Burning Down the House (2 page)

I don't know exactly when the nightmares started, I just know I didn't expect them and that they haven't stopped—and I wonder if they ever will. I know they are made from the building blocks of hundreds of fire calls and accidents, from the mundane to the horrifying, but I don't know which specific calls are the cause, or how the pieces will end up fitting together. I know that I can expect, regularly, to be jarred out of sleep, terrified, and that I may never fully escape the damage done. Within the first few months on the trucks I was seeing people ripped apart into their constituent bits, a sort of deconstruction that makes you look at your own hands and feet differently. Before I turned twenty-four, I would see how a 100-kilometre-per-hour head-on crash could break both a person's wrists so that their hands hung limp as if they were cloth, forced to fold against the bias. I would see people with their heads torn off. High-speed rollovers. Fuel tanker wrecks. I'd witness the way camper trailers blow apart into quarter-inch plywood splinters when they roll over at high speed on the highway.

I learned quickly that when I was with other firefighters, there were things I was allowed to talk about and ways that I was allowed to talk about them. There were other things I just wasn't supposed to mention.

When I finally stopped firefighting I was close to forty, the deputy chief of a thirty-member department. When I started I was twenty-one, and about to get married. Most people at twenty-one are getting ready for their life, told to hope for happily-ever-after and a fairy-tale ending. At twenty-one, you should be looking at clean wallpaper and fresh starts; I was seeing broken limbs and people taking their last few breaths after a cardiac arrest.

The job caught up with me eventually, and, inside my head at least, it hit me far more harshly than I think I deserved.

ONE

In 1983, when I was twenty-one, I took a day off from a summer job in the periodicals department of the Acadia University library and unintentionally changed the rest of my life. I found out that the volunteer fire department in Wolfville was taking new members, and that they might actually accept me. The department would have their monthly meeting the next night, and if I didn't get an application in to them, signed by a parent, it would be another month before I would even be considered again. That was back when a month meant something more than thirty days, back when I was young enough that it seemed like something close to forever.

So I jumped on a train at Wolfville's small red-brick station for the short ride to Halifax, through the summer birch woods and the grey smooth stands of sugar maple, a train ride I had taken dozens of times before. The railway tracks there have a wonderfully voyeuristic quality: you can see the messy parts of people's lives—the rusting snowmobile pushed over the bank, the big gold LeMans with the hood propped open for months on end, as if someone went to get one more tool and simply forgot to come back. The fronts of houses, the sides that face the road, always have a peculiar, rigid formality. But more than that—the fronts of houses lie. They're the faces you're meant to see, while the backs of houses, visible to the train rumbling through once or twice a day, tell the real story. A man in a red and black plaid jacket, sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, smoking and holding a shotgun loose across his knees. Another man, methodically hitting a prone and subservient dog with a length of knotted yellow rope, the man's arm swinging straight up in the air before slashing down again. A police car left empty on a red-soil woods road, its front door open and emergency lights flashing, with no one in sight.

The people I passed were going on with their lives as if no one was watching. Adults fighting, their mouths open and yelling even though you couldn't hear the words, their bodies in that angular and obvious semaphore, hands on hips, faces leaning close. Kids brazenly shooting the glass insulators off the railway signal poles even as the train trundled past. It's like listening at the heater vents to a family fight downstairs: listening makes you a witness, but you foolishly believe you're out of reach because you can't be seen, as if being invisible keeps you safe.

It was, in the end, a trip that would profoundly change the way I looked at both myself and the world in general. I've come through what lay ahead of me then without serious physical injuries, perhaps, but with a clear, concrete knowledge that little in the world is the way it seems, and that the line between morality and most of the deadly sins is pretty darned thin.

My mother, small and intense and always wearing her feelings naked on her face, had spent years trying to convince me that life wasn't fair, drumming that sentence into my and my brothers' heads regularly. What she hadn't told me was that life can also be savage and hard and capriciously unfair, and that the change can come as simply as the wind turning a few degrees on its compass. That humanity can be both a balm and a veneer, and that you can wind up being unsure which is which.

It was only a year or so later that I began to realize that fire departments do exactly the same thing as that train ride: they provide a window into the backyard of people's most personal moments, unguarded, bare and raw, moments that many don't even realize they're sharing, moments they would be embarrassed to know someone else was seeing. It's a window into both the heartfelt and the heart-wrenching, and perhaps it's a view that a person like me— carrying too much imagination and lacking the ability to simply shake things off—wasn't suited to see.

Riding the train, like firefighting, was interesting both inside and out. Outside, the Dayliner crossed a lot of terrain that seemed virtually untouched by humans: long sloping embankments down to the Bay of Fundy, the occasional crashing river gorge, the back of apple orchards, heavy in fall with bright red fruit. Inside, the scenery was just as changeable. Once, a florid man pulled a glass bottle of 7UP and a handful of Dixie cups out of his briefcase. “Lemon gin's already in there,” he said quietly, offering me a cup at eleven o'clock in the morning, an older man taking an unsettling interest in someone barely out of their teens, travelling alone.

Another time, I sat with a smoothly shaven army recruit heading back for a second round of basic training. He had gotten tossed out in his tenth week the first time, he told me, because he hadn't used the footbath outside the showers and had developed three hundred plantar's warts, a hundred on one foot and two hundred or so on the other. He'd had the warts frozen off, and he offered to show me the soles of his feet. I looked at his skinny white ankles and imagined I could already see the scarred red tissue.

Imagination can be a horrible thing, I thought, and I declined both offers.

Reality can be far worse.

