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Free and Clear

Drew Brashaw

    Stanley Rickards walked through his darkened house, fumes from the kerosene burning in his nostrils and wetting his eyes. It sloshed against the bottom of the galvanized steel can with every heave, beating on it like a snare drum in a slow, somber cadence as he doused burgundy and gold wallpaper peeling from knotted pine walls, dusty wooden furniture, faded rugs. Methodically, he moved along the second floor, tried his best to leave no surface untouched by the gas. He crossed the threshold of his father’s bedroom and his steps stuttered a moment. His eyes fell on a framed photograph on the bedside table.
    “Who’s that?” a very young Stanley asked his father, pointing to the same photograph taken nearly a quarter-century earlier.
    “That’s your mama and me on our wedding day,” his father replied. “Ain’t she a peach?”
    “Yeah, she’s real pretty,” Stanley said. “But you look funny in that suit.”
    “I guess I did,” Stanley’s father said, chuckling softly. “That was the first time I ever wore a necktie. It choked me up somethin’ awful. Only wore it once since. Reckon I’ll only have to wear it one more time. Won’t bother me none, then.”
    “When Mama comes home?”
    “What? No, she—Son, we’ve talked about this. Your mama gone off to heaven the day you was born.”
    “But when’s she comin’ home?”
    “She’s—” He paused for a moment. “I don’t want you worryin’ about that, all right? Now help me get them lamps lit before it gets dark.”
    Stanley walked to the nightstand and set the gas can on the floor beside the bed. Carefully he removed the faded photograph from its dusty frame and tucked it into the back pocket of his trousers. He sighed and took up the can and poured some of its contents onto the bed—the same bed he was born in; the same bed where his mother and father, both, had perished.
    He left the bedroom and started down the stairs, tipping the can so a splash of kerosene spilled out behind him onto each step as he descended. Stanley made his way to the kitchen, pouring out a splash or two onto everything he passed. The dinner table now bore only dust and stacks of papers stamped with red ink. Stanley turned the can upside-down and poured most of the remaining kerosene over the piles of paper. The gas cascaded down the mounds of documents and gathered in dark pools on the tabletop. Stanley watched nearly two years of collected dust float to the surface of the beaded gas. The particle stared up at him like eyes; judging him.
    Stanley set the near-empty can on the table and opened the cabinet above his father’s roll-top desk. From the cabinet he retrieved a small leather pouch and a pair of quart mason jars wrapped in burlap. He put the jars on the table next to the gas can and dragged out his chair and sat down, untied the pouch’s drawstring. Out of a book of rolling papers he plucked a leaf, emptied the pouch over it. Flakes of dry, stale tobacco ground nearly to dust spilled over the edges of the paper and stuck to Stanley’s greasy fingers. He tucked the crooked cigarette behind his right ear.
    Stanley collected the two mason jars from the table and cradled them under his left arm. He grabbed the gas can by its rusted handle and started toward the front door. The last remaining ounces of kerosene splashed at his feet as he crossed the threshold and exited to the front porch. He dropped the empty can on the wooden planks, and it made a sound like the hollow peal of a funeral bell as it rolled down the steps into the dirt. Stanley took the cigarette from behind his ear and stuck the skinnier end of it between his lips. He produced a matchstick from the pocket of his trousers and struck it on his belt buckle, raised the flame cautiously to his face, blocking the wind with his other hand. He lit the twisted off end of his cigarette and inhaled deeply. With his exhalation, Stanley dropped the still-burning matchstick onto the dampened rug just inside the front door.
    By the time he sat down in the dirt, about twenty yards from the house, black smoke was billowing from the doorway and orange flames begun licking their way out of the first floor windows. Watching the fire spread slowly throughout the only home he’d ever known, Stanley cracked the seal on one of the jars and unscrewed its lid. He lifted the rim to his lips and tipped it back, wincing at the burn of pure grain alcohol in his throat. He coughed, wiped the back of his gritty wrist across his mouth. “Foreclose that, you sons ‘a bitches.”
