by Rick Bass
There was a grand piano in the lobby and somehow it was not entirely obliterated when the ceiling fell, so that a few crooked, clanging notes issued forth as the rubble shifted, settled, and burned; and still the shots kept firing.
No casualties. All of them went home to their families that night.
One year Rhonda tells Kirby that she is going to Paris with her new fiancé for two weeks and asks if Kirby can keep Jenna. His eyes sting with happiness. Two weeks of clean air, a gift from out of nowhere. A thing that was his and taken away, now brought back. This must be what it feels like to be rescued, he thinks.
Mary Ann thinks often of how hard it is for him—she thinks of it almost every time she sees him with Jenna, reading to her, or helping her with something—and they discuss it often, but even at that, even in Mary Ann’s great lovingness, she underestimates it. She thinks she wants to know the full weight of it, but she has no true idea. It transcends words—spills over into his actions—and still she, Mary Ann, cannot know the whole of it.
Kirby dreams ahead to when Jenna is eighteen; he dreams of reuniting. He continues to take catnaps on the roof by her chimney. The separation from her betrays and belies his training; it is greater than an arm’s length distance.
The counselors tell him never to let Jenna see this franticness—this gutted, hollow, gasping feeling.
As if wearing blinders—unsure of whether the counselors are right or not—he does as they suggest. He thinks they are probably right. He knows the horrible dangers of panic.
And in the meantime, the marriage strengthens, becomes more resilient than ever. Arguments cease to be even arguments anymore, merely differences of opinion; the marriage is reinforced by the innumerable fires and by the weave of his comings and goings. It becomes a marriage as strong as a galloping horse. His frantic attempts to keep drawing clean air are good for the body of the marriage.
Mary Ann worries about the fifteen or twenty years she’s heard get cut off the back end of all firefighters’ lives: all those years of sucking in chemicals—burning rags, burning asbestos, burning formaldehyde—but she does not ask him to stop.
The cinders continuing to fall across his back like meteors; twenty-four scars, twenty-five, twenty-six. She knows she could lose him. But she knows he will be lost for sure without the fires.
She prays in church for his safety. Sometimes she forgets to pay attention to the service and instead gets lost in her prayers. It’s as if she’s being led out of a burning building herself; as if she’s trying to remain calm, as someone—her rescuer, perhaps—has instructed her to do.
She forgets to listen to the service. She finds herself instead thinking of the secrets he has told her: the things she knows about fires that no one else around her knows.
The way lightbulbs melt and lean or point toward a fire’s origin—the gases in incandescent bulbs seeking, sensing that heat, so that you can often use them to tell where a fire started: the direction in which the lightbulbs first began to lean.
A baby is getting baptized up at the altar, but Mary Ann is still in some other zone—she’s still praying for Kirby’s safety, his survival. The water being sprinkled on the baby’s head reminds her of the men’s water shields: of the umbrella-mist of spray that buys them extra time.
As he travels through town to and from his day job, he begins to define the space around him by the fires that have visited it, which he has engaged and battled. I rescued that one, there, and that one, he thinks. That one. The city becomes a tapestry, a weave of that which he has saved and that which he has not—with the rest of the city becoming simply everything between those points, waiting to burn.
He glides through his work at the office. If he were hollow inside, the work would suck something out of him—but he is not hollow, only asleep or resting, like some cast-iron statue from the century before. Whole days pass without his being able to account for them. Sometimes at night, lying there with Mary Ann—both of them listening for the dispatcher—he cannot recall whether he even went into the office that day or not.
He wonders what she is doing: what she is dreaming of. He gets up and goes in to check on their children—to simply look at them.
When you rescue a person from a burning building, the strength of their terror is unimaginable: it is enough to bend iron bars. The smallest, weakest person can strangle and overwhelm the strongest. There is a drill that the firemen go through, on their hook-and-ladder trucks—mock-rescuing someone from a window ledge, or the top of a burning building. Kirby picks the strongest fireman to go up on the ladder, and then demonstrates how easily he can make the fireman—vulnerable, up on that ladder—lose his balance. It’s always staged, of course—the fireman is roped to the ladder for safety—but it makes a somber impression on the young recruits watching from below: the big man being pushed backwards by one foot, or one hand, falling and dangling by the rope; the rescuer suddenly in need of rescuing.
You can see it in their eyes, Kirby tells them—speaking of those who panic. You can see them getting all wall-eyed. The victims-to-be look almost normal, but then their eyes start to cross, just a little. It’s as if they’re generating such strength within—such torque—that it’s causing their eyes to act weird. So much torque that it seems they’ll snap in half—or snap you in half, if you get too close to them.
Kirby counsels distance to the younger firemen. Let the victims climb onto the ladder by themselves, when they’re like that. Don’t let them touch you. They’ll break you in half. You can see the torque in their eyes.
Mary Ann knows all this. She knows it will always be this way for him—but she does not draw back. Twenty-seven scars, twenty-eight. He does not snap; he becomes stronger. She’ll never know exactly what it’s like, and for that she’s glad.
