Chapter 85 Deli
Deli
“Cairn!”
Deli raced up the unpaved path toward the fire. She could see the silhouette of Cairn’s buggy at the top of the hill—harsh black against the smoke behind it—and what looked to be the bent knees of someone lying on the ground.
She had to fix it. She had to get to him. Rocks skittered down the path when her feet slipped. Adrenaline pumped through her as she crested the hill.
It was Cairn, lying in the grass with arms flung above his head and face turned toward the sky.
Angus shot past her as she closed the gap.
Deli hit her knees beside him as Angus licked his face. Cairn moaned, moving slowly. Her hands flapped uselessly over him. “What hurts? What happened?”
“Huh?” Cairn sat up in a half crunch. “When did you get here? And why?”
Deli’s mouth fell open. “I thought . . . I thought you’d fallen or the smoke had gotten you or”—she waved a frenzied hand at the growing, suffocating wall, far too close for comfort—“Cairn, your farm is on fire!”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“Aye. I know.”
“Then why aren’t we running? Or trying to like . . . put it out?”
“Well.” Cairn sucked his teeth and propped himself on his elbows. “Because I started it. And I don’t have a bucket that big.”
She stared. He stared back.
“Okay, Cairn, but, um . . . why did you light your own land on fire, Can I Ask?”
He tilted his head. “How else would I do it?”
“Do what? Destroy everything?”
“No, darlin’. Save it.”
She tried for a smile and felt her eye twitch. “It’s. on. Fire.”
“Yes, Deli. Fire. Good.”
She threw her hands up. “But Angus came and found me! He thought you were hurt. You’re not hurt?”
“Did he, now?” Cairn ruffled the dog’s fur. “No, Deli, I’m not hurt. Was just admiring the clouds while I waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“For the heather to burn, of course.”
She whipped around to see the heather, all the heather, ablaze. There was an ugly black scar in the fire’s wake—ashes where there had been life. She fought the impulse to run to it.
“But . . .” Deli sounded small, like a child. “It was so beautiful.”
“No, it was beautiful last year. That was all dead.”
Deli’s alarm surged. “No it wasn’t! There was still color, Cairn. There were spots where it was living. It was going to survive and you just . . . You killed it!”
Cairn studied her face.
“Deli, if you’d tried to pull that heather from the ground, the flowers would have come off the plant and turned to dust in your hand.
Most flowers—they have their day in the sun and they go soft.
Turn back to the soil. But heather goes hard, holding on to time that doesn’t belong to it anymore.
It dies with clenched fists. Do you understand? ”
Here was Cairn, a gnarled thing himself, tending to her soreness. She shook her head.
Cairn nodded. “Sheep are the only things that can stomach the stuff. It’s why so much of this land is left to the sorry old lot who farm them.
” He chuckled softly. “But they don’t eat enough, and it chokes the earth.
I have to burn it. Because the soil needs to churn, and the new needs to grow.
Even if it seems unkind, or it doesn’t look dead, it was time.
It would suffocate its own seeds if I didn’t help it move on. ”
“It was already d—” Her voice broke and the first tear fell. She inhaled jerkily. “Dead?”
“Yes, Deli. It was already dead.”
How long had she been watering something that was already dead?
Bringing it sunlight, trying to nurse it back to health because there were still parts of it that seemed alive.
What was she supposed to do? Bury something .
. . someone still blooming? Leave her haunted house with her mangled heart in a suitcase, and burn the whole thing down?
She sat back and pulled her knees up as she buried her face in her hands. Angus lay beside her, his nose wedged between her thigh and belly. Then, to her true surprise, Cairn wrapped an arm around her and gently pulled her toward him until her head fell onto his shoulder.
The last of the dam inside her was swept away as she wept and Cairn ran his hand up and down her upper arm, leaning his cheek against her hair. In the flickering shadow of the fire, Cairn’s penchant for long, quiet stretches was finally welcome.
The light began to turn toward dusk—promising to sink her last moments into the horizon.
“Cairn? How do you know?”
“Know what, darlin’?”
“That something new will grow?”
The wind changed, and the smoke shifted, and sunlight fell upon the three of them, sitting in the grass. Cairn dropped a grandfatherly kiss onto her head.
“Because it always does. You just need to make it room.”