I read the gray letter at the long table by the radiator, with my glasses pushed up on my forehead, while the copier behind me hummed through the March issue. It was a finding of the State Fire Marshal for the burning of Tibbetts Hardware on the night of the ninth of November, 1987. Cause, electrical, accidental. Case closed. Then, at the bottom, under the signature of a man named Pelkey, a single typed line that someone had underlined in blue ink. At the request of the owner, the names of four minors have been omitted from this report.
Dwayne watched me read it. His hand had stopped shaking. “Four minors,” he whispered. “Ma, my boss is Dale Whitcomb. He runs the whole regional office in Augusta. He grew up on Water Street. He told me last week that the fire at the store of Dad was the worst night of his life, and I did not know what he meant.” He drew a breath. “You wrote in the Dispatch that your husband never blamed the boys. He wants to know who told you there were boys.”
I folded the letter and set it on the table. I had never told anyone, not in thirty years, and I had not intended to break that silence in the Dispatch. I had put one line in a column about the winter of 1987 and had changed nothing but the weather. “Nobody told me, dear,” I said. “Your father did, in 1995, the night before his first operation. He said he wanted me to know he had made peace with it. He asked me to keep it as long as any of the four were alive.”
I told him the story slowly. In November of 1987, four boys of sixteen had been smoking in the storeroom at the back of the hardware, among the paint thinner and the sawdust, after the store closed. A cigarette fell. By the time they got out, the whole back wall was alight. One of them, a skinny fellow with red hair, ran back in for the cash box, because he thought it would save the store. They stood in the snow on Water Street and watched the whole building go, with the volunteer company too late.
The kindest thing a man can do for a frightened child is to take the blame upon himself, and then never ask to be thanked.
“Rollie found them behind the church an hour later,” I said. “Four boys sitting in the dark, shaking like leaves. He did not shout. He sat down on the wall beside them in his bathrobe and said he supposed the wiring had always been bad. Then he went to the fire marshal in the morning and told him that, and the marshal, who had known your father since the third grade, asked that their names be left out. They would have lost their scholarships, and one would have lost his chance for the Navy.”
Dwayne sat in silence. In the next room, Paige had stopped even pretending to shelve books. “He never told you?” I asked gently. He shook his head. “I thought the store burned because Dad was careless,” he said. “All my life. The kids at school said so. I never knew he had done it on purpose, to save four idiots.” His voice broke. “That is why you have always been so proud of him. And I have been angry at him for thirty years, for something that was the best thing he ever did.”
The door of the library opened a quarter of an hour later, and a man in a gray overcoat came in, fifty five years old, with a red face and a head of white hair that had once been red. He stopped at the sight of the table. Then, without a word, he took off his hat. Dale Whitcomb crossed the room slowly and sat across from me. He had driven up from Augusta that morning, he said, because he could not wait to see me. He had been the boy who ran back for the cash box.
He told me he had carried the night for thirty eight years. He had become a fire inspector, then a deputy commissioner, because he could not stop trying to pay it off. Each year on the ninth of November he went to the old lot on Water Street and stood there. Rollie, who had seen him in the grocery store, had only ever nodded and asked about his mother. “I tried to thank him once,” Dale said, and his eyes filled. “He said, it was only an old building, son. Go build a better one.”
We sat at that table until the library closed. Dale asked if he might do one thing for the Dispatch. A week later, a truck from Augusta backed up to my door with a crate that held a restored Smith Corona, cleaned, oiled, with a brand new E key. He had also funded, quietly, a small fund at the school in the name of Rollie, to help any boy or girl who made a bad mistake and needed a second chance. The four of them, the grown men, came together to sign the first check. They were all there.
Dwayne unblocked my number that very night. He called me at half past nine, and we talked for two hours, and he said he was sorry in a dozen different ways, and I said it was nothing, and then we stopped pretending and just breathed at each other over the line. He came on Saturday and learned to run the copier. By summer he was writing the sports column, under his own name, and had a gift for it. His father had a way with a plain sentence too.
The Dooryard Dispatch has four hundred readers now, and a standing order from the Augusta office. I type it on the old Smith Corona with the new E, which does not stick, and I confess that I miss the sticking a little. On the table under the dish towel sits the old machine of Rollie, with its stuck letter. Now and then, when no one is looking, Dwayne sits down at it, and types a single line, and covers it up again. Last week the line said, Dear Dad. It was a lot, and it was enough.
