Aunt Ruby's Fire

Aunt Ruby is old, eccentric, and gossipy. But most importantly she does not seem to notice Sean's new best friend, Jeremy, and Sean begins to wonder if Jeremy exists at all.

 

Aunt Ruby’s Fire

 

“She hates me,” Sean mumbled, but his parents did not hear.

The pile of luggage with which he’d shared the ride to North Carolina pressed against the back of the driver’s seat like a weary traveler. Sean stared at the back of the passenger headrest, counting the ugly leather creases when the streetlights would let him.

“Sean, don’t say anything to Aunt Ruby that might upset her,” his mother said.

One of the streetlights flickered and died as the family car passed. “What you mean is you don’t want me telling her about the separation,” Sean replied.

“That has nothing to do with you, Sean. You shouldn’t talk about it.”

The two tall figures in the front seats looked like shadows in watercolor, their soft black silhouettes unmoving despite the light that poured in. Sean shifted in his seat, looked out the window, and then rested his head against the glass. He watched the glass fog as his breath escaped.

“How much farther, Mom?” he asked.

“Just about twenty miles or so.” The other shadow seemed to bow in agreement, but it was only a trick of the light.

A red arrow stopped them short, one last stoplight at the city limits. The driver’s window groaned as it slid down, and moments later the blood-and-ginger smell of his father’s cigarette choked all but the numbness away.

 

The Lewis plantation was a faded gray monolith with an amber glow of candlelight in every window; it faced the two-lane country road from a distance. A single, solemn willow tree stretched its limbs away from the porch railing.

Great Aunt Ruby did not have a television.

“It’s a tool of the devil,” she said. “A window to all kinds of worldly wickedness.”

Great Aunt Ruby did not have a radio. “Nothing but sex on it nowadays,” she said with pursed lips.

Great Aunt Ruby did, however, have a deluxe telephone payment plan with no extra charges for long distance calls.

She was expecting a call when Sean and his parents arrived, and by the time they were finished unpacking she was expecting two more.

“But don’t worry,” she said with a smile. “I have three-way.”

 

Vacation, to Sean, was a black leather suitcase. The next morning, when a big orange sun began to annoy his closed eyelids, he tossed up the covers and toe-tapped the rug in search of his shoes.

There was no dew in the garden, and stale gray leaves cracked under Sean’s feet. It was a quarter mile downhill before the river came into view, he remembered. The grounds hadn’t changed a bit in the two years since his last visit.

Sean’s favorite spot was beneath a young oak, leafless and laced with tiny ribbons of blue-green fungus. The foundations of an old stone cottage protruded from the brown dirt like a broken gray crown of stones and petrified wood. One winter break Sean had brought a journal and sat for hours in a corner where the sunlight warmed the ground.

On this cloudless day the air smelled of pine and chimney dust, and an older, dark-skinned boy sat cross-legged in the white sand on the other side of the oak tree. He wore smoky gray clothes.

“Hey!” he said with a smile and something akin to recognition.

“What’s up?” said Sean.

“Not much,” the boy said.

“You live around here?”

“Not far at all. Name’s Jerry.”

“Sean. You spend much time out here?” Does Aunt Ruby ever give you grief? he wondered.

“Lately I’ve had lots more time. I’ve been passing the time fishing in the river, mostly. You like to fish?”

“I don’t have a pole, and I don’t know how.”

“Well, you might just be a natural.” The boy squinted towards the sunlight. “You see that birch sapling over there?”

Sean, determined not to seem ignorant, trudged through the brush. “This skinny one here?”

“Yeah. That one. You know you could cut it and make it into a fishing pole? I’ve done it before.”

“Where’s yours? You still got it?”

Jerry grinned. “Yeah, o’ course I got it. It’s right on the riverbank where I left it. At least, I reckon it is.”

Sean followed Jerry into the river clearing. It was warmer near the riverbank, and the wind was not as bitter.

 

The “Sounds of Nature” bird clock on the kitchen wall whooped its lonely noontime call. Aunt Ruby sat on the edge of the small dining table with the telephone cord stretched between her toes. The handset was a pale blue and matched the kitchen clock and the countertop.

“You’re a little late for lunch.” Aunt Ruby set her bony right hand over the mouthpiece. “And what is that?” she scoffed as Sean held the screen door open for Jerry, who smiled meekly as he wiped his shoes on the mat.

Aunt Ruby sat there at an angle, her mouth agape. Sean blinked and took a breath.

“Aunt Ruby, this is Jerry. I told him to come in out of the cold.”

Her thick brow wrinkled, and she looked down at Sean while holding her breath.

“I told him he could join us for lunch. You don’t mind, do you?”

Aunt Ruby seemed unable to find the words she wanted, so she shut her lips and shook her head. She smiled into the receiver.

