Burning Down the House Page 2

  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.

  I’m not sure they would have signed the forms if they’d known what the next few years would bring. They might have made a different decision, and I would have missed at least one year on the trucks. And how eager I was to get on those trucks!

  Three blocks from the house where I grew up—one block up and two blocks over—was the Halifax Fire Department station at Robie Street and University Avenue. It was a quiet station—in the city but in a residential neighbourhood with two universities, not the kind of busy station where the trucks roll ten or more times a day. It was the sort of station that gets called out to false alarms pulled in the residences, and the occasional kitchen fire. It was staffed mostly with older firefighters, careerists, well past the flush of wanting to be at every single serious call. The station is still standing, an old structure built in 1903, sandy grey stone on the outside layered with years of climbing sucker-footed ivy. It’s
so old that the doors are barely wide enough for the new equipment, the bay barely long enough for the ladder truck.

  Trucks have gotten bigger and heavier and, paradoxically, easier to drive. Drivers on big aerial ladder trucks now often drive from low down, out in front of the wheels, and a huge truck can corner much the same way a compact car does. But that’s not the way it’s always been. When I was growing up, the University Avenue station had a tiller ladder truck—a long aerial ladder with an open cab for the driver and the captain and a small seat high up on the back, where another firefighter sat with a steering wheel that turned the rear end of the truck. For many of its calls, the big truck had to come out of the bay and immediately turn right, down a narrow one-way street lined with cars parked at meters all along one side. Watching the truck turn, especially from the pine-lined island in the middle of University Avenue, was an awe-inspiring sight. The firefighters always looked far more blasé about the fire calls than I felt as a bystander.

  Even if it didn’t look as though I’d ever fight fires, I could still run to the dining room at the front of my old Halifax house at the first sound of the sirens coming up South Street, while my mother yelled “Fire trucks!” from the kitchen. At the time, firefighting seemed like an unattainable career. I started wearing glasses in grade six, and a bunch of boyhood dreams were closed off right then. I wasn’t going to be a jet pilot, and I wouldn’t be an astronaut either. I was growing to look like my mother: too short for the police and, like my grandfather, too wiry in the upper body to fit the fire department’s entrance criteria.

  Even the chief in my first department would occasionally repeat the old joke about the perfect firefighter: “Strong back, weak mind.” The classic firefighter was supposed to go where he was told and throw all his strength into whatever task had to be done. But while this may have been true once, there’s now so much more to keep track of: chemical fires and emergency placarding on trucks, high-angle rescue and medical calls. Every year it’s more complex, with warnings about car plastics and chemicals in furniture, and concerns about whether exposure to regular smoke can cause heart attacks and urinary and bowel cancers later in life.

  Fortunately for me, volunteer departments have different entrance standards, and now I had my chance. After the permission slip was signed and I was back in Wolfville, I was given boots and bunker gear, even if the boots had to be special-ordered because, at size 8 1/2, my feet were smaller than any of the pairs they had on hand in the storeroom.

  Starting out in Wolfville, I had my mitts, a two-dollar throwaway flashlight—the first one I bought was white, but there would be many more—an aluminum hose tool for tightening connections, and eight feet of lightweight yellow nylon rope, coiled tightly and tied around itself. And helmet number nine—that was the number I signed out on everything. The helmet was light yellow, with a Plexiglas visor on the front to protect my eyes and reflective numbers on the back so that the safety officer would know who I was even walking away from him in the dark.

  I was in locker number nine, an open-front wooden locker in a row of real firefighters, all the other gear on either side of me, all of it belonging to the kind of guys who ran into burning houses while their owners were running out: Big Al MacDonald, with a craggy, pockmarked face and steel-rimmed glasses, a guy who stood with his feet wide apart as if good balance was a necessity. Drew Peck, the training officer, who could turn his steady grey eyes on you while you were working, squint slightly as if looking in under your skin, and take apart every move you made. Bob Cook, always smiling, short and stocky and able to drive every single truck in the station, and he would stay smiling while the siren wailed and he ripped the big pumper through the night. He could fix small engines with his fingertips like a magician making quarters appear, and he knew what was wrong with the chop saw from the sound it made when he pulled the cord. Scottie MacDougall, shorter than me but broad— an oil rig worker, three weeks on, three off, and a weightlifter too, and in his bunker gear he looked as solid as a wall.

  They all looked bigger than real life to me, every one of them, all huge and serious and professional, incapable of either fear or doubt. Guys who knew what to do, always. The chief, Gerald Wood, small and wizened and hard as nails. Captain Tim MacLeod, a no-nonsense prison guard who once used a piece of broken broomstick to show another firefighter how quickly a nightstick could take a violent prisoner down. MacLeod spent every quiet minute at the fire station joking and kidding around, but on the fireground his face would fall like a curtain had swept over it, all business and calculation and concern.

