by Jay Varner
But the surrounding natural beauty almost compensated for the debris. Blue ridges of the mountains humped on the horizon and overlooked farm fields whose crops were divided as neatly as patches on a quilt — in the snowy winter, those ridges looked as though they were topped with whipped cream. Oak and English walnut trees shaded our lawn in the summertime. A pear, a cherry, and four apple trees flanked our neighbor’s hog pasture along the far end of the yard. These provided spots for the tree house I had begged my father to build.
“That’d be pretty neat, huh?” he said. “One of these days, I’ll build one for you.”
Three
My dad and I sat inside the stuffy cab of a restored 1954 Ford Oren pumper fire truck — the chrome polished, the cherry red chassis waxed. We parked outside McVeytown on a narrow road. Sitting on a slight rise, we looked down on the spectacle before us: the Lewistown Area High School marching band stood at the front of the half-mile-long parade procession, followed by antique cars, their bodies glinting under the sun, and John Deere tractors hitched to floats, one of which carried the Mifflin County Dairy Princess. The vehicles’ engines churned, clotting the afternoon with exhaust and noise.
In only its first year, Country Memories Day already seemed a success in McVeytown. Food vendors arrived at the fairgrounds at dawn and assembled stands to sell hot sausage sandwiches and funnel cakes. Mennonites set up tables around the town square and displayed homemade cookies, bread, and whoopee pies, a Pennsylvania Dutch specialty — two chocolate cakes with a creamy frosting between them. Townspeople opened their garage doors, ready to sell quilts, antiques, wicker baskets, and knickknacks. It went on like this for hours, capped in the afternoon by the pageantry of a parade through town.
“What time does the parade start?” I asked.
“Three,” my father said. He flicked his wrist and glanced at his Timex Ironman watch. “We still have a few minutes yet.”
He was tall and slender, dressed in a white, starched short-sleeved shirt with ironed creases. A black tie, perfectly knotted and pinched in the middle by a silver clip, hung from his neck. He wore black pants held up by a slim dress belt that matched his shoes, both a radiant midnight black, polished to a sheen that looked wet to the touch. Had it not been for the silver badge pinned over his right breast, my father might have been mistaken for one of those dapper Jehovah’s Witnesses who sometimes knocked on our door. He thought he looked spiffy, a term he always used to describe his dress uniform. And Country Memories Day was the perfect chance to show off in front of the entire town.
In the distance, the blue and white uniforms of the marching band lurched forward — I heard their faint horns and drums. The cars and tractors followed, huffing diesel fumes into the hot air. Finally, my father stomped on the clutch and shifted the truck into first gear.
“Ready to get this show on the road, kiddo?” he asked. He pressed the gas and we jerked forward.
We came dead last in the parade procession, the best part to a six-year-old. Each year, I had watched on television as Santa Claus waved to the crowds from the final float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Since my father and I came at the end, I thought that we were the most important part of this parade.
We rolled past the playground, where the Babe Ruth and Little League teams played, and turned left onto Vine Street. Spectators watched the parade go by — some sat on lawn chairs, others stood shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors. Nearly all of them waved at my father or shouted his name. He waved back and smiled like a candidate running for office.
“Hey Denton, who’s that in there with you?” someone asked.
“Our new recruit,” my father yelled out the window. “A little young, but he’ll grow into it.”
As we rolled through town, I craned my neck and peered over the dash. From the cab of the truck the world appeared to be far below us. We passed the old Rothrock High School, closed eleven years earlier, just after my father graduated. Wild webs of ivy now suffocated the dark brick walls. It looked haunted, like the kind of place forever stuck in the past. I wondered what my father had been like when he went there.
“Like riding in here?” my father asked.
“Yeah. It’s so big.”
“Well, if you think this is big you should ride in the tanker or the engine sometime,” he said. “Maybe next year we’ll do that. But to drive a rig like this someday, you’ll have to know how to shift.”
“Shift?” I asked.
“Some trucks need to be put into different gears in order to go faster or slower. You just put your foot on this pedal down here called a clutch and move this stick in the floor.”
“Dad, my feet can’t even reach the floor.”
“I know, I know, but I’ll teach you this someday when you learn how to drive. Here.” He gently grabbed my left hand and rested it on the knob at the end of the stick. “This is called the gear shift.”
His large palm cupped the back of my hand.
“Just get a grip on it, step on the clutch and move it like this.”
His long leg stamped on the clutch, and when he pushed the stick forward, our hands moved together as if we were one.
As the parade rolled slowly on, we passed the Lutheran and Methodist churches and then the town library. The crowds continued to wave, and at my father’s encouragement, I did too. My father, his right hand on the gear shift, his other on the wheel, looked at me and nodded as if I were doing a good job. Ahead of us, people clustered around the town square. The flag flew high against the crisp blue sky. It seemed that we were moving in slow motion until something suddenly banged against the passenger side door. I flinched, jerking away from the open window.
