Burnt Offering Read online

  “Since we are now discussing Van Brunt Avenue,” Miss Shively said, “or Route Eleven-F, I would like to enquire whether—”

  “Oh dear,” Marian Alden said, in a whisper, for her uncle. “Here we go again.”

  “At all hours of the day and night,” Miss Shively said. “Reeling along the road at sixty miles an hour. Seventy—heaven knows what. And you men—all of you—just sit there and shrug your shoulders.”

  Heimrich found himself looking at the supervisor and board of the Town of Van Brunt. None shrugged his shoulders. One put his right hand to his forehead, so that his eyes were shielded.

  “—a disgrace to the community,” Miss Shively said. “The lowest form of gin mill. Boys in their teens—”

  A heavy-set man, very red of face, was on his feet. He spoke very loudly. He said there was such a thing as slander, if Miss Shively didn’t know it. He said he was good and god-damned tired—

  Mr. Phipps pounded the table. He said that Mr. Armstrong would watch his language. He said Mr. Armstrong would remember where he was.

  “—have you know, nobody under legal age—” Mr. Armstrong said, and now he was shouting. “Tell her to watch her language, why don’t you? Trying to lie away a man’s livelihood by—”

  “—guzzling,” Miss Shively said, and raised her voice to match Armstrong’s. “—rotgut—the youth of the community—”

  “—respectable place and everybody knows it,” Armstrong shouted. “Don’t have to stand here and be accused—”

  “—self-respecting women,” Miss Shively announced, with a certain wildness. “People not fit to drive making it as much as a person’s life is worth—”

  “The Three Oaks,” Marian told her uncle, “the tavern on Van Brunt Avenue. It is a curvy road and there’s never a State cop around when you need—Oh!”

  The State cop beside her nodded. He said he knew the road. He said cops could not be everywhere. He said he had never heard of any particular complaints against the Three Oaks but that where there was a bar, some people would get drunk, naturally. Mr. Phipps banged wholeheartedly.

  “And the mortgage,” Miss Shively screamed over the pounding. “Don’t think we don’t all know. A bank—a bank—taking profit from the debauching of our youth and—”

  “I will not have—” Phipps said, and had to shout also.

  “—not held blameless,” Miss Shively told him. “There will be an accounting and—”

  “—some people had their way, Bill,” the man in the blue shirt shouted to the man next him, “fellows like you and me couldn’t buy a beer. Maybe we’re gonna have to join the country club, Bill. Learn how to play golf. Don’t hear anybody yelling about the bar at the club and—”

  “This,” John Alden said across his wife, to Captain Heimrich. “This is the noisiest one ever.”

  The man who had bolted his dinner, who was very red of face, was still standing. There was an instant of quiet and he shouted into it. “Mr. Chairman!” he shouted. “Mr. Chairman!”

  Mr. Phipps quit banging his gavel, and shouted back. He shouted that Mr. Noble had the floor. Then Mr. Phipps stood. He was not at all a tall man. He leaned forward, with his hands on the table. He glittered from side to side. He said he hoped that, now, they could begin to have orderly procedure. He said that he appreciated everybody’s interest in the affairs of the town—that they all appreciated it. (His “all” was, by indication, the board.) He said that, as he understood it, the first matter on which the board wished to hear the views of those—a gratifyingly large number—who had turned out tonight was on the petition for rezoning to R-2 the R-1 area designated on the map as Zone C.

  “For the benefit of any who may be unfamiliar with the matter,” Mr. Phipps said, and now he seemed to have the matter in hand, “the petition is signed by fifteen taxpayers who represent a little less than half of the acreage involved. The petitioners seek a modification of the present requirement of four acres, two hundred and fifty feet average width, to require only one acre, no average width specification. The planning board has recommended that the town board consider this change favorably but considerable opposition has been expressed. So—Mr. Noble, you want to talk about the rezoning, I gather.”

