Summerfire

The old timers called it summerfire.

They gathered around the pot bellied stove in the general store, these retired, disabled, or widowed old men and re-told stories everyone already knew but still laughed at.   They put on their rubber boots and suspenders and red flannel shirts, packed their pipes and took their seats, whittling, spitting, smoking and rocking away, trying to fill the empty hours.   They spent their nights in ones and twos, playing fiercely contended games of cribbage and dominoes and drinking more than was good for them, then stumbled off to cold beds and old dreams.  They were a rough lot with their unshaven, leathery faces and gruff tobacco- ruined voices but they could tell stories.  Oh, could they tell stories.  Tales that would curl your hair and drop your jaw, as my grandmother used to say.  Mostly about the one that got away, be it a woman or a fish didn’t seem to matter, or the blow of ’38 off St. Georges Banks or the night ol’ Jimmy Sparks shot up the dance hall and kilt his wandering’ wife deader’n a mackerel.

 

“They’s memories powerful more sharp than they’s wits,”  Nana would tell me, “Don’t be thinking them things aren’t true.  Mostly anyways.”

The summer I was sixteen though, the summer I fell in love for the first time, was old enough to go to the dance hall on Saturday nights (provided I was bright eyed and repentant when called on to go to church the next morning) and be walked home in the dark and kissed at the backdoor just out of range of the moonlight, well, that lovely and perfect July and August, they were talking about summerfire.

My mind was so distracted  that summer, that  I didn’t give much thought to the fires.  Johnny was a tall, slim-built, chiseled- faced and well brought up young man with high cheekbones and a mass of intense dark red hair always at odds with the slicked down look he tried so hard to keep.   He charmed my grandmother with his manners and easy smile, utterly disarmed my mother with flattery, and swept me off my feet with his first glance.  The moment we’d boarded the scow at East Ferry, he’d leaned in to the passenger side window,  smelling of Old Spice (my daddy’s favorite aftershave) and ginger, and given me a grin.

“Reckon this is gon’ be our summer?” he’d asked and winked. “Figure I’d better be askin’ ‘fore anybody else gets the chance.”

I’d nodded, too stage struck to find my voice, almost too nervous to catch my breath.  My heart was suddenly beating so loudly I was sure he would hear it and make some sort of humiliating joke.  I thought if he did I would up and die right in the front seat of the road-weary  old Lincoln, never see seventeen much less the inside of the dance hall.

 “Pick you up Saturday night,” he’d said instead, “Long about seven.  If……” and here he paused and gave my grandmother a tip of his cap and a brilliant smile, “That’s okay with you, Miz Watson.”

Nana had nodded, trying not to smile and busying herself with counting out coins for the passage.

“I ‘spect you could do a lot worse than Doug and Marylyn’s boy, “ she’d said calmly, “Good stock. Good family.”

I could only shiver.  I’d known him all my summer life, always liked him, and all I could do was shiver.

“What was that all about?” my mother, who had been following  behind us in the old Mercury station wagon wanted to know.

“Doug and Marylyn’s boy wants to take her to the dance Saturday night,” Nana had said, so casually you’d think it happened every day of the week, “I said he could.”

My mother had blinked in surprise and I’d steeled myself for the familiar You’re too young lecture, hoping  that she wouldn’t feel the need to deliver it then and there and only dimly realizing that this would be the first one I’d actually fight for.   My heart was creeping steadily toward by throat again and I didn’t think it was the sun warming my face and neck.  I was stilling actively avoiding her eyes when she shrugged.

“Well…..,” she said slowly and I knew she was appraising me, considering me, “Well, that’s alright then. I don’t guess a dance will do anybody harm.  Not if it’s Doug and Marylyn’s boy.”  She stepped back,  pressed both hands to the small or her back and stretched like a coiled but chubby spring then shaded her eyes, looked toward the island and frowned.

 

“Look, Mother,” she’d said and nodded, “Smoke.  Wonder what’s burning.”

