by Jay Varner
When the temperature finally began to rise, the rain turned our yard into a muddy mess. Lucky showed up one evening to help my father lay the new pipe. Like I did every time Lucky came to our house, I watched from the living room window. He drove his truck over our yard, bouncing over dips and holes, before the wheels finally sank in the mud. I watched as Lucky gunned the gas — the tires sank lower and his engine growled angrily.
“Lucky’s stuck,” I said.
My mother walked up behind me and sighed. “I am so sick of this mud and dirt. And this stupid house. I’m sick of it. We’re not even going to be able to afford this.”
My dad slowly hobbled in the mud behind Lucky’s truck. It looked like the two argued with each other, though we couldn’t hear anything.
“Get your coat,” my mother said. “We’re going to Pap and Nena’s. I need to get away from here.”
The faint scent of coffee always lingered in Pap and Nena’s kitchen. Antiques decorated the rooms. Wooden crafts my grand-parents had made — he sawed them out of wood, she painted them — decorated the walls: roosters, cows, farmhouses, Amish men, and hearts.
That night, we sat at the island in my grandparents’ kitchen and talked. When my mother told them about Lucky’s stuck pickup, Nena raised her eyebrows and bit her lip to hold back laughter. She stood and grabbed a coffee mug off the counter.
“Dad says he doesn’t know if the septic tank will be hooked up in time,” I said.
“It better be,” my mother said. “This was all his idea.”
“Don’t worry, Teena,” Pap said. “Denton knows what he’s doing.”
“But what’ll we do about a bathroom?” I asked. “What if it’s not hooked up? We might need an outhouse.”
Pap laughed until his cheeks reddened. “You don’t need an outhouse,” he said. He flashed me a confident grim. “If Lucky’s truck is out there in the yard, just go and piss in it.”
My mother gasped and then laughed.
“Don’t say that!” Nena snapped.
“I never did care for that man,” Pap said.
“Why?” I asked.
Pap furrowed his forehead, thought a moment, and then told me the truth about Lucky.
Thirteen
Here’s what I learned:
One Saturday afternoon in the mid-1960s, Lucky parked his new Studebaker in Licking Creek State Park, about a half-hour drive from McVeytown. He loved the outdoors, especially hunting — he had killed deer, turkey, rabbit, pheasant, and grouse, and in the spring and summer, he trapped muskrat, skinning their bodies and then selling the hides. He grabbed his fly rod and creel from the backseat of the car and headed toward a mountain stream. Hours later, he told the police that when he reemerged from the thick underbrush, he saw that his Studebaker had caught fire. Only the charred frame and seat springs survived.
Nobody had any cause to disbelieve Lucky. He had fought for the army in World War II, returning home to marry his high school sweetheart, Helen. They bought two acres of land outside of McVeytown and Lucky built their home. In 1949, the couple had their first child, a daughter named Rose, who died not long after. In the years that followed, Lucky began working as a contractor. Business was good — Lucky even built a workshop about thirty yards from the house he and Helen now shared with three young sons. Everyone in McVeytown knew Lucky. They probably would have called him a good guy — he was a hard worker and a family man.
But a few months after that day in Licking Creek, a garden shed in McVeytown caught fire — it sat adjacent to a house Lucky was rebuilding. The shed mysteriously erupted in flames just after Lucky left for home one evening. Though no one else seemed to connect the stories, Lucky knew that he had gotten away with setting the fires. It must have thrilled him.
The workshop Lucky built almost doubled the size of the family’s house. He stored most of his tools inside — band saws, table saws, electrical and plumbing supplies. For his first really big fire, Lucky burned this workshop to the ground. He blamed it on an electrical short — with his experience in construction, Lucky would have known how to disguise the cause. It tricked the insurance investigators — they found nothing suspicious. Throughout that winter, the pile of debris — ash, melted PVC pipe, puckered and charred wood — sat untouched, a kind of testament to Lucky’s new passion.
