Little Fires
by Matthew Neill Null
When Route 7 was built, the engineers just followed a blacksnake up the hollow. With each switchback and horseshoe nonsense, you believe the joke a little more. Out 7, the town signs are green and faded, bullet-pocked and stamped with UNINCORPORATED beneath the names—St. Joseph and Basnettville, Roulette and Rafes Run—well, Anthem was incorporated until the town council voted to dissolve itself, which has come to be regarded as a grievous mistake. It happened when no one wanted to take another term as mayor. The position was a thankless, unpaid burden. Grant-writing, tracking down road menders, etc. Tended to be held by one of the six or seven college grads still left in town, mostly teachers in the county schools, some of them husbands and wives.
“Worst game of musical chairs on earth,” they called it.
And now, under a shocking blue winter sky, several ex-mayors gather on the main drag with a few dozen other souls. Their voices one low bank of frost. Together they watch an excavator knock down the scorched walls of the cut-stone financial building that burned over the weekend. The machine roots around in the mess, smoothing the crush, damping it down, bucket clanging, with all the jerky motions of a toddler at play. When the ex-mayors were children, three times as many people thrived in Anthem. The census claims that 157 remain. Every set of ears can hear the excavator do its work.
When a corner falls, the onlookers block their mouths against the dust.
“We never should have disincorporated,” says an ex-mayor, which touches off a fresh round of argument. The lady can only cry, “Well it’s true and you know it!” When the council dissolved, Anthem was suddenly ineligible for state grant money to tear down eyesores and firetraps. But the Farmers & Merchants Bank, if void of windows and full of busted timbers, isn’t exactly what they had in mind; they mean the scraggly, listing drug houses on either end of Main Street like hateful bookends. No, this here Farmers & Merchants stone was chiseled by the hands of skilled, itinerant Calabrese and could be called lovely, the closest Anthem had to a cathedral. Hard to believe Anthem once hosted two banks, back in timber-boom days, and the other stands across the way even now, defunct like its twin, looking nervous.
When will it burn? One by one, an arsonist is taking downtown buildings no one would have chosen. Some psychopath. That said, hell, a few sheepishly call it better than a federal grant, considering how tricky and expensive it would have been to coax out all the asbestos shingles. Town’s a row of three-story brick buildings from hope-high 1904. They’re glutted with the stuff.
This touches off fresh complaint.
By three p.m. the bank’s demolished, except for one square, stubby ruin that juts from the ground: the bank vault. Someone built it right. The excavator can’t manage to push it over. The best it can do is bust off the wheel. When night falls, ex-mayors worry.
In one of those lamented houses on the far end of Main Street, before the excavator powers up, Annette thumps the trunks of her pale legs to work blood into them—the skin is cratered with diabetes and varicosed, and her granddaughter says it gives her the creeps to look at them, foolish child. “Can’t them doctors do nothing for you?” she’s forever asking. The feet swell like red balloons with mysterious fluid. “Here, cat,” Annette calls, putting off the moment she must tilt herself from bed and push logs into the fire. The air is frigid. Ice has formed on the panes. She has already removed the breathing machine and rubbed away the red lines the elastic leaves on her face. Across the room the stove is an orange worm where the banked fire shines through a poor mending job.
“Up and at ’em,” she commands her swollen legs, then painfully eases herself up. She uses her left arm, the one the stroke spared—her strong arm, thank God. The fire is prodded back to life. The coffeemaker ticks and burbles. The cat snakes in figure-eights around her legs and her walker. The snake-killing cat that moves like a snake; it’s like a riddle. Crosswords, riddles: Annette tries to keep her mind sharp, running these files over it. She likes the black moment before sunrise, she likes a little peace.
When outsiders drive past, they assume Annette’s home is abandoned the way it slouches and sheds roof shingles, how the lawn grows wild and implements rust in the grass. She’ll startle them by popping her head out a window.
She approaches this day with sweetness and dread. Her sons, her daughters, and her innumerable grandchildren may appear. Every bed and couch will be spoken for. Annette, it is known, is someone who gets a check.
The checks arrive today—full disability from the stroke; dead husband’s pension—and two generations will come to peck away what they can. (Three soon, with Terry’s baby, she reminds herself.) They’ll offer rides to St. Joe to make the deposit, maybe a trip to the café and the dollar store. At day’s end the stragglers will curse her for giving out money “to them that needs it least,” but just the same, they’ll stick around and the house will swell for a few days, then empty like a wineskin, leaving her in peace, if lonesome.
She supposes she better make herself a bite, her sugar being what it is.
Does anything happen here (besides a fire or two)? The sun has not risen. There is no sound. Deer move on the ridge. Thin smoke curls from chimneys and is sharp on the nose. The lone store will open shortly, then the post office. As dank and small as a cellar, the P.O. was supposed to be shuttered last year, but Delegate Pethtel got involved and Senator Manchin made his displeasure known. “It will tear the heart out,” he said. “The very heart.” Both the store and the post office have been broken into numerous times. With log-chain and trailer-hitch, someone ripped the door off Minerva’s store and dragged it all the way to Rafes Run. They took petty cash, cigarettes, and $2,000 worth of scratch-off tickets.
Warm her cold body, cat. The excavator mutters in diesel, the sun is shining now at Annette’s house, rural delivery pulls up to the box, first on the route—living near the post office has its benefits.
As always, her grandson Terry finds a way to get there first, though he lives the furthest away, apartment-surfing Grant Town as he does.