  “You’re damned right,” the man who had bolted his dinner said, in a small explosion. He recovered himself. He said he was sorry. “All the same,” he said, “it makes me pretty damn mad. I come up here—a lot of us come up here—and put good money in property on the assumption that—”

  Mr. Noble gained coherence as he progressed. He was not, he wished it understood, indifferent to the desire of people to escape from the city. He shared that desire. That was why he had brought his family to “this beautiful place, this historic area.” He realized that the four-acre requirement placed financial obstacles in the way of many—

  “At fifteen hundred an acre, maybe two thousand, yeah,” the man in the blue shirt told the man next to him.

  But Noble waited politely; said that that was precisely what he meant. He, and the others who felt as he did, appreciated the problem. If this section of the countryside were the only area—if there weren’t alternatives—then he, and, he guessed, all of them, would just grin and take their losses. But—was that the case? Weren’t there—

  To Heimrich it was all familiar. It was very human. Build your low-price developments—but not too close to me. Abolish racial discrimination—but in the next block, not in my block. Forward the brotherhood of man, but in another county, not in this. I put good money into my place and if the community changes—

  “—a tradition of graceful living,” Mr. Noble said, having now warmed to it. “Represented, if Mrs. Van Brunt will permit me to say so, by the family which has always been so much a part of the community, has set the tone of—”

  Mrs. Van Brunt permitted him to say so; Mr. Phipps permitted. It became apparent that, while Mr. Noble might bolt his dinner, he was no man to bolt his arguments. Captain Heimrich ceased to pay close attention; he found that he was, as well as he might from his view of backs of heads, classifying those who listened—or did not listen—to the speaker’s now extended remarks.

  “—with the assurance—I repeat, assurance—that the community would retain its character, that it would not—for whatever praiseworthy motives—be allowed—”

  Some of the heads nodded, associating themselves with the tradition of graceful living; others were held stiffly, necks rigid in disapproval. Some of the taxpayers, Heimrich suspected, were forming answering arguments with their minds, and possibly with their lips. Now and then a man turned to the man next him and whispered something; once a woman, seated well toward the front, permitted herself a little gasp, presumably of incredulity that what was being said could be said. The man in the blue shirt was sunk low in his chair—or as low as the nature of the chair permitted. He looked—with, it was to be assumed, an expression of exaggerated hopelessness—at the ceiling. A man in a gray summer suit said something to the woman with him, and both suppressed laughter. As taxpayers went in a semi-rural, partly suburban, community, these, Heimrich thought, went in many directions, while maintaining familiar patterns of divergence.

  There were the well-to-do indigenous—the men and women who owned, not building lots (and five acres, even ten, may be a building lot) but acreage. Mrs. Van Brunt exemplified; Mr. Phipps, presumably, was of the group. Miss Burns was an associate, or so he guessed—her ancestors, while of equal status, probably had been less provident. Hence her library position. Miss Shively—he mentally shrugged. She would be one of the community problems—“poor dear whatever-her-first-name-was.”

  There were the less well-to-do indigenous—and some of them might well come from families as old, once seemingly as permanent, as the Van Brunts. They would work for the Van Brunts, now, and for the Phippses; they would operate trucks which broke down often; they would scythe the sides of roads. They would live in The Flats. The man in the blue shirt was not, probably, one of these. He was o
f the less well-to-do non-indigenous.

  There were the newcomers—the commuters, the straddlers between town and country. Mr. Noble was one of them; the man in the summer suit almost certainly another. (They tended to wear city suits; odd jackets and slacks would be their garb on week ends only.) His own Aldens were of this group, for all that John now wore a sports jacket. They were the golf—and, less frequently, tennis—players at the club. Their offspring splashed in the club pool. Some of them spent winters in Florida, and some in the city. A few, in the twelve to fifteen thousand class, tightened belts and drove four-wheel jeeps over icy roads, and of these the men left their homes in darkness from November until middle March, and returned in darkness, considering as they skidded to the station and back from the station, that summers made up for everything—they guessed.

