Burning Down the House (25 page)

There was no one to find, and that should have been it. I should have been able simply to head home then—but the car was leaking gasoline into the ditch. I could see the slight sheen on the water, moving slowly downhill, so a tow truck had to be called, and someone had to wait, and the trucks had to be ready in case another call came in, because the snow was still battering fatly down, the road greasy now with the passing cars, morning traffic packing the slush into hard white ice.

So I stayed with my pickup, the flashing light twirling on the dash, until the tow truck got there. Then I directed traffic while the big steel cable played out and the Fiesta rolled back onto its wheels and came up, dented, out of the ditch. In my head I was trying to figure out just where one set of responsibilities ended and another began.

I realized then that, in my own way, I had crossed some sort of Rubicon, that I had made a choice I was unlikely ever to be able to undo, a choice, embarrassingly enough, about just where I wanted to be. That I'd rather be dealing with the external battles of fires and accidents than with the internal battles of everyday life. That I'd rather have things imposed on me than have them surround me, growing like guilt-filled vegetation.

It was a choice I was already making subtly anyway. Often I was the last one out of the fire station, ostensibly to make sure the doors were properly locked, but also because I liked to be there alone in the quiet, surrounded by the big trucks hunkered down and waiting.

If anyone knows this, I do—I know there are lots of things that can't ever really be undone, honest apologies or not.

Break someone's ribs doing CPR and you know you're running the risk of puncturing their liver with the jagged ends of bone working up and down. But you can't unbreak those ribs, and you can't stop either, so you work with what you've got, and tell yourself that they're old anyway, that their bones were probably frail and thinning.

Things get rationalized. Forgotten, if you're lucky.

But never undone.

If I see a crumpled duvet, especially an off-white one, cotton, I'm right back in that bedroom, doomed to make the wrong decision either way. Stay, and maybe someone dies. Go, and maybe something else dies instead.

You're supposed to be a professional firefighter, the one who never lets anyone—or anything—die. You don't get to just give up.

Afterwards, you're supposed to let it run off you, let it blow away like ash. The awful part was that, more and more, I didn't believe I was ever going to let any of it go, because the person who had to do the most forgetting was me, and I couldn't even seem to do that right.

Sitting on the edge of a bed on the second floor of a house above St. Philip's, I remember watching a man's face go pasty grey and then greasy wet with big balls of sweat. That's the only way to describe it— suddenly they were all over his face, the size of chocolate chips, just tumbling down from his hairline like he'd sprouted tear ducts all over his face and found something to cry about.

He'd been complaining of chest pains, and he was probably having a small heart attack. All the symptoms were there, including his urge to deny that it was even possible.

Outside, I could hear the other trucks arriving, and the guys coming up the stairs with the oxygen kit. I think he had figured out what was going on, and I was already trying to get him flat on his back before the shock hit and he passed out on me.

I remember thinking: If he's going to code, if his heart is going to stop, couldn't it just wait until it's someone else's responsibility?

Suddenly it was incredibly important that if he was going to die, that he didn't die right there in my hands.

TWENTY-FIVE

A summer night, six years in, and time was ticking down, only a month or so left for me in the department, the beginning of the end of firefighting for me.

We were down behind a big three-storey farmhouse on Round Pond Road in Portugal Cove, behind a house that was encircled by an ever-increasing ring of burning grass when we arrived. Captain Dave Lambert dropped the breathing gear and its loose straps in a pile on the blackened grass in front of me and said, “Just put it on.”

Aiden Denine was methodically walking the whole burning circle, shuffling his feet and stamping out the flickering grass, while we tried to figure out how much water we were going to need to try to put the house fire out. The building was burning the way buildings burn in the movies, fire shooting out through every window, and since all the windows had long since been broken out of the place, the updraft was sucking the smoke out as quickly as the flames made it.

Dave and I wound up together around the back of the building with a couple of other firefighters, and every few minutes the wind would bring the smoke down on us, a heavy, sooty blanket full of burning roofing tar and wood and everything else. We were standing among piles of rusted metal from old farming equipment and wire fencing, and the smoke was coming in waves, heavy and dark. Down below the grade, we were looking through a back basement door, the only opening in the building that fire wasn't coming out of, holding a charged inch-and-a-half hose line, not even sure yet where it would be best to put the water.

We had wrestled the hose around the back of the building and down the slope, but there was only so much water in the pumper, and the water pressure kept dropping off as the pump operator cut it back, waiting for the other truck to trundle back up with a full tank from the hydrant on the main road.

In through the basement door I could see that the whole back of the room was ablaze, and I could make out square shapes, the room packed tight with leftover items: a couple of fridges, mattresses and a blazing box spring. Dave and I yelled back and forth for a few minutes about whether we could really expect there to be anyone left inside. He didn't think so; I wasn't convinced he was right.

It was an abandoned building on the edge of a small pond at the end of a narrow road, not even electrical service to the place anymore, and the fire had gotten a healthy head start before we were called. Some places you're familiar with, because you drive by them every day or so, but this was different. Out at the end of a dead-end road, it was a big old solid place, an older farmbuilding with a square four-throat chimney almost exactly at the middle, the sort of place that sports finishing work—round-edge shingles, for example— that modern builders have given up on completely because they're just too much work. I could tell there wasn't anyone living there, but I knew that didn't mean there wasn't anyone inside.

I suggested to Dave there might be teenagers inside. The place looked as if it could be a drinking spot, and there was always the chance that someone had passed out or gotten caught up or lost in there. So we pulled our masks on and went in. Going through the door, I felt the patter of flaming droplets of burning tar from the roof falling onto my helmet and shoulders. Black and permanent, they would stay on my white helmet for as long as I had it.