• • •
The spring after that workshop fire, my father — only nine or ten at the time — boarded the school bus one morning along with his brothers. Helen then left for the grocery store in nearby Lewistown. But Lucky stayed at home longer than usual, not showing up at the house he was remodeling in McVeytown until close to noon. Not long after he had heaved a toolbox from the bed of his pickup truck, he heard the sirens of fire engines. Someone called a neighbor near the work site and a man yelled out the window to Lucky, “Your house is on fire.”
By the time Lucky arrived home, only a brick chimney rose from the smoldering pile of rubble. Years later, this would be the spot where my father opted to place the doublewide trailer.
I imagine that Lucky, Helen, and their sons must have lived with family in the months that followed — Helen had some sisters in the area — or perhaps the family stayed at the Coleman Hotel, which they owned by that point. Lucky designed a new home for his family, one that would sit on the same two-acre stake of land; the debris from the workshop remained, as did the rubble of the first house. Throughout that fall, Lucky worked. On Saturdays, people from McVeytown parked in the yard, lugged toolboxes from their trucks, and laced work belts around their waists, ready to help their neighbor rebuild. They might have thought that Lucky simply had a string of bad luck. Or maybe they wondered if he was even a good carpenter — his buildings had a way of catching fire.
At Christmastime, Lucky and Helen held an open house for the completed home. The woodworking inside was supposedly beautiful, all of it done by hand. Lucky had built the stairs, cupboards, and banisters, seemingly sparing no expense to give his family the best home possible.
“How’d you manage to afford all this material?” someone asked Lucky.
He shrugged and said, “Insurance money.”
A few years later, Lucky burned that second house.
On that day, one of their neighbors, Roy Peicht, looked out his kitchen window and saw smoke rolling from the house. When he realized that the fire had yet to fully engulf the home, he ran across two fields, hoping to help save some of the family’s possessions.
Lucky stood on the front lawn under a walnut tree. His right hand jingled the change in the pocket of his painter’s paints. The thumb of his left hooked a belt loop.
Roy grabbed Lucky’s arm.
“Come on,” Roy said. He huffed for breath and felt the heat against his skin. “We can try to save something.”
“Don’t,” Lucky said. He stared at the house and jabbed a toothpick between his lips. “Let it burn.”
Officially, the workshop and the first house fire had been ruled accidental; the fire marshal found electrical shorts. Still, people must have suspected that Lucky Varner was a firebug: the car, the shed, the workshop, the house — a lot of coincidence. It seemed everything Lucky touched turned to flames. After the second house fire, however, the police charged Lucky with insurance fraud and arson. He pleaded no contest in court and was sentenced to five years in Huntingdon State Prison, where Pap worked.
After Lucky was released, he moved into an apartment in Lewistown with Helen and my father, then a junior in high school. His brothers, Curt and Russ, had already escaped from Mifflin County. Eventually my father married my mother and moved back to that same piece of land where Lucky had burned down those three buildings.
Life seemed to go on as if nothing had ever happened. Every Sunday morning, Lucky and Helen attended church in McVey-town. Lucky went back to work, both at the hotel and as a self-employed contractor.
But that spark still burned inside him. My stomach chilled and I thought of Lucky’s Saturday morning blazes. I imagined our
trailer burning down and then imagined my father losing everything. When my dad reminisced about his childhood, which he did rarely, it was those younger years that my father liked to talk about — it was as if the good memories simply ended at some point. Now I understood why. My fear of Lucky boiled into a steaming hatred.
After my grandparents told me that story, we sat in silence for what felt like several minutes. I replayed all of what I had just learned, trying to somehow figure out why Lucky had lit those fires and why it had taken so long for someone to tell me the truth.
“How do you know about all of this?” I asked.
“Everyone around here knows it,” Nena said. “People know about Lucky Varner.”
“Plus for years I saw him every day at work,” Pap said. “At the prison.”
