Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 32 of 32

Chapter 32: Spring Burn

He sat in the back row.

He said he would, and he did, with his crutches propped against the stone wall.

His apprentices lined up on stools beside him.

The room filled up behind him.

Crew came, and pack pups, and three teenagers from the volunteer brigade.

Two packless wolves from the burn stood in the doorway until Patsy pointed at a table and said, "Sit."

The boy sat in the front row with his notebook open.

I'd planned a whole first lesson.

I looked at the old reader in the back, and I forgot every word of it.

So I picked up a jar.

"This is a shirt," I said. "Somebody wore it. Tell me who, and how they felt."

I passed it to the front row.

The boy breathed over it with his eyes shut, the way he'd watched me do all winter.

"Somebody happy," he said. "And somebody who's sad but pretending she isn't."

"Good. Which one's louder?"

"The happy one."

"So which one do we stop at?"

He frowned at me.

"Neither," he said.

In the back row, the old reader made a sound.

I didn't look at him.

I couldn't.

I passed the jar to the next table.

At the end of the morning, when the room had emptied, he hauled himself up on his crutches and stumped to the front.

He looked around the long stone room.

He looked at the open boxes on the open shelves, and the window where the coal chute had been.

He looked at Patsy at her desk, with her key on its red string.

"They called me down to read my first case for this pack in this room," he said. "Sixty years ago. They burned that evidence too."

He looked at me.

"You'll do," he said, and went out to find a pastry.

The prescribed burn was set for the third Saturday in April.

The weather held: cool, damp, a light wind out of the west.

The slope below the bluff hadn't burned in the July fire.

It was thick with old brush and dead pine, the kind of fuel that had nearly taken the school.

The glass house was gone from the top of the bluff.

A rancher had bought it and taken it down to the foundations.

The money was parked in the school yard, as a new red engine with a pump that didn't leak.

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