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

time he had brought only Rachel into the woods. He had satisfied Ian’s curiosity by telling him he’d found some good wood to carve and would take him out for a look someday.

For Christmas he’d carved for Ian, the stargazer, a plain wooden star from a flawless block of mahogany. The star was as smooth as Rusty’s young skin, its undulating grain as alluring as Rachel’s hair. “It will always be my Christmas star,” Ian had said, turning the polished wood in his gnarled hands. He was silent for a moment or two, and then he said, “I want to see what you’re working on out in the woods. When it’s all right with you.”

On the first Sunday after Independence Day, Joe washed his breakfast dishes, made his bunk, and set out for Ian’s house with Pal at his heels. It felt like a good day to take Ian to the woods.

Ian’s pickup was in the driveway, and there was a shovel thrust into his garden, but when Joe knocked first on the front door and then the back, Ian did not come.

“Ian,” Joe hollered through the screen door. He cupped his hands against the screen and peered into the house. The bathroom door on the far side of the kitchen stood ajar, the shower dry. The cellar door was shut, the bolt shot. “Ian,” he called, backing away from the door.

He looked out across the fields, thinking that Ian might have gone walking. “Ian,” Joe called, walking toward the plank that bridged the stream at the edge of the fields. Pal, ahead of him, stopped suddenly and looked back over her shoulder.

Ian, who had offered Joe sanctuary, who had seen how alone he was and offered him allegiance, was lying on his back in the clear, restless water of the stream. At first Joe thought he had simply become hot while gardening, fancied a moment in the cool waters of the stream, and become caught up with such dreams and diversions as water often inspires. He thought that Ian simply had not heard him calling, did not hear him at the stream’s edge, for he was lying in the shallow water with his ears submerged, his short hair waving like an unpinned halo, his face dry and pale in the sunlight.

But in the water next to Ian lolled an upended pail. On his hands were gardening gloves. On his feet, good boots. His red shirt and old jeans were swollen with cold water.

“Ian,” Joe whispered and went down on his knees. A jay landed on a rock near Ian’s boot, jabbed its beak at a stem of berries arcing over the water’s edge, and then hopped onto the toe of the boot to ruffle its plumage in the breeze.

Joe waited until the bird had flown, waited until his heart had stopped trembling, and then stepped down into the water of the stream. He gathered Ian up against his chest and staggered onto the grass. He knew he would never be able to carry him to the house alone. He was a heavy man, in wet clothes, his body weighted with the gravity of the dead, impatient for the earth.

Joe knew that if he dragged him, even in a barrow, the sight of his friend bouncing lightly, his hands dragging in the grass, losing their gloves, his heels rutting the lawn would haunt him for the rest of his days. This was Ian, drinker of brandy, singer of songs, teacher, confessor, companion, the sort of man Joe had made up his mind to be.

He sat down with Ian stretched out beside him on the grass, attended by wildflowers, and closed his eyes. He had not prayed much in his life, but he prayed now. He prayed that Ian was somewhere good. He sent a bray of anguish and longing skyward. And he began, quietly, to cry.

He thought of Ian lying alone in the beautiful water, dying, perhaps by conscious degrees, his eyes full of sky, his ears memorizing the sound of pebbles as they shifted in the current, his heart flooding with blood. He thought of Ian realizing that these were his last moments. Giving up his claim to flesh and land and voice. Sorry for the lack of warning, for the fact that he was leaving things undone, yet at the same time grateful to be leaving quickly.

“Good-bye, Ian,” Joe said inside his chest. “Good-bye and good-bye and good-bye.” And as he gained his feet and started toward the empty house, where he would find a coffee cup on the kitchen table and on the desk a letter just begun, he knew with exhilarating certainty that someday, in the far, immeasurable distance, he would see his friend again.

Chapter 30

        “Ian was my teacher,” Rachel said, looking at the faces of those assembled around his grave. “He taught me about Henry the Eighth and the fall of Rome, showed me how to make pickles, taught me the proper way to splice a rope.

“I never had any uncles, but Ian was a lot like one to me. He and my father were friends, so I got to know Ian pretty well over the years. After my parents died, he told me I could depend on him if I ever needed anything. And I knew I could. He was that kind of man. I never expected him to die so soon.” She plucked at the damp sleeve of her dress. It was too hot for long sleeves, but Rachel didn’t notice. She had cried for Ian as she had not cried for her own parents—shock and anger over losing them leaving her too clenched for tears—and her eyes were swollen and red.

“I didn’t expect him to die at all,” she said. “When he did, I sat down and tried to write a poem to read at his funeral. To read here. I sat up all night thinking about Ian, remembering. That’s as far as I got. What’s in my head wants to