The Night the Feed Store Burned

Front Street

The trouble was, Wade was right. Nobody in Calder Ridge wanted to believe it.

Nora found that out the next morning at the Ridge Café, where she went for coffee before starting her mail route and found the whole place buzzing. The state fire marshal’s preliminary report had come out overnight. Accidental, it said. Space heater. No evidence of arson. The sheriff’s office had announced that no charges would be filed in connection with the fire. And somebody, she never found out who, had already heard that Wade Corliss was being held on a parole violation and that there was some kind of story going around about him pulling Wendell out.

“Convenient,” Dale Huckabee was saying loudly at the counter as Nora came in. “Real convenient. Kid gets caught on camera, and suddenly he’s a hero. You know who started that story? His lawyer. That’s what they do.”

“The 911 recording—” Nora began.

“Anybody can make a 911 call,” Dale said. “Sets the fire, drags the old man out so it’s not murder, calls it in, runs. Covers himself all the way around. I’ve seen it on TV a hundred times.”

Several people at the counter nodded. A few looked uncomfortable. Nobody argued with him.

Nora stood there with her coffee and felt a deep, tired anger rising up in her chest. She had known these people her whole life. She had carried their mail and pulled their kids out of ditches and fought fires in their barns. They were good people, most of them. Generous and kind. They had brought food to Wendell’s house every day for a month after Marjorie died. But they had decided who Wade Corliss was a long time ago, and they did not want to decide again.

She went out to her truck and sat there for a while. Then she drove to Springfield.

Wendell was sitting up in a chair by the window of Room 212 when she came in, dressed in his own clothes now, a flannel shirt and his old canvas barn coat, with a portable oxygen tank on wheels beside him. He was due to be discharged that afternoon. He had already heard everything. Denise Harlan had called him the day before. He looked up at Nora with an expression she had never seen on his face before. It took her a moment to recognize it as shame.

“Fifty-two years I’ve known Dale Huckabee,” Wendell said. “I was a pallbearer at his daddy’s funeral.” He shook his head. “And I sat in this bed for three days believing that boy might have done it. They told me he took Biscuit. They told me he ran. And I thought, well, maybe. Maybe he was hurting for money. Maybe he went back to the pills.” He looked up at her. “He saved my life, and I thought maybe.”

“Everybody thought maybe,” Nora said. “That’s the problem.”

“When’s his hearing? The parole board.”

“Thursday. In Jefferson City.”

“I want to be there.”

Nora looked at the oxygen tank. “Wendell, you just got out of the hospital. It’s three hours each way.”

“I don’t care if it’s three days,” Wendell said. He reached out and gripped her arm with surprising strength, the way he used to grip the handle of a feed sack before he swung it up onto a truck bed. “That boy crawled into a fire for me. On his belly. With his bare hands. I can sit in a car for three hours.”

When Nora finally left the hospital that afternoon, she drove past Wendell’s house on her way back into Calder Ridge, to check on it the way she had every day since the fire. The porch was dark. Biscuit had been staying with Pam Ridley, the dispatcher, who had volunteered to take her.

But something was different about the porch. Nora slowed down, then stopped the truck.

On the top step, leaning against the door, was a cardboard box. She got out and walked up the path and looked inside.

It was full of mail. Letters, cards, envelopes of every size, some stamped and some just hand-addressed and dropped off. On top, someone had taped a sheet of notebook paper. In a child’s careful printing, it said: FOR THE MAN WHO SAVED MR. TEAGUE. PLEASE GIVE TO HIM.

Nora picked up the first envelope. It was from the little girl in the pink snowsuit who had asked where the chicks would go.

She picked up the second. It was from Pam Ridley.

She picked up the third. It was from the night clerk at the Gas-N-Go.

She sat down on Wendell Teague’s front step in the cold and went through them, one by one. There were thirty-four. Some were just two lines long. Some went on for pages. A few were from people Nora knew had stood on Front Street that first morning and said nothing. One, near the bottom, was from a woman who had been in the pharmacy in Linden the night Wade broke into it, six years ago. I was the pharmacist on call, it said. I testified against you. I want you to know I am proud of who you have become.

Nora sat on the step until it got dark. Then she put the box in the cab of her truck and drove it home.

She had a lot of experience with delivering mail.