Burning Down the House (9 page)

We were still a minute or so away from the intersection when the driver flicked the siren off, so I could hear the gravel on the shoul- der crunching under the tires as we pulled over on the left side of the road, the big square brute nose of the pumper facing oncoming traffic. Then the RCMP cruiser arrived, moving fast enough that you could hear the tires tear sideways against the pavement as the back end of the Crown Victoria slid, cornering at the intersection.

I jumped off the truck as it was stopping, stepping down during that last slowing instant where one foot touches the ground and the other is still on the truck, when the forward motion stretches your stride comically so that you feel the extra distance in your groin. Pulling latex gloves out of my pockets and pulling them awkwardly onto my already sweaty hands, just like I was supposed to.

Car accidents feel like fixed and finished tableaux. Everything has happened long before you get there, all the noise and banging and tearing of sheet metal, the breaking glass and unworldly chest-deep slamming thump of it—and the people, if they are conscious, are usually still in that deep shock that leaves them essentially mute. If they can talk to you at all, it's in a kind of breathy undertone, the sort of voice you expect in church when someone's talking to an obstreperous child. Sometimes there's screaming, but that's unusual at first; at first there might be moaning, but most often there's just painful silence. The screaming will come later—it takes more than a few minutes for the pain to work its way in through the wall of shock, so you get a period of something close to grace. But not for long.

I remember running to the side of the car, seeing the woman's profile through the open side window, and I remember shouting for the trauma kit. Everyone else was moving much more slowly, as if, once again, they knew something I didn't. Looking back over my shoulder, I watched the driver get out of the cab, open the first equipment compartment and kick the aluminum chocks into place on both sides of the big back wheels. Those chocks make a noise I can always find in my head, a hollow metal chatter, a sound that's also tied to the scrape of them being pulled out from under the tires just before we left a scene. It was always the final sound, the one that meant the end.

I didn't see anyone rushing from the rescue with the trauma kit. The back doors were yawning open, but that was all. What I did see was Big Al MacDonald, all of a sudden standing next to me as if he had simply appeared out of thin air. He was a square man with a perpetually sunburned and scarred face, always serious, as if firefighting was a business that brooked nothing short of total gravity. The kind of firefighter I wanted to be, the kind of firefighter who didn't ask the chief's permission before buying his own expensive, specialized forced-entry tools, the kind of firefighter who knew that someone of his stature didn't have to ask to bend any rules— and still played almost everything exactly by the book.

I was reaching for the door handle on the car, wondering why it was that I was the only person who felt any sense of urgency at all, when he put his hand on my shoulder. “The engine block's in her lap,” he said, as if he were explaining something to a particularly stubborn child.

And it was. Rusty, huge and completely shifted off its engine mounts, forced right through the firewall and into the passenger compartment, where it just wasn't supposed to be. Sometimes things are so incongruous that you can look at them over and over again and never really see them. Perhaps it's because your head can't make sense of them; they're so unlike the regular puzzle pieces that you can't find any rational order.

The engine was right up level with the seatback, crushing the driver's seat and shrugging the woman's legs apart. Seeing that, I could imagine the internal injuries. Two broken legs, up high where the immediate concerns include torn femoral arteries and fast, uncontrollable bleeding in the long leg muscles. A crushed pelvis for sure, and all of the gut injuries that come with having something that heavy thrown onto you. And despite its weight, the impression the engine gave was of having just been flicked onto her by an absentminded and huge finger.

They were not survivable injuries, not for a fit young woman let alone a frail old lady. When the medical examiner and the police finally filed their reports, the doctor's decision was that she had died about half a kilometre before her car stopped—that she had suffered a heart attack and basically continued in a straight line until the road she was driving on ended and she piled into the house.

Climbing down from the truck, I hadn't even guessed she might be dead, hadn't even imagined it.

The rescue truck, smaller and more nimble than the pumper, had arrived first, and I realized then that the other firefighters must have known, that the crew in the rescue had radioed to say there was no hurry, and that's why the driver of my truck had cut the siren even before we got to the scene. Someone, maybe Al, maybe someone else, would have reached in through the open window and put two latex-clad fingers on her neck just below the ear—carotid pulse, the easiest one to find—and realized that this was an equation we had no chance of successfully solving.

I was all geared up for the mythology, the idea that I was supposed to fight death, that the victims were grimly fighting as well, even if they were unconscious, even comatose. The mechanics of rescue don't include the idea that sometimes you lose before you even start fighting. Losing, fighting, struggling for air—they're all concepts I would hear about again and again and again, but they are concepts that made no sense at all when it was just me and a little old lady who was sitting so very still, with a serious expression of near resignation on her absolutely motionless face.

They put me on a hose line beside the car then, because liquid of some sort was spilling onto the hot engine block—oil or radiator fluid or something else—and thin grey smoke, so thin that I'd occasionally wonder if I was seeing things, was threading out from under the crumpled hood and into the car. The engine was making metallic pinging sounds that reminded me of a car cooling during a bathroom break on a long highway trip—cooling metal, infinitesimally changing in size as it slowly equalized with the heat of the day.

Down in the basement of the house, other firefighters were trying to stem the flow of heating oil that was coming out of the tipped-over fuel tank. I could hear them swearing and banging into things, the sound trickling out through the hole the car had made, and occasionally there was the big hollow-drum sound of something striking the side of the tank. I could see them on and off, yellow helmets moving past the opening next to the base of the chimney.

I noticed a big stand of shrub roses, now past their prime and weeping magenta pink petals, and I wished—over and over again— that I had something else to do. Standing there, I felt as though they'd left me alone with her, even though firefighters on their own errands swept by me again and again. The only thing between me and the woman was the windshield. One step to the side and I would have been able to reach in and touch her.

