Oh! he said. You ain’t hear? Suddenly his crow’s-feet wrinkled up with apparent shame and he shut down completely. His fat legs shifted as if he meant to break into a run. If it’s any help, he said, I myself spent last night downtown on vagrancy and I ain’t see them bring nobody in, definitely not Nat, ’cause when a fine fellow like him come in a jail cell, everybody notice. Darlene thanked Sparkplug and hurried closer to the store, wringing her knuckles, feeling her pulse race across her cheeks, into her eyes.
A group of older women in flowery muumuus and silky wigs crossed the road to greet her, two of them with flowers behind their ears. The two biggest ladies blocked her path in a way that seemed obvious and deliberate. Darlene recognized the women as her neighbors, but she didn’t have a close relationship with any of them, not Harriet, not Alice, not Jeanette. From her vantage point she could not make out the store through a tall copse of sugar maples and pines that obscured the view.
Why, Miss Darlene! How are you today? Alice said, gripping Darlene’s wrist with both hands, her voice high and fake. Alice’s thick forearms looked like big tubes of cookie dough.
Ignoring Darlene’s many questions about whether they’d seen Nat, the ladies clucked about nothing of consequence—the muggy weather, who’s cooking what, who wasn’t at church and why, last year’s cane harvest, an upcoming wedding. They did so with enough energy to confuse Darlene for several minutes, especially when they paused to solicit her opinion of the various trifles, but then she came to understand that they had information to conceal. When she subtly endeavored to step around them, they moved along with her, surrounding her in their human corral.
How is Eddie? asked Jeanette, taking hold of Darlene’s forearm, walking both her hands down Darlene’s arm and stitching their fingers together. She put her face close to Darlene’s face and forced her to lock eyes.
Darlene, for her part, resisted Jeanette’s stare, letting her eyes blur into the distance through the trees, in the direction of Mount Hope. She answered the ladies’ questions without listening very carefully, keeping her responses terse and attempting to graciously extricate herself from Jeanette’s firm touch.
Isn’t this cool afternoon just delightful, what with how hot it’s been? Harriet said. She breathed in to the crest of her lung capacity while caressing her face with her hand. The others agreed and added boring comments to her cheerful, inconsequential statements until the cloud of boringly ominous comments seemed to attack the group like thirsty mosquitoes.
The wind changed then and the heavy smell of burned wood rushed up Darlene’s nose; for the first time she saw a thin tube of grayish smoke rising above the vicinity of the store’s footprint. The horror must have shown on her face, because the ladies moved their feet apart like they would momentarily need to hold her or push her backward. Jeanette lurched forward and gave Darlene a loving, paralyzing bear hug. Tears distorted her voice as she begged Darlene, Please don’t go no further.
Darlene wrenched herself free of the ladies, who lumbered after her but could not prevent her from running to Mount Hope on her own. She clutched herself and cried out when she arrived at its charred maw, raising her eyes to see the sky through what she had known as the roof, the support beams askew, blackened, cracked, and shiny from the inferno, the front door chopped apart by firefighters and dangling from its bottom hinge, melted plastics, and even the freezer severely burned, all telling her with one voice that the police had spoken the truth, that her husband had perished among these things.
Later that day in the morgue, which smelled of lemon cleaner and formaldehyde, the same cops she’d hoped had lied when they spoke about it in her house asked her to look at something else burned, something they had found in the debris, and for a moment Darlene thought that they had taken a pig from a nearby barbecue pit and decided to play a prank. At first the sight of this thing did not affect her any more than watching a tray of ribs show up on a picnic table, until the doctors and policemen referred to it as him.
Him resembled one of the support beams from the store, a log turned to charcoal, and had she run her finger along its contours, she thought it would’ve dropped bits of black powder onto the steel table and the floor and darkened the swirl of her fingerprint. She knew why they had asked her to come, but it confused her to see this bizarre piece of driftwood that they might have pulled away from a riverside bonfire. She almost laughed, as any normal person might have, but those other people wouldn’t have noticed that the gold ring around one of the fingers matched the ring on her own finger. The sculpture had an open mouth, and Darlene thought of her husband screaming and choking on smoke as the fire changed places with his breath. The blood drained from her arms and legs, and she spun around and covered her mouth as she walked carefully out of the room to the nearest waiting area and collapsed over the back of a chair.
It had really happened, somebody had burned her husband to death, ripped him out of her life forever and left her alone. And now she might be equally likely to get stabbed to death and set on fire by the same people, who had decided that it didn’t matter when someone killed and mangled bodies like his. She wished that she had died instead. No, she wished that she had come with Nat to the store and changed the outcome, or that she hadn’t had a migraine that night at all, or that she hadn’t let him go to the store even though she’d said she’d be fine, that she had taken a sedative instead. Then she wondered if somebody on the police force had been involved, or known something, that maybe somebody on the police force had doused Nat with the actual gasoline, maybe another had lit the match, a few more had stabbed him, and perhaps they had followed her into the sitting area at that very moment. Maybe that man, or that one; which of these creeps had the cruelest face? Or the nicest one. Which sonofabitch could cover up the best? She felt certain that they would try to chop her up and roast her body like a rack of ribs too—or her son’s.