Singing out, “Here you go, grandma!” he feeds chunks of oak to the stove, which commences to kick out an awesome, skin-drying heat. Now he lifts the coffee-can. “I’ll carry out the ash.” The creek-bank turns gray. Then he gets on her kitchen telephone (for this end of the county still lacks a tower) and before you know it, he’s got a ride lined up for her when the bank drive-through lane opens at 8:30. She tells him that respectable people wait until the lobby opens at 9. Terry smiles. Got no time for that. St. Joe’s nineteen miles each way—blacksnake miles—they shan’t dally. By 10:30 a.m., his grandmother deposited back at her kitchen table, he will go to a friend’s and slide a needle into his bony foot and sleep the sweetest sleep.
On the way to the bank in Terry’s other friend’s car that rattles like a bag of hammers, Annette and her grandson catch up on one another’s lives. “I worry about them fires,” she admits to Terry and the friend as snow-covered hills slide by. “Awfullest way to die, I can think of.” (“I can think of much, much worse,” mutters the driver.)
“Don’t worry, grandma, your house is out on its own. Deeeee-tached,” Terry says, singing it and stretching it like a cowboy singer.
“Poor Minerva! Her store’s attached!”
“Minerva should’ve thought of that,” says the nameless friend as he jacks up the heat.
Annette scoffs. Talking nonsense. The friend’s annoyed because he had to move “all my shit” to jam her walker in the trunk. She says, “Store been there seventy years. My uncle used to raise beef and mutton for Arliss. What Arliss didn’t grow for the store, he asked dad,” she says with throaty pride. Though that statement makes zero factual sense. Her dad was a quarryman—maybe she missed a pill or two.
Terry says, “Hey Wayne, you know that big butcher-block she got on the porch? That’s from Arliss’s. Remember, grandma, how me and brother carried it down the road for you? We knew you’d like it. Pret near killed us both, damn.”
Annette smiles. Terry is her favorite, he’s the joker, he’s got her dad’s reddish hair. In the bank lot, where he insists on being left, she counts him out a few fifty dollar bills into his flat palm, “with a baby on the way and all.” No, alas, he can’t travel back to Anthem with her, he’s going in other directions. “Wayne’ll take care of you, love you grandma.”
She’s too shocked to argue.
This new generation.
Half an hour later, shuddering back into downtown Anthem, Terry’s friend mumbles, “Fire’s the best thing could happen to this place.”
Annette purses her lips. It is not a minority opinion in the county. Even when she was young, Anthem was on the slide. Annette’s husband was like a lot of men, he had to drive an hour and a half each way to the chlorine plant in the valley, and of a winter when the roads locked up, he roomed in a boarding house for weeks at a time. The railroad left Anthem in ’57, the clothespin factory and the mill in ’72. High school empty and echoing. Her dad’s quarry a tangle of briar and holes. Each closure like a hammer-blow to the face. Even the chlorine plant’s down to a hundred employees; the union hall closed; they turned Terry down. For months, small fires have been swallowing this and that on Route 7. The depot one week. The abandoned Sinclair station with its concrete dinosaur of peeling green the next. But none really hurt like the Farmers & Merchants, with its knapped sandstone and the corner arcade the three pillars made, where you could rest for a moment in the shade to joke, rumormonger, and flirt, where Annette met her girlfriends once upon a time.
“Farming’s dead,” says the friend. “Butcher-block, what in the hell is he on about?”
For the first time, she really looks at the gruff boy at the steering wheel, twentysomething, she reckons, like Terry. He has a soft chin, shaggy hair, and a white t-shirt so clean he might have just pulled it from a plastic pack. He keeps touching his ballcap, he can’t seem to decide if he wants it to face the back or the front. His earlobes are stretched to alarming proportions by black discs. Still, he extracts her walker without a word of complaint and escorts her into her house like a gentleman, then surprises Annette by asking if he can come in, maybe drink a cup of coffee.
“Well I suppose that’s fine. What’s your name?”
“Wayne.”
“Ain’t allergic to felines, are you, Wayne?”
“I love ’em.”
“Then come on in, Wayne.”
Her legs ache, so Wayne is told to help himself to cream from the refrigerator as she drops on the couch with her purse and her pocketbook. “You got the real stuff,” he says admiringly, carton in hand. “None that corn-syrup from the pump.” His sneakers squelch on the curling linoleum where snow has melted; his smile is not unpleasant. “God bless the cow,” he says.
He helps her trade shoes for slippers. Every shoe wants to pinch her toes nowadays, she explains. Even inanimate objects gang up against her.
He nods sympathetically. “Getting old’s rough.”
She was wrong about Wayne, perhaps.
The cats, for their part, rigorously avoid the boy. He and Annette pass a good deal of the morning together as she wonders when the rest of her hangers-on will show; evidently none are as daring, as obvious, as Terry. So, she and Wayne speak of the weather, of the roads, of Terry, Terry’s baby, Terry’s baby’s mother (neither are admiring), the fires and whom they suspect, of Annette’s numberless ailments and the 13 different medications she takes each day. A second pot of coffee’s made. Now and again she makes him chuck a log in the stove. There’s no television to watch. It disappeared last month and she can’t say she misses it at all.
“Seasoned oak,” she says, feeling sleepy and warm.
“I been driving pilot car,” says Wayne. “There on the frack jobs.”
“I wondered what the rack of lights meant.”
“I got a sign I put on the back. This is my one day off. Booming out there! I tried to get Terry to drive pilot. But he don’t got no car. Surprised me.”
“He did have one.”
