Wicker and Stone and Coral (Part 3)

“How is it there’s a sunrise already?” Lester broke, noticing a fuzzy glow spilling over a hillside to left of them. He rolled down the car window lent him by Brett White for the journey, and her Tiger II shuddered and gasped as it filled quick with whirls of smoke.

“Fucking bonfire country and all I tell you,” she said with fierce knowing. Recklessly dedicated to the health of the car, she flung open the driver’s side door to relieve the beast, maintaining her speed while wafting it open and shut until a passing-space in the lane big enough could be stopped in.

As they left the car and traipsed toward the crest of the hill, her comfortable that no one would touch the car because her will shielded it from such things, him wondering how she knew so well that they had crossed a border into Bonfireland, the cool of the night seemed to have eased off. They met the hilltop but no bonfire. Occupying the clear plateau up the hill was a maybe 24-foot effigy lit bright and an old proper train carriage christened Marguerite, according to its paintwork, that had no business being so far from where it was useful. The scene presented so much warmth that Lester took off his coat. Laying it down, the two sat on it in silence and absorbed how ever they did what they saw before them.

The fire burned fierce. Scary fierce. Only once previous had a fire scared him, that vehicle fire on the road years ago that they had driven past whose heat and colour seeped through his own car and mesmerised him so. To Lester this one resembled the heat distribution of the human body, orange at the extremities, burning white hot in the chest up to the nape of the neck. It brought to life some the abandoned and run-down Marguerite, as though the tribal protector the fellas who had lit the thing hoped to summon had inhabited the old girl. Her cream colour was bright and her rust colour was back red again. Lester turned to Brett White and saw her eyes fixed and hungry to take it in and digest it and make it hers permanent. Imagining all the fires she’s set real and in man alike, he thought it entirely possible that she might ask him to lay down on the grass in front of it all so that she could harvest his heart as he thought a true Celt would want. He thought of how he would do so in an instant had she asked it because he believed entirely that, somehow, she would have the power to keep him alive with no heart. He didn’t dare try and break into the wicker to burn with it as whichever custom dictates, it would only snap with the heat and would have been destroyed by man not fire, and besides the fire was warm and so big it was new and interesting.

Lester stirred and reached into a pocket of the coat-turned-blanket. Out came his hand and with it a copy of Hemingway’s A Dangerous Summer. In this book, Lester’s favourite book, was a picture, Lester’s favourite picture, showing Ernest shooting a well-smoked cigarette out of the mouth of the bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez at his 60th birthday party. Lester looked and remembered the lesson he had learned through his simultaneous reading of and subsequent associations drawn between that book and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: all that happens to us is prescribed to us, any disease, disablement, loss or affliction is valuable and gives us a story to tell. Fate was at your elbow for it all and if she didn’t get you there she’d get you in the knees or the brain or the liver or the heart. Why, then, should you dwell bitterly on the ‘bad’? Lester didn’t. It had been a bargain that book, oh Jesus such a bargain, but was worth more to him now than house or car or queen or country, coming up alongside Brett White in value almost.

In lieu of his flesh and bone Lester, striding toward the blaze, ripped the picture from its binding, screwed it into as tight a ball as he could manage and sacrificed it to the effigy. It singed then burned then ashed. “All showbiz ain’t you?” she said as he came back to her.

“I was scared to get too close, being a land animal and all I’m dry enough without being cooked-up; and I wasn’t sure if you’d like it or if you couldn’t stand it but it weren’t half as dramatic as what I thought you might ask for.”

“It was probably perfect and I love you and I love you.”

If you had stood behind the two at that moment so that they were silhouetted against the light of the fire, you would have seen each outlined by an aura following their bodily contours up to a bridge between them. Thus the couple appeared, encapsulated by a shared energy burning lightning against the mere white heat of the flames before them.

“They probably set it hoping they’ll get the rain turning to cider. Can almost hear their chanting still.”

Lester was stung some by this. It seemed to him needless and tore down a little the beauty of what they had witnessed. He had never understood attitudes of that sort. He had no background or allegiances he knew of, he didn’t hate Jew people or immigrant people or country people none. He sought kinship only with her. Brush it off like always, he thought, and join in good sport,

“Rain, rain, dear Apple Tree Man: rain on the orchards and the plains of Bonfireland.”

Her exhaling nose laugh was cut off by the collapse of the structure. An arm fell toward Marguerite, clinging to the sturdy home she offered the fires’ spirit and the fire spirit. Her paint and all else but her paint especially began to melt. She changed the colours of the flames with her make-up and began to perfume the air thick and sickly. 

At this they turned and retreated. Noses wrinkled and coughs spluttered, but hearts and minds pleased that they had been present at the resurrection and second death of her and with what had been said. Halfway back to the Tiger, now fully recovered and ready to prowl along the lanes in search of more and more, Lester stopped sharp. “Best hurry back up ‘fore it gets that acridity stuck to it eternal and it gets all caustic,” she said. “I’ll get her warm and nice for the rest of it, ElAitch.”

Back up the hill the fire had burned down quick and succumbed easy to the cool night. Lester picked up his coat and stowed the book back away somewhere within. His last thought of the collapsed effigy as he turned away from it for a second time was of how its still partially intact torso, with what flames remained licking up through the wicker ribs, resembled more than a burning man an ages old human skeleton through which grass had grown and made a part of nature itself.

She had a martini waiting for him and they toasted to the old gods that had been brought back then sent back by whoever had set the fire going and let it burn out. Then back into contentedness and back on the road, starting off over the fragments of the cocktail glasses they had dedicated out the window to what they had just experienced.