Chapter 10 #2
Michael patted him on the back. “Don’t worry, I was like that with Emily too for a while. She still teases me about it today. But Dorothy seems to think everything you do is either brilliant or exceptionally sweet. For a little while, at least, you’re immune to making a fool of yourself.”
“I wish that were true,” Warren said as they approached the long tables that had been set around the square’s far edge.
There were so many dishes, he thought the locals must have been cooking for days to prepare this feast. Well, at least that hinted that there might be more community spirit here than he’d originally believed.
Soon they returned to the ladies with bags of small pastry pies that contained chicken and potato or cheese and vegetables. They also brought mugs of the wine, which had been spiced and sweetened.
“Look, they’re coming to light the bonfire!” Aunt Sadie cried excitedly.
Warren watched as a man in a top hat and a lady with a wreath of ivy around her head came to the front of the bonfire. They were accompanied by Sheriff Rafferty, who eyed the crowd with something like mistrust. Warren supposed he didn’t blame the man.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” the mayor said. “For any visitors that we may have to our fair town, I’m Mayor Gerald Brisby, and this is my wife, Matilda. We’ve lived in this fine community of Pine Hill all our lives and it does us both proud to see you all here tonight.”
There were quite a few cheers at that and Mayor Brisby grinned, looking younger than his white hair proclaimed he was.
“We’ve had some tough days lately, haven’t we?
” Mayor Brisby continued, looking from face-to-face.
“It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve rallied, haven’t we?
We’ve come through it all, surviving the bad.
We’ve stood together as a community. And now, tonight, we’ve come together to light this fire.
Now, this bonfire represents so much more than a festival celebrating the harvest. This fire symbolizes our commitment to each other.
We are a community of friends and family.
We are neighbors, and we stand up and look out for each other. Isn’t that so?”
More cheers.
This was disingenuous. Warren thought back to what had happened with Pauline the previous day, and he wondered just how hypocritical these folks were.
How could they cheer when they had stood by and allowed a blind woman to be treated so badly?
In spite of the large array of foods somebody or other had made, he didn’t believe they were a community anymore.
Perhaps they had been one at some point, but not any longer.
Now they were just a group of people living close together.
They didn’t care about each other. They were too afraid to stick their necks out.
In Unity this speech would mean something. Unity was a community; it was a place where folks genuinely cared. They didn’t stick their heads in the sand and ignore the troubles of the world in favor of a few bribes and a bit of additional safety.
Warren realized that he was crushing his pies in the paper bag in his fist and hastily released it.
“Are you all right?” Dorothy asked, concerned.
“I’m not one for outright lies,” Warren said softly, his anger rising. “And this isn’t a community of friends and family. Not at all.”
“I know,” Dorothy said, taking his hand in hers. Happy as he was to thread his fingers through hers, the anger persisted.
“He’s trying to lift them up, to entice them to try and be a community again,” Aunt Sadie whispered. “He’s trying to build them up. Sometimes you have to tell a little lie to make it true again.”
It made a strange kind of sense, but Warren didn’t think it was having as great an effect as the mayor hoped. He wasn’t seeing the light of anything good being rekindled in these people’s eyes. All he saw was shame and fear and possibly a little self-loathing.
Finally, the mayor finished his speech. There was some enthusiastic applause and a lot of forced clapping.
The social convention to clap for a speaker was seemingly too much for them to ignore and not feel rude.
Then Mayor Brisby’s wife accepted a lit torch from the sheriff.
She turned to the bonfire and raised the torch in the air.
With little ceremony and a strained smile, she placed it on the mass of burning wood.
The cheers were enthusiastic and heartfelt this time. Warren clapped as well as he could while holding wine and pies in both hands.
“Well, well!”
Warren knew that voice. He turned to find a man in a wolf mask standing off to his right. Even with his face covered, Warren recognized Brett’s wiry frame and his sneering voice.
“Get ’em, boys!”
It all happened so quickly. One moment, everything was fine, and the next, it was chaos.
Brett’s men had stationed themselves at intervals in the crowd.
They all seemed to have torches of their own and lit them in a coordinated fashion.
Rushing through the crowd, they terrorized those watching the ceremony, threatening them with the burning brands.
Warren reacted automatically, flinging his half-drunk hot wine into one of the men’s faces.
Then, he clanged the metal mug into a different hooligan’s face as the man ran by him.
Michael stuck out a foot, tripping one of the men heading for the bonfire and watching him stumble right into the burning wood.
Reaching out, Michael pulled the screaming man off the flames and rolled him on the ground a little until he stopped burning. It didn’t take long, and apart from his hands being burned, he seemed unharmed. “You’d best be careful there, son,” Michael drawled. “That could have been a lot worse.”
The boy, who was hardly older than eighteen or nineteen, looked at him with horror in his eyes. “My hands!”
“The apothecary will be able to help you,” Michael said. “Unless your friends burn his store down. Then you might be out of luck.”
“Hey! You let Peter go!” another one of the boys yelled. He was brandishing a thick torch that he clearly meant to bash Michael in the head with. Warren grabbed the torch from his hands and must have left splinters in the kid’s hands because he cried out in pain.
That was when the criminals turned on Warren and Michael and surrounded them.
“Did we mean to do this?” Warren asked, raising his fists as all feelings of happiness at being with Dorothy disappeared like a puff of smoke.
“Better they focus on us and leave the town alone, don’t you think?” Michael asked.
Once again, they circled back to back, waiting for the assault to come.
“No,” Warren decided. “No, I don’t think this helps the town much. And I don’t think it’s better at all.”