“Yeah, and driving around without insurance and the tires as bald as your butt!”
Your car’s worse off than his, she’s tempted to say. “Don’t talk nasty.”
“Sorry. I guess he sold it.”
“That’s right, a little Hyundai.” She remembers now. “Needing money for something. His grandpa would’ve strangled him for buying foreign. Between me and you, I ain’t even sure he’s got a license.”
“They’re going around stealing catalytic convertors, cut ’em right out from under you. Pretty good money for the platinum in ’em,” Wayne says admiringly. “Platinum’s way up.”
After that, the conversation begins to lull.
“Ain’t ye bored?” Annette yawns, pining for a nap. “Can’t be fun hanging out with the old folks.”
“Oh it’s tolerable.”
Annette shifts in her chair. “Well, you done had your coffee.”
“Terry told me to wait for him.”
This hadn’t been mentioned. Understanding floods her mind. “Honey, Terry won’t be coming back. Once he got that money in hand, he’s gone another month. I love him, but it’s true.”
“He said he’d come right back to me.” Wayne grows agitated. “I don’t go driving people around for my health. He said he’d come back.”
“Listen. Why would he have you drop him in St. Joe just to come right back? How does that make any sense at all? How will he get here? Don’t got no vehicle.”
“He said the guy didn’t like him bringing… aw never mind. Damn it, Terry,” he says as if Annette’s grandson were standing here in front of them. “After all I done for you. I loved you, bro.”
“People will disappoint you.”
“That’s for sure,” he says glumly.
“Children, grandchildren, all of them.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re welcome to wait, but I’m telling you, Terry ain’t coming, you might as well go. I’ll tell him to call you.”
“He won’t.” The voice is desolate.
“I’m going to lay down a minute. I’m expecting more relations shortly. Surprised they ain’t here yet. Wake me if they come? Ought to be a crossword there in the paper, you want to work it. I done half.”
She begins to retreat painfully on her walker, then a thought crosses her mind, you can see it ghosting across her face as clouds cross the moon.
She picks up her purse from the coffee table and takes it with her back to the bedroom. “Throw a log on now and then,” she cries.
After a minute, Wayne follows.
But her grandson Terry does make it to Anthem—well, not quite to town limits, but close. Terry and the mother of his unborn child are kicking timbers in a deconsecrated church up Ministry Hollow, drawing on the walls with marker to pass the time, shivering as they wait for Wayne in twenty-eight degrees, for the two friends, muddle-headed by need, have miscommunicated the process.
The church is packed with square bales of hay. The pews have been torn out, every trinket filched and sold: the bell, the window frames. Even the hinges are gone, sold to an “architectural salvage” up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can see their pale outlines against darker wood.
She says, “Where the hell is he?”
“I dunno, I told him I’d meet him back here. I don’t like holding.”
“Did you say when you wanted to meet him?”
“No.”
“You dumb hump.”
“You’re the dumb hump!” He pushes her slightly, and she rocks back on her heels, then they crash together, laughing. He likes the way she’s dyed her hair into purple wings.
“Watch the baby.” They fall on bales.
“This is ridiculous.” Pieces of straw cling to their hair and their clothes. “Wayne,” he bellows to the altar. “WAYNE!”
“Maybe you’re confused.”
“Maybe he’s confused, you ever think that? Oh shit, is that a mouse?” She jumps—then punches his arm. “You tramp. You lush.”
“Tramp? I’m mayor of this here church. Mayor Terry.”
They draw pentagrams, feeling devilish. But the fun ebbs, their fingers ache with chill. Terry says soberly, “I’ll give him a bit. But it’s effing cold.” He tears a lath or two from the wall. They rip handfuls from the bales. They pile whatever will burn in the center of the floor. The Bic comes out. The fire is no bigger than a bread loaf. After it brings their fingers back to life, they grow drowsy and pass out around it and dream of their futures and of the child knitting itself together inside the girl, the child they want to call Nettie (like Annette, you see?) if female and who knows how long they rest? But Terry hears a murmuring from the far edge of the country of sleep, something that rouses him like a trusted friend. A tongue of fire’s licking up the walls, the ceiling’s black with smoke, and now Terry and his girl go dancing out into the snow. When the church doors are flung open and the oxygen hits, the smoke becomes a roaring orange ceiling.
After Wayne strangles the old woman, he drives to Basnettville, makes his connect (Brian Lassiter), hurriedly buys a tea, and gets high in a gas station bathroom on the backside of the building. The key is attached to a ruler.
Should’ve gone to Brian Lassiter’s in the first place. Brian he can pretty well trust.
Brian, though, cut his stuff with Fent the last time around. That’s the word around the campfire. Got two dead high-school girls in Grant Town morgue over that.
