Nothing Left to Burn

by Jay Varner

  Ford New Holland hired my dad that summer and he quit his job at the milk plant. He worked third shift and slept in the afternoon and evenings. But if a fire call beeped over his pager, he’d crawl from their bed, dress in his turn-out gear, and speed away. Though his work shift began at 11 p.m., he often showed up late and reeked of smoke and sweat. When layoffs hit the plant a few years after I was born, my mother suspected that his unreliability factored into why he was among those cut.

  My mother soon realized the fire company was no mere hobby for my father — hobbies don’t cost men their jobs. My dad, perhaps reading her feelings, tried to get her involved with the company. He told her that the ladies’ auxiliary at the firehouse always needed help with brownie sales, meals, and fund-raisers. All the other guys’ wives helped out — surely she could as well.

  “When I didn’t do it,” my mother said, “the women thought that I was snob, that I thought I was too good for them.”

  Thus began a silent feud between my mother and the wives of the other firemen. In the rare instance when my mother and one of those women talked, neither seemed particularly friendly. Instead, they just exchanged hollow pleasantries about the weather or shopping.

  But my mother preferred to ignore the women. Each week, we encountered at least a half-dozen people we pretended not to see; if we disregarded them at the gas station or post office in McVeytown, they would do the same for us.

  “There’s Sally Kenmore,” my mother said. “Don’t look.”

  And it seemed that while my dad didn’t ignore my mother, he was at least emotionally vacant. For as long as I could remember, it felt as if my mother always missed my father. On the nights when my dad worked at the firehouse, she washed dishes or cleaned the house. She helped me with homework or sat next to me on the couch while we watched television. Sometimes it seemed that my parents lived in the same house but never together.

  And he neglected me. When I was sick with a fever, he never held a cold washcloth on my forehead like my mother did. Once, when I had tonsillitis before the end of first grade, he spent most of the day at the firehouse. He had arranged for Life Lion helicopter, Central Pennsylvania’s first emergency medical chopper, to land at the McVeytown baseball field so the community could see “just what their tax dollars paid for.” He had talked about the helicopter visit for months.

  I vomited every fifteen minutes that Saturday morning, gagged and coughed, and then finally felt the dizziness of dehydration. My mother crouched beside the couch and pressed a palm against my forehead.

  “I’m going to have to call your father,” she said. “You need to see a doctor.”

  She talked to him for a long time, coaxing him to leave. “He needs to see a doctor,” my mother said. “I’m worried he might be dehydrated. He keeps throwing up mucus.” After a few minutes, she would speak again. “Denton, I think we should both take him. We don’t know how long it’ll take at the emergency room.” As I listened to my mother plead with my father to return home, I felt ashamed — I had ruined the day for him.

  When he walked in the living room, he stared at me for a few moments. His eyes looked hard, as if he were concentrating on something.

  “You’re okay, aren’t you squirt?”

  “He’s not okay,” my mother said. “Let’s go.”

  My dad drove us to the emergency room and said little. He cradled me in his arms and carried me into the hospital. After a saline drip poked my vein, my fever eased and I fell asleep. When I woke up on the couch back at home, covered with a blanket, my father was kneeling next to me, his strong hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey kiddo, the helicopter’s already here,” he said. “I drove up to see how you’re feeling.”

  “My throat still hurts.”

  “I brought some Popsicles home for you,” he said. “Think you still feel like seeing the chopper?”

  I nodded yes. He grinned and winked. “I thought so.”

  He cradled me in his arms again and carried me to his truck. I lay on the seat, my head resting on his lap, as he drove to the playground. He lifted me out of the truck and then walked me toward the blue and white helicopter. My father explained to me how joysticks and gimbals worked, though the specifics quickly faded from memory. He gently lowered me so that I could see inside the helicopter’s cabin. He pointed out suction masks, fluid boxes, defibrillators, and the drug cupboard.

  “This helicopter can fly to Hershey in just fifteen minutes,” he said. “You remember, it takes us two hours to drive there when we go to Hershey Park.”

  Then he showed me the cockpit, with its LCD panels and gauges spread across what looked like a dashboard.

  After I recovered from the tonsillitis, my doctor said that in order to avoid more illness, I should have my tonsils removed. And so, on the day after first grade ended, my mother drove me to the hospital for surgery. When I woke in my hospital room, I saw my mother seated in a chair by my bed.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. My throat felt as if I had swallowed sandpaper.

  “He’s working on his truck,” she said. She explained that one of his mechanic friends offered to help my father install a rebuilt engine in my father’s rundown pickup.

  My mother slept on a cot next to my bed that night. Each time I woke, she sat up and asked if I was okay. I wondered where my father was, if he had come to visit and I had somehow slept through it. When I went home the next day, our driveway was empty — he hadn’t returned yet. My mother helped me walk up the porch steps. She brought me water and Popsicles to ease the dry burn in my throat.

  When my dad finally drove home late that afternoon, he told my mother that he had worked straight through the night and said the truck drove like new. He then walked into the living room and looked down at me on the couch.

  “Dad,” I said. I tried to sit up on the couch so that I could look strong.

  “How are you feeling, kiddo?”

