by Jay Varner
“He was a young guy.”
The man shakes his head and stares a moment. “That’s not what I meant. Would have thought your mother could have at least had a proper funeral.”
Twenty-two
A few days after my father died, the Sentinel published a story praising my dad’s commitment to the fire department. The reporter didn’t call my mother for quotes — in fact, the story didn’t even reference my mother and me. Instead, members of the fire company talked about my father. They said what a great man he had been, how much he had helped not just McVeytown’s fire department, but other companies countywide. The article said that at noon on the day of my dad’s funeral, all of the fire whistles in Mifflin County blew for five minutes in his honor, and every firehouse flew their flags at half-staff.
“It would have been nice if we could have been more involved in his funeral,” one fireman said in the article. “Since the funeral was on a weekday, a lot of men who wanted to attend couldn’t, due to work. And we asked to carry the casket on top of a fire truck from the church to the cemetery but the family made the decision not to do it.”
When my mother finished reading the article, she folded the paper and slapped it onto the table. She shook her head.
“A lot of people around here are mad at me,” she said. “They wanted a big fireman’s funeral for your father. But I just wanted to make sure he had a nice service. He was your father and my husband. Didn’t that fire company take enough of his time?”
“I’m glad you didn’t do any of that,” I said. “I wouldn’t have wanted his body on a fire truck.”
She wiped a tear from her face. “I don’t know. Maybe I did the wrong thing. People wanted to have a viewing. But I remember once, when we lived in the old trailer, your father said he never wanted a viewing. That’s what he wanted. And now people are going to tell me that I’m wrong?”
I didn’t understand who these “people” were. My father’s friends, especially Art, had always been so nice to me.
“Art called me up,” she said. “He wasn’t very nice. He was pretty smart. He thought it was terrible that I didn’t have a big funeral for him, that I didn’t ask the fire company to do more. I guess maybe I should have asked them to speak at the funeral.”
Still, all of this just seemed wrong to me. Who were other people to say how we should handle my father’s death?
“People wanted to have a big meal at the fire hall after the funeral,” she said, her voice growing stronger, angrier. “I just buried my husband. Did they think that I wanted to eat a bunch of food? I just wanted to be here, with you. And you know who’s the worst about this? Your grandparents, Lucky and Helen. She wanted all of that too. He was her pride and joy because he did anything she asked. He moved them into that house when he was sick. But, oh, she loved him to be a fireman, she loved reading about him in the paper. It made her husband look good, for all the things that he burned.” She shook her head and bit her lip. “I can’t stand those people. They took enough of him.”
The day after the article appeared, Mrs. Fagen, who had been so kind while my father was sick, stopped me in the hallway on my way to lunch. Something seemed different about her — her smile was gone, as was her soft voice. She spoke with a harshness that seemed to bark. And she didn’t kneel next to me — she looked down at me.
“Did you see the newspaper yesterday?” she asked. “That must have made you very proud. People said a lot of nice things about your father.”
“It would have been nice if they had asked me or Mother something,” I said. “And it’s no one’s business what we did at the funeral.”
“When that man was the fire chief, when he was important as your father was, it is people’s business,” she said. “More people than just you and your mother are mourning for him.”
She pursed her lips, sighed, and then shook her head. It seemed that she wanted to say more. Finally, she turned her back and walked around a corner, leaving me alone.
Over the next several weeks, my mother and I saw some of my father’s friends and their wives at the grocery store. I didn’t know all their names, but I recognized their faces. Each time, my mother stiffened — I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or defiance. The friends usually walked past us without saying a word, pretending not to see us. The firemen’s wives were different, though — they stared my mother down, looking like they wanted to pull her hair or spit in her face.
One time we saw Art Kenmore in Jamesway. He walked, next to us, looking down aisles opposite from us.
“Art,” I said.
He lowered his head and turned toward us. “Teena. Jay.” And then he walked away from us.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“I told you,” my mother said. “They all hate me. None of them have been right with me since your dad died.”
Not even Helen and Lucky. It seemed as if they had all but disappeared from our lives. It felt like my mother and I were simply tossed away now that my father, their hero, was gone.
That winter, my mother sat me down in the living room and explained that a man would never again live under our roof. Little had changed within our house since my father had died. His blue place mat remained on the wooden dining room table, his flannel shirts still hung in the closet, and my mother continued to sleep on just one side of the bed. It seemed as though his new Blazer could rumble into the driveway at any time and then I would hear his steel-toed boots stomp up the porch steps.
“If you’re worried about me getting a boyfriend or stepfather, don’t be,” my mother said. She was thirty-two then, and thin. Her curled brown hair flowed past the collar of one of those faded flannel shirts that my father once wore.
“I only ever loved one man,” she continued. “When I met your father, I knew he was the one. I knew it on our first date.” She looked down at the silver wedding band on her right hand and cried. The ring was usually worn on the left hand, she had explained. Wearing it on the right was a sign of loss. “I’m not going on a date again, even if someone asks me.”
I didn’t know what to say or do that would make her feel better. Instead, I slowly nodded and wished that I had someone to talk to about these things.
