A Blanket Benediction

A thousand miles to the south and east, the demolition of the Kerby Court House crunched on; the grasp of the machine grabbed ragged mouthful after mouthful until little of the charred remains stood upright. Only the arched stone entrance and its flanking columns refused to be brought to their knees, though the gathering crowd knew the outcome was near.

The atmosphere was one of watching a pair of bloody martyrs face the jaws of the lion. Then, as the column on the right teetered and succumbed, the overhead arch and its left guardsman gave up the ghost and buckled in a cloud of dust with the grating groan of concrete against brick and stone.

The crowd applauded – whether cheering for the success of the man in the machine or bidding farewell to the unfortunate seat of Kerby County – they could not have told. Decades of history had yielded first to the flames and now to steel, either an outmatch for the once “pride of the prairie”, the likes of which “they sure ain’t building anymore.”

Callie sat on a patch of grass and watched the old timers shuffle away, energy sapped by the holes in their hearts.

The puncture in her own heart gapped, though connection with the burned out relic had only recently become important to her. Just more wreckage along the climb to find answers to her mother’s questions. If only she could have made this trip a week or so earlier. And yet for what?

Younger sister Shelly only caused delay after delay to satisfy her own schedule – a hair job and nails the next day followed by what not. Big help. Then after stalling for time, now proven precious, to declare that she did not share Callie’s thirst to investigate and why did she not just forget the whole thing. Frustrating to say the least.

After all, she had stormed on, Callie was the adopted one. If she and brother Sean, blood kin, did not feel the need, why should Callie?

Ouch! Callie suspected those feelings were under the surface but Shelly had not so openly expressed them before. She would not dare if Mom were here.

Where did Shelly get off speaking for Sean anyway? Twins do not always know what each other is thinking and now there was no way to ask him if he cared or not. He just might, even though he had been a real trial to her mother the last year or so.

Never-the-less, Callie smiled at the memory of the conspicuous similarity of expression on the twins faces when the new neighbor, patting them on their blond heads inquired whether the two were identical. Only a pair of nimble parents had prevented Sean’s demonstration of his most obvious dissimilarity.

 Amusing memories aside, the upshot of the disagreement had been that Callie couldn’t explain something to Shelly that she didn’t understand herself so, why then, in the name of common sense, hadn’t she just aborted the whole plan when she heard of the court house fire on the late news? She had watched the pillar of smoke rise; the whole countryside gathered to watch the fire company volunteers do their best to douse the flames. Extinguish them they did, but not before the pillars and joists had allowed the vault and its cargo to crash to the basement.

The cooled down remains had just today allowed the demolition to take place and Callie had driven into town to find main street empty as if the rapture had come and she, the only soul remaining. Magnetism pulled her, too, to the burn site. But why? Drawn, driven, downright obsessed, she could not say.

As people began to drift away, she walked back toward her rag-topped 4X4. The sidewalk, its corridor had worn smooth but green contours of grass had forced their way through an occasional crack well wide enough to bring down the breaking of one’s grandmother’s back, were you seven years old and accidentally stepped on one.

An oxidized brown sedan diagonally parked nearby supported a man leaning against an open driver’s door whose insignia authorized the vehicle’s use by the county clerk. Slumped in the driver’s seat, elbows on the steering wheel, head in hands, sat a second man she supposed was that clerk.

“Cheer up, Joe,” said the first, shifting his backside to the hood. “That vault was manufactured to stand way more heat than this. Once it’s out of the hole and pried open them records will be readable, maybe good as new.”

“No, they won’t, Buzz. We were putting the old records on microfiche and the ledgers were not in the vault. Both the originals and the films went up with the flames. They’re gone.”

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