Authors: Rene Steinke
I got out of bed and changed into pants and a shirt. I grabbed THE FIRES / 163
a wool jacket. I thought a walk might be the thing to take my mind off them, no matter how long it took. I could sleep late the next morning, well into the afternoon if I wanted to. Down the hall I heard a guest turn on a light and cough, a toilet flushing. I took the stairs lightly and walked through the dark of the lobby, unlocked the front door, and then locked it again behind me.
The snow looked like sea-foam or soap, too airy to have a temperature. But the air was freezing, I’d forgotten a hat and gloves, and my jacket was too thin. I didn’t feel like creeping up and down the stairs again for my coat, so I gave up the idea of a walk and decided to take a drive. I walked over plowed snow piles to my car, in a cleared space near the curb. I got in, and after a few tries the engine started and the heater blew at my fingertips as the tires crunched over the salt scattering the pavement.
I drove down Lincoln toward the train tracks. It was dark, but a film of light lay over the snow. I passed the train platform and the gas station, the long white fields fenced with telephone poles.
That uneasy, testing feeling came toward me. I recognized it, dissolute and just beyond my grasp in that dark, edging down the road in front of me, glinting and dancing over the snow, and I had been afraid of it so long I didn’t chase it. I slowed down near Taft Way, a dirt road that wound past the Barr house to the edge of Lake Eliza. Someone had plowed the road, so I turned through the narrow gorge between snowdrifts, into the pine trees, and traced the shallow path swept by the headlights, pushing into the needly green dark. There was a static of false energy in my blood, but my eyes were dry and exhausted. My foot cramped on the gas pedal, frozen at a level to push the car at a reluctant speed.
The house popped out of the darkness, a wet gray of old wood and cinder blocks. The Barrs had moved out decades before, and no one had lived there since I could remember. I parked, turned off the engine, and blew on my hands. In the headlights, the front 164 / RENÉ STEINKE
porch sloped over the mouth of the door. Old boards crossed the windows, and the foundation teetered catty-corner like the after-math of an accident. Teenagers broke into the house on dares, and the police sometimes chased out vagrants, but most of the time it stood empty. I didn’t understand why someone in City Hall hadn’t torn it down or rebuilt it yet, why all these years it had just sat there, secret in the woods, as if no one could bear to consider it long enough to decide what to do with it.
I got out, went around to the trunk, and lifted the gasoline and flashlight out of the clutter. I sat on the fender with the tin between my knees, pointing the flashlight at a blue-flecked snow-bank hunched like a shoulder. Then I shone the light at the crooked front porch, pushed the beam down to the place where it slumped and then up to the roof, blinking it past a small round window. I traced the house’s outline, then swirled the light around, scribbling out the lines I’d traced.
These were thin and porous walls you could break through easily. My father had punched through the wall of our dining room like that. Two cracks rivered down and shakily met where the paint bulged, and when he’d come home, furious, screaming, I sidled into the doorway of the kitchen. His head rolled back, his hand fisted, and it went right through the wall. I remembered the astonished look on his face when he pulled his hand out from the plaster, scraped and bleeding, and he was quiet again as if he’d let go of his fury on the other side of that wall.
I pointed the flashlight at the warped grain of the house’s wood.
It had accumulated a history, punched walls and handprints, broken shutters, lost doorknobs, a foundation that rose on one side, sank on the other: all this time that a fire would collapse.
Jumping off the fender, I followed the path up to the front porch and warily went up the rickety steps. I turned the knob on THE FIRES / 165
the door and opened it a crack before it caught on the huge pad-lock. I walked around a hole where the porch was worn away and scooted along a lone plank until I got to the window. Through the X of two rotten boards, I pointed the flashlight inside the house to what once must have been the living room or dining room. All I could see was a lumpy floor. My cheek grazed a splintery edge of wood as I called inside, “Come out. It’s an emergency!” Beside me wind flicked through the bare trees.
I leaped off the other side of the porch into knee-deep snow.