My grandfather Lucky climbed onto the running board of the moving truck and poked his head into the cab. His face always set off a surge of fear in my chest. Behind Lucky’s Buddy Holly glasses were beady birdlike eyes that rarely blinked, and he stared at me in the same way a mannequin stares through a storefront window, with a still and fixed expression. For Lucky, that expression was a smirk, as if he had just told off the smartest man in town.
“Got a little fireman in here with you?” He asked the question as if provoked, in sharp whiplike cracks. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”
He reached into the cab and grabbed my arm with his calloused hand. “You’re never going to be strong enough to be a fireman with those muscles.” His lips curled in a sneer and sweat glistened on his bald head.
I squirmed out of his reach and slid across the seat next to my father. Lucky stared for a moment and then winked at me.
“Be nice if the boy took after you, wouldn’t it, Dent?”
“Oh, Jay’s just along for the ride, Dad. At least for today.”
“I’ll bet he wants to be a fireman just like his old man.” Lucky stared at me and lurched further inside the cab, resting his elbows on the window frame and hunching his shoulders. “Think you want to be a fireman?”
I stared ahead, hoping that if I didn’t answer he’d leave me alone.
He poked my shoulder as though checking to see if I was still alive. “You need to stop acting so shy. Start talking once in a while.”
Lucky raised a hand, pretending to be ready to give me a backhand slap across the mouth. I flinched and looked up at my father — he waved at the crowd, ignoring my grandfather.
Then Lucky leaned back out the window and jumped down off the truck. I slid back to my original position and peeked over the window frame.
Lucky, his long legs swiveling, stepped over the wooden sawhorses meant for crowd control. He then stood next to my grandmother Helen, who was wearing one of her too-tight dresses and looked upon the parade with an open mouth. She clasped her purse and smiled at Lucky. Many people still regarded Lucky as one of the best carpenters in Mifflin County even though he was in his midsixties. He fingered a toothpick from the front pocket of his shirt, stuck it in his mouth, and stared hard at the truck.
Sometimes when my dad was at
the firehouse, my mother told me stories about my grandparents — she never attempted to hide her dislike for her in-laws. When Lucky and Helen visited, my mother sat on a recliner in the living room, her arms folded across her chest, her jaw clenched, speaking only if Helen or Lucky asked her a question.
During my birth, my mother and I had both contracted staph infections at the hospital and nearly died. We spent weeks recuperating at the house of my mother’s parents, under doctor’s orders to have few visitors. Lucky finally saw me, his first grandchild, over two months later. My mother told me he stared at me with his usual smirk.
“Look at his little hands,” he said. “Look like monkey’s paws.”
Helen had come along with Lucky — she seemed to never go anywhere without him. She gave my mother baby clothes. When my mother unfolded the sweaters and coveralls, she saw that they were stained.
“I saw them at a yard sale along the road on the way here,” Helen said.
“Figured he’d just stain them again anyway,” Lucky said. “What’s the sense of buying something new only to have them ruined?”
My mother always told that story in disbelief. “You were their first grandchild,” she said. “And they couldn’t even buy you new clothes.”
To me, these seemed slight offenses compared to the terror I felt whenever I was near Lucky. He always called me “boy” and I always thought of him as Lucky, never as Grandpa. When he came to visit, Lucky usually asked me about school, but before I could answer, he told a story of his own boyhood in an attempt to one-up me. “The teachers sometimes sent me home halfway through the school day because I was so smart,” he told me. “They figured that I’d learned all that they could teach and that I slowed the other kids down.”
I never believed any of his stories. He said that one time, after a hard rain, he was driving home but couldn’t see the road for a mile and a half because toads completely blanketed the pavement — “should’ve heard them pop under the tires.” He said that he often dived from the river bridge in Lewistown to cool down on sticky summer days. Each time I went to Lewistown with my parents, I looked at the depth meter painted on the side of one of the bridge’s trestles. If his story was true, Lucky would have endured a seventy-foot freefall into the Juniata River, usually only two or three feet deep at the peak of summer.
But those were just stories. Harmless. Nothing compared to the fires I watched him light on Saturday mornings. I muffled my ears with my hands, anticipating the loud pop from the explosion, a sound so thunderous it seemed to reverberate through my stomach. The stink of the smoke seeped through the trailer, a scent that hung stagnant inside the tiny space for hours afterward — it was how my father smelled after he returned from fighting a fire. And Lucky’s burns weren’t just restricted to Saturdays — at any moment, he could turn into our driveway, his left arm hanging out the open window, the bed of the truck filled with whatever he had found that would ignite. “Cheaper to burn than pay for trash collection,” he said once.
Sometimes my mother stood next to me and we both watched his custom of culling the dead rats and then laying them on his bumper.
“After you were born, I was so afraid of that man,” my mother told me one Saturday morning. “I was terrified that he’d come here and burn you or this trailer. One time he asked for a glass of water when he came to check on his pigeons. I gave it to him but didn’t let him inside because your dad wasn’t home. He handed me the glass and said, ‘Glad you let me have this. I’m not so bad, huh?’ But before he left, he leaned toward me and said, ‘But how do you know? I could be contemplating murdering you right now.’”