  “—a homogeneous community,” Mr. Noble said, with that assurance of manner most appropriate to those assertions which are least demonstrable. “Some of us have a little more than others—I’ve got five acres, Phil Brent’s got twenty more or less, our supervisor’s got more than a hundred. Some of us have been here a couple of years—like Mr. and Mrs. Alden back there—”

  The Aldens looked at each other; several near by turned to look at them, to smile encouragingly.

  “—some have lived in these parts all their lives, and their people did before them—back to the Indians. But what I mean to say is, we’re all the same kind of people. Same stock, pretty much the same way of looking at things—”

  If the man in the blue shirt leaned his head back farther, dissociated himself more obviously from all about him, he would, Heimrich feared, dislocate cervical vertebrae.

  “—the barriers,” Mr. Noble said. “We get an influx of—well, who knows what kind? This typical American community may—”

  He was interrupted. He was interrupted by a tall, thin man, with a long face. He sat a row or two in front of Noble, and to the side; he turned to face the speaker, and he shook his head, adopted an expression of alarm.

  “Might even get Democrats,” the long man said. “That’s what Edgar means.” Over this he tched.

  Everybody laughed at that—even Edgar Noble laughed; even Orville Phipps smiled the smile of tolerance.

  “That’s Sam Jackson,” Marian told her uncle. “Nice man. Be the leader of the Democrats, if there were any.”

  “Everybody’s pet Democrat,” John Alden added. “They keep them as pets around here.”

  “Have your joke, Sam,” Edgar Noble said. “All the same—”

  “Oh,” Sam Jackson said, and now he rose slowly. He was very long. “Not a joke exactly. People start coming out here from the city, we’re going to get Democrats. Law of averages. Not a lot, perhaps. Maybe they get out in the fine country air, start catching the seven fifty-six, you can cure them, Edgar. You and Orville, of course. On the other hand—”

  He turned, with unexpected suddenness toward the town supervisor, who glittered at him.

  “Thought of that, Orville?” Sam Jackson said. “Run a risk of Democrats—God knows what—once you let down the bars, as Edgar says. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen to this—this integrated, homogeneous community, with its gracious traditions—”

  “Haw!” the man in the blue shirt told the ceiling. “Haw. That’s telling ’em, Sam.”

  “Mr. Phipps owns the local Republicans, of course,” John Alden said, across his wife. “That’s how—”

  “John!” Marian Alden said. “Look! Out the window!”

  She did not keep her voice down, but she was not the first to see. Jackson did not finish his sentence. He turned, with others, toward the windows which opened toward the north. There was a red glow against the darkening summer sky, and as they watched—as they rose from their chairs, pointed, raised voices—the glow grew larger—spread and grew taller. A telephone bell rang shrilly somewhere—rang and continued to ring.

  There was a rush, then, toward doors. Some of the men—the man in the blue shirt, Sam Jackson, Paul Stidworthy among them—were given preference. They, Heimrich realized, would be members of the volunteer fire department. It was odd, he thought—

  “It’s funny,” Marian Alden said, “that we didn’t hear the siren. Come on!”

  Already there was, from the parking lot outside, the sound of car motors, started violently, raced into action. Already, the room was more than half empty. Phipps and the members of the town board had vanished, going through an exit of their own.

  “Come on,” Marian said. “It must be right at The Corners.”

  II

  They jostled out of the parking lot at the Town House; they joined the cars which streamed toward The Corners in a long line on the black road—ancient pickup with flapping fenders keeping its place behind a Cadillac; jeep station wagon bouncing sturdily; a square-built Ford of years ago pursuing an MG doggedly. The Aldens’ Olds, its top down, was near the end of the line. They dipped into a hollow and the glow ahead was only a redness against the sky. They climbed out of the hollow and at the crest the glow was red flame leaping into the increasing darkness. By then they knew—by then all those who rode toward it knew—that the fire was at The Corners and that one of half a dozen buildings fed its red appetite.

  Jim Purvis’s Garage, The Corners market, The Basket Shop, the Conley House, the Ridgley Building—ancient and frame, housing Vincent Ridgley’s law offices, and L. P. Brown, D.D.S.—and the fire house—among these, and only among these, the fire had its choice, could find its fuel. It could, of course, devour all of them, if human luck was bad. It had been a dry summer.

