Free Embers by Antoinette Stockenberg

Some have power; some are powerless. It's the way of the world."
    Tom neither agreed nor disagreed, which was about par for the course. But Meg saw a flicker of anger in his blue-gray eyes. He wouldn't have let Meg's grandmother stay on, she decided. If he had loved her, he would've defended her.
    Tremblay resumed. "I told Margaret she was imagining things ... that it was my fault, confessin' my own devotion to her; that now she was seein' an admirer behind every potted palm. I told her not to jeopardize her career by saying or doing nothin' foolish. I told her ... to stay put." He sucked in a long, shuddering breath. "And she did."
    "Was my grandmother at all specific?" Meg asked, more gently than before. "About how Gordon Camplin was coming on to her?"
    Tremblay shook his head. "She did say that at first it was done more by way of innuendo. She said a woman knows these things, knows when a man is ... pressing."
    "And then what happened?" asked Meg, because she knew that the story did not end there.
    "For a while, not much. Life went on as before, except that Margaret cooled considerable toward me. Once, I got up the nerve to ask how things was between Camplin and her. She gimme a hard look and said, ‘I'm still here, aren't I?' But I didn't mind. She was still there. That's what counted.
    "In the meantime the drought worsened. I never saw nothin' like it, not in thirty years. The woods was mere tinder; the leaves still on the trees crumbled in your hands. Wells were going dry one after th'other.
    "Day after day we had hot, dry, hateful weather. By the middle of October there was a dozen Maine fires burnin'. Two days later, there was fifty. It was terrible, terrible. I remember when I first heard the news of Bar Harbor 's fire. When news got out that a fire in Dolliver's Dump had carried over into the cranberry bog alongside it, I felt kind of ... queasy. Never mind that it wa'n't burning in the timber yet. They could not put it out in the bog. That said it all.
    "For three days, we waited and we watched. Everybody knew there were hotspots burning in the bog underground, that the fire wasn't really out. It was, how can I explain it, like watching a living thing, creeping and slithering and bubbling, a monster just biding its time.
    "And then, like that, it leaped from the bog into a growth of spruce and pine ... and with the wind northwest and brisk ... that monster burst into a roaring fireball, crowning forty, fifty feet above the trees. They rushed in two hundred reinforcements, but the men couldn't do a damn thing. They tried to make a stand in the open pastures of Hugh Kelly's farm. No luck. The barn caught fire, and then some dry slash left over from a logging operation. Right there is where they lost the war. They couldn't stop the fire; they couldn't direct it. All they could do was hope and pray that it'd fetch up against Eagle Lake .
    "But it didn't, and after that it was anyone's guess where the fire would head next: Somesville, Hull 's Cove, Northeast Harbor ; Bar Harbor itself. No one knew. It all depended on the wind. It was a terrible, terrible time, like a grievous punishment was about to be visited on someone, only no one knew who."
    Tremblay paused long enough to ask for a glass of water. Meg rushed out to get some, but the old man wouldn't wait. On her way back into the room she heard him say to Tom, "Some claimed later that Bar Harbor was doomed to suffer God's wrath because Bar Harbor was where the greed and money was — the bankers, the railroad men, the rubber tycoons. That's where the unseemly excess was; the selfish, money-grubbing arrogance."
    Tremblay looked up, his eyes burning bright with cynicism. "Don't you believe it," he said to them both in a croaking voice. "Rich man or poor, most of us behaved in the exact, same way: we all tried to save our precious things. You've heard the stories — the millionaire New Yorkers who chartered planes back to Bar Harbor to save their artwork; the common