As soon as we were inside, my neck felt like it was burning, right through my fire hood and the long flaps of helmet liner that hung down over my ears. It was hot enough in the basement that embers were popping off the beams like fat, hot chunks of popcorn, shooting across through my vision, black in front of the flames but glow- ing when they caught on my gloves and sleeves. The roar of the drafting flames was incredible, constant in my ears like an aircraft taxiing. It sucked air into the building around us as we went through the door, a great, constantly inhaling breath, rippling the fabric of my fire jacket, helping me forward—teasing me forward—with each step. The embers would sit on my arms for only a moment before the wind plucked them away again, surreal in their pecking appearance and disappearance.

We went straight into the basement, and the heat from both sides went from making me sweat to giving me steam burns in my armpits almost immediately. Turning back, I could only see part of the black doorway, because the flames were lapping out over it. We were only steps inside, but it felt like miles.

Dave put his mask next to the side of my head. “If there's anyone in here, it's too late anyway,” he yelled.

I could see his lips moving far more clearly than I could hear his words, and we turned to head back out. By then the building was starting to creak and groan, and the heat was a solid wall we had to force ourselves into.

Walking felt like swimming, as though we were forcing our bodies forward through air as thick as stew: the fire was pulling air all around us, the intense heat sapping our strength. We were barely back outside when we heard the crashing sounds of kitchen appliances coming through the floor into the basement we had just left. Over my shoulder, great towering sprays of sparks shot up through holes in the roof, brilliant for an instant against the sky.

The next morning, the arson squad found a distinctive pattern of burn marks on what little part of the outside wall was left. The constable scraped at the wall for a few moments, smelled the blade of his knife, then folded it and slipped it back into his pocket. “Gasoline,” he said. “Right about here.”

There was nothing left by then but three vertical storeys of brick chimney, straight up in the air like an index finger pointing at the sky. The police didn't ever come close to finding a suspect, and the fire only saved the owner from eventually having to tear the place down. Later, a hired backhoe knocked the lonely chimney over with its bucket.

For months afterwards I was violently angry about the whole thing. Flashes of it would come back to me all at once, about how stupid it had been for me even to be in there. Me, with a wife at home and two little boys, angry because I took a foolish chance, and an arsonist I didn't even know—would never know—had come precariously close to killing me with the plunging weight of a refrigerator crashing down from an upstairs kitchen.

I had conjured up the idea that there might be some missing teenagers down there in the basement so I would have some reason to go in there. That was a fact: I didn't go in there because I had to, but because I wanted to. Dave was right—there was no way anyone inside could have had the faintest chance of being alive. Even if, by some extremely remote chance, there had been someone alive in there, they would have been so badly burned that they wouldn't have wanted to be rescued anyway.

But I needed to take the chance that there might be someone there. Because I wanted a reason to go in. This is another kind of secret that I'm not really in a rush to share. Sometimes you do something wrong because you can't seem to find a way to stop yourself from doing it. I couldn't avoid it: there was a simple physical charge, a thrill, the rush of being in the house while the fire roared around me, embers spitting.

Even now, I can feel the claustrophobic roar of the flames all around, the way the heat would wallop into me, the unworldly rush of an otherwise explainable universe blowing apart in ripping flames of deep yellow and red.

Here's another little fact: if that falling fridge had hit me, or if the doorway had caved in, or if I had gotten my feet tragically caught in the torn-up basement floorboards, the fire service would have called me heroic. They would have been absolutely willing to complete the public fiction for me. They would have classed it as me having made “the ultimate sacrifice,” when the fact is I was only being stupid. The truth is, anyone in the fire service who looked at the situation would know it had been stupidity, but they would all call it courage anyway. And as hopeless as the effort would have been, they would even have come in after me.

That's the way it works.

Firefighters are human, and they make mistakes—they do the wrong things, turn the wrong way, put their hands in the wrong places. People end up more seriously injured than they might have been, and sometimes people even end up dead. But no one is in a hurry to have firefighters be anything but big and strong and fearless.

Firefighters don't make bad decisions; what they make, so the fiction goes, is brave ones. They are expected to keep doing it, time after time. Everyone else is supposed to keep up that pretence. And for the most part we do.

There's no one to blame. You're put in extremely high-stress situations, where lives depend on you making the right decisions; but more than that, they depend on someone making a decision,
any
decision. So a lot gets swept under the carpet, mistakes along with it.

I've never, ever been questioned about a single thing I did on the fireground. No one has ever come to ask why I chose to send people into a building, or why I chose not to. Why I chose to approach a building from one side but not from the other. Paramedics and police have come back to accident scenes to trace diagrams of the marks left by crashing cars; they've asked me where I found victims, whether I found liquor bottles or smelled alcohol. But no one has ever asked me where I put my hands before I started CPR, or whether I thought I was doing it right.

We close ranks because we know, if we ever start asking questions, those questions might come uncomfortably close to any one of us. There are tons of skeletons in anyone's closet, tons of things that might have turned out radically differently—and radically better, too.

The big three-storey farmhouse is gone now, but the concrete foundation is still there, and a regular breeze springs up from behind where the house used to be and runs down the hill towards a small pond. The pond was the kind of place we could have set up the portable pump to draw water, instead of trundling one of the two big trucks back and forth to the hydrant all night long, if only we'd known it was there.

There's a new fence made out of spruce longers across the hill on the side of the road where we ran our hoses, and a fresh thicket of small blueberry bushes is coming up on the edge of the hill, waxy flowers hanging downwards like bells or baggy underwear, the first sign that the forest is starting to win again.