Her face was completely unmarked, eyes closed, mouth a narrow line. She didn't really look like she was sleeping—but she certainly didn't look dead. She looked more as if she had been told by someone in charge to keep her eyes closed, and she was doing that, even though she couldn't understand why and following instructions was something she didn't really like to do. Her hair was perfect, looked as fine and even as embroidery floss, soft and shining in the shafts of sunlight that winkled down through the elm leaves.

Her face did not change while I stood there, not so much as a tremor or a sag or a muscle twitching, as we waited endlessly for a medical examiner to arrive. I spent all that time finding it hard to believe that everything was as final and formal as it eventually turned out to be.

The medical examiner had a moustache and long, thin arms and legs. He was a general practitioner from New Minas when he wasn't declaring people dead as the official medical representative for the province. He drove up in a car that looked too small for his long, angular body, so that he didn't so much get out of the car as unfold himself from behind the wheel like a hatching insect. Searching anywhere for a break from the oppressive, constant weight of look- ing at her, I had watched the car come up the road along the river and stop at the stop sign, had watched the turn signal and the car pulling up behind the rescue, without knowing who it was.

He looked in at her for just a moment, barely touching her neck in a motion as simple and straightforward as signing his name on the bottom of a form, and then told the captain that it was official and that we should start the work of getting her out of the car while marking her up as little as possible—“a favour to the family.”

It's funny how the sheer mechanics of the equation change everything: since there was no rush, we had all the time in the world to figure out where to attach the heavy chains and how many pulls of the come-along winch's handle it would take to lift the engine high enough to shimmy her out from underneath it. Firefighters who would normally just get down to work instead stopped and talked and puzzled about the best way to do the job—whether we needed to cut the roof, whether we'd actually have to find a way to pull the engine fully back.

Little things make all the difference. Even once we had the engine lifted clear of her, I couldn't see how we could possibly get her out of the car without grabbing her shoulders and wrenching her out with brute force. I thought we'd soon be cutting the car apart, using the heavy tools to pry our way in. Instead, one of the other firefighters reached down next to the woman's leg, pulled the lever on the side of the seat and flopped the seat backwards as far as it would go. She flopped with it, loose-limbed and uncaring, and she came out the back door in a straight line onto the backboard, as easy and even as a cookie sheet coming out of the oven.

Standing next to her before the ambulance attendants put the blanket over her legs, I found it almost impossible to resist reaching out and tugging her dress down over her stocking-clad knees. As I looked around, I saw someone in the house looking down at us from a second-storey window. Really, I only saw the shape of the person's face as they pulled back out of sight, followed by the slight sideways motion of the curtain.

We passed the tow truck coming the other way from Wolfville, driving slow, amber flashing lights turning on top of the cab. Heading back, I wondered who was making the phone calls. For the first time, but definitely not the last, I thought about what a cheat it was that we got to be there and then slink away before anyone had to knock on a door and tell a family that the inevitable had visited earlier than expected.

They couldn't get Aiden Denine out of the bathtub. Two huge firefighters, big men in full gear, breathing tanks and gloves and coats, and Aiden was in the smokehouse, pretending to be a victim. Even though he was only slight, maybe 140 pounds soaking wet, he had a way of making his entire body go limp so that you just couldn't get a grip on him.

I was the training officer that night, watching the two bulky men in the narrow bathroom from the hallway, and every time they grabbed onto him Aiden kind of slithered away. The firefighters were laughing so hard they fell to their knees. One bashed the end of his air cylinder off the bathroom tiles and broken tiles rained down on Aiden, but he still wouldn't move. With the flashlight, you could see he was shaking with laughter too.

After we had trained in that house, an abandoned building behind the fire hall, for a couple of years, all of the tiles were gone and the bathroom sink was broken clean off the wall. We had furniture in there too, but it didn't last very long. The legs broke off the couch, and the doors came off the cupboards, and we were always crashing though things with hard tanks and hard helmets.

When the floor finally started to cave in, the town tore the building down. But I still know every room by touch.

EIGHT

There's a switch in my head that has a way of putting everything into play; not a switch like a light switch but like a railway switch. One moment I'm going in what looks like an obvious direction, the scenery unfolding the way I expect—and the next, with a perceptible jarring thunk, I'm on another, more personal route. Maybe I'm doing my best to stop someone from bleeding to death and then, with something as simple as a shift of the light or a familiar shape, it suddenly seems like my own life, or the life of one of my kids or my friends.

I remember a burned-out building with a tricycle on the front porch, the exact same model my oldest son had at home. Familiar shoes, cars, even dishes—they can bring the horror much too close to home, reinforcing the sense that every moment could be the one where disaster pokes its nose in and intervenes permanently between me and any sort of happiness. Something horrible could happen to me just by bare-naked chance, because it so obviously has happened just like that to someone else—and it's always out there, on the edge of happening, as regularly as the weather will change and bring rain.

Sometimes still, that sense of apprehension, of impending dread, comes over me in a rush. I can be fishing on a mirror-flat small pond, dragging a small trout fly, a grey Adams, across the water like a broken-winged insect stranded on the glass of the surface, surrounded by Newfoundland bog. The air can be full of the cold-metal smell of early morning in summer, with the bog orchids out all around me, pink and delicate yellow, the plastic-looking flowers of the pitcher plants at rigid attention, and the fish can be rising and striking with the fast eagerness that means the flyline will wear a friction burn in my right index finger long before noon. The kind of day that calls out for building a small campfire around ten in the morning, a frying pan with trout and butter and a kettle of strong, sweet boiled tea. And then, I can become convinced for no logical reason that just around the corner I might find someone dead, hours past needing help.