Читать книгу Only the Women Are Burning - Nancy Burke - Страница 9

“I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s in me should set hell on fire.” - William Shakespeare

Chapter 1

Hillston, New Jersey

Friday started as an ordinary day, but that was before I failed to save Ann Neelam from burning to death. I stepped through the usual golden light filtering through the branches onto the blacktopped path through my park to the train. I greeted a squirrel poking out of a trash can with a chunk of someone’s discarded bagel in its jaw. That station, with its quaint station house, its coffee window for busy commuters, its old wooden roof and neat platform will never feel tranquil again, but that Friday my girls were off to school, my coffee maker was shut off and unplugged, the front door was closed and locked into its frame, and I walked my usual eight minutes to the station. I had a vague recognition that my life was so routine that I was entering a phase of middle age where habits and patterns would repeat endlessly and I would perish from my own boredom.

My neighbors in their own routines were already aboard the midtown direct to their big jobs in New York, which stopped in Newark and would normally drop me to my twelve dollar an hour job teaching visiting school groups at the museum, but not that morning. I never got on the train. They, however, watched from the windows while I tried to save her.

That day should have been a happy acknowledgment of spring. I liked teaching the kids and I got home before the school bus dropped Mia and Allie, my eight-year-old twins, at the corner. Before that day, it all worked.

On the platform, the whistle announced the train, commuters shifted briefcases, newspapers, and their weight from one foot to the other. A man dropped a coffee cup into the wastebasket. Headlines in the newspaper dispenser offered the only hint of dread, “Roadside bombs incinerate three U.S. Marines,” along with three head-shots. I stared at the soldier’s portraits, there in their young perfection, their buzz cuts, hats perched above their young scrubbed faces, reflecting their assertion of inherent toughness and pride. I thought of their mothers receiving phone calls, visits from men in uniform delivering a blow from which there is no recovery. With three daughters, I was not likely to ever face such a thing. My three daughters were not the tough female soldier archetype. More Hera or Aphrodite than Athena, although Lila was beginning to go to war with me as she entered her teen years. I knew women’s struggles were very often the silent variety.

The train was visible in the distance. The weight of all that metal screamed at its approach, slowed to a crawl and stopped. On time, dependable, strong and enduring. I use my time on the train to review my notes about ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, mythical creatures, life after death, Buddha, the wheel of law, and the Hindu goddess Durga. Whatever was on my lesson calendar for the day. I needed no notes for the god of destruction, Shiva, as I was intimately acquainted with him from my days in Bangalore.

I stepped into line among the women in low heels, their confidence obvious in their posture, their preoccupation with watches or cell phones. Next to me, a blue suited woman with a briefcase and purse, holding a cup of coffee up to her lips, tisked her tongue against her teeth and sighed. Her impatience, her gaze up the tracks, made me think she was waiting for someone or something more important and far more interesting than anything I expected. That hint, that sense that there is always something more, more than what I did every day, hovered there over me and for an instant I felt envy of her. She was waiting for something so important that she was impatient. I was always patient. Often I laughed and told other mothers that God first gave me patience, then he gave me Lila.

I reached for the railing and lifted my foot. It was just then a wave of heat flowed over me like a hot flash. I turned and the heat burst into a pillar of flame the ends of which gave off dark smoke like a phantom cloud forming in the shape of a demon. Waves of hot gaseous plasma hit me, a raging tower of yellow fire, from exactly where the tisking woman had been. I can only now compare it to that feeling of time slowing when in a car you know a crash is unavoidable and you hear the metal crunching of impact. Terror knotted in my viscera. I expected the flame to roar and engulf me. Panic tasted like metal in my throat and my heart’s pounding mobilized me to flee. I turned back from thirty feet away and saw the flame had now pulled into itself and towered in a vertical column and the woman was behind it, underneath it, inside it. My God, the woman in the blue suit was burning. My skin felt singed, a dry hot wind pushed my hair across my eyes and I stood, my mind saying help her, my heart saying move before it leaps and ignites you. But I could not, frozen as I was in holy terror. Stop, drop, and roll is what they teach you in first aid class, but there was nothing to roll her in and the flame was like a shield pushing back everyone. It was only me and the conductor and her and I succumbed to a helplessness I’d felt only once before. This woman in the blue suit was burning to death. The conductor was at the station’s ticket booth pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall. My CPR training, as a Girl Scout leader, screamed, “first call for help” and I dug out my cell phone and dialed. The flames licked down her arms and legs while the voice of the female dispatcher came on, “911, what is your emergency.”

