Words Burned to Flame Page 3

  Chapter 3 – A Town Composed of Bone

  I remember how difficult it can be to remain within the town’s city limits as I drive through Addieville. One stray turn and two errant blocks gone beneath the wheels center Addieville in the rear-view mirror. I take several wrong turns before I rediscover the path to the public park my father’s library overlooked.

  Addieville hasn’t changed much in the thirty-some years that have passed since I helped Mr. Turner change his magic into flame, and it feels like it was only yesterday when the wind floated that fire through town. Many an ashen, backyard toolshed and doghouse remain charred from the heat of that event. I pass the corner lot where Mr. Hustedde’s A-frame home stood before it caught fire that day Mr. Turner tossed his runic tiles onto his book pyre, and nobody’s bothered to demolish or rehab the abandoned foundation. A blue tarp still flutters in the breeze, clinging against the wind to cover the hole that remains in the roof of the old, empty elementary gymnasium, created by still more of Mr. Turner’s fire, and plywood still covers the school building’s windows where firefighters broke through the glass so that their hoses could flood the structure.

  The church of the Later Day Harvest, where Minister Friend’s congregation once shook and sang while waiting for the spirit to enter their hearts and move their tongues, still stands as a skeleton of two-by fours, no one yet inclined to salvage what remains of that church after Mr. Turner’s fire consumed so much of Addieville. I count the rotten tree stumps left in the ground, and my imagination often attempts to remember the elm or the oak that stood on those spots before the wind carried the flames of Mr. Turner’s books through the community. Mr. Turner told me the scars of fire seldom heal and that they never vanish, and though that old man showed me so much magic, I hadn’t believed the ash from that day would still linger after three decades. I thought as a boy that, maybe after a handful of years, the town would clear its debris and rebuild. But Addieville proves Mr. Turner right - people seldom find the motivation needed to rebuild atop bones.

  I find the public park, and I finish my cooling coffee seated at a picnic table wrapped in a shell of peeling paint. A wooden pavilion once covered the spot, a place where young teenage girls and boys gathered to feel beneath one another’s clothing. But that pavilion was one more victim of Mr. Turner’s fire, and so that spot offers me no shelter as the sun climbs in the sky and burns at the back of my neck.

  It’s difficult for me to look towards the metal building waiting at the end of the roadway meandering through the park. For not the first time, I wonder what ever motivated my father to accept a position of librarian in such an ugly structure. My father’s efforts always deserved better fortune than what he received. I suppose that he originally came to Addieville to please my mother, who herself grew up in a community a little further downstate which was little larger than Addieville. Mother must’ve fallen in love with the remains of Addieville’s one-room schoolhouse. Mother must’ve imagined Addieville as a wonderful place for that doll shop and candle-making storefront she always wished to run. Somehow, she must’ve dreamed the town’s residents possessed the money and desire for her homespun crafts. My mother must’ve thought the people of Addieville had a nose for scented potpourri, and a zest for homemade hand soaps.

  Whatever his motivation, Vance Frost accepted the position as Addieville’s librarian, and he didn’t let an ugly, metal building dim his dreams of what books might bring to the isolated community. My father never let go of the notion that words could elevate humanity. My father’s faith in ideas never faltered, not when Addieville shunned him, not the least when cancer killed him twenty-six years later and four more libraries down highway.

  That metal building somehow looks uglier than I remember at the end of that twisting road through the park. The town converted it into a municipal garage for the community’s fire truck, a fitting irony considering the part I played in helping Mr. Turner set his fire. I stood next to dad and watched them cut open the wall on that building to make room for the garage door. I watched them pack all the books into cardboard boxes and haul them away. I heard them tell my father that most of what was lost in Mr. Turner’s fire might’ve been saved if only Addieville possessed a fire engine instead of a library, so that the town hadn’t needed to wait thirty-five minutes for the first trucks to arrive from out of town. I don’t think it would’ve mattered. I don’t think Addieville ever owned enough breath to employ the tools the fighting of fires requires.

  A decal bearing the Masonic emblem now clings to the building’s front door. Corrosion streaks the garage door to mark the trail where water trickles from broken gutters, and I doubt that a fire truck any longer waits inside for an occasion to rumble down the street with a siren singing about flames. I drift to the single window next to the door, but I cannot peak beyond the inner curtains. I knock on the door, imagining that some elder man, with a trim, gray beard wearing a stonemason’s apron, will happily lead me inside to show how well his lodge has preserved the small reading room where my father enjoyed his afternoon company of coffee and books.

  Yet nobody answers, and I don’t have the optimism and courage to pound my knuckles a second time. So I meekly turn my back on that metal building that my father so long ago worked into a library, a silly resource for a town like Addieville. I return to my car and stare a little while longer out the windshield, thinking that the trees shouldn’t be so barren this time of the season, wondering if some species of Asian beetle is responsible for the blight apparently impacting the park’s canopy. I’m in no hurry to continue with my homecoming. I have only a handful of stops on my itinerary, and the highway will quickly enough direct me out of Addieville.

  So I stare at the façade of that metal building until I’m honest with my nostalgia and admit that Addieville has always been an ugly place. How long ago did the town decay into bones? How long has Addieville been nothing more than a cemetery?

  Perhaps I’m starting to appreciate what Declan Turner attempted to do when he piled all his books and notepads into a pile three decades ago. Perhaps Mr. Turner was trying to pay Addieville a kind of respect by burning its body so that the community no longer needed to rot beneath the open sky. Perhaps it’s time that someone finishes the ritual.

  Maybe something does wait for me in Addieville. Maybe something has pulled me back to this place. Didn’t Mr. Turner tell me that the tiles would always be there for me when I decided I was ready to sift through the ash to find them? Didn’t he tell me that those runes carved onto bone would be waiting should I one day decide to continue with a boneshaker’s magic?

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