  “Sick.”

  He nodded and inserted a video into the VCR.

  “I figured you would be,” he said. “I rented you this Pee Wee Herman video to watch.”

  “Do you want to watch it with me?”

  He shook his head. “I would if I weren’t so tired. I have to get into bed.”

  Eleven

  In the evenings when my father led meetings at the firehouse, my mother and I sometimes walked to her parents’ house a quarter mile away. Our trailer felt like a tiny shed compared to their house. When I was younger, I sometimes tried to tap dance on the cement floor in their basement, telling my mother that I wanted to be like Fred Astaire, whom I had watched on afternoon movies. Or else I clambered up the carpeted steps to the second floor, pretending to be a rock climber.

  But most of all, I loved their yard, with the row of tall pines lining the alfalfa field on one side. A flower garden flanked their small paved driveway. It seemed as though my grandmother had planted every type of flower — daffodils, azaleas, roses, mums. The scene looked like one of the pictures on the boxes of Kodak film my mother bought: the purples and reds of the flowers and the bluish tint of the pines. No piles of concrete or old bits of foundation covered in ash like our yard, just green grass and brilliant flowers.

  One night, my mother and I walked on the stones and cinders covering the berm of the road. As we neared their house, I watched my grandmother carefully walk among her flower beds and glide a sprinkling can above them, slowly going back and forth as though ironing. Her flowers always smelled like the air after a summer storm, fresh and sweet.

  When I first learned to speak, I called her Nena (knee-naw), a name that had stuck ever since. Before retiring, she had worked in the bakery at the Giant Food Store in Lewistown, the same grocery store my mother shopped in every Friday night. She looked much younger than someone in her late fifties: tall and fit, with curled gray hair.

  The three of us walked across the yard, past neatly trimmed bushes and dwarf pines. The evening crows squawked and fluttered in the trees. We stepped onto a
wooden deck and entered the screened-in back porch. My grandfather sat on a chaise lounge in the corner and read the evening newspaper. His belly bulged against a white undershirt and drooped over the belt line of his jeans.

  “There’s my boy,” he said. He removed his reading glasses, folded the newspaper, and combed his fingers through his thinning gray hair. He smelled like Old Spice aftershave and Irish Spring soap. Each evening, after he returned home from his job in the mail room at Huntingdon State Prison, he showered, then read the newspaper and watched television before bed. I called him Pap.

  “How’s school?” he asked. For the past few weeks, he had asked me this question every time I saw him. It became a game for us: each time he asked, I tried to invent new ways to explain just how much I hated second grade.

  “Would you stop reminding him about school?” Nena said.

  “What?” He smiled. Before he continued, I knew the next words out of his mouth. They had become his mantra, what he told me throughout the summer and every time I complained about school: “They’re the best days of your life.”

  “Best part about school is summer vacation,” I said.

  The four of us sat quiet for a moment. Tractor trailers hummed and rattled over the highway.

  “Denton at the firehouse?” Nena asked.

  “Work detail,” my mother said. “They’re cleaning chimneys.”

  “You guys will have to worry about that pretty soon,” Pap said. “Denton’s still putting a woodstove in the basement, isn’t he?”

  “As far as I know,” my mother said. “At least it’ll be warmer than that oil furnace we have now.”

  “Has Denton been feeling better?” my grandmother asked, her tone softer.

  “He says he is,” my mother said. “He’d never tell me anyway.”

  “What’s wrong with Dad?” I asked.

  My mother glanced at Nena and then looked down at the floor. Neither of them answered and I knew that this had been something I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “Your dad says that his stomach has been upset lately,” my mother said.

  “But he’s okay, right?” I asked.

  “You know your dad,” Pap said. “Nothing can keep him down.”

  My dad rarely got sick. It seemed that he never had a cold or a cough. And he had seemed fine since that day at Hershey Park four months earlier. I decided that Pap was probably right.

  We talked for a bit after that, probably about the Pittsburgh Pirates or the neighbor’s farm. When the sun dipped below the ridgeline, my mother stood and said that we should leave before the light disappeared.

  As we walked home that night, I pointed to a silver can that glinted in the remaining light. My mother stepped into some weeds to retrieve it. She carried a balled-up plastic bag inside one of the pockets in her jeans. When we saw a soda or beer can along the side of the road, my mother placed it in the bag and then saved it for recycling. A garbage bag full of crushed aluminum cans brought around twenty dollars.

  “We should save the money we get from these cans,” I said. “Then I could get a new bike.”

  She upended a half-full Coors Light can and poured the beer onto the ground. It smelled like the rotten apples that fell from the trees in our yard. She shook out the last drops, pulled out the bag from her pocket, and placed the can inside. “Your dad always says that he’ll show you how to ride one some day.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He always tells me that.”

  • • •

  Much of what my dad knew about carpentry, wiring, or plumbing he had learned from working with Lucky. My father had built a shed for the riding lawn mower several years earlier. The plywood structure, capped with a sheet metal roof, looked as though a strong wind could blow it over, but somehow it had remained intact. For the past several months, my father spent a few hours each week at the kitchen table drawing crude blueprints for the wires and pipes he planned to install in the new doublewide.

