Burning Down the House Page 6

  Then the woman I was supposed to be keeping calm tried to get out of the rescue. When she pulled the handle open and started to push on the door, I reached across and grabbed her by the wrist, encircling her small arm as gently as I could, the tips of my thumb and index finger barely touching.

  That was all it took. I didn’t have to pull or really even hold her arm, just gently wrap my fingers around it, and she stopped moving as suddenly as if I had bound her in place, like a magic lasso. Like all she needed was the tiniest reason to stop, because while she felt drawn to the noise outside, really she didn’t want to see anything at all. As we sat there, frozen like that, I watched the emergency lights of first the ambulance, and then the police, and finally the wrecker, dance down the hill behind us in the big wing mirrors of the rescue, and neither of us spoke again.

  Her friend Carla, it turned out, had back injuries low down, and savagely torn muscles, the kind of constant pain that can wind up changing your life so that you can’t even remember what it was like when you used to wake up without hurting. Once they had her free, she screamed more when they put her on the backboard and then into the mesh Stokes basket, and even though they carried her up as evenly and steadily as they could, the firefighters kept slipping left and right in the mud, and she screamed with every small jolt all the way up the bank to the side of the road.

  I let go of Carla’s friend so that the police could talk to her in the back of their own car. They had come up to the window and knocked, and after I let her go I rode back to Wolfville on the same long bench seat where the chief had placed me, hemmed in on both sides by tired, dirty firefighters who smelled like wet brass and clamshells. Big firefighters who actually did something, who didn’t get sent just to sit in the rescue.

  Even though we hosed the gear down as soon as we got back to the station, the fine red and black silt of the mud had worked its way into the fabric of the other firefighters’ bunker pants, and they had that shadow—a carry-over of past circumstances, a little black cloud, a badge, a deep-seated messaging smudge—until we spent a Monday night training with firefighting foam, both the fluffy detergent foam and the heavier protein foam that smelled for all the world like hotdogs. After that, all our gear was clean for a while, as if our histories had been magically overwritten.

  By then I knew I was learning a secret alphabet, a different kind of code, a type of shorthand that passed for identification between firefighters, so you’d designate things as “the woman in the reservoir,” “the burning pig” or “the asphalt-truck crash.” It was a remarkably private language, something inside the firefighting fraternity and, most times, inside the particular department itself.

  The geography of firefighting is built on experience, and it’s built by every call. Windsor, I’d learn, was the town where the fire department had been called out to a propane explosion and found a house where all the sills were broken off, and two pies that had been cooling on a kitchen table had glued themselves to the ceiling, driven straight upwards by the force of the explosion. You tend to lay things out in your own distinct memory map; it’s a pattern of dots where things have happened, sometimes insignificant things— like the house I’ve always called the bacon-fire house because, every time the family cooked bacon, their smoke alarm went off and we would get sent to check it out. I’ve built my own mental pocket guide to two very different communities, including indelible marks that indicate where things went wrong—or, worse, the inevitables I tried to change and couldn’t. It’s all mine, my private complication— no two firefighters have been on the exact same pattern of calls, have been in the same places or have the same memories.

  Bit by bit, you write your own shorthand.

  The man who came from the propane company to teach us about how stable the gas could actually be had a trick at the end of the lecture, where he’d flick a lit cigarette, end over end—everyone smoked in the fire hall then—into a glass he’d carefully filled to the top with propane. Falling into the glass, the cigarette was supposed to go out, proving that propane will only ignite when it’s perfectly mixed with air—and the trick worked, every time.

  Until there, in front of the fire department blackboard, when we were treated to a slapping great sooty explosion, a fireball that reached to the ceiling tiles and a drinking glass that blew apart in bits.

  “That’s never happened before,” the propane safety officer declared, shaken.

  “It’ll never happen again,” the chief said, “because that’s the last time you’ll do it here.”

