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

She sighed, pushing the sheet down and away, swinging her legs off the bed and rising.

She missed Joe. She was angry with him. She wanted him back. But on that spectacular morning she tied back her hair, cuffed her sleeves, grabbed a wicker basket from the pantry, and slammed the door shut behind her. “Never waste a summer day,” she said out loud and bounded down the steps into the sunshine, stomped down the hill, and headed for Caspar’s Hollow.

Rachel had accomplished a great deal in the two years since she’d left school. She had raised funds for special door-to-door bus service for the elderly and the handicapped, fattening the pot with money of her own. She had spent scores of hours in Belle Haven’s single library, scribbling down the titles of essential books she could not find, and had then donated them all, boxes and boxes of them, and new shelves to hold them. She had bought dozens of flowering trees and arranged for them to be planted wherever there was room: along the creek, in the park, outside the post office, throughout the town. She had taken a course in CPR. She had spent a hundred afternoons with the kindergarten class—singing, painting, storytelling. And every Thursday morning for two years, she had walked down along the old, meandering, leaf-slick cow path that led into Caspar’s Hollow to sit with Mr. Caspar and hold his knotty hand, water his plants, make sure he had enough to eat.

Ross Caspar was too old to do any more farming; his wife had died a long time ago, and his children had moved away. So he lived alone on his hill-bound farm with a passel of dirty black kittens and an attic full of bats. When the batteries in his hearing aid went dead, he simply turned up the sound on the television and made Rachel look straight at him when she talked. When the television went dead, Rachel brought him a book and began to teach him how to read. And when he finished reading his first good story, he laughed and cried and beat his fists on the arms of his old chair until the air became foggy with dust.

“You’re on your own now,” Rachel had said.

“Don’t I know it,” the old man had replied, wiping the tears off his baggy face. “Bring me some more books, Rachel, next time you’re out this way.”

And she had. Every Thursday morning. For two years. Rain or shine.

It had been weeks now since anything unusual had happened in Belle Haven. The grass had grown back over Otto Browning’s grave. The water in the Hutters’ well was fresh and cold. Even at the edge of town, boreholes that had once fairly whistled were often quiet now, and the fumes they vented were mild, the smoke infirm. In the face of all this, Rachel had allowed herself to be seduced by summer: by the scepters of corn that raced upward, creaking and snapping, through the quiet summer nights; by the children stalking crayfish along the shady banks of Raccoon Creek; by the black storms that blew in from the west, lifting the branches of the trees, flashing the white, warning backs of the leaves.

As Rachel headed for the hollow, she thought only good thoughts, put Joe and Harry Gallagher out of her mind and with them, unknowing, the lesson Harry had taught her: that seduction can come with fangs.

On the way through the town, Rachel bought a dozen hot rolls from Angela, a slab of honey ham from the grocery store, and a bottle of homemade grape juice and a quart basket of tomatoes from a farm truck parked at the side of the road. She packed the food into her basket and lugged it across a wide field and down into Caspar’s Hollow, taking turns with her arms, watching for the copperheads that liked to nap on bits of hot slate.

As she came through the trees at the bottom of the hill, Rachel looked up smiling. She took another step, still smiling. Her eyes saw that something was wrong, but her feet kept moving. Her lips kept smiling. Her heart kept beating. There, on the left, across a small field of clover, was the old barn where the black kittens were always born. There, to the right, was the flower garden that grew to a luscious tangle, seeded itself unaided, offered itself to the honeybees and the birds. The house where Ross had always lived should have been there too. It should have been near the garden. But it was not.

Rachel dropped the basket and ran. She tripped in the clover and raced on again, screaming for Ross. Where his house had been she could now see, amazingly strange, the peak of the roof with its old, mossy tiles poking up through the soil, the top edge of an attic window, unbroken, the brick of a chimney rising up out of the ground as if it offered passage to the center of the hot, revolving world.

Rachel was brought up, panting, by the sight. The bit of roof, the chimney, that was all. The soil was gray all around where the house had been. Rachel took a step onto the strange ground, and her foot disappeared, she began to sink, quickly, her other foot bracing against the lip of firmer ground, her arms flapping in the air, hands wild, mouth working. She threw herself backward, scrabbled at the sparse grass, rolled away from the big grave where Ross Caspar was now buried, turned toward the hills, and ran.

She ran past the basket where she’d dropped it, ran up the path through the woods; ran until her lungs were seared. Then she ran some more, her mouth full of paste and heat, her bare legs scratched, sweating, stuck all over with seeds.

At the top of the hill, in the field of tall grass, Rachel lay down, choking on hot phlegm and the memory of Ross’s rooftop. There