Many nights he runs a fever for no apparent reason. Some nights, it is his radiant heat that awakens her. She wonders what it will be like when he is too old to go out on the fires. She wonders if she and he can survive that: the not-going.
There are days when he does not work at his computer. He turns the screen on but then goes over to the window for hours at a time and turns his back on the computer. He’s up on the twentieth floor. He watches the flat horizon for smoke. The wind gives a slight sway, a slight tremor to the building.
Sometimes—if he has not been to a fire recently enough—Kirby imagines that the soles of his feet are getting hot. He allows himself to consider this sensation—he does not tune it out.
He stands motionless—still watching the horizon, looking and hoping for smoke—and feels himself igniting, but makes no movement to still or stop the flames. He simply burns, and keeps breathing in, detached, as if it is some structure other than his own that is aflame and vanishing, as if he can keep the two separate—his good life, and the other one, the one he left behind.
Swans
I got to know Billy and Amy, over the years, about as well as you get to know anybody up here, which is to say not too well.
They were my nearest neighbors. They saw me fall in and out of love three times, being rejected—abandoned—all three times.
And though that’s not the story, they were good neighbors to me then, in those hard days. Amy had been a baker in Chicago, thirty years before, and even after coming out here to be with Billy she’d never stopped baking. She was the best baker who ever lived, I think: huckleberry pies and sweet rolls and the most incredible loaves of bread. I’ve heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner. I’ve read accounts of people who’ve died and come back to life, and their stories are all so similar I believe that’s how it is.
And that’s what this end of the valley—the south fork of it, rising against the flex of the mountains—smells like all the time, because Amy is almost always baking. The scent of her fresh loaves drifts across the green meadows and hangs along the riverbanks. Sometimes I’ll be hiking in the woods, two or three miles up int
o the mountains, and I’ll catch a whiff of bread, and I’ll feel certain that she’s just taken some out of the oven, miles below. I know that’s a long way for a human to catch a scent, but bears can scent food at distances of nine miles, and wolves even farther. Living up here sharpens one’s senses. The social senses atrophy a bit, but the wild body becomes stronger. I have seen men here lift the back ends of trucks and roll logs out of the woods that a draft horse couldn’t pull. I’ve seen a child chase down a runaway tractor and catch it from behind, climb up, and turn the ignition off before it went into the river. Several old women up here swim in the river all year round, even through the winter. Dogs live to be twenty, twenty-five years old.
And above it all—especially at this south end of the valley—Amy’s bread-scents hang like the smells from heaven’s kitchen.
All that rough stuff—the miracle strength, the amazing bodies—that’s all fine, but also, we take it for granted; it’s simply what the valley brings out, what it summons.
But the gentle stuff—that’s what I hold in awe; that’s what I like to watch.
Gentlest of all were Amy and Billy.
All his life, Billy worked in the woods, sawing down trees on his land in the bottoms, six days a week. He’d take the seventh day off—usually Sunday—to rest his machinery.
There weren’t any churches in the little valley, and if there had been, I don’t know if he and Amy would have gone.
Instead, he would take Amy fishing on the Yaak River in their wooden canoe. I’d see them out there on the flats above the falls, fishing with cane poles and crickets for trout—ten- and fifteen-pound speckled beauties with slab bellies that lived in the deepest holes in the stillness up above the falls, waiting to intercept any nymphs that floated past. Those trout were easy to catch, would hit anything that moved. Billy and Amy wore straw hats. The canoe was green. Amy liked to fish. The hot summer days would be ringing with stillness, and then when Amy hooked one, it would seem that the whole valley could hear her shout.
The great trout would pull their canoe around on the river, held only by that one thin tight fly-line, spinning their canoe in circles while Amy shrieked and Billy paddled with one hand to stay up with the fish, maneuvering into position so he could try to net it with his free hand—and Amy holding on to that flexing cane pole and hollering.
They were as much a part of the valley, living there in the South Fork, as the trees and the river and the very soil itself, as much a part and substance of the valley as the tremulous dusk swamp-cries of the woodcock in summer.
And the swans.
Five of them, silent as gods, lived on a small pond in the woods below Billy and Amy’s cabin, gliding in circles and never making a sound. Amy said they never sang like other birds—that they would remain silent all their lives, until they died, at which point they would stretch out their long necks and sing beautifully, and that that was where the phrase “swan song” came from.
And it was for the swans as much as for anyone that Amy baked her bread. She had a park bench at the pond’s edge that Billy had made for her, and every evening she would take a loaf of bread there and feed it, crumb by crumb, to the elegant big birds, just as dusk began to come sliding in from out of the trees.
Amy would toss bread crumbs at the black-masked swans until it was dark, until she could see only their dim white shapes moving pale through the night, the swans lunging at the sound of the bread crumbs hitting the water. I had sat there with her on occasion.