Her stories made me fear him even more. Something dark seemed buried inside him, a hatred or anger that could blow with little prodding. Once, when I was very young, Lucky slapped our Dalmatian, Patches, on the head after she put her feet on his lap — the dog whimpered to the floor and Lucky nodded, as if he had taught her a lesson. I realized then that he would do the same to me, or to my mother. There would be no difference.
After the flames had burned out on those Saturday mornings, he stepped into his truck and drove away. And those times when he hadn’t thrown them into the fire, the dead rats he had placed on his bumper littered the road.
Four
Just after New Year’s Day 1988, my dad began talking about living somewhere else. It started during a blustery night when my parents and I watched television together. I sat sandwiched between them on a secondhand couch that Helen and Lucky had given us. My Christmas break had ended — the second half of my first grade year started the next day. My dad slouched next to me, arms crossed, eyes focused on the small, fuzzy television screen. He wore a flannel shirt, faded Levi’s, and one of those mesh hats that he seemed to take off only when he showered or went to bed. My mother, also in flannel, was nodding off to sleep. We had learned to dress in layers or else spend the winter shivering. Though I wore long johns under my corduroys and sweatshirt, I felt my legs and arms goose-pimple from the ever-present draft. The wind hissed through cracks in the window frames. Branches on the oak trees next to our trailer raked against one another and creaked like rusty hinges. A gust roared outside and something crashed onto the trailer’s metal roof.
My mother snapped awake. “Denton, what was that?” she asked. Her voice quivered, matching her shallow breaths. “What in the world was it?”
My dad hadn’t even flinched and continued to stare at the television. He rolled his eyes. “I’ll check once this is over.”
“Go see what it was,” she said.
He huffed and said, “Fine.” He stood, marched down the dark hallway to their bedroom, put on his down coat, and then grabbed one of his Maglite flashlights on the nightstand.
After he opened the back door, he paused and pointed a finger at the television. “Make sure you watch that,” he said. “I want to know what happens.” He stepped outside and slammed the door shut.
In the winter, weekly storms dumped clean snow onto the already frosted landscape, white-blanketing everything outside. Afternoon squalls added fresh dustings that rolled with the blowing wind. Storm gusts smacked against our trailer. We felt the whole thing sway like a boat even though my father had placed an old out-of-tune upright piano in the living room as ballast. Frigid air leaked through the single-paned windows, and the oil furnace hummed in vain to overtake the cold. Our kitchen sat in the middle of the trailer, cramped with the round dinner table. No wall or partition separated it from the living room. A hallway, too narrow for my parents to stand side by side, led to my bedroom, the bathroom, and then my parents’ room. My father called the trailer a “tin can” and said that sooner or later the wind would blow the place onto its side.
When I heard that crash on the roof, I wondered if the wind was finally going to blow the trailer over like my father had warned. I barely breathed for fear that any movement would throw the entire place off balance. “Are we going to be okay?” I whispered.
My mother pulled me close and hugged me. “Don’t worry. Your dad will take care of it.”
After a few minutes, he stepped back inside. His reddened cheeks looked minutes away from frostbite or windburn. “Just a branch,” he said. “Must of snapped off and fell onto the roof.”
“Is there damage?” my mother asked.
“Maybe some dents, nothing too bad,” he said. He unzipped the coat, placed it on the back of a chair at the kitchen table, and scratched at his mustache. “Good thing it wasn’t the whole tree,” he said. “Would of crushed us like a soda can.”
He sank down into the couch next to me again, the flashlight still in his hand. “So, what’d I miss?”
The next day, my dad carried our old wooden ladder from the toolshed, leaned it against our trailer, and climbed onto the roof. The orange and yellow sunset reflected the frozen, snow-crusted ground. The raw cold numbed my nose while I stared at the roof — the jagged base of the branch hung over the edge. He yelled down to me that it had missed the furnace vent by
only a few inches.
“Could of blown us up,” he said. “Or at least caused a pretty bad fire. And you better believe that this baby would burn lickity-split.”
He heaved the branch from the trailer roof, and when it cracked onto the ground, I saw that it was no small stick — my dad would need his chain saw to cut it. He climbed back down the ladder, tugged at the bill of his blue McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company hat, and then scanned the snowy yard before looking up at the spot where the branch had broken off the oak tree overhead.
“Hey kiddo, what would you think of living somewhere else?” he asked. “Still by McVeytown but just not in this trailer.”
“What’s wrong with here?”
He nodded and examined the yard again. “Just could be a lot better, that’s all.”
My dad had turned thirty the previous November. Though his true passion was the firehouse, he also loved his job cutting glass at Overhead Door — more than once I heard the pride in his voice as he told a friend that he had been the one who cut the glass for new garage doors at TV anchorman Dan Rather’s ranch in Texas. But the paychecks barely covered the bills — even I knew he didn’t make enough to build a new house. And so, a few weeks after that branch fell, my father did what he thought was the next best thing.
“We’re getting a doublewide,” he said one night during dinner. “They’re bigger than this place, almost like a real house.”
My mother carefully laid her fork on the table and looked up from her plate of peas and pork chops. She bit her bottom lip and forced a half smile. “How can we pay for that?”