Sure enough, a patch of sky at the far end of the island was spreading dark like a spider web, curling and spiraling up over the tree line.  Nana had peered at it over her bifocals.

“Coming from The Point, you reckon?” she’d asked.  Her voice had been edged ever so slightly with concern, just enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck.  Our house was at The Point, it sat on the corner lot with a strawberry field between it and the road and the ocean a stone’s throw from the sloping front yard. 

“Central Grove more’n likely,” Johnny had said with something like an oddly superficial reassurance, “Most of the summerfire’s been mid-island.”   He’d given us a not-to-worry grin, pulled a Players from the black and blue pack in his shirt pocket and lit it despite the mild wind, cupping his hands around the match until it caught, flared and died.   For a second or two the salt air was tinged with sulphur.   Then seeing Nana’s face, he quickly smiled.

“Could be just a grass fire, Miz Watson,” he’d said quietly, “Don’t you worry ‘bout it none.  Likely be out ‘fore you get halfway down island.”

But it wasn’t out and it wasn’t a grass fire.  It was, in fact, one of the idle fishing shacks past the old  breakwater, a tumbledown old affair that hadn’t been used for years.  By the time we’d pulled into the long gravel driveway we could see the red and yellow flames and the air was dirty with smoke.   A fine spray of ash floated like dust - no, more like snowflakes, I thought, like the flurries we would get in New England on those bitter cold January days - brief and harmless.   Island volunteer firefighters were out in force and the blaze, bright but brief, was contained fairly quickly.  It wasn’t so much the fire that caught everyone’s attention, one more abandoned bait shack was no great loss, but the fact that it was the third fire in as many weeks made people sit up and take notice.  No one wanted to admit that there might be, living and working in our very midst, someone who would set fires.  It was far more comfortable to blame it on summerfire,  a random mix of heat and lightning and boredom, a careless  but surely unintentionally tossed match, a wayward spark, perhaps.   Suspicion, which had been, until the bait shack fire, a passive and slow moving beast wearing blinders and minding its own business, began to peer around at its surroundings.  It was growing up, feeling around and picking up speed.

“It can’t be one of us,” the schoolteacher told my grandmother, “It just can’t be.”

 Nana, bless her practical, no nonsense soul, looked unconvinced.

“Three weeks, three fires,” she reminded him cooly, ” Two of ‘em ‘fore the first summer family even got here.   Ain’t no coincidence in that, teacher, no coincidence at all, by God.”

The night before the dance while I was being sick with anticipation and begging my mother for permission to shave my legs for the first time,  the schoolhouse caught fire.  In the telephone office next door, Elsie heard an explosion and a WHOOSH! of air, tree limbs and flying schoolbooks slammed into the side of her small house, shaking the foundation and rattling the old woman’s teeth out of their accustomed place on the nightstand by her bed.

“Kee-rist!” Elsi had shrieked and like to have flown to her switchboard, denture-less and still in her nightclothes, to raise the alarm.   The island’s emergency alert system - the church bell in the steeple of the Baptist church - was ringing furiously only minutes later but Elsie, seeing a raging fire with flames shooting a hundred feet into the air, “A wall of fire!”  she screeched in a raspy, lisping kind of wail all across the party line, knew it was useless.  “All I could think was to snatch that ol’ tomcat and run for the hills,” she confessed to my grandmother, “Never been so petrified in my all born days!”

The telephone office was saved -  only by a whisker  the old timers said - but the one room schoolhouse which every island child had attended at one time or another and which had stood its ground against the metal and brick consolidated school on the mainland and every other form of progress, was a total loss.  All that was left, a charred and blackened foundation covered in ash and bits of burned up books, sat desolately under the old singed and now smoky trees.  It was a sight too sad to bear for the schoolteacher who walked through the debris with his shoulders hunched and his face buried in his hands.

“I don’t understand,” he kept repeating, “Great God Almighty, I don’t understand who would burn a school.”