    By sunup, little more remained of the old Rickards house than some blackened, teetering framework and a smoldering pile of ashen coals. Stanley had hardly moved an inch all night, and his eyes had barely blinked. As dawn’s first rays washed over him, he noticed a dust plume tracing the road on the crest of the eastern ridgeline. After a few minutes, Stanley heard the familiar rumble of an automobile engine turning up his lane, and the car appeared shortly after. It was a shiny black ‘27 Packard with white-wall tires and an oversized chrome hood ornament. Behind the wheel was Mr. Hyde Franklin, proprietor of First Bank and Trust of LaPointe. Mr. Franklin exited his vehicle and started toward Stanley, neither man’s gaze breaking from the smoldering wreckage.
    “Christ almighty, Stan,” Mr. Franklin said, still staring into the smoke and ash, “What in God’s name happened?”
    “Fire,” Stanley replied, twisting the top off of his second jar.
    “Well it wouldn’t take a Pinkerton to sort that part of it out,” Mr. Franklin snapped, “I meant what caused it?”
    “Faulty wirin’, I suspect.”
    “Faulty wiring? Stan, you and I both know there hasn’t been a single watt piped into this place in more than a year.” Then he noticed the blackened gas can sitting on the ground at the edge of the charred ruins. “Jesus, Stan, what the hell did you do? Do you have any idea why I came out here this morning?”
    “I suspect I do,” Stanley said coolly before taking another nip.
    “You suspect? Well I suspect you don’t know your ass from your elbow sometimes. I didn’t come here to put you out, Stan, that’s the sheriff’s job. I came to bring you something, but it seems pointless now.”
    “Tough break, Hyde. Gonna be a pretty sorry auction.”
    “Dammit, Stan, that’s what I came to tell you. There isn’t going to be any auction. The bank was robbed yesterday, right as I was closing it up. Sheriff Dawkins seems to think it was Pretty Boy Floyd’s outfit, but I couldn’t say for certain. All I saw was the muzzle of that scattergun. They made off with almost fifteen hundred in cash, and they took my watch. The cash is all insured—so the people will get their money back eventually. Wish I could say the same for my watch, I had it since I was your age. My father gave it to me when I graduated university.”
    “Sad story, Hyde. Things are rough all over. But if you drove all the way out here just to accuse me of robbin’ the bank—”
    “Would you just shut up and listen a minute? They didn’t just rob the bank. They burned your mortgage papers, Stan. Understand? You’re off the hook. The farm, the tractor, the house—it’s all yours, free and clear.”
    “Free and clear,” Stanley echoed with a whisper, his eyes falling from the burned-out remains of his home and sinking to the bottom of his mason jar. Without regard for the cleanliness of his pressed, tailored trousers, Mr. Franklin took a seat beside Stanley in the dirt.
    “I helped your folks build that house,” Mr. Franklin said, staring down at the barren ground between his knees. “I don’t just mean signing off on the loan, either. I’m talking about pulling a saw and swinging a hammer right alongside your dad. Helped him clear the fields and put his first crop down, too.”
    “I know you did. He always talked fondly of you, even at the end,” Stanley said, offering Mr. Franklin a drink with an outstretched arm. “He told me never to blame you for our bad luck.”
     Mr. Franklin eyed the jar in Stanley’s hand, paused only a moment to consider the hour of morning before accepting it. He lifted the jar to his mouth, but stopped it short.
    “Ellie wanted so badly to adopt you when you were born,” he said. “She believed it was our Christian duty. She begged me to convince your father that it was the best thing for everyone, that we could give you a better life and ease his burden. She even lobbied Judge Harris’ wife to the same end. Ellie made some good points, but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t take you away from him. You and this farm were all he had left in the world, and I knew he couldn’t keep either without the other.”