  The rest of the department climbed up off the floor and stood up the grey-enamelled metal folding chairs that had toppled over as we had all thrown ourselves down.

  SIX

  Going to an autumn fire in White Rock, and the pumper was racing along the narrow Nova Scotian back roads. I watched the high grass whip by on the shoulder without knowing what was in front of the truck, without ever knowing what was coming. Hanging on tight, hearing the air brakes muscle on, feeling the truck tilt down in the front end and my shoulder press into the back of the truck, the hose nozzles dangling down and banging hard against the metal plate.

  The house in White Rock was burning fast; I could tell that from the pillar of dirty yellow-black smoke I could see when the truck was at the crossroads a mile or so away. A big thumb-smudge of smoke, the kind of smoke that made one of my hands check the front of my fire coat, that made me mentally walk through the steps of putting on breathing apparatus and pulling hose. In my head, my left arm was already through the loops that hung from the attack line and my body was bending away at an angle with that first tug. I was pulling those loops in my imagination long before the truck stopped, spilling the flat yellow coils across the grass, waiting for the pump operator to pull the lever and fill the line with water, snapping the flat hose round and popping the sharp kinks into smooth curves.

  The house was an older two-storey, white with a black-shingled roof that came down over the sides of the second floor, a television antenna half broken away from the chimney leaning awkwardly. A fan trellis on the side of the house with a tangle of climbing clematis, but only a few late, deep purple flowers. A clothesline, hung limp with laundry, ran out diagonally from the back corner of the house towards the fence. There was furniture out on the lawn, the front door wide, windows broken and smoke pouring out upstairs. In the driveway was a red car with both doors open on the passenger side, photo albums piled on the seats in the front and back.

  The pieces I picked up in my head and actually remembered later were scattered and arbitrary, accidental snapshots that wound up fixed in place and then defined everything later, after the hose had been loaded again and the trucks had driven away.

  It is a disturbing concept. High on the pointed thrill of adrenalin, I would gather up images fast and at random, as if I’d won one of those old-fashioned radio contests where you get an empty shopping cart in a department store and you’re allowed to keep whatever you can grab and stuff into the cart in the three minutes you’re permitted to run loose down the aisles. Afterwards, the winners must look down at their carts in sheer amazement, wondering just how it is they wound up with thirty cans of beef stew and not a single steak. The thing is, after you’ve collected a collage of random images of a place, maybe, just maybe, you never have another call that takes you past that property again, so that it lives on forever in your head as a crazy quilt of dislocated pieces sewn onto the same blanket.

  Inside, the house was like many serious fires. Downstairs, the walls had a reverse tide line of smoke stains, soot-black near the ceiling and getting lighter as the smoke had crept down the walls, although the air was almost clear by then—windows broken out upstairs were wicking the smoke away up the stairwell, the heat creating its own powerful updraft. The rooms had a kind of toppled, windswept disorder; things knocked crooked or tipped over, the couch at an awkward angle with its legs bunching the carpet, and light-shadowed spaces on the wall where pictures had briefly blocked some of th
e smoke before falling from the heat.

  Things take on their own lives in the heat of a fire. It’s easy to imagine that all the pictures would do the same thing, but often there are three or four whose frames curl like animals twisting to escape the heat, and they pop themselves away from the wall and break on the floor. If you’re crawling towards them in the smoke when they fall, you stop and call out, wondering if there’s someone out there in front of you, knocking things over. You crawl faster forwards.

  There were shelves where the top row of books had burned but, lower down, others sat untouched. Something plastic on the top shelf of one bookcase had started to turn to soup, and then reconstituted itself as a sooty and black-specked blob, its original definition gone.

  The stairs had a red-patterned runner up the centre. The edges of the steps were white, and I could see the yellow of the hose clearly, feel each heavy, wood-denting thump as the brass coupling between hose lengths struck the wood through the runner. It was hotter upstairs, oven-hot and steam-wet. So quickly in a fire you feel the sweat gathering into a thick runnel and streaming down the hollow of your spine, soaking the back of your shirt and sticking the cloth to your skin.