The side of the house leaned in slightly, and there was a scrappy frilled curtain behind one of the boarded windows. Trudging through the snow, my feet and ankles numb, I squirted gasoline up against the white paint curling off gray walls, the tin burping in my fingers. I held the flashlight under my arm and saw the gasoline tearing down in rivulets as I went around to the back, grown over with vines and black with some kind of mold or moss.
I squirted the gasoline so high up on the wall it fell back down and stung my cheek, and I had to wipe it off on the rough sleeve of my jacket.
I went on squirting gasoline. This felt proprietary somehow, like my grandfather’s checking his roses each night for blackspot or red spider mites. My feet tangled in icy overgrown bushes near the last corner, where a stone jutted out that said BARR.
People would wonder what had happened here. In the morning the ground would be burned black, soot smoking in the snow—a startling blankness like the hungry nothing after a storm.
Only for a second did regret shake in my hand as I fished up the matches from my pocket. I tore one out, pulled it between the matchbook cover, and when it lit, I wanted to sing. I heard a cat meow inside. “Get out of there, kitty,” I screamed. “Here, kitty, come out!” I banged on the window with my fist, not hear-166 / RENÉ STEINKE
ing it anymore, but not seeing it creep out either. The wind sheared over the trees. I tossed the match at a string of gasoline and it zigzagged the wall.
Lifting my knees high up out of the snow, I ran to the edge of the woods and swiveled around to watch. It was the pale yellow of a winter sun, wobbling like a reflection.
I tried to ignore the thing that itched, tingled at my wrist, a twig or a leaf caught there. I hoped the cat had got out somehow; it wasn’t the point to burn anything that was alive, only what wouldn’t move. On the roof a wave of fire arched back and whipped into another; the flames twisted and preened, then coyly shrank back. I looked down, and in a blurry second, I thought I’d bled it, the flame ruffling up my sleeve. I fell on my arm into the snow and tried to put it out. Yellow flicked at my elbow, and then the heat turned to ice. I lay there, my hair wet, my cheek numb in the snow, the pain in my wrist exquisitely strummed with fine nerves, an intricate musical torment that felt familiar.
Beside me, the fire applauded, and I watched it from the snow, one cheek frozen, the other hot with firelight.
My father’s rage was so separate from him: that voice as if it had been piped into his throat, the one time he hit me so hard I fell back onto the prongs of the steaming radiator, the backs of my thighs burned over the scars. When he played the organ, I heard the rage, pushed low in the sharp harmonies, then radiant as the melody rose to its familiar refrain. Those hymns. Something in him was trying to break through them.
My heart beat faster as the fire billowed at the trees. I finally pulled my hand out of the snow and clambered up to my knees.
My pants and jacket were wet, and between my shoulder and hand an emptiness spread. Hot and cold scarves of air whirled against my face as the numbness in my wrist cut to pain. I packed THE FIRES / 167
snow against it and looked up again. The house’s frame wobbled uncertainly, then collapsed, and the flames fell into the snow.
Slamming the door of my car, I heard sirens. I started the ignition with the hand of my unburned wrist and the car rocked through the white, sliding over icy spots, snowflakes salting the windows. I swerved onto the highway in the opposite direction of the sirens and drove without hearing anything for a long time, my head cold and unoccupied.
T
he next day each time I touched water I thought I smelled smoke. I was coughing in the shower. My complexion paled.
I wore perfume and didn’t stand close to anyone so they wouldn’t smell it. The weepy blisters on my wrist turned crusty and brown.
At work Jo was gathering receipts when my sleeve fell back and she saw them. “Ella, what happened?” she said, grabbing my arm and turning the burn toward her.
“I fell against the iron,” I said, my heart like a caged mouse.
“It looks worse than it is.” I thought she’d never believe me.
“It looks painful,” she said. “Have you put anything on it?”
Later in the lobby two women sat waiting for an old relative to come down from upstairs.
“I can’t believe the Barr house is gone.”
“I heard it was a firebug,” said the one with thin strands of hair that clung to her face like paint.
“They call them pyromaniacs, Susan. They’re not cute.” I stood up and turned around, pretended to be checking the keys in their boxes.
