Roy held the evidence bag up against the glass of the car window so that the adjuster could see what was inside it. It was a small gray junction box, blackened and half melted, with a twisted splice of two different kinds of wire sticking out of it. Still stapled to one side, scorched at the edges but perfectly readable, was a yellow inspection tag. “Son,” Roy said through the window, in the same voice he once used for rookies at the station, “do you see that stamp? That is the stamp of Midstate Risk Services. Do you know who hires Midstate?” The adjuster did not answer. His face had turned the color of putty.
The tag was dated February of last year, the very month my policy was increased. At the bottom, in blue ink, was a line that read, “Electrical system inspected and approved by order of Carrier.” The company had sent its own man to my house. He had walked through my kitchen with a clipboard, written that the wiring was acceptable, and let them raise my premium. Now they were telling me that I had burned my house down on purpose, using the same wiring that their own inspector had called safe. Roy lowered the bag. “The fire marshal pulled this from the wall behind your stove, Peggy,” he said.
The adjuster finally rolled the window down, and he did not meet my eyes. “Mrs. Lunsford,” he said slowly, “I think there may have been a misunderstanding. I need to speak with my supervisor.” Roy folded his arms. “You do that,” he said. “And tell your supervisor that the fire marshal is going to write one word in the cause line of his report, and it will not be arson.” The adjuster nodded, rolled up the window, and drove off down the gravel road so carefully that he did not raise a speck of dust.
A house can burn to the ground in a night, but a neighborhood can raise it again before the next harvest.
The report came out ten days later. Cause of fire: accidental, failure of a spliced connection in the kitchen wall, an aluminum to copper joint of a type that had been recalled by the manufacturer in 1996. The fire marshal even attached the recall notice, a faded sheet printed on blue paper. Under it, in a sharp black hand, he had added a note for the insurance carrier. “The inspection performed by a contractor of the carrier failed to identify the defect, and the carrier approved the wiring in writing.” I read that sentence in the kitchen of my sister four times, with my dog Biscuit warm against my foot.
A lawyer from Paducah named Marguerite Boyd called me the next morning. Roy had gone to see her personally. She was a small, brisk woman with a voice like a pitcher of cold water, and she offered to take my case for a third of whatever we recovered, which I thought fair. But she did not need to spend a month on it. She sent the company a letter of six paragraphs on a Tuesday. On Friday, the regional vice president telephoned me himself, and he apologized so many times that I finally had to ask him to stop.
The claim was approved in full. The company paid one hundred eighty four thousand dollars for the house, another thirty one thousand for the contents I could prove, and, because Ms. Boyd insisted, an additional sum for living expenses and for what she called the injury of being accused. The adjuster himself came to the house of my sister a week later, in a clean shirt, with his hat in his hands. He did not make excuses. He said he had been trained to look for fraud, and had stopped looking for people. I told him it was a hard lesson, and that I hoped he would carry it.
Meanwhile, the whole county went to work. The volunteer fire department turned out on a Saturday with a flatbed truck, and Roy, who is seventy four and should have known better, climbed onto the new roof with a nail gun like a man of thirty. The lumber yard in Metropolis donated the framing. A church group from Mayfield provided sandwiches. The widow of the high school coach brought a coffee urn the size of a fire hydrant. By October, the walls were up, and the smell of fresh pine drifted across the yard.
The strangest gift came from people I barely knew. When word got out that I had lost forty years of photographs, neighbors started to bring envelopes. They had pictures from the church picnic of 1983, from a Fourth of July parade, from my wedding, copied from their own albums. One old woman I had never met arrived on my porch with a shoebox and said she had been the flower girl at a wedding where Dale was the best man. By Christmas, I had nearly four hundred photographs, none of them mine, all of them my life.
In January Roy came by with a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a folded American flag, still creased from the case, and a small card. “the regiment of Dale sent this after the fire,” the card said. “We took up a collection. The flag that burned was his. This one is for his wife.” I sat on the edge of my new sofa and held it against my chest. It smelled faintly of cedar. For a long time I did not trust myself to speak, and Roy was kind enough to look at the ceiling beams and admire them.
On the first warm Sunday in April, the house was finished. We had a dedication on the porch, with a pastor, a cake, and forty neighbors in folding chairs. Roy hung the new flag from a bracket by the door. Biscuit trotted back and forth in her new yard, sniffing every board of the porch as if it were a letter from a friend. When the pastor asked me to say a few words, I looked at the faces on the lawn and said, “They told me I lit the match. You are the ones who lit the lamp.”
