Instantly the trailer was a box of flame, roaring and snapping in rage, sending a dark cloud and poisonous fumes into the night sky as the paneling and walls ignited and burst into flame. Next door, wakened by the first explosion and terrified by the sight of the flames and the roar of the fire, Carol Constant rushed from her bed to the road, where everyone else in the park was gathering, wide-eyed, confused, struck with wonder and fear.
Marcelle hollered at Terry and Bruce, ordering them to hook up garden hoses and wash down the trailers next to Flora’s. Then she yelled to Doreen. Dressed in a filmy nightgown, with the naked Claudel Bing standing in darkness behind her, the woman peered through her half-open door at the long, flame-filled coffin across the lane. “Call the fire department, for Christ’s sake! And tell Bing to get his clothes on and get out here and help us!” Captain Knox gave orders to people who were already doing what he ordered them to do, and Nancy Hubner, in nightgown, dressing gown and slippers, hauled her garden hose from under the trailer and dragged it toward the front, screeching as she passed each window along the way for Noni to wake up and get out here and help, while inside, Noni slid along a stoned slope of sleep, dreamless and genuinely happy. Leon LaRoche appeared fully dressed in clean and pressed khaki workclothes with gloves and silver-colored hardhat, looking like a cigarette ad’s version of a construction worker. He asked the Captain what he should do, and the Captain pointed him toward Bruce and Terry, who were already hosing down the steaming sides of the trailers next to the fire. At the far end of the row of trailers, in darkness at the edge of the glow cast by the flames, stood Merle Ring, uniquely somber, his arms limply at his sides, in one hand a fishing rod, in the other a string of hornpout.
In a few moments, the fire engines arrived, but it was already too late to save Flora’s trailer or anything that had been inside it. All they could accomplish, they realized immediately, was to attempt to save the rest of the trailers, which they instantly set about doing, washing down the metal sides and sending huge, billowing columns of steam into the air. Gradually, as the flames subsided, the firemen turned their hoses and doused the dying fire completely. An hour before daylight, they had left, and behind them, where Flora’s trailer had been, was a cold, charred, shapeless mass of indistinguishable materials — melted plastic, crumbled wood and ash, blackened, bent sheet metal, and flesh and fur.
By the pink light of dawn, Flora emerged from the swamp and came to stand before the remains of the pyre. She was alone, for the others, as soon as the fire engines had left, had trudged heavily and exhausted to bed. Around nine, Marcelle Chagnon was stirred from her sleep by her telephone — it was the Concord Hospital, informing her that the woman she had signed in the day before, Flora Pease, had left sometime during the night without permission and they did not know her whereabouts.
Marcelle wearily peered out the window next to her bed and saw Flora standing before the long, black heap across the lane, and she told the woman from the hospital that Flora was here. She must have heard last night that her trailer burned down, over the radio, maybe, and hitchhiked back to Catamount. She assured the woman that she would look after her, but the woman said not to bother, she only had the flu and probably would be fine in a few days, unless, of course, she had caught pneumonia hitchhiking last night without a hat or coat on.
Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park also, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and seeing her there, stayed inside and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and started back toward the swamp.
Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I’m sorry.”
Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn’t understand.
“Flora, I’m sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.
Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn’t my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle’s big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn’t my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”
That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.
By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built a tiny, awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pine woods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might just as well have belonged to the state of New Hampshire, but it was going to take a couple of lawyers and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure, so as long as neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire fussed about it, neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.
She built the shack herself, from stuff she dragged down the road and into the woods from the town dump — old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tarpaper, cast-off shingles — and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldly rug that had been in a children’s playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and for light a single kerosene lantern.
For a while there were a few people from the trailerpark who went out there to the edge of the swamp and visited her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it right where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, went fairly often to visit her, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said, but even so, he used to sit peacefully with her in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether or not Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said, but then, no one asked him, either. It quickly got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, exactly the way she was, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn’t have any guinea pigs, and there wasn’t much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out. Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had left off and had gone about his and her business quite as if Flora no longer even existed. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice-house out on the lake. And though Marcelle never went out to Flora’s shack, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman’s secret.