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

“I won’t, Joe.” He looked around the house one more time, turning on his feet like a boy in a music box, and then put his arms around Joe and laid his head against his chest. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’ll never forget you as long as I live.”

“You won’t need to,” Joe said, his hands in Rusty’s sleek hair. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he put the boy away from him. “Listen, Rusty,” he said slowly. “I know that you might have preferred something a little less … refined. You know: a rope ladder, apple crates. Don’t think you have to keep it this way just to please me. It’s your house. Do whatever you want with it. I just couldn’t help making it this way. For some reason I just can’t help thinking of you as much older than eleven.”

Rusty looked as if he would explode. “It’s perfect,” he said.

“One more thing you haven’t seen,” said Joe, leading him out onto the deck and lifting his chin up toward the pinnacle of the tree.

“A crow’s nest!” Rusty cried, scrambling farther up the walnut’s massive trunk, rung by rung, to where it was encircled by a sturdy, narrow walk. From his perch Rusty could look through the walnut’s upper branches, over the tops of its smaller neighbor trees, and down the gradual slope of the hill. In one direction he could see the top of Rachel’s house and, beyond that, a distant field, moving with wheat and a mare’s tail of smoke drifting in the breeze. When he looked quickly away toward the town he could see more, for the hill sloped sharply down to Raccoon Creek. As the walnut’s upper branches soughed gently the boy caught glimpses of his own rooftop.

“You can send me messages, Mom,” he called down. “We can learn Morse code and use flashlights.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, looking up, her feet making continuous small adjustments like an outfielder gauging descent. She held the back of her head in both hands, her fingers buried in her sandy hair. “Just watch yourself on the way back down, Rusty.”

By now it was well and truly sundown, and somewhere below them a choir of frogs began its fervent evensong.

They all climbed down from the old black walnut. Rusty kissed his smiling mother, Rachel took Joe’s callused hand, and the four of them walked along the well-worn path and out of the woods. At the edge of the trees they were silenced by a sunset as gaudy as a parrot’s wing and felt themselves slipping from long practice into uneasy admiration of the fine, polluted light that swept slowly toward Belle Haven.

Chapter 23

        That night, in a field not far from town, not even as far as Ian Spalding’s campground, alongside an old stone wall that had mostly tumbled down, a doe stopped grazing and lifted her head. Her companions, loitering in the near distance, paused to watch her. The ones closest to her began to tremble. The doe gathered herself to flee. For one silent, enormous moment, she knew nothing but terror and the exhilarating notion that she could save herself. But even as her hooves braced themselves against the ground, it melted away like sand touched by tide. Where the deer had stood was nothing but a dissipating spout of smoke.

A few more stones had fallen from the mossy old wall. The site of the deer’s abduction was oddly bare. But there were, otherwise, no signs to caution passersby that this was a place best avoided. Just as flags were lacking in a dozen other scattered places waiting for unlucky strays.

Chapter 24

        It was the middle of August, and Joe had not been up to the second floor of Rachel’s house since Easter.

“I’m redecorating,” she’d said in the spring. “No going upstairs until I’m done.” And Joe had been aware, all summer long, of panel trucks parked by Rachel’s house, trails of sawdust on her front porch, the sound of hammers coming down the hill as he biked into town.

With her house in such disarray, Rachel sometimes drove out to the Schooner to spend a short summer night, cook with Joe, play crazy eights, maybe dance in the clearing. And on nights when the moon was big or the days so hot that the streets melted, Joe often showed up at Rachel’s door and led her to the moss in the woods or, if Rusty was in his tree, lay with her on her cool kitchen floor.

He had long deferred to Rachel’s wish that they—neither of them—spoil their lovemaking with concerns about the future. It wasn’t that he no longer cared whether or not Rachel became pregnant, but the thought of a child no longer alarmed him as it once had. If Rachel didn’t worry about it, neither would he. They were already a family of sorts, married or not. More, in some ways, than the one he’d lost.

These notions of family had made Joe miss the house on the hill, where everything was both a source and an extension of Rachel, and he was glad when she invited him to see what she had done with it.

Rachel was unlike anyone else he’d ever known, but Joe somehow expected to climb the stairs into the upper regions of her house and there encounter something predictably feminine. Pretty. Charming. Full of mirrors and scent. He felt strangely gratified to be joining the fraternity of mated men who are presented with such emasculating bowers and are expected, unconditionally, to applaud.

As they climbed the winding stairs together, Joe felt a great tenderness for Rachel. She had seen his work unveiled. He readied his smile and his kindest words as he climbed toward hers.

“Well,” she said, watching his face. “What do you think?”

At one time there had been, at the top of the stairs, a hallway joining two bedrooms, a study, and a sewing room. All of that was gone. There was, instead, one large open