A Fire in the Rain

FICTION A Fire in the Rain David Huddle DAVID SAWYERS WAS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD. He and Judy had gotten married when he was nineteen and she was sixteen. They had boys, one and three years old. David had started working for the carbide plant three weeks after he'd gotten married. David was a Rosemary Sawyers, which for most of the people in the county suggested that he was not necessarily law-abiding or smart or wellmannered or hygienic or ambitious, but that he was probably hard-working, uncomplaining, accustomed to the deprivations that came with being poor, and fiercely loyal, especially when it came to family. Within David's lifetime, a Sawyers, a first cousin of David's, had murdered a Delby, had slit the man's throat with a butcher knife, on account of the Delby's having cast aspersions on the reputation of the Sawyers's mother. The young Delby man had in fact asserted that the Sawyers woman was "a cocksucking whore," which most people agreed was a step or two beyond what anybody ought—even at the height of a name-calling quarrel—to say about another person's mother. As a matter of fact, for generations to come in the hamlet of Rosemary, that particular incident drew the line for verbal insults: In an argument you could speak a lot of trash to someone, but if you went so far as to call that person's mother a cocksucking whore, then you took your life in your hands. And since it was a Sawyers who had set that measure (and who would spend the rest of his life in the penitentiary for having done so), Sawyerses were tacitly seen in this harsh light as carrying the moral mean of Rosemary and perhaps of the county and maybe even of that entire region of the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. David, however, everyone agreed, was a cut above your average Sawyers. For one thing, he was bigger, stronger, and better looking. For another, he had good manners; he was well spoken, and he presented himself cleanly and neatly. And for yet another, he had finished high school. If he wasn't smart, he certainly wasn't stupid. And he had a naturally cheerful disposition. He stood up straight, grinned at you, said, "Good morning," and called you by name. He spoke to you at the post office or in Miss Ossie's store. If you ran into 47 David in downtown Rosemary, you were very likely to find your mood improved by the encounter. He was that kind of a fellow. In short, though he was a Sawyers, David was an exceptional Sawyers. By the time he was twenty years old, he was generally held in the affection of the townspeople of Rosemary. Though it was named on maps detailing the area, Rosemary, Virginia, was not in any legal sense a town. The little pocket of houses scattered higgledy-piggledy around the three hills of that valley wasn't incorporated. Such government as existed in Rosemary was exerted by Deputy Sheriff Kenneth Stoneman, who lived there with his wife and children. Though a tough customer, Deputy Stoneman understood the place and the people and took his duty to be to protect law-abiding citizens from the harm available to them because they lived among drunks and criminals. Had he been present when the feud broke out, Deputy Stoneman would have prevented the murder of the Delby man by the Sawyers man. Had neither of those men drawn a weapon, Deputy Stoneman might very well have let them battle with their fists until they were tired enough to stop it. Justice in Rosemary was Darwinian. The small and the weak learned to live with the large and the strong; the meek avoided or negotiated with or navigated around the vicious. Family was the first principle of survival: a strong family protected you; a weak family made you vulnerable. Sawyerses possessed neither wealth nor social standing, yet they commanded respect—for their integrity, for their willingness to fight, and for their numbers. A great many of them lived throughout the county. A Sawyers was a Sawyers...