  The Town House was about halfway between The Corners, which was a crossroads, and the community—it was not officially so much as a village—called Van Brunt Center, but not recognized as such by the Post Office Department, which considered it no more than a slight bulge on Rural Route No. 4, Cold Harbor, New York. The Corners was thus about a mile and a half from the Town House, and it took nobody long to get to it, to pile cars along the sides of the two roads which intersected there, to tumble out of cars and to stand facing the red light, the drying heat, of the leaping flames.

  The fire house was feeding a fine blaze. Flames were dancing through its roof, following black smoke. Flames were licking out of its windows. There was a great roaring in the night. Fire is a noisy eater. And the assorted taxpayers of the Town of Van Brunt stood and watched, there being nothing else to do.

  Or most did. A few ran toward the fire and ran from it again, and a few shouted, without much meaning. The rear of the building—which was, or had been, of two stories; which occupied a lot of almost an acre—was not fully alight when the first cars of the cavalcade reached The Corners, and there, where shadows held, several men were doing something, or at any rate, shouting to one another about doing something.

  The Aldens and Heimrich stood at the edge of the heat. John Alden hoped that no one would be damn fool enough to try to get in.

  “Oh, I hope not,” Marian said. “I do hope not. Nobody would—”

  There was, Alden said, a stairway in the rear—an outside stairway, leading to the second floor, where the fire company had its social headquarters, now and then held dances to raise funds. The fire chief’s office was there, and there might—for all Alden knew—be records somebody might try to save. There might—

  There was a muffled explosion. Part of the front wall of the Van Brunt Volunteer Fire Department fell away, and spectators jumped back farther, and flames shot in a burst from the roof. Three men who had been in the rear of the building ran from it, into the red light, and across the lot. Then, from far off, there was the sound of a siren. It echoed from hills, seemed to be everywhere. At almost the same time, another siren—shriller in tone—began to wail from the direction of Van Brunt Center.

  “It’s certainly time,” Marian Alden said. “Oh Sam! Sam Jackson!”

  Jackson had been standing a little way off with two other men. He had turned from them; now he could be recognized.
He came toward the Aldens and Heimrich.

  “Cold Harbor’s coming,” he said. “It’s—it’s driving the boys nuts, of course. Aside from everything else, we’ll never hear the end of it. Our own fire house burns down and most of us don’t hear a thing until—” he motioned—“until it’s like this.”

  “The operator gets a call,” Alden said. “She sounds the siren from a switch in the telephone office. Then the firemen gather, if they happen to be around—but you know how it works.”

  Heimrich nodded. It worked as it did in most rural areas—equipment was purchased, a fire house built (or converted) partly from town funds, partly by money raised at carnivals and in other fashions. When there was a fire, the siren on top of the fire house complained about it. The members of the volunteer company—if, as Alden said, they happened to be in the vicinity—leaped into cars and raced for the fire house, honking urgency. The first man there—the first qualified man—drove the fire truck out and away. The volunteers followed in cars and trucks, forming a tail to the truck’s noisy comet. That was the way it worked. Ordinarily, it worked surprisingly well.

  But it started with the siren on the fire house roof.

  “The operator got the report, all right,” Jackson said. “Threw the switch all right. But—nothing happened. The fire had got to the wires, apparently. Very—” He paused. “Very frustrating,” he said. “Everything we could fight it with is—” He paused again—“Well,” he said, “is it. Hose, axes, extinguishers, the trucks themselves—”

  Heimrich hoped they were insured, since fire trucks cost money.

  “Yes,” Jackson said. “Probably not adequately—have to check with Orville on that. He handled it.”

  “Our insurance—” Marian began, and stopped.

  “I know,” Sam Jackson said, and smiled down at her. “Puts us all in the unprotected zone, for a while. But the others—Cold Harbor, Yorktown—they’ll stand by, as well as they can. And, something’ll get fixed up.”