  At first the heat is gentle and body-warming, but with each upward step it becomes closer to a claustrophobic baking, a stultifying, strength-sapping heat that makes every step difficult, especially with fire gear and air tanks. On top of that, there’s the awkward struggle to turn the single-minded water-filled hose in directions it never wants to go, pulling it around corners while its taut curves fill every space from edge to edge like a huge overfed snake. The couplings catch on newel posts and door frames and always take an extra, draining tug to move.

  By then the fire was mostly in the back two upstairs bedrooms. There were already other firefighters from different departments working downstairs, crews from Aylesford and New Minas. Out front, the big, slow water tankers from Kentville and PortWilliams were pulling up, old air-driven sirens and big dome lights. The tanker, slow and steady, is always the last thing you dress up.

  Dave Hennessey and I were paired up with the hose, and we moved along the hall and knocked down the fire in the back, sweeping water across the burning, charcoaled two-by-fours where the wallboard had burned away. The paper burned off both sides of the Gyproc, and the white core fell away in dirty white mounds, but the nails stayed in place, marching in stub-headed lines up the burning two-by-fours.

  As the fire got heavier, or at least as we got closer to it, the combination of steam and smoke filled in down to the floor. We were moving around by touch, wrapped tight in the dark.

  Afterwards, the fire out and the smoke lifting to a thin haze, we moved slowly, overhauling the hot spots and salvaging whatever possessions we could. I looked out through the bubble of my mask with a kind of absent detachment, set apart somehow, as if I thought the fire and the damage couldn’t affect me. In a fire, no part of your body, not even your eyes, is supposed to be in direct contact with anything: your face is inside the mask, a fireproof hood covers your head and ears under your helmet, your fire jacket and bunker pants cover you from your neck to your heavy rubber boots. And the dislocation goes further. It’s not your house, so the rooms are strange, and often they seem completely foreign once the smoke has lifted.

  Walking back down the upstairs hall in that house in White Rock, after almost all the smoke was gone, I became entranced by the intricate pattern of the carpet; it seemed incredibly involved, a bright pattern of cream and brown. Then the yellow dome of a firefighter’s helmet passed right through the pattern, and I realized that I was looking down through a hole in the floor, that the ceiling of the kitchen had burned away entirely, taking some of the hall carpet with it. What had been a pattern resolved itself into the kitchen floor and part of the cabinets. The problem is that appearance can be every bit as real as, well, reality.

  Except for the distraction of that pattern, the fact that I had stopped for a moment to try to make sense of it, I would have stepped through and fallen eight or ten feet straight down. Below me, a firefighter from another department turned, looked up at me through the mask of his breathing gear and waved, his arm swinging slowly back and forth like a semaphore signal.

  Things were never what they seemed. You couldn’t trust either your eyes or your feelings to tell you the truth.

  We were last in and first out in White Rock, and when the fire-ground commander was done with us, Dave Hennessey and I rolled up the used hose in coils known as doughnut rolls and stacked them on the tailgate of the pumper.

  As we drove away, both of us on the back of the pumper standing on the rolls of wet hose to keep them from bouncing off, I looked back at the house—a house I’ve never seen since—and was left with the same sort of impression of it that you get when you see a dresser with half its drawers pulled open and clothes hanging out, the feeling that I had glimpsed a kind of manic disorder which I was not meant to see, where so much is revealed that it carries an inevitable embarrassment. There were wet curtains hanging out through the broken windows on the second floor, limp and sooty and ragged, and dark triangles above the windows where the smoke had boiled out and the flames had nibbled away at the eaves. It was like seeing a lover with her hair all wild in the morning—except she’s not your lover at all, so it was more like trespassing. Like walking through a friend’s house and running into his partner coming out of the bathroom with her robe open.

