Free True Fires by Susan Carol McCarthy

possible.
They say Ol’ Will Wolf’s the oldest thing on two feet. But, Daniel thinks,
this ’un’s got ’im beat
.
    “How do,” the man says to Pap and, seeing Aunt Lu and the girls, gently tips his hat. “Name’s Sampson. Brung you some honey.”
    “Mighty nice of ye,” Pap says and offers up his hand. “Franklin Dare.”
    When the old man holds out the jar of honey, Pap takes it with his other hand and continues to offer up a handshake. Sampson stands still, mute.
    Pap’s open hand indicates Daniel. “This here’s my son, Daniel. Up-air on the roof’s my brother Will. His wife, Lu, and the girls, ’Becca, Minna, SaraFaye, and baby June.”
    With a slow grin, the old man nods all around and, finally, accepts Pap’s grip. “Seen your field full of peas,” he says.
    “Cover crop,” Pap tells him. “Hopin’ to help out the soil so’s we can plant our trees next spring.”
    “Got bees,” Sampson says. “Peas’re good for bees in winter. Pay you in honey.”
    “Fine by me. Reckon they’d be good for the garden, too. What y’think, Lu?”
    “Reckon they’d be fine. I like bees.” Lu’s smiling wide inside her sunbonnet.
    “Need some help gettin’ ’em here?” Pap asks.
    Sampson shakes his head. “Got a cart. Bring ’em over next week?”
    “Anytime ye want,” Pap tells him, smiling.
    “Orange blossom, heh?” Sampson points to the jar of sunlit honey.
    “Never had it but we’ll give it a whirl.”
    “Good. Be back soon.”
    “Thank ye, Mr. Sampson. We’ll keep a lookout fer ye.”
    Sampson nods his silent good-bye, lifts his hat to the females and, as hushed and light-footed as he’d come, he’s gone. Daniel watches the tall dark figure slip across the field and into the far line of woods, which seem, for a moment, to leap with the flames of the fiery red sunset.

15
    In the dead of Saturday night, in the small, unadorned room just off the kitchen of the Charmwood Guest House, Betty Clayton Whitworth dreams of her other life. In 1918, she was twenty, the pretty, eligible daughter of one of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest families, and, like Isabel Amberson, heroine of that year’s most popular novel, she wore nothing but silk or velvet. Her dream of that life is not unlike the opening sequence of Mr. Welles’s 1942 film of Mr. Tarkington’s novel. In fact, although the dream’s images are personal—of her family’s great brick Gothic mansion, her father’s black silk stovepipe hats and gray frock coats, her pink parasol cocked over her pink silk shoulder—in her mind’s ear, she hears, as if just for her, Orson Welles’s opening narration of the popular film (she saw it seven times):
    “They had time for everything,” Mr. Welles intones.
Yes,
yes, we did.
She smoothes her skirt, adjusts her matching pink parasol, and smiles prettily. “Time for sleigh rides, and balls, and assemblies, and cotillions, and open house on New Year’s, and all-day picnics in the woods, and even that prettiest of all vanished customs: the serenade.”
    Yes,
Betty smiles in her sleep. But, unlike the fictional Isabel—who rebuffed the advances of the wild rogue Eugene, to marry dull, passionless Wilbur, and thereby received her comeuppance—twenty-year-old Betty, in a naïve interpretation of the popular story, chose dashing and more-than-a-little-drunk Cash Whitworth. The logic of Mr. Tarkington’s tale was unmistakable: marry the daredevil instead of the dullard and live passionately ever after. Betty tosses uncomfortably in her sleep, not wanting the pretty pinkness of her dream to fade into the eventual gray of her present state. But the truth of her life is inescapable: she and Isabel, through entirely opposite routes, arrived at a similar, unhappy end.
    The sudden ring of the telephone beside her bed snatches her awake. Relief at having the dream-turned-nightmare interrupted gives way to wondering concern. The man’s voice at the other end is oddly familiar.
    “That you, Miz