After, Wayne lazily shoots blood on the walls, where people have scrawled phone numbers and swastikas and little poems. It’s hard to believe that Terry ripped him off—they’ve known each other, what, all their lives? Two ridge-runners who liked to nap in the back of Vocational Agricultural. That class was a laugh. The ridgelands are rocky and poor and impacted clay even in the bottoms and everyone ditched farming back in the ’50s, racing for the chemical plants and union scale, pleased as punch to leave it behind, no matter what the hand-wringing editorialists and poets say. Nobody cried. His grandma, a dirt farm girl, a mother of seven, said the day she could buy a sliced loaf of Wonderbread in plastic wrap at the store was the happiest day of her life. “How do you retire with a million dollars as a farmer?” even the Vo-Ag teacher asked them first day of class. Silence. “Start with two million.” Maybe it’s different out west. The pictures in their textbook—shiny green machinery, table-flat expanse of soy in martial rows, smiling subsidized faces—looked nothing like West Virginia. Wayne can recall just a couple full-timers left in the county. Now let’s be honest: Old Jack Mavety’s propped up on tax breaks and frack money, leasing out his back forty to Chesapeake Energy for a massive well-pad, a play-farmer who’s big into politics with designs on County Commission (pay’s not much but the healthcare and the pension’s startling good considering how little work it is, requiring a day or two at the courthouse each week at most, everybody wants to be County Commissioner, you’ll have to sort through seven or eight names on the ballot, easy). On the other hand, Young Tracee Sixx works like a scalded dog with his high tunnels and his highland cattle, but his wife’s a guidance counselor and they’re definitely living off her paycheck and bennies, be surprised if Tracee breaks even on the beef and pastured pork (“organic!”) he ferries all the way to Bridgeport to sell to professors and surgeons at that fruity little market. Tracee was in Vo-Ag too, sitting in front and earnestly filling up his notebook, snagging FFA ribbons left and right and looking like a youth pastor. Wayne and Terry would laugh, laugh, laugh at him. Don’t even have a right hay barn, just that stupid deconsecrated church.
It takes Wayne several minutes to realize that someone’s pounding on the door. A mother and a little boy shoot him an evil look as he staggers out.
“Excuse me,” he says, swinging a grocery bag.
“He couldn’t hold it!” the woman cries. The little boy pissed himself.
Wayne pushes the key into her hand. He starts the car to blast some heat to the feet, which feel like they’re part of someone else’s body. Even his kneecaps are cold, like doorknobs. The radio plays country to a click track, the heater throbs, and finally it starts to feel cozy. Humming along, one eye on the road, he paws through the shopping bag and studies the old woman’s thirteen medications, holding the bottles to the light like a man candling eggs. To his chagrin, none seem to be worth a damn, the names are weird, but you never know, when he gets somewhere with cell service he’ll Google search the names. One sort of looks like Lortab, fat and white and enticing, and he can sell it off to stupid teenagers.
Clarity won’t come until later, much later. For now he doesn’t sweat, he doesn’t panic, though he does curse himself for not thinking to set Annette’s house on fire, cover his tracks, blame the arsonist. Ah well. He has $1,120 of the old woman’s money, and he fills his tank all the way, feeling prosperous.
The dry wood shrieks. Terry and his girl race from the fire, muttering, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” They really didn’t mean to do that, they just craved a little warmth.
The church burns cheerfully, as if it had been pining for this.
Already the heat is pushing them away, far past the Saturn-ring of melted snow.
She says, “Oh, Tracee’s gonna flip, he needs that hay.”
Smoke is spiraling out of the hollow. They haul ass out of there in her sister’s car.
“I feel bad for Tracee,” she continues. “Fuck, he’s a good guy.” No matter what the ex-mayors want to believe, there is no lone psychopath on the loose. Just misadventures and cloth wiring, home chemistry and pure boredom, the lurch of capital and the march of time.
“God. Please stop talking.” Terry settles his head against the cold window. “This ain’t a big deal like you’re making it.”
Her eyes widen. “Burning a church?”
“Hay barn. Hay barn!”
Fuck Wayne, then. Go to grandma’s and let the others coo and touch his girl’s belly like they’ve been asking to. He’ll settle up later with Wayne.
“Do we smell like smoke?” she asks.
He plucks at his shirt and lifts it to his nose.
“Are we going to hell?” she asks.
A volunteer firetruck comes rocketing toward from whence they came, clanging and fishtailing, looking cockeyed and wild for a machine.
“I was happy for once,” Terry moans. “Day started out great and now I can’t see it getting any worse.”
She strokes his hair. He’s crying, he’s blubbering.
Many cars are parked out front of Annette’s, to the point they’re spilling into Main Street or Route 7 or whatever it is. “Look at the vultures a-circlin’,” says Terry of his relatives. Then he squints. “Hold on.” Police cruisers are mixed in among them. The doorway is being draped in yellow tape. Drive! Terry says to put the pedal down—this will be much discussed in court, where he is shoved into a suit and Wayne wears orange and is shackled to his own waist. “Put the pedal down? Those were your exact words?” the Prosecutor asks Terry. “You didn’t want to check on this woman you supposedly adore?” But the Public Defender pipes up, says he doesn’t like the line of conjecture here, explains that Wayne’s tale of a set-up is just him trying to cut a sweet deal with the police and that Terry loved, loved, loved his grandmother, he’d never betray her—but the judge doesn’t like the looks of Terry at all, he’s seen a hundred Terrys lately, and where’s the rest of the family to support the defendant? (Kind of says it all when you think about it.) These drug people will do anything. The county is outraged. The county cries for blood. Terry beseeches Wayne with his eyes; Wayne looks off. Prosecutor, proceed.
It’s often said in the county that they won’t get you for what you done, but they’ll get you for something.
Annette’s house is condemned by the county in the wake of this. Arrests clean out the other hated abode.
The bank vault, though, the bank vault survives it all. No infamy, no outrage, can move it. For years to come, that iron room and its deteriorating shell of brick will stand in a field of swallowtails and poison ivy, pop-bottles and briar, condom wrappers and touch-me-nots. Much photographed, it gathers more graffiti each year, lashings of red, black, and blue. Teenagers and adults drive to Anthem from out-of-state to pose themselves against the decay. They explore. They traipse the rotting staircases, they drape themselves like slaughtered ingenues over window ledges, they dodge syringes, they post images to Instagram where they are very much liked. The “urban explorers” spend a little money at Minerva’s store, say the ex-mayors, you got to give them that. A she-owl with mournful eyes likes to sit in the ruined wall, not hunting, not doing much of anything you can tell. She produces no young. She glares at the camera’s eye, daring you to take it. Look.