  More like being a peeping Tom, eyes wide and staring, than anything else.

  The chief got us all out for a training night at an old people’s home on Main Street, one we’d been to before for fire calls because a resident we knew as the Major liked to pull the fire alarm and then masturbate to all the flashing lights outside.

  But this time the chief wanted us to evacuate as many people as the administrators would let us move, to see how much time it would take us to clear the building, and Chief Wood was being a real prick about it. Most of the time we rescued other firefighters, and that was hard enough, but this time it was actual residents, and one was a huge, laughing woman trussed into a wire Stokes basket. She was laughing so hard that her entire body shook, and she kept telling us, “I haven’t had this much attention from men in years.”

  We were lugging her down the outside wooden fire escape, six or seven of us trying to hang on to the edges of the basket, when the firefighter at the bottom broke right through the stair tread and we all started to fall, bright yellow dominoes toppling forward until we could find something to grip and get our balance back.

  The lady’s basket was sliding down along the fire escape railings, and if anything she was laughing harder than ever. We caught the basket before it hit the ground, but I remember thinking that if I were trussed up like that and suddenly found myself falling, I don’t think I’d be laughing.

  SEVEN

  When I joined the fire department in Wolfville, I was careful not to mention that I had never seen a dead person before—no family member, waxy hands folded across their stomach in their coffin, no ancient grandfather with a seriously made-up face and perfectly positioned hair, not even a closed-casket, distant dead cousin found gripping the stock of a shotgun whose death would never be talked about above a serious and conspiratorial whisper. Once inside the department, I also carefully avoided saying that I had been remarkably shaken by the first dead person I did see, even though she was just about the most relaxed dead person you could imagine. She was a little old lady with pure white hair, and she died of a heart attack while driving home from the hairdresser’s.

  It was just a normal Wednesday for her—I found out later that she had been making the same drive every other week for almost ten years. I can still imagine her driving slowly and carefully into Wolfville and searching out an easy parking space behind the Main Street grocery store before walking to the salon.

  Coming home that last time, she had driven along the spine of the Gaspereau River to where the road came to an end at an intersection s
haped like a T. From there, her car had driven through a stop sign, up a short driveway and into a two-and-a-half-storey chimney on the side of a grey-shingled farmhouse, bringing a large part of that chimney down in a pile of bricks on the hood of her car. She also went partway through the foundation, knocking over the house’s basement oil tank. Even so, the house fared better than either she or her car did.

  The fire truck I was on felt expressly, formally slow—the siren wailing as usual, but it was a wet, heavy, humid summer day, the kind of day when it seems as if even vehicles have a hard time pushing their way through the moisture-packed air. I was sweating in my gear already. I had a short-sleeved shirt on underneath, and the seams that always chafed—the long seams inside the fire coat and under my arms—were already working their evil passage on my skin. Inside the heavy fire boots, the heat made my feet feel like they were glued to the diamond plate of the tailgate.

  The road to Gaspereau from Wolfville winds up out of one valley and down into another. As you climb the hill, the houses thin out, then there’s the long winding twist down to the Gaspereau— two descending, sweeping curves, slalom-like, the road hemmed in on both sides by dairy pasture. Even with the siren, the big black and white cows stayed close to the fence, looking on with bovine disdain. The air horn always shifted them, made them lurch awkwardly and heavily away, but the siren left them on the fence, chewing. Their languorous gaze added to the feeling that the truck was going far too slowly.

  The whole sky opened up over me, and the space to the sides and behind was a huge panorama without the limits of windshield and side windows. The breadth of the view made me feel smaller, unimportant, even with all the lights and noise. Cars pulled over for the truck to pass, and on the back the only way I knew we were passing stopped cars was the sudden sideways pull of the truck biting out over the yellow line—and after, there was the small, guilty pleasure of staring back through my helmet visor at the cars behind us, squaring up my shoulders, trying to look confident and full of purpose.