  I felt like a kid among men, the coffee machine always running, the kitchen up in the back of the fire hall thick with cigarette smoke. I washed hose and hoisted it into the hose tower, washed and waxed trucks, swept the equipment floor—did anything I was asked to do, desperately afraid they might change their minds, decide I was a bad choice and ask me to leave. Probationary firefighters had a few short months to make their mark, and then there was a secret ballot at the monthly meeting to see if you’d be allowed to stay. If you weren’t, you’d never know who voted against you or why—the equipment officer would just meet you with his clipboard, carefully checking off every single piece of gear as you handed it back in. The last thing on the list was always the building key. I was keen to avoid that fate, and also afraid that it was out of my hands, that every small mistake I made was being indexed, compiled and totted up against every single thing I did right. As the vote got closer, I began looking at each firefighter, trying to decide if he would vote against me, and why.

  I didn’t find out until after the meeting that they’d voted to let me in, along with two other rookies just as intent on doing every single thing they could to stay.

  In the very first weeks of training for what was a brand new department, a training officer from a visiting department was quizzing us on how to behave in heavy smoke—how to stay low and out of the heat and smoke, but not so low that you might run into other dangerous gases.

  “Anyone know why you don’t put your face next to the floor?” the trainer asked, turning around at the front of the room and looking at us.

  The room, a space in the Anglican parish hall that acted as everything from a polling station during elections to a spot for hosting wedding receptions, stayed awkwardly silent.

  “Doesn’t anyone have any idea at all?”

  I was one of the few people with any firefighting experience, and I’d answered too many questions from the trainer already. I was afraid that if I kept answering them, I’d start looking like a know-it-all. So I kept my mouth shut.

  Down in the back of the room, a voice I didn’t recognize yet spoke up quietly. “Splinters?” the voice asked.

  We laughed until there were tears coming down our faces.

  TWO

  Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau River lies between two long ridges, one called the South Mountain, the other, just scant miles across the valley, reasonably enough called the North Mountain. Neither are truly mountains, just long ridges with the wide, flat, fertile river valley between them.

  South Mountain was essentially the backyard for Wolfville, with houses that started to range apart at more rural distances than in town, farmers’ fields dotted with big black and white battleships of cattle, long, orderly apple orchards, and big squared-off patches of field corn that would be stripped of its cobs and left thin and standing through the winter. Then, the wind and the snow would hiss off the standing stalks with a dry, sibilant whisper.

  Wolfville was a college town, home to Acadia University, and even on the South Mountain, up behind the highway, there were some houses rented out to students. But by the time you crossed underneath the highway and headed down into the valley behind, most of the homes were single-family dwellings with wide driveways and small windows, built square with steep peaked roofs.

  North Mountain was much rougher, with single-wide mobile homes buried deep in grey sugar bush, big dogs on chains, and pickup trucks whose h
eadlights could be seen beetling along the narrow dirt roads at all hours of the night on mysterious and private errands. Fire calls to the North Mountain used to be among the most serious. Sometimes they were medical calls, where you would have to sit in the rescue truck and wait for the police to arrive before you would go in. Other times it was a big, hot fire, where the aluminum skin of a mobile home had already melted into round, otherworldly, bright silver pools on the ground by the time we got there.

  There were fires in houses where there was little property to save but where every scrap you could salvage was something the family would keep, stained with smoke or not. Sometimes we’d get called out to a fire where you couldn’t even save the small things— families with no money and no insurance, staring with dead eyes from the other side of the caution tape as if they had always known they’d end up with nothing.

  Once, we were called to a fully involved house, flames jetting yellow out of the upstairs windows when we got there, but with no one and nothing inside, only two single tire tracks in the thin, wet snow, turning onto the muddy road and away. It turned out the house was a bank foreclosure, abandoned, but we already knew something was strange as we searched the downstairs carefully but vainly in the pitch black while the flames roared upstairs. We didn’t run into even a single stick of furniture. By the time another firefighter and I started for the stairs, the smoke was heavy, the fire burning so hot that the railings had burned off the tops of the spindles on the stairs, and the chief pulled us out because the roof looked like it would cave in. Big, long blasts on the air horns of the pumpers, the pump operators standing on the running boards and pulling the horn chains for long, moaning blasts that echoed off the hills long after the horns fell silent—a universal signal for firefighters, the sound of those horns, a sound that means the building’s on the verge of collapse. So we beetled backwards out of the house as quickly as we could, so fast that the difference between the heat inside and the cold outdoors steamed the mask on our breathing gear. Even though I had successfully and safely navigated a burning house in the pitch black and heavy smoke, with my first steps out in the blinding light of the truck spotlights I fell down the porch steps and sprawled in the snow like an ungainly starfish tossed flat on the beach.