“Worst game of musical chairs on earth,” they called it.
And now, under a shocking blue winter sky, several ex-mayors gather on the main drag with a few dozen other souls. Their voices one low bank of frost. Together they watch an excavator knock down the scorched walls of the cut-stone financial building that burned over the weekend. The machine roots around in the mess, smoothing the crush, damping it down, bucket clanging, with all the jerky motions of a toddler at play. When the ex-mayors were children, three times as many people thrived in Anthem. The census claims that 157 remain. Every set of ears can hear the excavator do its work.
When a corner falls, the onlookers block their mouths against the dust.
“We never should have disincorporated,” says an ex-mayor, which touches off a fresh round of argument. The lady can only cry, “Well it’s true and you know it!” When the council dissolved, Anthem was suddenly ineligible for state grant money to tear down eyesores and firetraps. But the Farmers & Merchants Bank, if void of windows and full of busted timbers, isn’t exactly what they had in mind; they mean the scraggly, listing drug houses on either end of Main Street like hateful bookends. No, this here Farmers & Merchants stone was chiseled by the hands of skilled, itinerant Calabrese and could be called lovely, the closest Anthem had to a cathedral. Hard to believe Anthem once hosted two banks, back in timber-boom days, and the other stands across the way even now, defunct like its twin, looking nervous.
When will it burn? One by one, an arsonist is taking downtown buildings no one would have chosen. Some psychopath. That said, hell, a few sheepishly call it better than a federal grant, considering how tricky and expensive it would have been to coax out all the asbestos shingles. Town’s a row of three-story brick buildings from hope-high 1904. They’re glutted with the stuff.
This touches off fresh complaint.
By three p.m. the bank’s demolished, except for one square, stubby ruin that juts from the ground: the bank vault. Someone built it right. The excavator can’t manage to push it over. The best it can do is bust off the wheel. When night falls, ex-mayors worry.
In one of those lamented houses on the far end of Main Street, before the excavator powers up, Annette thumps the trunks of her pale legs to work blood into them—the skin is cratered with diabetes and varicosed, and her granddaughter says it gives her the creeps to look at them, foolish child. “Can’t them doctors do nothing for you?” she’s forever asking. The feet swell like red balloons with mysterious fluid. “Here, cat,” Annette calls, putting off the moment she must tilt herself from bed and push logs into the fire. The air is frigid. Ice has formed on the panes. She has already removed the breathing machine and rubbed away the red lines the elastic leaves on her face. Across the room the stove is an orange worm where the banked fire shines through a poor mending job.
“Up and at ’em,” she commands her swollen legs, then painfully eases herself up. She uses her left arm, the one the stroke spared—her strong arm, thank God. The fire is prodded back to life. The coffeemaker ticks and burbles. The cat snakes in figure-eights around her legs and her walker. The snake-killing cat that moves like a snake; it’s like a riddle. Crosswords, riddles: Annette tries to keep her mind sharp, running these files over it. She likes the black moment before sunrise, she likes a little peace.
When outsiders drive past, they assume Annette’s home is abandoned the way it slouches and sheds roof shingles, how the lawn grows wild and implements rust in the grass. She’ll startle them by popping her head out a window.
She approaches this day with sweetness and dread. Her sons, her daughters, and her innumerable grandchildren may appear. Every bed and couch will be spoken for. Annette, it is known, is someone who gets a check.
The checks arrive today—full disability from the stroke; dead husband’s pension—and two generations will come to peck away what they can. (Three soon, with Terry’s baby, she reminds herself.) They’ll offer rides to St. Joe to make the deposit, maybe a trip to the café and the dollar store. At day’s end the stragglers will curse her for giving out money “to them that needs it least,” but just the same, they’ll stick around and the house will swell for a few days, then empty like a wineskin, leaving her in peace, if lonesome.
She supposes she better make herself a bite, her sugar being what it is.
Does anything happen here (besides a fire or two)? The sun has not risen. There is no sound. Deer move on the ridge. Thin smoke curls from chimneys and is sharp on the nose. The lone store will open shortly, then the post office. As dank and small as a cellar, the P.O. was supposed to be shuttered last year, but Delegate Pethtel got involved and Senator Manchin made his displeasure known. “It will tear the heart out,” he said. “The very heart.” Both the store and the post office have been broken into numerous times. With log-chain and trailer-hitch, someone ripped the door off Minerva’s store and dragged it all the way to Rafes Run. They took petty cash, cigarettes, and $2,000 worth of scratch-off tickets.
Warm her cold body, cat. The excavator mutters in diesel, the sun is shining now at Annette’s house, rural delivery pulls up to the box, first on the route—living near the post office has its benefits.
As always, her grandson Terry finds a way to get there first, though he lives the furthest away, apartment-surfing Grant Town as he does.
Singing out, “Here you go, grandma!” he feeds chunks of oak to the stove, which commences to kick out an awesome, skin-drying heat. Now he lifts the coffee-can. “I’ll carry out the ash.” The creek-bank turns gray. Then he gets on her kitchen telephone (for this end of the county still lacks a tower) and before you know it, he’s got a ride lined up for her when the bank drive-through lane opens at 8:30. She tells him that respectable people wait until the lobby opens at 9. Terry smiles. Got no time for that. St. Joe’s nineteen miles each way—blacksnake miles—they shan’t dally. By 10:30 a.m., his grandmother deposited back at her kitchen table, he will go to a friend’s and slide a needle into his bony foot and sleep the sweetest sleep.