On the very coldest nights—when the swans were able to keep the pond from freezing only by swimming in tight circles in the center, while the shelf ice kept creeping out, trying to freeze around their feet and lock them up, making them easy prey for coyotes or wolves or foxes—Amy would build warming fires all around the pond’s edge. Wilder swans would have moved on, heading south for the hot-springs country around Yellowstone or western Idaho, where they could winter in splendor, as if in a sauna, but these swans had gotten used to Amy’s incredible breads, I guess, and also believed—knew—that she would build fires for them if it got too cold.
They weren’t tame. She was just a part of their lives. I think she must have seemed as much a natural phenomenon to these swans as the hot springs and geysers must have seemed to other swans, farther south.
From my cabin on the hill, I’d see the glow from Amy’s fires begin to flicker through the woods, would see the long tree shadows dancing across the snowfields, firelight back in the timber, and because I was her neighbor, I’d help her build the fires.
Billy would be out there, too, often in his shirtsleeves, no matter how cold the weather. It was known throughout the valley that Billy slept naked with the windows open every night of the year, like an animal, so that it would help him get ready for winter—and he was famous for working shirtless in zero-degree weather, and for ignoring the cold, for liking it, even. It was nothing to see Billy walking down the road in a snowstorm, six miles to the mercantile for a bottle of milk or a beer, wearing only a light jacket and with his hands shoved down in his pockets, bareheaded, ten below, and the snow coming down like it wasn’t ever going to stop.
Billy had always been precise—a perfectionist, the only one in the valley—but during this year I am telling about he seemed more that way than ever. Even his body was in perfect shape, like a mountain lion’s—a narrow waist but big shoulders and arms from sawing wood all the time. But there were indications that he was human and not some forever-running animal. He was going bald, though that was no fault of his. He had brown eyes almost like a child’s, and a mustache. He still had all of his teeth (except for one gold one in the front), which was unusual for a logger.
He took his various machines apart every day, in the dusty summers, and oiled and cleaned them. I think he liked to do this not just for fanatical maintenance but also to show the machines his control over them; reminding them, perhaps, every evening, that he created them each day when he took them in his hands. That his work gave them their souls—the rumbling saw, the throbbing generator, and his old red logging truck.
Even in the winter, Billy took deep care of his machines, keeping fires going night and day in the wood stoves in his garage, not to warm himself, but to keep the machines “comfortable,” he said—to keep the metal from freezing and contracting.
It would make a fine story to tell, a dark and somehow delicious one, to discover at this point that all the concern and even love that Billy gave to his machines was at a cost, that perhaps it came at Amy’s expense.
But that was not the case.
He had a fullness to him that we just don’t often see. He was loving and gentle with Amy, and I would often marvel, over the years I knew him, at how he always seemed to be thinking of her—of how his movements seemed to be dictated by what might bring her pleasure. And I was struck, too, by the easy way he had of being with her. They seemed fresh together: untouched by the world, and as fresh as that bread.
Billy took caution to cut the lengths of stove wood to fit in Amy’s various stoves for her bread-baking. He scanned the woods for dead standing or fallen trees, wood that would have the proper grain and dryness to release good and controlled steady heat—good cooking wood.
In some ways Billy was as much a part of that bread’s scent hanging over the South Fork as was Amy.
But they were her swans.
So Billy and Amy had a lot of fires: for Amy’s baking; for Amy’s swans, along the shores of the little pond on the coldest nights; for Billy’s machines. Fires in Billy and Amy’s cabin, with those windows always open.
They used an incredible volume of wood. I could step on my porch at almost any hour of the day and hear Billy’s saw buzzing away in the rich bottom, where trees sprouted, grew tall, became old, and fell over; and through their midst, all his life, Billy wielded a giant saw that other men would have had trouble even lifting, much less carrying and using.
He kept the woods down there neat; he cut up almost all of that which h
ad already fallen, and carried it out. You could have picnics or ride bicycles or drive cars into those woods if you so desired, between and among the larger, healthier trees, so free of underbrush and downed trees did he keep it.
But no one ever went there. Things only came out of it.
Stove-sized pieces of wood, for Amy’s bread. For the swans’ bread. For the scent of the valley. The sound of the saw. Billy’s huge, cross-striated chest muscles.
What it was like was a balance; Billy’s (and Amy’s) life was wedged—as if stuck in a chimney—between rise and fall, growth and rot. He had found some magic seam of life, a stasis in those woods, and as long as he could keep the woods the same, he and Amy would stay the same, as would his love for her—as would her love for him.
I would think—without pity—If I had done it like him, none of them would ever have left. If I’d given it my all, I could have lodged us, wedged us, into that safe place where neither life nor death can erode a kind of harmony or peace—a spirit—but I wasn’t a better man. There goes a better man, I’d think, when I saw him driving out of the woods and down the road in his old red truck, the truck sunk nearly to the ground with its load of fresh wood. He gave it his all, and continues to give it his all, I’d think, and he’s going to make it. They’re both going to make it.
I would feel better to realize that—and to see it.
Somebody in this world has to attain peace, I’d think.
Baking was not all Amy knew how to do. She had gone to a music school in Chicago, had been there on a scholarship to play the piano, but then she’d met Billy, who had driven a trailer load of horses out to sell to a man near Chicago, Amy’s uncle.
