Let the Fire Do the Work

Outside her house, there’s a tree on fire.

Her hand holding the blue coffee mug that says “Another Morning” doesn’t even shake as she looks out the window and sees the tabby flames consume the branch Chet fell from that summer he broke his arm.

That summer he turned eleven and got sweet on the girl two houses down who was either named Marie or Mary and begged her to let him go to sleep-away camp. She had never been eager to let him out of her sight, and after her divorce, her anxiety over his care only intensified. She would wait until he fell asleep and then stand stock still in the entryway to his bedroom watching him the way a pianist notes the time. If his breathing quickened, she would wake him and make him take a cold bath against his protestations. Her ex-husband would tell her to ease up, but a boy in his class died of a bee sting right before summer break. The world had so many things that could spark and so many places without water.

A fire cracks a branch and keeps going, because it’s going to climb up before it climbs down and then outward, and in that way, the fire reminds her that she’s seen it do this one other time when she was in soft, apricot-colored pajamas and not a ratty old robe that she can’t bear to replace, because she wore it throughout her pregnancy.

Chet was eleven when he fell from the tree that’s on fire in front of her. She was nine when she woke up in the middle of the night and smelled the smoke coming in through her bedroom window. In July and August, her mother would let her keep the window open even though years before a girl had been snatched from her room and never got found. The heat was so bad in July and August, that rules of safety and care were suspended just so everybody could get some sleep--and even then you’d wake up salted-picked in your own sweat.

She remembers smelling the smoke outside and thinking of that Memorial Day weekend two months before when her uncle pulled her father aside while holding the rusted spatula he’d flip burgers with and told him they were going to have nothing but trouble in their house. Her parents had only bought the house the week before Good Friday, and by Memorial Day, there’d been no trouble. Her uncle had a way of worrying that would bring perspiration to his neck. He’d pull a rag out of his back pocket and dab at the sweat in a way that seemed pointless.

“That neighborhood don’t want you there, Alvin,” her uncle told her father, while she tucked herself around a corner, pulling at the gingham her mother made her wear, “And you won’t last the summer. I can promise you that.”

But June went by, then July, and aside from a tossed egg at their front door, there was no incident that couldn’t be shrugged off over one of their Friday dinners. Kids play pranks. That’s what she told Chet when he came home crying one day spouting words off a razor that the kids on the bus had used on him. She used the same tone her father used while yolk rotted against the door in the summer heat.

“It’s just kids,” the words echoed through her mouth and time and landed paralyzed on her son, “Kids are mean.”

When she was nine, she never thought about the cruelty of children, because her mother home-schooled her. The only children she saw were her cousins, of which there were two. Gracie, who never spoke more than a few words a day, and who at the age of twenty-seven would go on a bike trip and never report back, and Jonah, who was very good at wrestling and football and started drinking too much until he quit and then took up preaching and never took it down. They were both kind to her, and so when she heard about the children who were ugly and unkind and tossed eggs and, right before the night of the fire, wrote a foreign word on the mailbox in what looked like soot, she could imagine what they looked like and how they sounded and what they would do next.

She imagined hands bigger than hers, but smaller feet. Straight, straw-colored hair and grey overalls and hair bows. Placid, plaque colors that would help them blend in and signal that they were young people devoid of emotion or care.

They were what flashed through her mind as she calmly put on the lily slippers her grandmother bought her for her birthday and made her way down the hall to the front door where her father was standing in front of the screen. She remembers the way her father was lit by oxidation. The fire must have taken him by surprise, because he never left his bedroom without a shirt, but there he was, his back exposed to her, looking fixedly at the flash of stormless lightning like it was something he could fix if he could just wait it out.

She remembers a tree in her front yard when there was no tree. She remembers her father stoic in the doorway when she could hear the crying from across the room. She believes the fire went out on its own, but she knows that her mother was in the kitchen placing a call to her uncle and the next day they’d be moved out.

This time there’s a tree and this time there was lightning and this time there’s no mystery to solve and nothing much worth remembering.

The firefighters are on the way. Chet is safe at a friend’s house for the weekend. He’s going fishing tomorrow, and he’ll have wonderful memories of that. He won’t even miss the tree or be upset when he sees the char.

Whether or not she’ll remember the way it all looks is something she can’t know in the moment, but the smoke argues its way past the olfactory into the memory, and try as she may, she can hear the way the wail caught in her father’s throat.

Smoke scratches you before you know it’s there.

It stands behind you and lets the fire do the work.