The Peculiar Lives of Boys & Girls At Plumfield

Chapter Three - The Ghosts of Little Fires

Billy's life was one forever plagued with fire. It followed him like a dog at the heels of an intruder. That same day, while Emil and Daisy held their ground in a shouting match, Billy saw the fires again.

Before they could devour him, he opened his eyes. He shot up in his bed, the raging flames around him melting away so that he saw only the bedroom, the morning-washed nightingale wallpaper, the rumpled white sheets of Tommy's abandoned bed.

This was his seventeenth year, yet he quivered like he was twelve years old again, the fires burning up inside him, turning his blood to lava. His father, smelling of starch and cigar smoke, leaning over him. Whispering words of cruel, awful promises as if they were a lullaby. As if they'd make him feel better. A hand around his neck. Pressing. Billy had thought he would die that night, but he woke up the following day to the face of a kindly woman, with a round, fat face and deeply sorrowful eyes.

Sometimes he wished he hadn't.

Billy held his face in his hands, biting his lip and trying not to cry. Waiting for his body to forget the nightmare. The fear and despair from the dream. It was silly. He could see it wasn't true. There were no fires. He wasn't sick. His father wasn't really there, towering over him. But he couldn't stop feeling the heat or the panic.

"It's alright, Billy," someone said and came by him.

He jumped, mortified that someone had seen him. It was Dick looking down at him like his mother had just died, grey eyes searching his face, dark hair ruffled from sleep. Dick looked like a nightmare himself. He was wiry and always had faint, purplish circles beneath his eyes. His head was too big for his body, and he limped. He was constantly coughing, sneezing, or wheezing, which got on Billy's nerves. Something was always oozing out of the boy. Especially in the cooler seasons. And he bled too easily, so Billy and the other boys didn't play with him as much.

Billy shrugged off Dick's hand from his shoulder. "Wash your hands before you touch me." He sniffed and wiped under his nose.

The mattress sank as Dick sat by him, not looking much hurt. But he did not touch Billy. "Bad dreams again?" he asked, voice a low hum. He talked like a mother when her baby was sleeping.

"It's nothing. Just . . . stupid nightmares. Where are the others?"

"Downstairs," Dick said. "I heard an awful racket in my sleep, and when I got up nothing seemed amiss. My guess is it was Tommy at it again, pranking the boys in the other room," and he gave Billy a warm smile that made Billy a little embarrassed. He shouldn't have been so mean.

"Do you think we can dream the future?" Dick asked.

Billy thought they'd had this conversation before, but he couldn't trust himself. He couldn't trust whatever brain was rotting in his skull.

"No," Billy said. "Do you?"

Dick drew one leg up to the bed and shook his head. "Yes. I think they can warn us."

Billy smirked. "About what?"

"Things we haven't seen. Stuff we might've missed. Things we ought to prepare for. I think God sometimes speaks in dreams." His smile waned into something shyer. "Maybe it sounds a little silly."

"A little," Billy said, but something about the simplicity and openness of the conversation comforted him. "Most of my dreams are gibberish, or repetitive."

Dick grinned. "I once dreamed I was a yellow snake, and I lived in the willow tree by the lake, and I could talk, but only in numbers."

Billy smiled in spite of himself. "I once had a dream I got asked to dance by a cockroach who happened to be the daughter of a very important banker, and I got so worried because I didn't know any of the steps and her legs were too many."

Dick laughed loudly, too loudly, and Billy had to shush him and got annoyed once again when he started coughing. It hadn't been that funny. "I'll trade you right now," Dick said, eyes twinkling with tears.

Billy forgot his annoyance.

"Out of curiosity, what do you remember of your dream?" Dick asked, subsiding. "This last one."

"Fires. Small ones becoming big ones. Burning." Billy rubbed his freckled arms, hoping he could massage it away.

Dick nodded understandingly and didn't ask any more questions, which Billy appreciated.

"There are no lessons with Bhaer today, so what do you think of going out to Asia's Wood? We could see birds." The forests by the mansion didn't belong to the large, chippery woman that cooked their food. Billy supposed Dick called them that because sometimes, in the late afternoons, when the sun slowly rotted from white to yellow to orange, like bad fruit, you could hear her singing what she called "spirituals." Hymns, but more desperate and genuine than the neat ones in church books, with prim lines and syllables. Whenever she sang, Billy's eyes stung as though he'd been struck. The songs sounded like wailing and rejoicing all at once. Like hope. It hurt awful. It hurt good.

Dick thought Asia was magic. He thought the entire world magic. He named ordinary places in the house like they were spots on Gulliver's map. Every ordinary thing became a magic item, a mysterious land, with secrets only the willing, like Dick, could learn. Secrets of God and what He had made. Dick seemed to see everything and everyone as a vessel of some divine life. His tenderness came from an uncharacteristic, steady reverence in a boy so young.

Billy ached to believe him, but he never had enough spirit to play along.

Billy shrugged. "Are you sure? It's cold out."

Dick swatted his words away. "There's sunshine today. Plus, we'll be in our coats."

Billy knew that Dick had trouble getting around and that walking for long, let alone in the snow, would tire him so terribly that he'd need about an hour to catch his breath.

But he seemed so chipper about it, Billy couldn't find it in himself to say no, plus he had the slightest intuition that it would only have annoyed Dick if he kept asking about his health. Dick never complained, but Billy sometimes felt his weariness, his loneliness for being the sickly one.

"Alright. But breakfast first," he said, trying to sound stern, though he blushed seeing how he'd lit up Dick's face.

Billy knew that there were no fires and his father wasn't standing over him, and he continued to know it throughout breakfast. But dreams are strange. Sometimes, like water, they leave you damp, and your clothes become light and dry in minutes. Sometimes, you are drenched, and it takes a lot longer to lift.

Whatever Billy knew, it took his body much longer to catch up.

Although, with Dick's chatting about whatever fancy got caught in his head, Billy found that soon his mood was lifting, and he was forgetting the dream. The fires, his father.

Until whenever he heard the chirping of birds, and eventually felt the gentle touch of young sunlight, he could believe the morning was new. He could believe and trust the small happiness kindling within him.