to work.

He spent the first days of May in dirt of one sort or another, his boots heavy with mud, his fingernails so packed with earth that they ached. He helped a farmer plant potatoes in the rain and hang a new barn door. He turned over a vegetable garden for Mrs. Sapinsley, who lived next to the elementary school and had sciatica so bad she could no longer wield a shovel. He dug a new grave in the Baptist churchyard and then filled it back in the next day. And every evening, after he had fed himself and washed the dirt from his eyelashes, he gathered up his tools and hurried across the fields, scattering birds and big-eyed mice as he ran.

Rachel had not asked him about the silence or the absence he’d maintained for that handful of days. But after Mother’s Day Joe decided that it would cost him nothing to make a pact with her.

“I think I can make you understand why I’ve stayed in Belle Haven, Rachel,” he said to her one day in June. “But it will mean telling you things I’d rather not talk about, so don’t ask me any more questions after this.”

That afternoon Joe led Rachel to the woods on the far side of Ian’s sloping fields. He walked carefully, on the sides of his feet, as if he were stalking deer, compelling her to do the same. She was taut with anticipation and found that she had to make a conscious effort to breathe deeply. What is all this? she asked herself, unable to believe that Joe could have any secrets from her when he’d already told her so many.

Through the green galaxy of maple leaves, she thought she glimpsed a face up ahead, watching them, but in a moment it was gone. The light was growing brighter, she realized, and the undergrowth less dense. Someone—Joe, she presumed—had beaten a path through the ferns, which made their travel easy and certain. I’ll be able to find my way back here, she realized.

Then Joe came to a stop, moved to one side, and Rachel saw before her an austere collection of small, dead trees, all the more unlikely for the attendance of their robust neighbors. It was an eerie, quiet spot. The dead trees were very still. Very stark. She wondered why Joe had brought her here.

She looked to him for some clue, but he was standing as quietly as the trees, looking into their branches. So she turned to them once more, and that was when she saw what he had accomplished.

Given the chance, weather and time would camouflage Joe’s creation so well that a person could walk right by it without ever knowing it was there. But although the wood was dead, it had not yet completely grayed and the places that Joe had carved were a different color from the bark he’d left untouched. It was this different color that drew Rachel’s attention. Once it had, she was so startled that for a moment her heart stopped beating.

She was immediately reminded, when she saw what he had done, of a photograph she’d once seen, of a cliff of red clay tumbling down into the sea. Nothing but mud, chunks of it, boulders of it. And then, when she’d stopped looking at the photograph so hard, she had seen among the rubble a fantastic sculpture of a mermaid sitting on a rock. The tide had taken most of her tail, but her magnificence had been unimpaired. Rachel had not forgotten that photograph, just as she would not forget this.

She had never seen Holly or any likeness of her, but she knew that this was Joe’s sister among the trees. It wasn’t just the imperfection of her face, although that made Rachel certain. It was the way Joe had carved her, so that she was less beautiful than striking, and with a look of such yearning on her face that Rachel crossed her arms over her chest.

Joe had carved the trunk of the small tree so that it merely suggested a woman’s body, but he had given her a face of such acute detail that for a moment Rachel found herself questioning Joe’s part in its creation.

“You did this?” she asked him.

“I can hardly believe it myself,” he said. “I’ve been carving things for months now, but I had no idea I could do anything like this. Nothing at all like this. I feel like a man who goes to bed one night a cripple and wakes up with wings.”

“I don’t know what to say, Joe.” She walked up close to the statue and, glancing at him for permission, ran her finger along its jaw.

“It’s not just carving this that has me so excited, Rachel,” he said. “It’s the idea that if I can do