At one point, before my parents married, Pap looked up Lucky’s criminal record and memorized his identification number. Pap also remembered Ricky Trutt and said that most of the prisoners hated “men like him.”
“Why did they hate Ricky Trutt?” I asked. “What’d he do?”
Nena stirred her coffee and acted as though she didn’t hear my question. My mother eyed the countertop. Finally, Pap sipped from his steaming mug and cleared his throat.
“Ricky Trutt’s hurt little boys who were your age,” my grand-father said. “He touched them in places he shouldn’t have.”
Nena frowned in disapproval. “I don’t know how someone could ever bring a person like him around their own grandson.”
I shook my head, numbed by what I had just heard, piecing together the stories. Some of it made sense — no wonder Lucky lit those fires every Saturday; he liked to burn things. And my mother locked the door when Ricky Trutt came around because she feared what he might do to me.
But I still thought of my dad — how he had saved the Grass-meyers’ Christmas presents that day, and how he had said that it was awful to lose everything. My grandfather started fires, but my father put them out.
“Is this why Dad became a fireman?” I asked.
My mother nodded. “Probably. I know Helen really pushed him into it. She thought that it would make the Varners look better if your father became a fireman. If Helen tells your father to jump, he’ll ask how high.”
“So that’s why he leaves for fires all the time,” I said. “Because of her.”
“Your dad’s a good man,” Pap said. “Don’t be angry at him. Most of this isn’t his fault.”
“Your father means well,” Nena said. “He just has his priorities mixed up. But Pap’s right, your father is a very good man and he loves you.”
We sat in silence again. I thought more about Lucky and those fires. It seemed strange to me that my father wanted to place our new house exactly where Lucky had burned his old one. I just couldn’t understand it all.
“Why did Lucky do it?” I asked. “Why would Lucky burn down his own house?”
“He’s sick,” my mother said. “Your grandfather’s a sick a man. He enjoys it somehow, just like you enjoy playing with Match-box cars.”
I was only seven when I learned all of this. I didn’t know anything about pyromania. Years later, I would read about pyro-manipyromania and understand that it was a disease of the mind. My grandfather battled it for years. I learned that little is known about the root of pyromania — some evidence suggests an early environmental factor in childhood, such as abuse or a learning disability. Other research claims that lighting fires causes euphoria that an individual might otherwise never experience owing to poor social or sexual skills. Pyromaniacs, often believed to feel sadness and loneliness, are sometimes struck by an intense rage that can only be quenched by starting a blaze. They do not seek monetary gain through insurance fraud, do not attempt revenge, and do want to cover up other crimes. They enjoy watching the beguiling, dancing flames and give little thought to the resulting destruction or even death.
A true pyromaniac, like my grandfather, simply loves fire. The tension prior to striking a match arouses them. Gasoline smells like perfume, the radiating heat feels like hot breath against their face. A good fire blazes with uncontrollable passion, whipping palls of black smoke into the sky, swallowing houses in minutes, a beautiful ruin that never burns the same way twice. But a fire starter’s greatest joy is the response — they are drawn to firefighters and fire stations. A pyromaniac is gratified by the orchestrated chaos of screaming fire trucks, of men dressed in turn-out gear dashing about and dragging hoses over their shoulders, of the people who extinguish their beautiful living, breathing, flaming creation.
That was my grandfather. That was my father’s legacy. And now it was mine.
Fourteen
I didn’t see the doublewide arrive. One afternoon at the start of March, my school bus screeched to a stop. Some of the other kids said, “Whoa” or “Look at that.” The trailer sat on the foundation and looked as if someone had sawed it in half — it was split in two. Some men worked on the outside of the trailer, placing siding. My dad walked among them, wearing his tool belt.
“Knocked off early today,” my dad told me.
“Can I see it?”
“Not yet,” he said. “It’s not safe yet. We’re putting it together. But in a few days, we’ll move everything in.”
