The chief and I went together in his truck up to the back of Western Gully Road, back onto an overgrown farm where the owners thought we could do a controlled burn of the remains of their barn. Surrendering to gravity, the upper part of the barn had toppled backwards onto the hill it was built into, and the only part that remained standing was the ground floor, hemmed in on three sides by fieldstone walls roughed together with mortar. Just inside the lower portion of the barn was an equally weathered tractor, and Gary Collins and I talked about it, said we could probably haul it out of the way if we went ahead.
It would be the sort of fire we could use as a training exercise, pumping water up from the end of the pond, practising spilling the big hose from the pumpers. The biggest concern was exposures; in layman’s terms, how things nearby—a rose hedge, a house clad in vinyl siding, and two large trees—would be affected by the tremendous heat a fire load that large would throw off. That, and whether the long pasture running up to the spruce behind the barn would be so dry that it would burn as well.
I took a flashlight in around a partition at the very back of the barn, stumbling in over the broken floorboards that had fallen from upstairs, shining the light into a narrow space onto two 50-gallon drums of diesel, one with a hand pump still screwed into place through the bung, and a wet-looking pile of shallow boxes marked C-I-L—Stump Dynamite. We didn’t get any closer.
We drove back into the cove in Gary’s truck. He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window of his big Ford.
“Don’t think we’ll be issuing a burning permit,” he said quietly.
TWENTY
“You could come out and visit if you’re out this way.”
My mother’s voice, small and thin through the telephone receiver. By then my parents had retired to Victoria, B.C., the absolute other end of the country from Newfoundland, and the trip out to see them seemed both impossibly long and somehow unnecessary.
That’s the problem with pushing people away, even if it’s for their own good—sometimes the pushing away sticks in ways you don’t expect, and you end up making distance into a habit. I know all about that now, and I know we’d spent so much time making sure everyone had enough room that we’d almost forgotten what it was like to be close.
It wasn’t until I was in Banff for a month and they were going to come and visit me there that I realized they were doubting their own arm’s-length sacrifice. They were willing to fly across the Rockies and then take an hour-and-a-half bus ride up from Calgary, even though Dad’s bladder needed a bathroom every half-hour or so. The fact of the matter was that the trip would be virtually impossible for them, but they were going to make it anyway, even if it meant Dad would be saddled with adult diapers for the nightmare trip along a big chunk of Alberta highway.
At the same time, they wouldn’t cash in the parental trump card and just simply tell me why it was important that I should make the trip. I made it anyway, hearing, thankfully, the unsaid sentences my family tucks into the spaces between their words. And when I got off the airplane and met them in Victoria, it was like my dad was already halfway gone, this frail and smiling man was already well on his way to being someone else. Mom was Mom, but my father had aged tremendously, and I almost had to search through his features to find the landmarks that meant Dad.
I felt that the same was true for me, but in a different way: I was packed full of all sorts of things that I wanted to tell someone but that I seemed to have forgotten how to say. To me, there was no point of contact between the person they knew and the person I had become. There was just too much ground to cover: I wanted to tell them that fires and accidents and the rest of the world had made me hard and pragmatic and more distant than ever. But there was no way into that conversation; it was enough that they clearly understood I was in bad trouble and that they could be a comfort if I needed one.
I wanted to tell them that I was regularly ripped apart at night, and not to worry if I screamed or got out of bed and roamed the strange house in the dark. But I also knew that the first sound of my voice would bring my mother padding down the hall barefoot anyway, and that if I told her anything she would try to wait up and listen, just in case I needed her help—and she needed the sleep as much as, maybe more than, I did.
I woke up anyway, the way I do especially away from my own bed and my own familiar darkness and shapes and sounds, and I was wound up in the sheets and hearing sirens in my head, even though the calm of their quiet Victoria neighbourhood didn’t seem ever to be disturbed by a siren, not even lost and echoing out in the distance somewhere. In a strange room, it’s easy to look around and imagine you see smoke. Then I’d smell it, and wake up covered in sweat, sometimes moaning, my feet in fire boots that were caught so tight that I couldn’t move, and I felt like I was running out of air.
Out in the darkness of the rest of the house, Dad was snoring his long, gasping snores, and I could hear Mom moving around in her bed on the very edge of awake—and that familiarity alone helped shake me back into myself.
I think, in retrospect, that they would have been the easiest ones to tell. Perhaps because the house was just close enough: because Dad’s chair was there, because of the brass ship’s clock that ticked steadily on the mantel, because down in the basement, unused and dusty, his fishing gear still hung in a familiar satchel, his fishing knife in its smooth leather sheath. All of that made it somehow possible to have one last chance. All of it was one set of secure and familiar arms, right there around me.
Once, as a teenager, playing cards with strangers for a dime ante, I had come home well ahead and my mother asked me if I was in the red or the black. I’d been dealing blackjack at the end in a big screened-in porch, fat white moths battering the screen like they were desperate to come in and join the game. Confused, I told her I was in the red, and she drew herself up straight, my dad behind her looking at me, both of them ready to put out another teenaged fire, and she said, “We’ll bail you out this time, but only this time,” and even as she was saying the words I was thinking, “No, no, I got it wrong, it’s okay, I don’t need you to help.”
