Doug Rice
The Work of Fire
Years before Bob returned from Vietnam, the Compson house caught fire and burned completely to the ground. Nothing remained of the house or of the family, aside from ashes and a few scattered rumors. The house disappeared from the earth. This fire that put an end to the Compsons was the kind of fire that burns fire. It burned so hot that the firefighters thought it would destroy the entire neighborhood, but through divine intervention, or something else holy and unspeakable, or perhaps through something unholy and most likely too evil for words, only the Compson house burned and burned and burned.
Neighbors say that fire burned for years. Some say it is still burning, that it will always burn and that nothing will ever be settled. Those flames leapt up into the night sky, as if they were seeking enlightenment or redemption. Houses on either side of the Compson house were unharmed. The walls of those houses did not even become warm. Children stood in their yards watching the flames reaching out of the earth toward those heavens. Their parents told them to be careful, to not get too close to the flames; in even softer voices, they told their children to pray and to be thankful. “God is good. God is kind. There are lessons to be learned.”
When all that fire had grown tired of being fire and just quit on itself, only a scorched hole in the earth and a small pile of ashes remained. Nothing else. No charred wood. Not a refrigerator or a stove. Not sad, abandoned mementos. Nothing. The house and everything in it had been reduced to a single pile of ashes. Everything that everyone wished could be forgotten, but that would never truly be forgotten, rested in those ashes. The Compson family was missing. They still are. Years later, a new house was built where the Compson house once was, and a man named Bob bought that new house when he returned from the Vietnam war.
With that Compson house burned down into the earth, no one who remained in the neighborhood held onto any sort of belief. The words had been burned out of the Bibles in every house for miles around, and the souls of all those who lived nearby were eaten by those flames. All the faith that everyone who lived in the Compson neighborhood had ever held dear to their hearts perished. More than any other kind of faith, these people had lost their faith in the possibility of enchantment. And that did something to each of them. It changed them in ways that made them doubt their children and made them think twice before taking God at His word.
Nearly every day, the oldest of Bob’s neighbors, Mr. Fenneston, pointed all that out to Bob. “You can rebuild a house,” he shouted over at Bob while he was trimming his rosebushes, “but you can’t ever get belief back. Lumber and bricks isn’t belief. You can’t make faith and trust appear out of thin air. You can’t.” The old man turned red in the face with anger. He nearly spit the words across the street at Bob. Drool dripped from the corner of his mouth. “You can’t rescue what’s already been gone, Bob. What has been taken is taken.” He wiped drool off his chin with the back of his hand. “Every burning is a burning forever.”
Mr. Fenneston shook his clippers at Bob with such rigor that they fell out of his hand to the ground. “It takes more than wood and nails and shingles and paint. More than all that,” he said as he bent over to retrieve the fallen clippers. “More than anything you can imagine, Bob. You’re not man enough to even begin imagining what needs to be imagined to get done what needs to be done. There’s no resurrection, no rising from dead ashes.” The old man spit at the ground. “You ruined it for us.” He turned his back to Bob and cut into the stem of one of the rose bushes like he wanted to destroy the bush, kill it, send it back to the great beyond.
Bob tried to explain that he was not to blame. That it was true that he had done other things, bad things, in that war, but that he was not the one who rebuilt the Compson house. Investors bought the plot of land and built this new house. He was not the one who started the fire. He had never seen the old Compson house, did not even know what it looked like, never met the Compsons. He was in Vietnam when all this happened. He just wanted to live as close to his sister as he could without causing problems.
On the day he moved into the modest two-bedroom house, Mrs. Fenneston brought him an apple pie, one with a crust that would literally melt in his mouth. “Why’d they even try to rebuild the Compsons’ house? It makes no sense,” she said. “What with all that happened and all that could happen, all that seemed to be waiting to happen.” Mrs. Fenneston appeared to be gazing in slow misery beyond the house that stood before her eyes, off into the past, into a shadowy vision of those Compson windows that had burned away. “You have that same look in your eyes. Compson eyes. Like you left something you needed to do back in the past, and you still want to do it. Those Compsons kept too much under their floorboards. Hidden cries.
“Those parents trying to heal their children of whatever it was they thought was wrong,” she continued. “Giving them both, boy and girl, the same name, like there was no difference, not in name, not in flesh. And old man Compson had stories of his own, dark ones. And he had to tell them, like something was forcing him to. He carried them with him from his own past, up from Mississippi in his bones and in his feet, carried them wet and lonely from other rivers. Angry rivers that flood too often. Stories that became a part of you once you heard them. Some say that’s what did it, that’s what caused it all to happen so quick.” Mrs. Fenneston told all this to Bob while his friends carried his scant belongings into the house. “Sorry as I am to say it aloud to you, I’d rather remember that house and their family, than see this. See the Compsons’ two Quentins in the yard playing, mirrorlike, as near to being identical twins as you can get without being true twins. Mistaking the boy for the girl and the girl for the boy. Likely there was not much of a difference when it came down to it. The past doesn’t die just because it’s not here any longer. You can’t rid yourself of it. It stays with you in the worst of ways. What has burned has burned.”