“Yes, I heard you, Margaret. It sounds like Luella told the truth for once.” She slid down from the tabletop and left the room in a hurry, stretching the weary phone cord.

“I’m sorry about my Aunt…” Sean was pale.

Jerry smiled. “Don’t apologize for her.”

 

The long dining table was quiet as death, save for the occasional clink of a fork. Aunt Ruby sat on the end nearest to the kitchen.

“So how does Jerry like his lunch?” Aunt Ruby asked. The left side of her mouth curled up, pinched and bloodless. Sean glanced at the empty space beside him. A plate was neatly set with a napkin and silverware, clean, untouched.

“What does that mean?” Sean said. “You made it clear he wasn’t welcome. You can see he’s not here, can’t you?”

Aunt Ruby flourished her mascara-mauve eyelids for Mom, who stared at her plate.

“My eyes are old, honey,” Aunt Ruby chewed with her mouth open. “They don’t see everything.”

Sean’s fork clanked against his plate.

 

Sean did not see Jerry the rest of that day, or the day after that. The clouds returned, and Sean did not wake up to see the sun anymore. As evening set in one lonely afternoon, twilight found Sean seated on his bed staring at his neglected cell phone on the bedside table. No reception.

His parents stood in the gray grass far below his open window. Most of their words were lost in the breeze, and after a few minutes his father flicked his second cigarette aside and stalked off. It took longer for the shadow of his mother to move. Before long, the sounds of two cars, Aunt Ruby’s and his dad’s, faded into the distance, each heading in a different direction on the highway.

Sleep will only make things easier, Sean thought. He stepped toward the doorway to turn off the light, and Aunt Ruby’s voice became clearly audible from the den.

“What? Oh, everything, Melissa. It’s the ugliest, dirtiest day in forever…. Yes, well, I just heard from Grace"you know, my stepdaughter"that Marian and John are considering separation…. I know! I can’t think why they haven’t said a word about it to me! Even still, the trouble might not be with them. Their little boy Sean"you’ve seen his picture on my freezer door"he worries me to no end. There’s just something strange about him.

“Well, he spends every day out in the woods, and just the other day, when he came in he was covered in dirt and talking on and on about his imaginary friend. “Jerry,” he calls him"just as serious as he could be! But he was all alone. I think he’s driven his parents insane with worry. Wouldn’t you worry if your teenager was still playing pretend or, God forbid, hallucinating?”

Sean coughed. He hated the humid, musty smell of the house.

“Sean?”

He turned around in surprise to see Jerry standing by the window.

“Jerry! What’s up? How did you…?”

            Sean looked back into the hall, expecting to see Aunt Ruby’s disapproving face leering at them from the shadows, but she was still busy.

            “Did you climb in through the window?” Sean whispered.

            Jerry moved his mouth as if to speak, but there was no sound.

            “What’s up?” Sean repeated. Jerry closed his eyes and did it again. No words.

            “Jerry, what’s wrong?” Sean said, feeling sick.

            Jerry slumped onto the bed. The air in the room was too thick and opaque, and although Sean could not tell for sure, he thought he was smelling smoke.

With a panic as real and terrifying as he had ever felt, he tried to shake Jerry to consciousness, to move him from the bed.

“Aunt Ruby!” Sean yelled. It was happening too quickly, and Jerry was unmovable as stone. Not even the sheets on the bed were crumpled.

There was a moment, it seemed to Sean, when the stone melted away, and Jerry was not so heavy any more. Sean finally lifted Jerry as the first licks of flame grazed the bed.

They moved like the flames they fled from, out the open window, Sean hanging on tight to the old house, down to the courtyard below.

“Is it over?” Jerry asked, half-asleep. There was no hint of pain in his voice.

And then Sean knew. Light and dark were dancing wildly in the room above them, but a dark shadow still rested on the cedar bed.

Sean sat on the chilly ground as several pairs of headlights pulled up into the yard.

 

The fire had not spread far before it was quenched by Aunt Ruby. No irreparable damage had been done to the old house. Aunt Ruby had only a few words of reassurance for her niece and nephew-in-law, and there was no telephone around, so she sat down under a garden canopy with one of the rescue squad members.

“When I was young,” she said between sobs, “living here on the farm, there was a fire. We had a cottage over near the river where the servants lived--the hired help, you know. Papa always told me not to ever mingle with them, so I stayed away.

“I was thirteen when the cottage burned down. I caught a glimpse of it from my bedroom window. Mama said we had to evacuate in case the house caught fire, too. A servant boy died in that fire. I never told a soul until now.”

Several yards away Sean’s parents held each other and cried with relief. Wisps of smoke still lingered in the chilly air.

Author's Note

This story has had several revisions, but not since 2008.
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