  By mid-October the backhoes had not only excavated the hole but had also dug large trenches where drainage pipes would be laid. Bundles of white pipes and pallets of cinder blocks sat in the dirt next to the hole. My dad had found a husband-and-wife team of bricklayers, both of whom looked close to retirement, to build the foundation of the new house. They had already poured the cement floor, which looked smooth and flat, just like Pap and Nena’s basement. The pair now worked at laying the walls. In the evenings, after my father came home, we walked around the hole and inspected their progress, which usually looked minimal.

  “How long’s it take to do this?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks,” my dad said. “If the weather’s good.”

  “It barely looks like they’re doing anything.”

  “Well, it’s slow, especially with only two people.”

  “Can’t you get more people?” I asked.

  “This is expensive work and these were the cheapest people I could find,” he said. “You know, I’m trying to do a lot of this myself so that I don’t have to pay even more.”

  When we finished looking into the hole, I followed him back to the trailer. The leaves on the oak trees had turned orange and yellow. With each gust of wind, walnuts thumped to the ground in the front yard, apples in the back.

  “Want to ride to Harshbarger’s with me?” my dad asked.

  Harshbarger’s Hardware Store sat next to the firehouse. It was small, maybe twice the size of our trailer, but as my dad always said, it had the best selection of building supplies in McVeytown. Of course, it also was the only hardware store in town. I followed my father through the cramped aisles. He filled small paper bags with handfuls of nails and grabbed a special crayon he told me was used for marking cinder blocks and cement.

  “You ready, squirt? Let’s head home. Your mother probably has dinner about ready for us.”

  When I turned to walk toward the cash register, I saw Lucky standing at the end of the aisle, his hands dug inside his pockets, as if he had been watching us.

  My father stiffened and glanced toward the floor. “Dad, what are you doing here?”

  “Your mother and I came up for supper at the Country Kitchen,” Lucky said. Country Kitchen, a tiny restaurant, sat just outside McVeytown along Route 522. Each time we passed the place, the smell of grease seemed to permeate my dad’s truck.

  “Where’s Mom at?” my dad asked.

  “Pissing,” Lucky said. “She drinks coffee like it’s going out of style. I just stopped in here to grab a few things quick. How’s the new place?”

  “Coming right along,” my dad said. “Hopefully they’ll get most of the foundation laid before the snow comes.”

  “Need any help with it? I can come up in the evenings. I’d even charge you less than my standard rate.”

  My father blinked and cleared his throat. “I think we’ll handle it all right. I’m about to put down pipe for the septic tank. Aren’t there two tanks?”

  “The old house had two,” Lucky said. “Should be about ten yards from the road. They’re not far apart. I’ll come up and help you look for them.”

  “You don’t have to drive up just for that.”

  “How would you ever find them?” Lucky snapped. “I’ll come up. But what are you doing that for now anyway? You’re not moving in until next year.”

  “Yeah, but I want to get it done before the ground freezes.”

  Lucky looked toward the front of the store. “Woman,” he yelled. “Hey. Come here.”

  Helen squeezed through the narrow aisle, her hips rubbing against hammers and tape measures. She smiled as though she hadn’t seen us in years. “Denton and Jay, oh what a surprise. What are you doing here? We just ate at Country Kitchen.”

  “Just getting some stuff for the new house,” my father said.

  Helen opened her mouth to speak but burped instead. “Pardon me,” she said. “I had to rift.” She swallowed and then continued. “Working on
the new house, that’s wonderful. Is the fire company getting ready for the fair?” The third week of October always marked the beginning of the Rothrock Fair in McVey-town, which was sponsored by the fire company.

  “We’ve got a chicken and waffle dinner one night,” my father said. “It’s Friday. Maybe you and Dad will want to come to that.”

  “Just think, Halloween will be here soon,” Helen said and smiled. “Are you ready for Halloween, Jay? Have a costume picked out? Lucky, remember last year he was a clown? Denton brought him down to the hotel. Wasn’t that special?”

  “When he came in,” Lucky said, pointing at me, “I didn’t even know he had a costume on. Looked the same as he always does.”

  “How’s second grade?” Helen asked.

  “It’s good,” I said. “There’s a lot — “

  Lucky rolled his eyes and interrupted me. “Your mother and I have some big news for you.”

  “We bought a house this week,” Helen said, her smile big. “And guess where it is?”

  “McVeytown,” Lucky said. “Gonna sell the hotel and retire. Figure we might as well return home. McVeytown always was home.”

  I could feel my stomach tense. Not McVeytown, I thought. Not here.

  “No kidding,” my dad said. He scratched at his neck and nodded. “Wow. Back to McVeytown. That’s great. Which house is it?”

  “It’s that one right next to Country Kitchen,” Lucky said. “As much as your mother likes to eat there, we can save some money on gas.”

  “Just think how much more often we’ll see each other,” Helen said. She turned to me and leaned forward a bit, as much as her fat stomach would allow. “Don’t you want to see your grandma more?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Speak up, boy,” Lucky said. “You always sound like you’re scared to talk around me. You got to speak up if you ever want someone to pay attention to you.”