Travis nodded, and kept nodding. “Yeah. Then it just comes to me. Burn it down. Burn him before he burns you. So I did.” He took a puff on the cigarette and eyed James from across the table. “Just like that. No thinkin’. Just snapped and burned it down.”

James flinched. The words, the matter-of-fact attitude, stung him like a surprise slap across the face. His heart pounded heavy against his ribs. His blood froze and iced his veins. That cold, dead statement, made in that blunt, no-nonsense tone, shattered his composure and ate away at his certainty that Travis was innocent. Urgency twisted into defeat.

Travis eyed James directly. “I didn’t mean for everyone to die.”

5

What’s done is done, and it can’t be undone. Duane’s words haunted James as he leaned against his truck in the blinding snow and tried to think of better days—days when his childhood friend wasn’t incarcerated for multiple homicides.

Days when this town vibrated with life, when hope rode on people’s shoulders and possibilities for the future were bright with promise. Dreams, that’s what this town was now missing. The imagination to move forward, the feeling that one could go out and conquer the world with sheer will and determination. The town, the people, were now dark with tragedy, as if everyone waited, breathless, for the next horrible event, no longer sure they had a future at all. His mind and heart revolted against the act that laid waste to people’s dreams. Why, God? Why? He flung the words mentally towards heaven, the same ones that his hurting parishioners had tossed up to the Lord. Those same parishioners whom he had soothed and assured that that their silent God was truly listening and that beauty would come from ashes. What kind of beauty could come from the ashes of the flesh and bones of this family? James clenched his jaw, the ache forcing his thoughts from whatever answers God might have for him.

Across a frozen baseball field, a group of teens loitered on the aging bleachers. Teasing taunts and occasional laughter carried across the expanse of ground. Watching the young adults—if they could even be called anything remotely close to adults—should have evoked the nostalgia he was seeking; but it didn’t. Too much sorrow, confusion, pain coated the years for James to see the sparkle that once shined his life.

Hope and promise didn’t shine in these teens, either. They weren’t self-assured, they didn’t share the exuberance kids usually exhibited—that invincible armor which made them make rash decisions, sometimes brought unthinking courage, and occasionally, fresh ideas that bordered on genius. That bliss and goodness was noticeably absent. Tragedy had touched them, had dampened the joyful purpose of simply being alive and having a future.

James pondered the obvious separation of cliques—a couple girls bundled up in heavy coats and mittens engaged in one conversation; a couple boys huddled in a separate space, looking awkward, and perhaps slightly judgmental as an obvious “bad boy”—complete with stereotypical sagging jeans and a lit cigarette that curled smoke into the crisp air along with his visible breath—cajoled a girl who was his girlfriend…or maybe not his girlfriend. She didn’t appear to be too impressed with his attempts to pull her to her feet and into…an embrace?