Free Town Burning by Thomas Williams Page B

lightly, yet she felt that if she were to fall the hand would hold her up as easily as if the old man held a rifle at arm’s length to weigh it.
    “I figured maybe you’d want to come home for a while,” he said. His voice was soft and breathy, yet everything he said sounded at first too aggressive, almost accusing. The surprised, sweet expression on his face belied the tone of his voice, and one result of this difference between voice and meaning was that everyone felt compelled to look him straight in the eye.
    “I could stay over tonight,” she said.
    Cesare Spinelli came into the room, harried and damp from his running through the house.
    “Mr. Stevens, I heard,” he said. “I think maybe that’s good for Janie. She’d be happier out of this house for now. I think you got a good idea.”
    Sam Stevens nodded. “I’m terribly sorry about your son,” he said. “I hope your wife feels better.”
    “Oh, I worry about Janie,” the little man said. He looked at her closely. “She don’t seem to be taking it too good.”
    She hadn’t cried. If she cried, she was afraid she would be crying for Jane Stevens Spinelli and ten wasted years, not for a poor fool who had killed himself. She would not cry at all.
    When she came downstairs with her suitcase—a wedding present she had never used before—the two men stood as she had left them: the huge farmer and the little father. Mr. Spinelli took her hand and said, “It’s all right, Janie. You’ll feel better after a while, now. You just wait and see.”
    Her grandfather backed the pickup truck carefully out into the street, then started slowly, as he always did, going deliberately through each gear, watching and not trusting other cars. They went around the Town Square and took the road to Cascom and the farm. When they turned off the asphalt onto the steep gravel road up the mountain, he spoke for the first time.
    “He’s a mighty funny feller, Spinelli.” Jane didn’t answer, and she saw him glance at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Seems to me he’s a good man,” he said, “although you never can tell about them people.”

CHAPTER 5
    John sat in his room in his old leather chair, a can of beer in his hand and four empties on the floor. His father had gone to the yard and his mother to a neighbor’s. The old house was empty around him, brittle and too clean. He thought of his miserable cave of a room in Paris; mold, mice, cockroaches and all, and he wished himself back there again. There were roses on the walls of that room, too, in the places where the paper hadn’t been turned back into brownish pulp by rot, the plaster absorbing, as if it were a sponge, the sweat of the ancient stone walls.
    He sat staring at the sun-glittering leaves of the rock maple, then got up and took his .30-.30 carbine from the gunrack. He balanced the short rifle in his left hand and flicked down the lever. Click clack; the crisp sounds were lovely and satisfying. The square bolt slid back and then forward to lock, leaving the large hammer cocked. He let the hammer down slowly and worked the action again: after two years the rifle had regained, as beautiful objects do, a measure of its original freshness and wonder. He didn’t want to put it to his shoulder just yet—he wanted to save that view of it—but he turned it over in his hands, discovering again the little planes and curves of it, from the slightly curved butt plate to the deep rifling visible at the muzzle.
    Then, with the rifle in one hand, he took his beer and went out into the hall. Bruce’s door was shut. He stood in front of it, convincing himself that Bruce was not there, could not be there, put his empty can on the banister post and turned the knob.
    The room was as bare as it had always been when it was forbidden to him on pain of—On pain of what? he asked himself as the details of the room sorted themselves out: single bed, highboy, two windows, closet door, bedside lamp. He thought of