With a smile of affection, she shook her head, then continued.
—Eager to return the firetruck to its rightful owners, Woolly climbed behind the wheel and went looking for the station house. Around the town he drove with a fireman’s hat on his head—as it was later reported—tooting the horn for any children he passed. After circling for God knows how long, he found a station house, parked the engine, and walked all the way back to campus.
The affectionate smile that Mrs. Whitney had been wearing began to fade now as her mind leapt forward to all that followed.
—As it turned out, the firetruck had been in the parking lot of the shopping center because several of the firemen were in the grocery store. And while Woolly was driving around, a call came in for a stable that was on fire. By the time the engine from a neighboring town arrived, the stable had burned to the ground. Thankfully, there were no people hurt. But the young stable hand who was on duty alone couldn’t get all of the horses out of the building, and four of them died in the fire. The police tracked Woolly back to the school and that was that.
After a moment, Mrs. Whitney pointed to Emmett’s plate in order to ask if he was finished. When he said that he was, she cleared it along with her cup to the sink.
She was trying not to imagine it, thought Emmett. Trying not to imagine those four horses trapped in their stalls, whinnying and rising on their hind legs as the flames grew closer. Trying not to imagine the unimaginable.
Though her back was now to Emmett, he could tell from the movement of her arm that she was wiping away tears. Deciding that he should leave her in peace, Emmett tucked Woolly’s note back in its spot and quietly pushed back his chair.
—Do you know what I find so strange? Mrs. Whitney asked, still standing at the sink with her back to Emmett.
When he didn’t respond, she turned, wearing a mournful smile.
—When we’re young, so much time is spent teaching us the importance of keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit—a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children—and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.
After shaking her head, Mrs. Whitney looked at the ceiling. When she looked down again, Emmett could see that another tear was making its way down her cheek.
—Those who are too confident . . . or too cautious . . . or too kind . . .
Emmett understood that what Mrs. Whitney was sharing with him was her effort to understand, to explain, to make some sense of the undoing of her bighearted brother. At the same time, Emmett suspected that tucked in Mrs. Whitney’s list was an apology for her husband, who was either too smart, too confident, or too hardworking for his own good. Perhaps all three. But what Emmett found himself wondering was what virtue did Mrs. Whitney have too much of? The answer, his instincts told him, though he was almost reluctant to admit it, was probably forgiveness.
Woolly
And this was my favorite rocking chair, said Woolly to no one.
He was standing on the porch, a little while after Duchess had gone to the general store. Giving the chair a push, he listened to the thwapping of its rockers as it rocked back and forth, noting how each individual thwap came closer and closer together as the back and forths became smaller and smaller, until they stopped altogether.
Setting the chair in motion again, Woolly looked out at the lake. For the time being, it was so still you could see every cloud in the sky reflected on its surface. But in another hour or so, right around five o’clock, the afternoon breeze would begin to pick up and the surface would ripple and all the reflections would be swept away. Then the curtains in the windows would start to stir.
Sometimes, thought Woolly, sometimes at the end of summer when the hurricanes roamed the Atlantic, the afternoon breeze would grow so strong that the bedroom doors would all slam shut and the rocking chairs would rock themselves.
After giving one last push to his favorite chair, Woolly went back through the double doors into the great room.
—And this is the great room, he said, where we would play Parcheesi and complete jigsaw puzzles on rainy afternoons . . . And this is the hallway . . . And this is the kitchen, where Dorothy made fried chicken and her famous blueberry muffins. And that’s the table where we ate when we were too young to dine in the dining room.