“A fire,” I said. “A woman is on fire at the Hillston train station.”

“A building, you say?”

“No, a woman. She’s ...was...waiting for the train. She’s burning. My mind raced through what needed to happen; the calm-voiced dispatcher was too slow. “Get them here to help her. Now…hurry…before she…” My voice was deadpan, my words left me, while my heart raced and sweat pooled in my palms.

“Is there danger to anyone else?”

“What? Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“The station has been called. They’re on their way. Please hold.”

Hold? She put me on hold? Faces on the train, through the windows, stared. I could see the flame wasn’t spreading to the train or the pillar holding up the roof, or the conductor and me. It was just taking her. In that fraction of a second of knowing I would be unharmed, I was mesmerized by the flame. A roaring of it filled the air, the scent of burning hair, of flesh. My throat closed, I held my breath. Banhi. Had that nightmare followed me here? The flame was colorful, flecks of blue and green mingled with the yellow and orange dancing in the oxygen it consumed. Unlike Banhi, who screamed and moaned, this woman hadn’t moved under it. Hadn’t run and fallen over. Hadn’t waved her arms or screamed in pain. She’d simply succumbed. Like a statue. A tree. Like she was abdicating to a higher power.

The conductor aimed the extinguisher. “Turn it upside down,” I shouted. “You have to turn it upside down.” I grabbed it from him like a child fighting over a toy. “Take this,” I handed him my cell phone. He relinquished the extinguisher and lifted my phone to his ear.

In a second, I had foam spraying fiercely from the nozzle, a schvwit sound starting it, a hiss continuing while the stream found her. The sizzle gave me a split second of satisfaction. The foam soaked the blue business suit with its distinct chemical scent. But then, her hair was gone. I could not see her face. I could see where the ends of her fingers had been. Her torso glowed. And despite the foam raining down upon her head, her neck, she simply melted inward toward her collar as though she were sucked into a vortex. That blue suit hung, like it was on a hanger, while all of her was no longer fuel for the flame. She was now a pile of gray ash. And there was her suit, on the ground, crumpled and blue, with no damage to it whatsoever, except that it was stained with the foam and soaking wet.

I kept the stream of foam pointed at it until I felt a hand on my arm and looked into the eyes of a firefighter, “Okay ma’am. We’ll take it from here.” He caught me as I groped for his arm, to stop my falling, as dizziness filled my head. He assured me I was out for less than a minute, but there I was on the ground.

“Did I pass out?”

He nodded. “Just sit there for a minute and take a deep breath.” His fingers were checking my pulse. “She’s gone,” I said. I let him lift me and guide me to the bench. An EMT gave me an oxygen mask and massaged my icy cold hands. I never imagined I’d see this again. A human being burning alive before my eyes. I couldn’t close my eyes and turn off the images. I wanted to hold my breath so I would not smell that burning human flesh or the sweet caustic extinguisher scent. The oxygen mask helped with that. I didn’t dare take it off.

What struck me, in slowed time, was how I had just watched two gold rings fall to the paved platform and bounce to a stillness next to the rumpled blue clothing. The sun had glinted on a diamond as it tumbled. A sense of my own incompetence, remorse, not only from knowing I’d done nothing to save her. Banhi’s jewels had also fallen to the cement slab of floor under her, bouncing, then coming to a stillness, a finality, their symbolic meaning in life now absurd immediately after death took her. It all came flooding back. My Bangalore days and my failure there to save Banhi. Dowry deaths. India. Hindu. Re-incarnation. This, I knew, was not that.

“The dispatcher is still on,” said the conductor.

I took my phone from him and lifted it to my ear.

“I need your name,” said the dispatcher. “Hello? Can you tell me who you are?”

“Oh, Cassandra Taylor,” I said. “I am just...”

“Address?”

“578 Sycamore Place.”

“Hillston?”

“Yes.”

“Phone number?”

“Don’t you have it?”

“Your home number please.”

“Occupation?”

“What? Why?’”

I always stumbled over this one and it was no different in the middle of this crisis. “Uh, mother,” I said. “And a part-time museum educator.”

She repeated it. I said yes. She said thank you. Then, she hung up.

