Lucky Turtle by Bill Roorbach

Author:Bill Roorbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Forty-Six

In the days after Francie’s poacher left, things got back to normal—building, gathering, hunting, gardening, horses, hot spring, Hawaii.

Lucky spent a whole morning ceremonially and mysteriously building something. “A pyre,” I kept joking to no response, a tipi of sticks to begin, a fortress of pitchy ponderosa logs around that. But instead of lighting the thing, he rode off on View, heading down the mountain on our road. Not a word. If he wandered down to the range land, he might be seen, might be tracked. I thought to jump on Chickadee and chase him down, but I dithered too long to possibly catch up, and that little horse would gallop me right into the treetops trying.

Francie was cutting a window into her addition—apparently Mr. Drinkins had promised panes of glass, not good. But she’d more or less convinced us that it was best to appease him, take his presents, let him have his crush on her. She felt herself in control, and I wanted her to have that. In truth, Dale Drinkins’s coming back with glass was less worrisome than all the other possible things he might bring. Even Lucky had endorsed the idea: Francie Power. Still, it’s not fair I called him “Francie’s poacher” before and here I emphatically take that back. Dale Drinkins was nobody’s fault, only his own.

But now the pyre. Lucky saw fire as a way to create space with Maria, as best I understood it. I was realizing that he invented his own rituals, strung from various sources. His grandfather had revered fire for all its usefulness, one of the pillars of truth, whatever that meant (and Lucky couldn’t explain). They lit candles for their ancestors, offered gifts of food, those ancestors very real to a boy, populating not only his imagination but his world: there weren’t other children around, just the inmates of Camp Challenge.

I pried the rest out of him in small, hot pieces: after Lucky’s grandfather was murdered, and after his traumatized mother had grown so hard, Maria and he had developed fresh rituals. Maria was all he had, emotionally speaking, and she knew it. Other abandoned kids might phone a beloved aunt, even write letters back and forth (and today, of course, text and email and all the rest), but those options weren’t available. What was available was Maria’s hearth. She told Lucky to build a fire whenever they were apart and he needed her, which was often, really most of the time. What he told the fire, she said, the fire would in turn tell her. It wasn’t so different from her lighting candles in church. Intention to pray, she called it. And what she told her fire, which in one form or another was always burning, the fire would tell him. You could see how an isolated, traumatized, and badly injured boy would come to believe in it absolutely, how plain comforting it would be to gain Maria’s presence that way when he couldn’t see her regularly, especially in winter, when he saw her not at all.

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