That next weekend, my parents worked to move most of our belongings across the yard and into the doublewide. My mother silently carried boxes — her face looked hard, as if she resented that the day had finally come. On Saturday, Pap and Nena helped us move the beds and furniture. Stepping inside for the first time, it felt as if we were leaving some part of our lives behind in favor of something greater.
“This is it,” my dad said. He turned to my mother, smiling, but she walked ahead without displaying any emotion.
“It’s big,” I said.
“You bet it is,” my dad said. “Bigger than that other junk box we lived in.”
Our new living room could hold a couch and two chairs. There was a dining room — no more eating in the kitchen, like in the old trailer. Our bathroom even had a skylight. The basement was incredible — a playroom almost all my own.
A smell of newness hung in the air — the scent reminded me of opening crisp books at the beginning of each school year. And the carpet, soft and thick, sifted through my toes like sand.
Pap and Nena gave us a new couch and matching chair — none of our other furniture ever matched. Lucky and Helen gave us an old floor-model television from the hotel that looked like it weighed about a thousand pounds.
“Say good-bye to long underwear and corduroy pants,” my dad said. “These windows are double-paned. The drafts won’t seep in now.”
We burned firewood in the woodstove in the basement and our new doublewide smelled faintly like my dad after he returned home from fires. But even with the woodstove and an oil furnace, it seemed that we could never warm the upstairs of the house. My mother endured the cold and said nothing. She wore her jacket inside the house during the day, turned up the electric blanket on their bed at night. I think she secretly felt vindicated — my dad’s promises of a grand new doublewide life already seemed empty.
One morning a week after we moved in, while my dad sat on our living room couch and tied the laces on his steel-toed boots, he closed his eyes and doubled over. He gently rocked back and forth, as if trying to work the hurt out of his body.
“Dad?”
“My stomach,” he said. He moaned and winced. “Smarts pretty good.” He tried to force a smile.
The cramps and nausea had come back while he rushed to finish the new house. “I’ll just work through it,” he had said.
But now the sickness had amped up. The pain continued for hours, and then days. At first, he chalked it up to stress, assuming that the ulcer had returned — a plausible self-diagnosis, since he had worked himself raw that winter. Overhead Door showed no signs of slowing down; many weeks he worked overtime. He only declined extra work if the shift interfered with a commitment at the firehouse.
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On some days, he returned home from work with a full lunch box. The sandwiches, potato chips, and Mountain Dew that my mother had packed for him all remained untouched. At dinner, he forked at his food, sipped water, and said that he just wasn’t hungry. After another week, he took an afternoon off work and went to the doctor again. Maybe another ulcer, the doctor had said. He told my father that the best way to fight it was to relax. My dad didn’t listen.
“Denton, you need to take care of yourself,” my mom said. “You can’t be running yourself into the ground.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Besides, I promised my parents that I’d help them out.”
The next weekend, he moved Helen and Lucky into their new house outside McVeytown. He spent all day Saturday and Sunday hauling their furniture on his truck and then unloading it with Lucky’s help. Throughout it all, the stomach pains continued; the headaches and fatigue worsened. He lost even more weight than he had the previous fall.
One afternoon, after blowing his nose, he pulled the tissue away and saw blood. He called for my mother, sat down on the floor, and titled his head against the wall. I crouched next to him, terrified. It looked like someone had punched him in the nose. Blood had already saturated the tissue, streaked down the hand that held it in place, and begun to color his wrist and shirt. He pinched his nose and sounded nasally when he talked.
“Get washcloths,” he said. “And cold water. Fill a basin with cold water.”
“Why cold water?” I asked.
“The cold slows the capillaries and veins,” he said. “Know how your hands get so cold in the winter? That’s why — your blood flow slows.”
My mother knelt beside him, replaced the dripping and bloody tissue with a washcloth that she had soaked in cold water. We waited. Minutes passed, more washcloths, and the basin’s water looked red. My father pinched a clean washcloth to his nostrils and closed his eyes.