And that was it. It was over. The fire fighters had nothing to do. The police in uniform dragged saw horses around the area and put up yellow tape. I sat there as though there was something more expected of me. Faces still peered through train windows until the whistle blew and it pulled slowly away with the hollow toll of its signal bell taking my ordinary routine with it. Then, the firefighter returned to me and said, “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t. Exhaustion and inertia now rendered me barely able to move.

He touched my arm and the signal of his touch put me into motion. A door opened before me and a chair at a table appeared and I was in the station house restaurant and a man was placing a ceramic cup with a slow stream of steam in front of me. Fire inspector Jeff Heffly, I recognized his red face and bulbous nose and short buzz cut grey hair. He’d been in the paper just last week. For what? A house fire...he’d also been on the TV news, a broadcast from town hall - a commendation to one of his men who had saved a child.

“Cream and sugar?”

“Just cream,” I said.

He placed my tote bag and my purse alongside my chair. I’d forgotten about them. Then, he fetched a cup for himself and sat. He took off his glasses and wiped them with a paper napkin. I put down my cell phone. He nodded as though giving me permission to drink my coffee which tasted like smoke.

“You’re not on the train,” Heffly said it so deadpan, not a question, not an accusation, not anything. Just a flat observation.

“I was supposed to get on.”

“So was she.”

“I saw her waiting, like she was looking for the next one. This one goes to New York. The next one goes to Hoboken.”

He asked, “Did you know her?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you hurt her?” he asked, his tone even.

“No,” I said, “I tried to save her.”

“But how did it start? Did you see anything…anyone…near her?”

“No. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just looking at the train as it came up.”

“Did you see her smoking?”

“No.”

“Did you see anything unusual?”

“No, just all of a sudden she was in flames.”

He stared at me. “Do you think she did it to herself?”

“Is that what you think?” I asked. It was what they thought in India whenever a woman burned and women burning to death was frequent in Bangalore. But this was different.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did you watch the news during the Vietnam War? Are you old enough?” I wasn’t, but I knew because fixations happen when you experience something like Banhi and you read a lot of archived newspapers.

“I served there. You’re thinking of that Buddhist monk.” He studied me.

“Yes. A self-immolation on the evening news.”

He took a sip of coffee. “Yes. That’s what this looked like,” he said. “It has to be something else, a spark from her cell phone, a cigarette, an electrical something.”

“Alice Herz did it,” I told him.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“During the Vietnam War. In 1965. In Detroit.”

“Never heard of her,” he said.

“She was famous for her protest.” I guessed not that famous. I took a sip of coffee. “It looked like it came from inside her.”

He studied me. “You think she did it to herself?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Her clothes didn’t burn. It didn’t spread. It seemed to burst out of her.”

He looked squarely at me. “Do you know more about this than you’re telling me?”

“There’s a war on now. Not everyone supports our being there.” I know more than you, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

“You think she’s a war protester?”

“I have no idea. I don’t know her. All I am saying is that there was a time this happened in the United States and elsewhere.”

He wrote down some notes.

“She didn’t scream. She didn’t move. She hardly seemed to feel any pain. At least, I would have expected a reaction but I didn’t see any.”

He wrote down some more notes. “We’re inspecting the area, checking for a source of flame or spark.” He looked over my shoulder and then, following his gaze, I saw one of the men in those oversized canvas coats with yellow reflective tape staring at me from the doorway. “We will figure it out, Ms. Taylor.”

He brushed his hand over his buzz cut. My mind went to the hair, her hair, flaming then gone, and I drifted to the idea of a firefighter in a blazing structure with hair that could ignite like a wick on a candle. The portraits of this morning’s Marines flashed and I understood buzz cuts for soldiers for the very first time.

“I just need you to give me everything you witnessed, what you did, and if you observed anything odd while you were waiting for the train - I mean before the, before she...”

I gave him what he wanted, slowly, patiently, with vivid details. He listened intently and scribbled.

“Tell me one thing, please,” I asked. “Why would a fire like that burn her so completely and not burn her clothes? Even if it was self-inflicted. Even if it was something like an electric wire electrocuting her or if someone torched her or if she accidentally burned from a cigarette. Maybe a spark from her cell phone. Her clothes would still burn.”

“Because you soaked them in foam from the extinguisher,” he said. “You just told me how fast you reacted…you and the conductor…you both moved fast.”

He didn’t want me to speculate. He didn’t want me to think. He only wanted facts. Observations of the surface of this thing. His words and the blanched look in his eyes signaled to me that I was dismissed and so was my question.