“And don’t worry about learning how to drive or hunt or use tools; someone will teach you,” she said. “Pap will teach you.”
When our old lawn mower broke that next summer, Pap drove his tiny Ford Ranger pickup to our house. He reached across the seat, grabbed his toolbox, and then shimmied out of the truck, wincing in pain from the arthritis that caused him to hobble like a bowlegged cowboy. When his wrench slipped or a bolt fell into the engine block, my grandfather sighed and tugged the red and white hankie out of his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his face. After hours of fumbling, bloodying his knuckles, and drinking several glasses of ice water, he fixed the mower so that it ran for a few more weeks. But there was his declining health: arthritis, high blood pressure, a hip replacement. I needed to become a man fast so I could take care of my mother. I wanted to know how to run a chain saw, swing a splitting maul, and replace blown fuses. For now, though, I raked grass and crawled around the outside of the house on my knees with a pair of hedge clippers, hardly the work of a real man.
One night, after we finished working, my mother and I sat on the front porch and drank water. Crickets chirped in the distance.
“I wonder what your father would say about all of this,” she said. “All of those guys who were supposed to be his friends, they can’t even stop by to check up on us. They don’t offer to do anything with you.”
“I thought maybe Art would take me fishing,” I said. “He said something about it that one time in Philadelphia.”
My mother shook her head and looked toward the orange horizon. “Nope,” she said. “They don’t care about us.”
I wondered the same about Lucky and Helen. Since my father’s death, we had seen them only briefly. On my birthday they stopped by our house to drop off our pres
ents — Lucky stayed in the car while Helen walked the gifts to our door. For Christmas, they mailed me a card with a twenty-dollar bill inside. Though this should have upset me, ultimately, I felt glad that I didn’t have to see them.
Not long after that, my mother and I watched the movie Backdraft together. Early in the film, some of the firefighters visit Rebecca De Mornay’s character, a widow with children. Her husband, a fireman, had been killed on the job. His friends and co-workers stop by to deliver groceries and check on the kids.
“Is that how it’s supposed to be?” I asked.
“We wish,” my mother said.
“Well, that movie’s not true anyway,” I said. “Those firemen, they were running with their jackets open. Dad told me once that if someone did that, they’d burn up.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I bet real firemen don’t act like those guys in the movie.”
• • •
At the start of fifth grade, I became friends with Ryan Oden, Hartley’s grandson. Ryan and his parents still lived in that small house on the farm. From their back porch I could see the manure pit where a front-end loader shoveled cow shit. A fenced, concrete pad held the cattle, their feeding and water troughs, and several sheet-metal buildings where Ryan and I hunted pigeons. The upstairs of the two-story barn held hay bales and sacks of ground corn used to feed the cattle. Downstairs were the fifty or so milking stalls.
Though my parents had once forbidden me to step foot on the farm, my mother now seemed happy that I wanted to go outside the house and encouraged that I had wanted to do “boy things” with Ryan. But she always told me to be careful, reminding me of Jonathan’s deformed arm. My dream of becoming a farmer had faded, but I remained intrigued by the Odens. Harley’s machines and the rumored blood-stained floorboards still captivated me. In the summertime, I played basketball with Ryan and some of his cousins, including Jonathan. He shot right-handed while his other arm curled against his chest in the brace. Jonathan worked on the farm too, driving the Oden’s old Moline tractor — quickly shifting the gears, then grabbing the steering wheel. He did it all as fluidly as a gymnast.
One soupy summer night, when Ryan and I played tag with his cousins, Jonathan invited me into his room. He lived with his parents in a house a hundred yards from the farm. Baltimore Orioles posters and baseball cards decorated the bedroom along with a baseball that was protected inside a plastic case. I saw the autographs of Mike Boddicker, Cal Ripken Jr., and Eddie Murray.
“How did you get that ball?” I asked.
“I threw out the first pitch at a game,” he said. “After my accident. They gave it to me.”
My mother and grandmother had told me what happened to Jonathan’s arm, but no one on the farm ever spoke of it. This was the only time Jonathan ever mentioned it to me.
“You know, your dad was there that day,” he said. “I don’t remember him but people told me that he was the first one to come. Because of him I was able to keep my arm.”
I had felt cheated by the McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company. Had it not been for that firehouse, I would have seen my dad more often. But now it didn’t matter — his body lay buried in a cemetery and I would never speak another word to him again. But it wasn’t just the fire company that angered me — the doctors had lied. The promised twenty years didn’t even last twenty months. And though I had prayed for my father every night like so many other people, God had also failed me. There had been no miracles.
I handed Jonathan the baseball and he placed it on his dresser next to the cologne and deodorant. I glanced at the reed-thin arm that was held in the brace and wondered why it had never grown or why they had even bothered to reattach it. I wondered if Hartley’s mysterious machines could help, just like he had once promised.