Her good intentions, all laid out bare, weren’t needed. And later, when they were needed, I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to start the conversation.
You forget, when you’re someone’s child, that your parents have lived too. My parents would have understood that good intentions sometimes fall flat, and that I was falling too. They wouldn’t have had to bail me out, but they would have understood.
I regret now that I didn’t tell them how I was feeling when I had the chance, because they would have offered a home and a quiet room to recover in for as long as I needed it, strong coffee and gentle words, the smooth, cool touch on my forehead of my mother’s hand. They managed to make that much perfectly clear to me, even though it was obvious they didn’t understand just exactly what was wrong.
I wouldn’t have taken them up on the offer, but just knowing it was there if I needed it was enough.
The woman pointed up past the small burning house towards a grassy hill. I had asked her if anyone knew where the homeowner was.
The small green house was well alight, smoke chuffing dark yellow-brown from the ends of the eaves and pouring out through the open front door.
There were small firs and spruce running up the shoulders of the hill like a dark green cape, and the owner was standing behind a spruce tree, hiding, his big stomach in a white T-shirt sticking out from one side of the tree, his backside sticking out from the other. Every now and then his head would dart out like a small bird’s, peering at us, and as soon as he saw us watching he would pull it back in again.
I pointed him out to a police officer, and the policeman started slowly up the hill. We were pulling hose off the trucks by then, and the day had that flat white light of fall—still sunny, but with the heat all gone, as if the sun was only there for show.
I told the guys that we couldn’t be sure the house was empty, that we’d have to do a f
ull search. I sent a crew up on the low roof to cut a ventilation hole in the back corner.
Up on the roof, two firefighters were sitting on the shingles, wrestling with the chainsaw, caught half in and half out of the hole they had started to make. They had pried up enough boards that we could see down into the small crawl space under the roof—not really an attic, because the space was only a few feet high, even at the peak— but the space was packed tight with rolls of garden hose and coils of barbed wire, and the saw was all caught up in the wire, and the guys hadn’t been able to push their way down through the ceiling yet to lift the smoke off the firefighters inside.
Inside the house, the firefighters found the fire in what had been the kitchen, knocked it down and were coming back out. I met one of them, Dave Lambert, at the door.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, motioning me inside as the smoke quickly lifted, wicking up through the ventilation hole the firefighters on the roof had finally cut down through the kitchen ceiling. The house was empty, and there was a white plastic beef bucket standing upright in a room just off the front door, the bucket acting as toilet for the house.
Inside the living room was a single couch, tufted stuffing poking out through the upholstery in several places, and where there might have been a coffee table in another house there was instead a rusted gas tank from a car, both the filler neck and the outlet packed tight with rags.
“We crawled right into the thing,” he said, shrugging. Dave rocked the gas tank back and forth with his foot, so that I could hear liquid sloshing back and forth inside.
There was still a mark all around his face where his mask had been pulled tight by the straps, and, outside that, a line of black soot.
TWENTY-ONE
Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing a shape, just a triangle or a square of a single familiar colour, and the film begins unspooling in my head all over again. It occurs by chance, and when it does I can practically draw it straight up, raw and hard and immediate enough to take my breath away.
I remember seeing the skirt of a lime-green dress, spread out like a pleated fan across the floor of the legion hall, and in the middle of the fan the mound of an unconscious woman. I always think of her as Rita—that wasn’t her name, but it offers some small privacy in an otherwise too-public final circumstance. The equation is strangely reduced in my memory to geometry: the curve of her stomach, the triangle of her skirt, the oval of people standing around her, looking down.
Sometimes I see that shape—sometimes it’s just the colour—and snap backwards. That’s all it takes. I’m back, surrounded by heat and desperation and the smell of boiled cabbage.
She was lying flat on her back, mouth open, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Around her, the crowd of a fiftieth-anniversary party circled at arm’s length, leaving her in a small, semi-private pool of parquet flooring.
She was about seventy years old, maybe a little less, and two firefighters had already started doing CPR, one sweating heavily and leaning hard into her chest by the time my truck arrived and we came in with the gear, the extra gloves and the ventilator. No ambulance yet, still miles away, not even the piercing top notes of its siren notching the heavy summer air in the valley by the hall. The deep July belly of summer, all the legion hall windows open, the curve-backed chairs hung with discarded suit coats. Men with slackened neckties—limp shirts losing their pressed definition—standing around and unconsciously pushing up their sleeves as if there was something they were about to start doing. Others sitting, wearing the distracted look of people thinking they had only barely dodged this particular lottery. Some of them with their backs to the firefighters.
The innate obscenity of it—firefighters, their hands on a woman who, if conscious, would have been embarrassed by their rough touch. When you’re doing CPR and someone’s ribs give and break under your hands, you hear the kind of flesh-quietened pop you get when you’re cutting up raw chicken and you’re twisting the joints backwards to separate them. It’s a pop you feel as much as hear, and it happens so easily that you sometimes find yourself absently counting a person’s ribs as they gently give.