After it left Wolfville, the train turned towards Avonport in a long, gentle curve, crossing the Gaspereau River on a huge steel-girdered bridge, green paint with angry boils of red rust. Avonport, I'd eventually be told, was marked by Wolfville's firefighters as the place where two kids had died in an apartment fire over a store. No one ever told me who was killed or who was on the trucks that day, but I did learn that two firefighters had turned in their gear and quit the department the day after they'd gone in to recover the bodies. Out of Avonport and around the corner of coastline, the train trundled through Hantsport, past huge bruised piles of raw gypsum waiting to be made into wallboard.

After the causeway at Windsor, the train took the long, slow climb through the centre of Nova Scotia. The railroad took a route away from the highway, and climbed its shallow grade through big spruce and pine and stands of heavy birch. Occasionally the train passed woods roads for a minute or two, and the land sometimes opened up wide through great square patches of clear-cut, the slash left in mounds and the skidder tracks cut deep in the reddish soil. The trees left standing, even when crooked or scarred by the equipment, giving the strange impression that the cutting had happened overnight, everything abrupt and raw. Once or twice the train would pass a parked skidder or a log truck with the driver up on top, pulling the chains tight over his load, but the overall sensation was of having come upon the scene of an accident without having seen it happen.

The distance was all the more palpable because the windows on the train didn't open—huge sheets of double-paned glass, cool against a forehead but sealed so the outside world was as untouchable as a movie. There were small dark lakes that looked as if they should be full of trout, and tea-coloured rivers that raced over beds of multicoloured, rounded stones; they looked exquisitely tactile, yet were completely out of reach. The glass and the unending click-clack of the wheels over the joined tracks gave you just enough distance to ensure you were never a part of what was going on, only an observer.

Coming into Halifax, the tracks curved around the bowl of Bedford Basin, riding high up over the first outer-edge fringes of strip malls and fast-food restaurants. By then most people on the train had the trip-almost-over fidgets, and were up on their feet getting coats or luggage down from the three-bar chromed racks above them. A Halifax boy, I was always counting off familiar landmarks: the floating dark blue research station on Bedford Basin, the concrete street bridges that arced over the railway cut. On a trip like that one, there's someone crying almost every time, looking out the windows of the small train as if searching desperately for a fixed and familiar point of reference. It's hard to tell if they're crying over what they're heading towards or what they're riding away from.

My parents lived in a big, square, flat-roofed house in Halifax's south end, the kind of old house that whispers at night, the hot-water radiators pinging and clanking like a fat man wheezing in his sleep. My father was a university professor then, much taller than me, quiet and gentle. His hands, like mine, were very soft, his voice soft too, and even, always explaining.

Waking up in that house, I heard the murmur of the radio, my parents often talking back to it, the sound of the manual coffee grinder and the burble of the percolator. Eggs frying, high ceilings, every sound moving like it was forced through loose fabric, so that the house existed, most of the time, without sharp edges.

My father signed the permission sheet in time for me to catch the train back. I remember him in his corner chair, hand up to his grey and white beard, the maple trees outside casting moving shadows across the living room floor. He signed the papers after he and my mother talked about it, without complaint but not without reservation. I think they didn't want to say no, just as long as they weren't forced to watch, just as long as they could keep any consequences firmly at a distance.

I remember being fourteen, ready to head off somewhere for several days, and saying goodbye to my dad up in his bedroom on a quiet, bright afternoon, the sun working in through the venetian blinds in thin, even stripes. I told him I was going, and instead of giving him the usual goodbye hug I reached out my right hand to shake his, and for a moment he stared at my hand as if he barely recognized the gesture. At the time I actually thought the idea of a handshake was kind of formal and dignified—I think I had read that somewhere—but I also remember watching a set of very different expressions play across my father's face: dismay, loss, maybe even resignation.

In the end he shook my hand, and I still regret that defining moment and my decision to behave so formally. He shook my hand, I suppose, because he realized that hugging me then would have crossed a crucial line between us, and embarrassed me in the process. So he did his best to put his own sadness aside, and let me keep the grown-up distance I'd tried to assume. It is, I realize now, what parents do—they accept a thousand small broken hearts, and trust that, inside, the changing child is still the one they've always known.

When it came to the fire department, I think he felt he had to trust me to make the right choice while keeping his fear about the possible consequences buttoned down tight inside him. It was a reaction I was familiar with. I had played rugby for years, all through high school and university—a small guy in a big man's game—and my father had come to exactly one game, when my university team played a much faster, much better squad. I was playing in the scrum half's position, right behind the big men, and I was savaged every time I touched the ball. He didn't say I should stop playing—he even liked to hear me talk about the games we'd played—but he never came to watch again.

I think he signed the fire department forms with that same kind of determined fatalism. A former U.S. Army Air Corps medical corpsman, he knew at least a slice of what I would be likely to see.

The funny thing was that you might have expected him to be the one who sprang into action in an emergency, but it was my mother who stopped the bleeding when I whittled a gash in my finger with a hunting knife. And it was Mom who smelled the deep infection in my ankle when a puncture wound went septic. We were in Maine then, with her mother, who had been a nurse, but it was Mom who spotted the infection and fought it tooth and nail.

Maybe Dad already had too much experience in the kind of world I was about to enter, and was doing what I would soon learn to do—drawing conclusions early, connecting the dots from incomplete equations. Maybe he had learned to shy away, which is probably the only real way to keep yourself safe. It makes me wonder if he should have said something then, except that I know, as all parents do, that you can't protect kids from their own bad ideas, no matter how much you want to.

He kept any concerns he may have had to himself. Both my parents would rather that each of their boys—there are three of us, one older than me, one younger—made his own choices. Not only that: both children of overbearing parents, they made a conscious decision to keep us at arm's length as we grew up, always within reach but only if we made the first move.