Each day after school, I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and then walked down the hill past Pap and Nena’s house and crossed a two-lane highway to see Ryan Oden once he finished helping milk the cattle. We slowly stepped through the ankle-deep cow manure, careful not to scare any pigeons. We ducked under the electric fence that kept cattle out of the barn. We propped ourselves against iron gates and slowly aimed our pellet guns as though preparing for a gun fight in the Old West. The pigeons lined the rafters inside one of the buildings where the cattle were fed. I stared down the sights, aimed at the breast of one of the birds, and squeezed the trigger. The roosting pigeons squawked and fluttered into the air — all of them except for the one I shot, which spiraled to the ground. We bagged the pigeons because we could, because we weren’t old enough to hunt deer like the men in our families.
In late September, some of McVeytown’s volunteer firemen climbed onto our roof and rammed long poles and brushes into the chimney shaft, knocking out last year’s soot, preparing us for the coming winter. A hollow, metallic clang resounded through the house as they cleaned the chimney, a sound that reminded me of a ramrod being shoved down a musket barrel like in the old Westerns I sometimes watched on television.
After finishing, the new chief, Art Kenmore, knocked on our front door. I stood inside the living room well behind my mother and watched as Art removed his helmet.
“We’re all done,” he said. “Everything looks good.”
“That’s good news,” my mother said.
I looked up at Art, at his broad shoulders and that mustache — it was thick and wide, like my father’s had been. I remembered how my father had laughed that night when Art wore the pink bathrobe. And there was that trip to Philadelphia, when Art mended his car’s radiator hose with duct tape he’d found wrapped on leaky restaurant toilet.
Art looked past my mother and into my eyes. He held the stare for a moment.
“Well, all right,” he finally said. “We have two more chimneys to clean before the night is out.”
“Thanks again,” my mother said. “It’s still a donation, right?”
Art stared at her, shifted his neck as though his collar were too tight. He looked down at his helmet, rubbed a finger over what I knew was a rubber lip around the edge — I had played with my father’s helmet enough times to have every piece memorized.
“Twenty-five dollars is the normal donation,” he said.
“I’ll send it,” my mother said. “Thank you.”
Art capped his head with the helmet, nodded, and said, “Yep.”
My mother closed the door. “They can’t even do it for free. All that your father gave that company, and none of them can give us a single thing.”
Twenty-three
One of the first men to help us was a burly, barrel-chested mechanic with thick hands and oil-stained sweatshirts. Walter Marrigan lived two miles away and passed by our house each day to and from work at his service station and garage. That winter, as my mother and I shoveled snow after a storm, I heard his rumbling engine stop at the mouth of our driveway. It was the excuse I needed to stop shoveling.
“Need a plow?” he asked. I noticed the thick bushes of gray hair growing untamed on his neck, hair that crept around the sides of his throat and connected with a scraggly, week-old beard.
My father had always plowed the snow from our driveway with the Case lawn mower. It seemed kind for Marrigan to offer his help, and we were too grateful to decline. After that, he never even asked and returned after every storm that winter.
One day in February, as the school bus crowned the hill before my house, I knew something was wrong when I saw Nena’s old, sea green Jeep parked in the driveway. The Jeep had been there the morning Nena and my mother told me that my father had bone cancer, and then, two years later, the morning when they told me that it had killed him.
When the school bus doors hissed open, I crossed in front of the bus and felt the wind sift down the collar of my coat. I kicked my heavy rubber boots against the siding on the house, knocking snow from the treads, then opened the front door and stepped inside. I blinked and waited for my eyes to adjust from the bright, near incandescent light of the late-afternoon sun that burned off of the snow.
Finally, I noticed my mother, who was slouched on the dining room love seat, limp as a marionette. She wore jeans and a flannel shirt. She fixed her stare on the ceiling, as though looking above for answers.
Nena sat at the kitchen table, and our Dalmatian, Patches, slept at her feet. Nena stared at me with unblinking eyes that looked flinty and cold. “Sit down,” she said. “We need to talk to you.”
I shrugged off my backpack, crossed the living room, and sat down next to my grandmother at the table.
“Mr. Marrigan was here today,” Nena said. “He stopped to plow out the driveway this morning. He noticed it had drifted shut during the night. Well, he hit your mother’s car. It’s nothing serious, just a long green scratch along the front bumper. And when he came inside and told her about it, she asked if he’d be able to pay for the damage.”
My grandmother arched her eyebrows and clenched her jaw. She opened her mouth to speak but started to cry.
My mother exhaled, closed her eyes, and said, “He said that he was lonely. That he thought I was probably lonely too.” She opened her eyes and stared at me.
“He tried to kiss your mother. He grabbed hold of her — ”
“He pulled me toward him,” my mother said and shuddered. “I put my hands on his chin and pushed. I guess I pushed hard enough because he kind of fell back. I pointed to Patches and said, ‘You see that dog? She’s trained to attack. All I have to do is scream.’”
I looked down at our Dalmatian. She was still asleep, so deaf that she hadn’t even realized I’d come home.
“He glanced at Patches,” she continued, “called me that word that rhymes with witch, and then he left.” A tear ran down my mother’s face. “I thought I could trust him.”
After I had heard my mother tell her story, adrenaline pumped through my chest and tensed my heart into what felt like a pounding fist; it burned up my legs like gasoline and poured into my eye sockets. I often wondered why Marrigan had been so kind when everyone else avoided us. Now I knew.