    Stanley was silent. Mr. Franklin surveyed the younger man’s rigid, folded frame. Stanley was always lean, but his slenderness had taken a sickly form. Bones jutted out beneath his skin like the poles of a circus tent, sharpening his joints and casting shadows where sinewy muscles had waned. “I must have told your father a hundred times when you were a baby that he ought to find another wife, keep growing the family,” Mr. Franklin said. “But I don’t think he ever gave it a second thought—always said he could boil his own beans. I had it in my mind that it would be easier for you two if there was a woman in the house. I thought he was just being hard-headed at the time. I didn’t understand until years later, after I lost Ellie. I was so proud of you, though, of the both of you. I’ve never seen a man work so hard as Jack did those first few years. I thought he’d slow down once you were big enough to help out in the field, but he just kept on charging. He expected the same out of you, too. You were an able hand before most boys can even cut their own meat. I watched the man you grew to be, and I’d think about the big fat sissy Ellie would have made you into. Jack raised up a son any father would be proud of.”
    Stanley finally turned to face Mr. Franklin. “You gonna talk into that jar all day, or you gonna drink?”
    “Sorry, Stan. I get to carrying on.” Mr. Franklin pursed his lips and pressed them against the rim of the jar, tilting it only a few degrees for a modest sip. He swallowed, and his head swiveled violently. His mutton-chopped jowls flapped as he hissed through gritted teeth. “Good lord, son,” Mr. Franklin said, regaining his breath, “What the hell’s in that jar, turpentine?”
    “Damn near,” Stanley said, taking back the jar. “Boots Johnson’s white lightnin’. Traded Boots my last chicken for two gallons of it. Kicks like a mule, don’t it?”
    “Sure as hell does.”
    “Well, don’t go pissin’ on any brush fires.”
    Mr. Franklin grunted and pulled himself up from the ground, dusted off the seat of his trousers. “What are you going to do with yourself, Stan?”
    “Haven’t given it much thought past the bottom of this jar, to be truthful,” Stanley said. He took another drink.
    “Here,” Mr. Franklin said, producing an envelope from the inside breast pocket of his waistcoat. “It’s the deed to the farm, take it. The bank has no claim to it without the mortgage papers—not without an expensive fight, anyway. You won’t get much for it now,” he said, glancing at the smoking black heap where the house once stood, “But it’ll be enough for a fresh start. You’re a young man. Go to Colorado, go to California, or Tahiti—just go. Leave this dead land before it takes everything you’ve got left.”
    Stanley rose to his feet. He looked north over the cracked, windswept field where acre upon acre of amber-tufted corn once grew; looked south to the grassless pasture where half a dozen fat Holsteins once grazed. He looked east to the hillside where his mother and father lay, and finally back to the charred remains of his lifelong home. “Ain’t much left to take, Hyde. I think I’ll stick around.”
    “I wish the best for you, Stan, I always have. I don’t want you to wake up one day thirty years from now and realize it’s too late. It’s not too late for you.”
    Stanley stood and watched the rear end of Mr. Franklin’s Packard dissolve in the dust and vanish into the darkness of the pines. He clutched the envelope in both hands, noting for the first time its heft, which seemed to him more substantial than that of just a single document. Tearing the seal and unfolding the flap, Stanley’s suspicion was confirmed. The parcel did contain the deed to the Rickards stead, as Mr. Franklin had indicated, but there was more. Along with the deed, Stanley found his father’s defaulted mortgage agreement—entirely unburned. At the bottom of the envelope he found nearly fifteen-hundred dollars in cash and a gold pocket watch with silver filigree hands and a faded inscription etched on its reverse.
***
    Dusk’s fire set the clouds ablaze above the hollow, and the cadence of Stanley’s hammer echoed unopposed through the August air. It had been three weeks since Mr. Franklin’s visit, and nearly as long since his funeral. Dr. Finkbine’s report concluded it was a heart attack that caused the old man to drive his Packard off the road; that he’d expired before the fuel tank ignited and was spared the agony of burning alive. Stanley found the wreck. He couldn’t help recalling the image of Mr. Franklin’s hollow, blackened skeleton as he tacked down the last of the tar paper on his new roof. He wondered to himself how Dr. Finkbine could tell it was a heart attack.

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