Nothing Left to Burn

I could see my mother’s breath when she asked if I checked the basement for scraps of wood to burn in the fireplace. We had been poor for as long as I had memories. I knew how my mother hid her want and exhaustion. This was different. Her eyes were focused and alert. Her words were crisp and landed like darts — it worried me. We had run out of heating oil and the last of the wood was dwindling on the fire. Snow was falling and the wind raged. All we had left to keep us warm through the night were the electric blankets on our beds.

It was colder than usual, but everything else felt normal. The house was always cold during the winter. We’d unzip our jackets when arriving home but wouldn’t take them off until the fire was warm. We had an old coal furnace that had been converted to run on oil. It heated the tap water and created steam for the radiators. It was a monstrosity. It was fussy and needed a lot of attention. My job was to maintain the water level. Using the green spigot knob to add water and the red lever to drain it, I had to make sure the indicator ball was always floating between the hashmarks in the glass gage. If the water looked rusty then I had to flush the system. I was almost 12 but the job made me feel much older. I liked the feeling of being needed.

We only turned on the furnace to heat water to clean dishes, do the laundry, and take baths. I took long baths during the winter, the cold tile floor was a cause for procrastination. During really cold snaps we would keep the heat running to prevent the pipes from freezing. The smallest number on the thermostat was 55, but even at the lowest setting we burned through a lot of oil.

Outside, a swirl of wind made it look like it was snowing upward. If we had not been watching Taxi, our favorite sitcom, I would have continued to stare into the storm. The wind and snow made me feel like I was in a Jack London story. The power had been flickering and threatening to fail all night; it was making my mother nervous as we sat side-by-side on the couch wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. I wasn’t scared. We were prepared. The hurricane lamps were filled with kerosene, placed on the kitchen table next to a box of camping matches so they’d be easy to find in the dark. I even put playing cards next to the lamps so we could play Gin Rummy until the lights came back on. But, if we were going to lose the electricity, I hoped it would be after the show. It was the episode when Latka and Simka met. Andy Kaufman was my favorite comedian. I would have rather watch him eat toast than eat lobster myself. I decided to wait for the commercials to look for more wood. I hid a small stash in my bedroom that I was saving for an emergency. I knew I would be able to keep the fire going.

Our house was old and sturdy. Many of our neighbors had insulation added to their walls and attics during the Oil Crisis, but not us. The heat left the house as fast as the cold entered. The windows chattered like teeth against the steady wind coming from the northeast. Occasional violent gusts whistled across Emerson Park hitting the house with enough force to reach inside the window frames and swing the counterweights on their sash cords. The heavy lead cylinders knocked around in their casings; the descending force of the thumps made it sound like footsteps walking across the room. It’s stuff like this that makes people believe in ghosts, I thought. I knew a lot about superstitious things. My grandfather was a cook on fishing boats that sailed out of Gloucester Harbor, just a few miles up the coast from where we shivered. Working in that trade, he believed, made him something of an expert on the supernatural. He spoke with great certainty about when and why spirits would appear and how they’d try to intervene in peoples’ lives. If the ghosts believed someone was about to die, he once told me, they would stay nearby and try to trick the angels into bringing them to heaven. I didn’t really believe his stories, but sometimes I wondered.

The lights flickered again and my mother reminded me to, “Double check, one more time, to see if there’s anything else we can throw on the fire.”

She thought we’d freeze if we ran out of wood and had no electricity to power our blankets. I obeyed without looking at her. If I saw fear in her eyes I wouldn’t know how to respond. I began to wonder if I should be more nervous. I jumped from the couch and left her to watch the dying flames turn to embers.

I ran upstairs and immediately went to the small stash of wooden toys I hoped to never burn, but I hid them knowing this day might come. Among the stash was a souvenir whistle that imitated the sound of the Mt. Washington clog railroad steam horn. It wasn’t mine, originally. It belonged to one of my brothers, who were 10- and 11-years older and had already moved away. It was bought before my parents divorced, when I was an infant, during a family vacation to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The whistle featured prominently in a Super 8 home movie that I watched so often I had convinced myself that the jerky Kodachrome images were my real memories. The movie had no sound but there were lots of closeups of my brothers blowing into the whistle. In one shot, my middle brother held the wooden block to my lips and everyone laughed as I looked confused and then seemed to squeal with delight.

I collected the whistle and a Pinocchio marionette that I still occasionally made walk around my room. I also grabbed a ruler that a hardware store gave away at a 1976 Fourth of July parade, my pinewood derby race car that wobbled when it rolled, and some hand-me-down blocks I didn’t care about. I tried to look in my nightstand to see if there was anything I had previously overlooked. I pulled the handle, but the drawer was stuck and the whole thing jerked forward. The wooden feet of the nightstand brayed against the wood floor causing an abandoned glass of orange juice to tumble over, but not spill. It was frozen solid. It’s colder than I thought. I can put this in the refrigerator and thaw it out. Maybe I’ll sleep in there tonight.

I ran downstairs assuring myself it was right to burn these bits of nostalgia — I didn’t need them and I wouldn’t miss them, I thought. I needed to build momentum so I wouldn’t hesitate in front of my mother. Do it quick and be done with it, I thought. Show no emotion. She needs me be brave to show her things will be okay. We’ll do whatever we need to do to get through the night.

