Free Town Burning by Thomas Williams Page A

now he’d been caught and expelled from life, and Mr. Spinelli couldn’t bring him back, apologize and make impossible promises.
    Mike was the first in his class to go into service. All the boys wanted to go, or nearly all, and when they graduated in June, 1944, all but two or three did go. Most came back in 1946. Four were killed, but more came back just to say goodbye to Leah before going West, where most of Leah’s sons went when they were old enough. Some stayed, but they were the ones whose parents owned businesses, or they were the ones who stayed because all they wanted to do was to go into the mill or whatever—the post office, a store, the tannery—and work and marry and get it regular, as Mike said once.
    She had chosen one of these, although it hadn’t been obvious at the time. Mike seemed to have so much energy left over, and she believed that the war had done something to him beyond making him put on the common grim act of the veteran, which sooner or later became old-fashioned as terminal leave pay ran out and time payments became more threatening than the memory of war. But she knew that she tended to plan sketchily, in visions and scenes: to her the constant excitement and energy of Michael Spinelli would somehow, through some maturing process, in time produce the home she saw vividly, as if she were looking in the window to see herself in a lovely scene of firelight and children.
    But there had been ten years and another war since then, and another crop of young men come home only to say goodbye. The town seemed always to send away its best. The population of Leah hadn’t changed in one hundred years, her grandfather said, and he once told her of the farms and hills that in his lifetime had turned from field and pasture back into woods. Even the woolen mill in the town had become obsolete. Last year it shut down for two months, and everybody was afraid that it would be for good. It was then that Mike started going with Junior and the Riders and cashed in his defense bonds to buy the new motorcycle. “It’s a Harley-Davidson!” he kept saying, as if it were impossible that his father and mother and wife were not infected by the magic of the words. “Look at the spark plugs!” He made them look at the two cylinders, the big saddle of genuine cowhide, the big balloon-like fenders. He insisted that they come and look, as if the bright, dangerous meaning of the machine might convince them of his need of it. And when he saw their disapproval he answered with the boom of his engine at night, burned rubber on the driveway, lifted his front wheel in the air as a horse rears and turns before it gallops away.
    She woke up in the middle of the afternoon, hearing a knock on her door. Mr. Spinelli looked in.
    “Your grandfather is here, Janie. I thought maybe you want to wake up.”
    In the living room she found her grandfather sitting uneasily on the edge of a wooden chair, a huge old man in clean workshirt and overalls. His great head solid on his short pillar of neck, he sat and mauled his visored cap between fingers that looked like the arms and legs of brawny wrestlers. His face was ruddy, shiny in little squares between fine cracks and wrinkles that were nearly as regular as the grid lines on a map. Curly white hair came down over his collar in back and on the sides halfway over his ears. A faint, pleasant smell of horses drifted across the room. He stood up and watched her, his feet wide apart as if he thought the fragile house might fall apart beneath him—but if it did he would still land in the basement right side up and on his two feet amid the fragments.
    “Hi, Grandpa,” Jane said. As he came toward her the floor creaked under his feet. His expression seldom changed, and it didn’t now. His eyes were bright and wide open; so blue it seemed that she looked right through his head into the sky. His eyebrows were raised as if he were slightly surprised and amused. He put one hand on her shoulder,