On Thursday Jo and I went to the Big Wheel for breakfast. We were drinking coffee, and when Jo went to the bathroom I heard the men talking in the booth behind us. “I think there was some-168 / RENÉ STEINKE
one in that house. A woman. He had a lover in there.” The finely scrambled egss suddenly reminded me of the fuzz on baby chicks, and I put down my fork.
“That house was condemned. No one could live there.”
“No, but you could if you were desperate to meet someone.”
My coffee cup rattled in its saucer, and when Jo came back I was already at the register, the thin paper check wavering between my fingers as I stared down at the chewing gum and mints in the glass case.
I had to keep myself away from matches for a while, keep myself calm. Where it was easiest not to think about them was work, with Paul there to distract me. I made myself study his face, the wrinkles brooming from the corners of his eyes, the broad plush cheekbones, the faint parallel lines between his nostrils and his lips, the comma in his chin, and the sudsy stubble near his neck. His flesh began to look more substantial than anyone else’s.
“When I was a kid,” he told me one night—the word sounded ostentatious in his mouth—“I was growing unevenly or something like that, my eardrums before everything else. For about a year every sound I heard was magnified a thousand times. At night I could hear the bugs in the weeds outside, my parents breathing in the room across the hall from mine, my brother combing his hair in the bathroom. Even the flip of a card, the click of a checker on the board, was unbearably loud. I couldn’t sleep.
I was sure I was going to die soon, but I was too afraid to tell anyone about it.”
I held two fingers against my mouth, knowing that fear of not being able to trust anyone but yourself.
A
s I walked back from Marietta’s the cold air had a fluted sheen. I wore the plaid wool coat she’d given me for Christmas, my gloved hands deep in the pockets as I picked my way tentatively over the ragged ice left in the furrow of plowed snow. This time of year, even in boots, it was easy to slip and fall.
You could die that way if your head slammed back on the pavement, and they’d find you lying there on the sidewalk, arms and legs sprawled. Tonight there were lights on in most of the windows, a greenish tint to the snow.
I walked slowly, with cramped steps, curling my toes in the thick socks inside my boots. I’d almost blurted out what I knew to Marietta. I’d been a second away from saying, “Why didn’t you tell me she was dead?” but stopped myself just as she held up a red feather and studied it. No matter what I said to her, she’d never allow the truth to stand up and breathe long enough for her to feel regret. It terrified her. She had her birds, her feather collection. She wasn’t going to kill herself as my grandfather had.
I tracked through an untouched sheet of snow and tried to feel what lay beneath it with the soles of my boots. Was this the place with the path stones? It was always hard to remember what lay beneath snow with only a marker, a spigot, a mailbox, to direct 169
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you. It made you realize how much you knew intuitively and how much you didn’t. I was wrong. I saw the warped wood bench and remembered this was the rough baseball field, where the boys practiced. I turned onto Washington and heard a dog bark somewhere down the block. Inside my gloves and socks, my fingers and toes stung with cold.
I was walking toward Grace Church, where the colors in the stained glass vibrated in the gray stone. I realized I’d been wanting to go back but while the church was empty, and remembered the door was sometimes unlocked for choir practice.
I thought I’d just go in and warm up for a minute. I went up the steps and pressed my thumb down on the handle until it clicked open.
Closing the heavy door behind me, I stood in the dark hallway where Pastor Beck greeted people after services, took off my gloves and blew on my hands, listening for footsteps or voices.
Moving through the dark, I bumped the table where they served coffee on Sunday mornings, and something fell over. I opened the door with a cross-shaped window and walked slowly into the sanctuary, where two lights glowed near the altar.
The pews seemed to multiply and the ceiling expand with the smell of candle wax and old paper. The wooden cross over the altar looked worn and functional, as if it had been cut from someone’s dining-room table. The problem was that the church sometimes trained people to become only more still and solid, to use God as a fortress against the very breath of life which could change you, but I thought sometimes in hymns you could hear the desire to burn away to nothingness, to not cling to yourself so much. I edged into the third pew on the right and looked back at the balcony, where the organ pipes rippled familiarly out of the dark. I turned back around and opened a hymnal, staring at the black notes, tiny vines strung neatly on trellises.