The schoolhouse fire was all anyone could talk about the next morning.  At McIntyre’s, the old timers huddled in a tight circle, drinking their morning coffee and uncharacteristically snapping at each other about what ought to be done.   One side was for calling in the Mounties, the other for keeping it in the family and as Nana and I passed by, the argument escalated.

 “Eustice Haines,” ol’ Cap’n Judd yelled at one point as Nana and I navigated the cluttered shelves in search of bobbie pins, “You ain’t nothin’ but a durn fool and you ain’t got the sense to come in out of the rain if’n you think we can handle this ourselves!”

Not to be outdone, Cap’n Judd snatched his cane and whacked his brother just below the knee where Eustice’s wooden leg was attached.  The sound was like a shot and was immediately followed by a string of curses as Eustice got to his feet and lunged at his brother.  My grandmother was so startled, she dropped a tin of canned peaches.  It rolled all the way to the counter before encountering  Miz McIntyre advancing on the group of old men with her broom clutched in two white-knuckled fists.  She gave it a wicked kick and it went airborne, soaring through the dust motes and cigarette smoke like a hot knife through butter and landing with a wet thud, dented and scratched, on the old pot bellied stove.

“Out!” she hollered, waving the broom like a club, “Every one of you useless, good for nothin’, chatterin’ old gossips!  Out, I say!  Go warm your backsides somewheres else or I’ll be givin’ you somethin’ to talk about for a month of Sundays and then some!”

“Well, Elizabeth,” Nana said mildly, “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“It’s all this summerfire nonsense, Alice,” Miz McIntyre said with a profound sigh, “They don’t talk ‘bout nothin’ else and it ain’t good for business.”  She smoothed her apron, brushed back a dark strand of hair and gave us a weary smile.  “Now what was you lookin’ for?”

“Bobbie pins,” I told her shyly, “Aunt Vi’s gonna curl my hair for the dance tonight.”

“And I reckon we’ll take them canned peaches,” my grandmother added.

“Oh!” Miz McIntyre whirled toward the old stove, snatched the now-beginning-to-swell can of peaches with one apron-wrapped hand and hastily set it on a nearby flour barrel.

“Mercy me, wouldn’t that’ve been a fine mess,” she laughed, “Now, let me see about bobbie pins.”

There were, over the course of the next two and three quarters months, seven more fires.  A second abandoned bait shack, Sam Melanson’s ramshackle old barn, a dusty and unused fish factory office, a whiskey still high in the hills above St. Mary’s Bay (although the general opinion was that that one might’ve been natural causes, ol’ Micah Albright was known to drink heartily of his own profits and it didn’t take much imagination to see that he could’ve gotten careless), and two summer homes across the cove.  A crowd of us, Johnny and I included, were hanging out on the old Prescott steps the night of the second cove house fire and we watched the flames break out and travel in an unnerving straight line toward the fuel oil tank.  The explosion was staggering and immense, it lit up the night sky like some massive fireworks display.

“Jesus!” Johnny exclaimed and ran for the telephone at McIntyre’s while the rest of us headed for the barber shop where the volunteer fire fighting equipment was stored.

A week later, the final fire took the dance hall.  Sifting through the wreckage, the Mounties discovered a body - a young boy, they thought, in his early teens maybe, buried beneath a pile of charred latticework and collapsed walls, badly burned but still recognizable - a summer boy from a new family who had rented a cottage on the adjacent island.  An angry and troubled boy whose parents had thought would work things out away from the noise and heat of the city, a boy nobody had ever noticed, an arsonist whose body was taken home in a box by broken hearted parents.

Some of the good island folk were relieved and grateful to have someone to blame but the old timers, warming their hands, telling their stories, and minding their newly found manners, knew it was more complicated than a random city boy gone a little wild.  There wasn’t and never had been anything simple about summerfire - it woke, worked its dark magic for a time, and slept - no one knew where and no one went looking.

Just like summer love.