The music was still on. All of the kitchen staff had come out from the back, and they gathered together in a tight white-aproned group, hands up to their mouths, hairnets still covering their heads. Everyone standing or sitting, unable, as if by unwritten convention, to move.
Except for one man, short and lightly built, wearing grey flannel trousers and narrow suspenders, his face brown and weathered, feet constantly moving, circling the woman and the firefighters warily, talking all the time like a commentator giving the play-by-play. “She’s alive. Throwing up—gotta be alive to throw up,” he said, standing in too close above the working firefighters, unwilling to be pushed back. “Might be breathing now. Might be breathing. Colour’s good, real good.”
In reality, though, time was running away. There was no reaction to suggest the light might come back to her eyes, no movement except for—twice—that deep and frightening stomach-muscle rasp that speaks of failing bodies and engines winding down.
There was an air of hopelessness in the room, hanging just above the windows, a palpable sense of the resigned. This audience wasn’t waiting for Lazarus, not expecting Rita to sit up and cough, or maybe attempt a feeble wave as the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance. These were people too old to trust in miracles, experienced enough to recognize the steps of the dance that has collapsed into the mere practice of rehearsal.
If I had been more astute, I would have learned something then about what dying actually is. If I’d been paying more careful attention, I would have heard that domino fall somewhere in my head. Later, I would have realized, much too young, that there’s a point when you turn away, secretly glad that it’s happened to someone else, just because it hasn’t happened to you. The fact is that some people can’t be saved, and others shouldn’t be, and that’s a concept you’re not even supposed to toy with. I was on the verge of realizing that sometimes you have to let go, even if you’re not supposed to. Rita was going to die. So would everyone I knew and loved. So would I. It wasn’t just people who I didn’t know and would never know. And suddenly, there wasn’t anywhere near enough distance between me and them.
The ambulance was suddenly close, coming down the long valley, howling.
By the time the stretcher was in the hall, everything was running the way it should. Decisions had been made without ever being spoken, everyone just waiting for that thin line of someone else’s authority to bring this story to a close.
With CPR you take turns—spelling each other off if there are enough of you. If it takes long enough, everyone works close to the victim. When I’ve gotten close enough to someone who doesn’t blink, to someone’s eyes that will never blink again, I’ve seen my own face reflected back, distorted slightly in the gentle curve of their irises.
Close your eyes quick, or just look away.
Close the ambulance doors and try to take off the gloves, try to pull them away from the sticky sweat of your hands.
Try to take off everything. Hide from the things that won’t wash away.
Aiden Denine spent his whole working life with a power utility in Canada’s north, and he was a volunteer firefighter up there as well. He hardly ever talked about what he saw—but he saw fire deaths, several, and had fought fires where the water tanks in the trucks had frozen solid. He said he served some time as a coroner there, too, and shook his head every time he mentioned it.
He had pale, staring eyes and thin, straw-like hair, and his lungs were shot. He couldn’t breathe smoke anymore, because it put him in the hospital every single time he got even the least little bit of it. But he wouldn’t quit the department, and he always got a lungful from standing on the edges.
At big fires he would do traffic, and if he was too sick even to do that he’d show up in his big extended-cab pickup, bringing flats of pop and bottled water for free from the convenience store he owned. And you could
tell by the way his hands moved that he wanted to be doing something, anything at all, but that he was holding himself back because he knew just how much he would have to pay for it later.
TWENTY-TWO
It was an autumn day, a cold holiday that was keeping most people indoors, and when my pager went off, the dispatcher asked for someone from the department to call in.
Usually that meant a nuisance call: someone who thought his neighbour was going to light a bonfire in her backyard during the height of summer when the fir was as dry as candle wicks, someone who thought there might be smoke in his basement or had a ceiling light that was acting funny—and once, a distraught man who had parked his brand new pickup at the top of the boat ramp, opened the hood to put in windshield wiper fluid, and had watched as the truck slipped out of gear and rolled away from him, down into the harbour. The fire chief went to that one—we took turns—and then he called me on the radio to come down and have a look. The owner was still standing there, looking into the water, the windshield wiper fluid bottle between his feet. All we could do was stand on the ramp and look at the $40,000 truck, its chrome glinting brown-silver up through the water at us.
The chief lit a cigarette and studied the completely submerged pickup. Every now and then a thin trickle of silver bubbles would break free from somewhere inside and creep slowly up to the mirror-flat surface of the harbour.
“You’ll be needing a diver and a tow truck,” the chief said matter-of-factly, blue smoke curling around his face. “And you’ll want to get on it quick, before the gas starts leaking and we have to call the environment department.”
This call, though, wasn’t a truck. It was a bird. “Lady wants to talk to you about a parrot,” the dispatcher told me on the phone.
Sometimes you just end up cornered into going, into trying to do something in a situation where you shouldn’t even be bothering. I called the woman back, and then I went.
Burning Down the House Page 17