On the way to the bank in Terry’s other friend’s car that rattles like a bag of hammers, Annette and her grandson catch up on one another’s lives. “I worry about them fires,” she admits to Terry and the friend as snow-covered hills slide by. “Awfullest way to die, I can think of.” (“I can think of much, much worse,” mutters the driver.)
“Don’t worry, grandma, your house is out on its own. Deeeee-tached,” Terry says, singing it and stretching it like a cowboy singer.
“Poor Minerva! Her store’s attached!”
“Minerva should’ve thought of that,” says the nameless friend as he jacks up the heat.
Annette scoffs. Talking nonsense. The friend’s annoyed because he had to move “all my shit” to jam her walker in the trunk. She says, “Store been there seventy years. My uncle used to raise beef and mutton for Arliss. What Arliss didn’t grow for the store, he asked dad,” she says with throaty pride. Though that statement makes zero factual sense. Her dad was a quarryman—maybe she missed a pill or two.
Terry says, “Hey Wayne, you know that big butcher-block she got on the porch? That’s from Arliss’s. Remember, grandma, how me and brother carried it down the road for you? We knew you’d like it. Pret near killed us both, damn.”
Annette smiles. Terry is her favorite, he’s the joker, he’s got her dad’s reddish hair. In the bank lot, where he insists on being left, she counts him out a few fifty dollar bills into his flat palm, “with a baby on the way and all.” No, alas, he can’t travel back to Anthem with her, he’s going in other directions. “Wayne’ll take care of you, love you grandma.”
She’s too shocked to argue.
This new generation.
Half an hour later, shuddering back into downtown Anthem, Terry’s friend mumbles, “Fire’s the best thing could happen to this place.”
Annette purses her lips. It is not a minority opinion in the county. Even when she was young, Anthem was on the slide. Annette’s husband was like a lot of men, he had to drive an hour and a half each way to the chlorine plant in the valley, and of a winter when the roads locked up, he roomed in a boarding house for weeks at a time. The railroad left Anthem in ’57, the clothespin factory and the mill in ’72. High school empty and echoing. Her dad’s quarry a tangle of briar and holes. Each closure like a hammer-blow to the face. Even the chlorine plant’s down to a hundred employees; the union hall closed; they turned Terry down. For months, small fires have been swallowing this and that on Route 7. The depot one week. The abandoned Sinclair station with its concrete dinosaur of peeling green the next. But none really hurt like the Farmers & Merchants, with its knapped sandstone and the corner arcade the three pillars made, where you could rest for a moment in the shade to joke, rumormonger, and flirt, where Annette met her girlfriends once upon a time.
“Farming’s dead,” says the friend. “Butcher-block, what in the hell is he on about?”
For the first time, she really looks at the gruff boy at the steering wheel, twentysomething, she reckons, like Terry. He has a soft chin, shaggy hair, and a white t-shirt so clean he might have just pulled it from a plastic pack. He keeps touching his ballcap, he can’t seem to decide if he wants it to face the back or the front. His earlobes are stretched to alarming proportions by black discs. Still, he extracts her walker without a word of complaint and escorts her into her house like a gentleman, then surprises Annette by asking if he can come in, maybe drink a cup of coffee.
“Well I suppose that’s fine. What’s your name?”
“Wayne.”
“Ain’t allergic to felines, are you, Wayne?”
“I love ’em.”
“Then come on in, Wayne.”
Her legs ache, so Wayne is told to help himself to cream from the refrigerator as she drops on the couch with her purse and her pocketbook. “You got the real stuff,” he says admiringly, carton in hand. “None that corn-syrup from the pump.” His sneakers squelch on the curling linoleum where snow has melted; his smile is not unpleasant. “God bless the cow,” he says.
He helps her trade shoes for slippers. Every shoe wants to pinch her toes nowadays, she explains. Even inanimate objects gang up against her.
He nods sympathetically. “Getting old’s rough.”
She was wrong about Wayne, perhaps.
The cats, for their part, rigorously avoid the boy. He and Annette pass a good deal of the morning together as she wonders when the rest of her hangers-on will show; evidently none are as daring, as obvious, as Terry. So, she and Wayne speak of the weather, of the roads, of Terry, Terry’s baby, Terry’s baby’s mother (neither are admiring), the fires and whom they suspect, of Annette’s numberless ailments and the 13 different medications she takes each day. A second pot of coffee’s made. Now and again she makes him chuck a log in the stove. There’s no television to watch. It disappeared last month and she can’t say she misses it at all.
“Seasoned oak,” she says, feeling sleepy and warm.
“I been driving pilot car,” says Wayne. “There on the frack jobs.”
“I wondered what the rack of lights meant.”
“I got a sign I put on the back. This is my one day off. Booming out there! I tried to get Terry to drive pilot. But he don’t got no car. Surprised me.”
“He did have one.”
“Yeah, and driving around without insurance and the tires as bald as your butt!”
Your car’s worse off than his, she’s tempted to say. “Don’t talk nasty.”
“Sorry. I guess he sold it.”
“That’s right, a little Hyundai.” She remembers now. “Needing money for something. His grandpa would’ve strangled him for buying foreign. Between me and you, I ain’t even sure he’s got a license.”
