Three Children and a Pot of Soup
Then I went to see Bill Rasmussen at the bank, and we worked out a plan to sell the oldest fifteen cows in the spring and keep the rest. It was arithmetic, not a miracle. But I walked out with something in my chest I had not felt in years, and it took until supper to know it was plain, stubborn hope.
I woke on the nineteenth of November at ten past four, knowing something was wrong before I knew what.
I put my feet on the cold floor and went into the hall. The quilt lay folded in a neat square on the boards. The dog was gone too. I did not wake Marie. I found the back door unlocked, the grass white with frost, and a single set of small footprints running blue through the rime and down the lane.
I knew where he had gone.
I was afraid. I walked fast and then I jogged, which I had not done since my thirties, and I prayed the whole half mile with no grace at all. Lord, let him be all right. I’ll keep the cows. I’ll keep everything.
The Mercer place was a black square in the starlight, the chimney standing in the middle like a gravestone. And on the front steps, the only part that had not burned, a thin boy sat with the dog pressed against his side.
I slowed down and made noise on the frozen grass.
“Danny.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll go back. I just wanted to see it.”
“I’m not mad.”
“I’ll get up and do chores.”
“Son, I’m not mad.”
I sat down beside him. My knees objected. The smell of old char was all around us, and the stars were so thick overhead you would have thought God had spilled them.
“I made toast,” he said.
I waited.
“That night. About midnight. I was hungry. Mom told me a hundred times to unplug the toaster, and I don’t remember if I did.” He picked at the new pink skin on his palm. “I think I burned down our house.”
He said it flat, no tears, the way a person says something he has told himself over and over in the dark.
Something went through me, part grief and part fury, not at any one person but at the plain fact that a boy had carried that by himself for five weeks without one of us knowing to ask.
“Danny, I’m going to ask you to do something. Come to the fire hall with me Saturday. Don Lockhart’s the chief. He walked it with the state man afterward. Ask him about the toaster, and ask him what the state says.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know. I’ll be there. Will you?”
A long time passed. The dog sighed.
“Okay,” he said.
Saturday morning Don Lockhart was in the bay washing down the pumper, a big man with a gray mustache and forearms like fence posts. He took one look at the boy and turned off the hose. “Danny. I’ve been hoping you’d come by.”
In the little back office he pulled the state fire marshal’s report from a cabinet. “It came in the mail Friday afternoon, son. I was fixing to drive it out to your house tomorrow.” He turned it so Danny could see.
“It started here,” he said, a thick finger on the diagram. “In the wall behind the kitchen, by the old fuse box. That wiring went in around 1948, cloth wrapped, brittle as dry spaghetti. It started inside the wall, son. Nobody could have seen it.”
“I made toast,” Danny said, very quietly. “At midnight.”