Road Ends by Mary Lawson

fire—the forest fire—not the Giles’s, but no doubt that was the trigger. Though it could have been my mother’s diaries, now that I think of it. For years I had recurring nightmares about it but I thought they were over. I have never known terror like it; the bombardments in Italy didn’t come close.
    In the dream my father was standing on the roof of the farmhouse, silhouetted against the approaching wall of flame, arms raised, shaking his fists at the sky. The grand, defiant gesture. Man against Fate. He was a big believer in Fate. In its malevolence where he was concerned.
    He was up on the roof trying to soak the shingles in order to prevent the fire catching hold. I was at the pump, pumping as if our lives depended on it, whereas in fact they depended on us getting to the lake before our retreat was cut off. But my father, being my father, was determined to save the farmhouse. No little forest fire was going to get
his
house, no
sir
. My mother and those of my siblings who were big enough were passing the buckets of water up to him and he was flinging them over the shingles and passing them back down. As if a wet roof would have stopped that inferno. As if anything could have stopped it by that stage. It filled the whole horizon and the wind was blowing the flames straight towards us.
    I woke up soaked with sweat. My pyjamas were wringing wet so I took them off. There were no clean ones in the drawer so I put on my long johns and my dressing gown and went down to the kitchen. By good fortune Tom wasn’t there. I had a bowl of cornflakes and sat for a while, trying to read about Rome, until I was driven back to bed by the cold. No more sleep, though. In fact, I was afraid to go to sleep for fear I’d slide back into the dream. The look on my father’s face, at the end.
    I got up early and slogged through the snow to the bank—Tom and his snowplough had cleared the road less than an hour earlier but already it was filling in again—and started working through the pile of paperwork on my desk, glad to have something to occupy my mind. Then, at nine o’clock sharp, in lumbered Sergeant Gerry Moynihan, Struan’s one and only officer of the law, shedding snow in all directions and eating a doughnut.
    “Good morning, Sergeant,” I said. “How are you?”
    He mumbled something and waved the doughnut apologetically.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “Take your time. Have a seat.” If he’d wanted to talk about his finances, such as they are, he’d have made an appointment, so I was curious to know the reason for his visit.
    He sat down heavily in the chair opposite my desk, swallowed a couple of times, licked the sugar off his fingers and said, “Archie Giles.”
    “Oh yes?”
    “You know ’bout his barn burnin’ down?”
    “Yes, he came in to see me yesterday.”
    “Know of anyone who might have a grudge against him?”
    I was taken aback. “You think it was arson?” I said. I recalled that Archie had seemed uneasy when I asked about the cause of the fire.
    “Footprints ’round the barn,” Gerry said. “Two sets. They don’t match nobody in the house. It was snowin’ Tuesday night, so maybe they thought that would cover their tracks, but it quit ’round about midnight so they were just dusted over. Filled in now, of course. Just wondered if you’d heard any rumours about … anythin’. Anyone actin’ strange. Makin’ threats, maybe …”
    “No,” I said slowly. “I haven’t heard anything of that kind.”
    There were, of course, two obvious candidates and Gerry Moynihan knew it as well as I did. The previous fall Archie had taken on two of Joel Pickett’s boys to help with the harvest, whichwas good of him considering the Picketts’ reputation as ne’er-do-wells, but after a week or so of the lads failing to turn up until noon Archie ran out of patience, paid them what they were due and told them not to come back. Apparently the boys were furious. They started shouting threats and