“They’re going around stealing catalytic convertors, cut ’em right out from under you. Pretty good money for the platinum in ’em,” Wayne says admiringly. “Platinum’s way up.”
After that, the conversation begins to lull.
“Ain’t ye bored?” Annette yawns, pining for a nap. “Can’t be fun hanging out with the old folks.”
“Oh it’s tolerable.”
Annette shifts in her chair. “Well, you done had your coffee.”
“Terry told me to wait for him.”
This hadn’t been mentioned. Understanding floods her mind. “Honey, Terry won’t be coming back. Once he got that money in hand, he’s gone another month. I love him, but it’s true.”
“He said he’d come right back to me.” Wayne grows agitated. “I don’t go driving people around for my health. He said he’d come back.”
“Listen. Why would he have you drop him in St. Joe just to come right back? How does that make any sense at all? How will he get here? Don’t got no vehicle.”
“He said the guy didn’t like him bringing… aw never mind. Damn it, Terry,” he says as if Annette’s grandson were standing here in front of them. “After all I done for you. I loved you, bro.”
“People will disappoint you.”
“That’s for sure,” he says glumly.
“Children, grandchildren, all of them.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re welcome to wait, but I’m telling you, Terry ain’t coming, you might as well go. I’ll tell him to call you.”
“He won’t.” The voice is desolate.
“I’m going to lay down a minute. I’m expecting more relations shortly. Surprised they ain’t here yet. Wake me if they come? Ought to be a crossword there in the paper, you want to work it. I done half.”
She begins to retreat painfully on her walker, then a thought crosses her mind, you can see it ghosting across her face as clouds cross the moon.
She picks up her purse from the coffee table and takes it with her back to the bedroom. “Throw a log on now and then,” she cries.
After a minute, Wayne follows.
But her grandson Terry does make it to Anthem—well, not quite to town limits, but close. Terry and the mother of his unborn child are kicking timbers in a deconsecrated church up Ministry Hollow, drawing on the walls with marker to pass the time, shivering as they wait for Wayne in twenty-eight degrees, for the two friends, muddle-headed by need, have miscommunicated the process.
The church is packed with square bales of hay. The pews have been torn out, every trinket filched and sold: the bell, the window frames. Even the hinges are gone, sold to an “architectural salvage” up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. You can see their pale outlines against darker wood.
She says, “Where the hell is he?”
“I dunno, I told him I’d meet him back here. I don’t like holding.”
“Did you say when you wanted to meet him?”
“No.”
“You dumb hump.”
“You’re the dumb hump!” He pushes her slightly, and she rocks back on her heels, then they crash together, laughing. He likes the way she’s dyed her hair into purple wings.
“Watch the baby.” They fall on bales.
“This is ridiculous.” Pieces of straw cling to their hair and their clothes. “Wayne,” he bellows to the altar. “WAYNE!”
“Maybe you’re confused.”
“Maybe he’s confused, you ever think that? Oh shit, is that a mouse?” She jumps—then punches his arm. “You tramp. You lush.”
“Tramp? I’m mayor of this here church. Mayor Terry.”
They draw pentagrams, feeling devilish. But the fun ebbs, their fingers ache with chill. Terry says soberly, “I’ll give him a bit. But it’s effing cold.” He tears a lath or two from the wall. They rip handfuls from the bales. They pile whatever will burn in the center of the floor. The Bic comes out. The fire is no bigger than a bread loaf. After it brings their fingers back to life, they grow drowsy and pass out around it and dream of their futures and of the child knitting itself together inside the girl, the child they want to call Nettie (like Annette, you see?) if female and who knows how long they rest? But Terry hears a murmuring from the far edge of the country of sleep, something that rouses him like a trusted friend. A tongue of fire’s licking up the walls, the ceiling’s black with smoke, and now Terry and his girl go dancing out into the snow. When the church doors are flung open and the oxygen hits, the smoke becomes a roaring orange ceiling.
After Wayne strangles the old woman, he drives to Basnettville, makes his connect (Brian Lassiter), hurriedly buys a tea, and gets high in a gas station bathroom on the backside of the building. The key is attached to a ruler.
Should’ve gone to Brian Lassiter’s in the first place. Brian he can pretty well trust.
Brian, though, cut his stuff with Fent the last time around. That’s the word around the campfire. Got two dead high-school girls in Grant Town morgue over that.
After, Wayne lazily shoots blood on the walls, where people have scrawled phone numbers and swastikas and little poems. It’s hard to believe that Terry ripped him off—they’ve known each other, what, all their lives? Two ridge-runners who liked to nap in the back of Vocational Agricultural. That class was a laugh. The ridgelands are rocky and poor and impacted clay even in the bottoms and everyone ditched farming back in the ’50s, racing for the chemical plants and union scale, pleased as punch to leave it behind, no matter what the hand-wringing editorialists and poets say. Nobody cried. His grandma, a dirt farm girl, a mother of seven, said the day she could buy a sliced loaf of Wonderbread in plastic wrap at the store was the happiest day of her life. “How do you retire with a million dollars as a farmer?” even the Vo-Ag teacher asked them first day of class. Silence. “Start with two million.” Maybe it’s different out west. The pictures in their textbook—shiny green machinery, table-flat expanse of soy in martial rows, smiling subsidized faces—looked nothing like West Virginia. Wayne can recall just a couple full-timers left in the county. Now let’s be honest: Old Jack Mavety’s propped up on tax breaks and frack money, leasing out his back forty to Chesapeake Energy for a massive well-pad, a play-farmer who’s big into politics with designs on County Commission (pay’s not much but the healthcare and the pension’s startling good considering how little work it is, requiring a day or two at the courthouse each week at most, everybody wants to be County Commissioner, you’ll have to sort through seven or eight names on the ballot, easy). On the other hand, Young Tracee Sixx works like a scalded dog with his high tunnels and his highland cattle, but his wife’s a guidance counselor and they’re definitely living off her paycheck and bennies, be surprised if Tracee breaks even on the beef and pastured pork (“organic!”) he ferries all the way to Bridgeport to sell to professors and surgeons at that fruity little market. Tracee was in Vo-Ag too, sitting in front and earnestly filling up his notebook, snagging FFA ribbons left and right and looking like a youth pastor. Wayne and Terry would laugh, laugh, laugh at him. Don’t even have a right hay barn, just that stupid deconsecrated church.