Mrs. Fenneston looked at Bob with a tenderness that he had not seen before. He nearly blushed. He looked down at the pie, then he looked back up at Mrs. Fenneston, nodded his head without fully understanding what he was agreeing with. The two stood in the quiet. Nothing much happened. They simply stood beside each other. Bob cleared his throat, tried to chase the quiet away. He thanked Mrs. Fenneston for the pie and told her he had to get back to moving. He told her that he did not want his sister to become upset with him.
“You be careful with all that,” Mrs. Fenneston told Bob. “Be careful beneath the eyes of God, and you be careful with….” A light breeze carried off her voice. “Careful.” Then Mrs. Fenneston walked away. Bob watched her cross the street, watched other neighbors hide themselves behind their curtains, behind their blinds. When Mrs. Fenneston arrived safely on the other side, Bob turned around and walked up the steps of his house. And he felt all those neighbors looking at him again, peeking through their curtains and blinds. A war does that to a man, makes him more aware than he need be, makes a man feel things in the back of his neck, in his spine, things that eventually break a man’s heart.
The shadows falling from Bob’s house lied. They had minds of their own, wandering souls searching for bodies. The pain that the Compsons could not take with them into the afterlife waited in those shadows. When shadows extended from Bob’s house onto the sidewalk, neighbors tiptoed around the edges of them, so as not to step on them or in them or, worse yet, to fall down into them. They feared it was possible to become lost, to become forgetful, to drown in those shadows, and they feared what that drowning might do to them. When the shadows disappeared at night, the neighbors became more troubled. In the light of day they could see where they marked the sidewalk, the lawn, their bodies. At night, the shadows continued to mark the earth, but they disappeared into the dark beneath the dark. The night cannot form shadows; the night can only hide them and make them that much more dangerous. The way the past shadows your heart. There and not there.
Some mornings, faint wisps of smoke came out of the ground in Bob’s front yard. The earth itself was still burning from the Compson fire, and it seemed angry. Bob told himself the smoke was just fog drifting off the river, or morning dew turning into mist from the heat of the early sun, and rising off the grass. But in his heart he knew better; he knew the smoke was smoke. He smelled it, and, when he touched the ground where it was coming from, the ground was hot—not just warm but hot, hotter than when the orange smoke spread across the beaches in ‘Nam.
Bob loved his house. Spoke to it. Touched the walls with his fingertips, almost could feel what would have been there if whatever was there in the beginning would have stayed. On the interior walls of his house, he wrote stories backwards, trying to discover where they began and why their beginnings mattered. Sentences never made much sense to him unless they caused more trouble than they solved. And he did not trust sentences. A sentence never cured anything; at best, a sentence was a thrilling misunderstanding of what you desired to say with your touch. He believed that each sentence had a shadow sentence, one more powerful than the physical sentence itself.
In his front yard, he carved his dreams into the trees. Not his hopes for a future, but his dreams that haunted his sleep. He carved the words of his dreams into the trunk of the trees and into their limbs in handwriting so small that his dreams were nearly invisible. He was careful not to harm the trees. He wanted his dreams to live with the trees. He felt it important to have his dreams become a part of time, of weather—rain, sun, snow—and part of the seasons—blossoms, leaves, the falling of the leaves. His front yard was a green world. Bob casually dropped seeds on the ground and they flowered. Most mornings, he sat on his porch with his dreams in the trees and with flowers sprouting in the most unexpected places.
In his back yard, where the Compson twins played with each other, he spit onto the dry earth, hoping something would grow. But the dirt resisted. Nothing grew in his back yard. God had made that patch of yard for keeping the dead dead. His back yard remained barren even when it rained. Without trees. Without grass. Without flowers. Without shrubs. The dirt itself refused to turn to mud. It stayed dry, hard, cracked. All nature of things broken beyond repair, things broken beyond recognition, things that could only truthfully be called things littered Bob’s back yard. Some days, around high noon, darkness fell around the back of Bob’s house, shrouded the yard in it, turned shadows into ice, even in summer, created the kind of cold that hurts a man’s skin, that forces a man to remember the forgotten. The cold that comes before the burning.