It takes Wayne several minutes to realize that someone’s pounding on the door. A mother and a little boy shoot him an evil look as he staggers out.
“Excuse me,” he says, swinging a grocery bag.
“He couldn’t hold it!” the woman cries. The little boy pissed himself.
Wayne pushes the key into her hand. He starts the car to blast some heat to the feet, which feel like they’re part of someone else’s body. Even his kneecaps are cold, like doorknobs. The radio plays country to a click track, the heater throbs, and finally it starts to feel cozy. Humming along, one eye on the road, he paws through the shopping bag and studies the old woman’s thirteen medications, holding the bottles to the light like a man candling eggs. To his chagrin, none seem to be worth a damn, the names are weird, but you never know, when he gets somewhere with cell service he’ll Google search the names. One sort of looks like Lortab, fat and white and enticing, and he can sell it off to stupid teenagers.
Clarity won’t come until later, much later. For now he doesn’t sweat, he doesn’t panic, though he does curse himself for not thinking to set Annette’s house on fire, cover his tracks, blame the arsonist. Ah well. He has $1,120 of the old woman’s money, and he fills his tank all the way, feeling prosperous.
The dry wood shrieks. Terry and his girl race from the fire, muttering, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.” They really didn’t mean to do that, they just craved a little warmth.
The church burns cheerfully, as if it had been pining for this.
Already the heat is pushing them away, far past the Saturn-ring of melted snow.
She says, “Oh, Tracee’s gonna flip, he needs that hay.”
Smoke is spiraling out of the hollow. They haul ass out of there in her sister’s car.
“I feel bad for Tracee,” she continues. “Fuck, he’s a good guy.” No matter what the ex-mayors want to believe, there is no lone psychopath on the loose. Just misadventures and cloth wiring, home chemistry and pure boredom, the lurch of capital and the march of time.
“God. Please stop talking.” Terry settles his head against the cold window. “This ain’t a big deal like you’re making it.”
Her eyes widen. “Burning a church?”
“Hay barn. Hay barn!”
Fuck Wayne, then. Go to grandma’s and let the others coo and touch his girl’s belly like they’ve been asking to. He’ll settle up later with Wayne.
“Do we smell like smoke?” she asks.
He plucks at his shirt and lifts it to his nose.
“Are we going to hell?” she asks.
A volunteer firetruck comes rocketing toward from whence they came, clanging and fishtailing, looking cockeyed and wild for a machine.
“I was happy for once,” Terry moans. “Day started out great and now I can’t see it getting any worse.”
She strokes his hair. He’s crying, he’s blubbering.
Many cars are parked out front of Annette’s, to the point they’re spilling into Main Street or Route 7 or whatever it is. “Look at the vultures a-circlin’,” says Terry of his relatives. Then he squints. “Hold on.” Police cruisers are mixed in among them. The doorway is being draped in yellow tape. Drive! Terry says to put the pedal down—this will be much discussed in court, where he is shoved into a suit and Wayne wears orange and is shackled to his own waist. “Put the pedal down? Those were your exact words?” the Prosecutor asks Terry. “You didn’t want to check on this woman you supposedly adore?” But the Public Defender pipes up, says he doesn’t like the line of conjecture here, explains that Wayne’s tale of a set-up is just him trying to cut a sweet deal with the police and that Terry loved, loved, loved his grandmother, he’d never betray her—but the judge doesn’t like the looks of Terry at all, he’s seen a hundred Terrys lately, and where’s the rest of the family to support the defendant? (Kind of says it all when you think about it.) These drug people will do anything. The county is outraged. The county cries for blood. Terry beseeches Wayne with his eyes; Wayne looks off. Prosecutor, proceed.
It’s often said in the county that they won’t get you for what you done, but they’ll get you for something.
Annette’s house is condemned by the county in the wake of this. Arrests clean out the other hated abode.
The bank vault, though, the bank vault survives it all. No infamy, no outrage, can move it. For years to come, that iron room and its deteriorating shell of brick will stand in a field of swallowtails and poison ivy, pop-bottles and briar, condom wrappers and touch-me-nots. Much photographed, it gathers more graffiti each year, lashings of red, black, and blue. Teenagers and adults drive to Anthem from out-of-state to pose themselves against the decay. They explore. They traipse the rotting staircases, they drape themselves like slaughtered ingenues over window ledges, they dodge syringes, they post images to Instagram where they are very much liked. The “urban explorers” spend a little money at Minerva’s store, say the ex-mayors, you got to give them that. A she-owl with mournful eyes likes to sit in the ruined wall, not hunting, not doing much of anything you can tell. She produces no young. She glares at the camera’s eye, daring you to take it. Look.