A glowing pile of ash and embers were all that remained as I returned to the living room. I held my toys above the embers just long enough for the backs of my fingers to feel pain — seconds. I watched the finish on Pinocchio’s head and body bubble and blister. It smelled like turpentine mixed with dirt. There was crackling and then the sudden whoosh of fire consumed the toys. Warmth. They went up in seconds and would only burn for minutes, but it would give me enough time to search the basement for more substantial fuel.

“Oh, Ben,” my mother said as she saw what I threw on the fire.

I hesitated too long, I thought.

“There was nothing useful and I hate that stupid car. I should have burned it after it came in last place,” I said as I went to check the basement. I did hate that car. A wheel fell off during the qualifying heat of the Boy Scout pine wood derby race and I had to sit and watch everyone else compete as my father pretended he wasn’t the one who made it. He only let me paint it.

The switch that powered the furnace was at the top of the basement stairs. I gave it an angry look as I descended. The cellar was unfinished, lit by two dim bulbs, and at nighttime filled me with horror. It was dank and musty. In the spring, the cement floor was often covered in water. The floor sloped toward a drainpipe where we’d sweep the flood water into the sewer. Onetime, when I forgot to screw the heavy steel cap back on the drain, I saw a rat crawl out. I saw one rat, one time, but knowing it was a rarity did not bring me comfort in the dim, shadowy light.

The sports equipment was stacked behind the furnace in the darkest corner of the basement. I went there first and found a wooden baseball bat and my brother’s lefty hockey stick. The bat was small, from my first year of Little League, and I was a righty — more firewood. I used a handsaw to cut the hockey stick in three pieces and the bat in two. While I was sawing, I noticed the gardening stakes my mother imagined she’d use again, but they had been lying fallow for years. I cut those in half and gathered the wood, which was more like kindling. The sawdust caught in my nose and I sneezed three quick times in a row. As I paused to catch my breath, I realized my eyes had adjusted to the dim light and I surveyed the basement one last time for anything that provided more value on the fire than it would in the future. Nothing.

I thought about all the things we burned when it wasn’t so cold: the shipping pallets my oldest brother stole from the tannery; our tennis rackets; the broken rocking chair that we could have fixed; other discarded furniture, and windfall collected from the woods in Emerson Park. We burned too much too soon, I thought.

The basement haul brought the fire back to a decent flame, but we knew it wouldn’t last very long. Taxi had ended and my mother turned off the TV. I was disappointed that I didn’t see what became of the budding romance, but I tried not to show it. We sat in silence. I wanted to assure her we were going to live through the night. People survive in snow caves, I thought to tell her, but I didn’t want her to know I could see the fear she was trying to hide. I just smiled and she took my hand in her’s.

Pinocchio’s plastic eyes and shoes and metal joints had melted away. He no longer looked like a puppet and I was certain he had lost all hope of becoming a real boy. The baseball bat burned slow and hot. Hickory’s good burning, I thought and then wondered if all baseball bats were really made of hickory. Either way, it would be the last to turn to embers.

“Let’s burn the lamp,” my mother said out of nowhere.

“What? What lamp?” I asked.

“Betsy Ross,” she replied flatly. “It’s ugly as sin.”

The lamp was a minimalist rendering of Betsy Ross draping a Colonial American flag over her forearm. It stood about three-feet tall and was carved out of a single block of wood. It was, in fact, ugly. In our family, ugliness was expressed on a continuum that went from homely to horrifying to that lamp. It could have scared a buzzard off a meat wagon, but it was purchased in 1976 with a living room set my mother bought after the divorce by working extra jobs on nights and weekends for an entire year.

“Mum, we can’t burn that lamp,” I said.

“Of course we can,” she said. “It’s made out of wood.”

She tried to hide her feelings of loss, but her eyes filled with tears that didn’t fall. The sharpness of her gaze faded into the emotionless cocoon where she retreated when she wanted to hide her desperation. I wished she’d just say she was afraid so we could talk about how to fix things, I thought, but this is how grownups do it.

“But, mum, we’ll have nothing left to make fun of,” I said hoping to make her laugh and pull her from her cocoon. Just then, as if on cue, the wind broadsided the house and the lights flickered again. The focus returned to her eyes.

“Let’s just take it apart and we’ll only burn it if the lights go out,” she said in the careful and determined tone that let me know other options would not be considered.

I went to the kitchen to get the adjustable wrench from the junk drawer and thought of arguments for saving Betsy. My mother was the first in our congregation to get divorced. We were often told we were going to hell; that we would fail in the next life just as we had in this life. Most people were sure we would end up homeless and hungry. We clung to our role as neighborhood pariahs. Each mortgage payment, each day we ate and kept the lights on, was an act of defiance. The morning the furniture store delivered the living room set, including that hideous lamp, my mother kept the doors open and invited in every neighborhood gossip and looky-loo who just happened by. She worked so hard for that day. She wanted to show the world they had underestimated her. It was the day I knew we were going to be okay.

I can’t let her burn it, I thought as I got back to the living room with the wrench. I unplugged the lamp and sat on the floor by my mother.

“I wish I had more light so I could see what I’m doing,” I said with a slight grin.

She turned up one corner of her mouth and suppressed her laugher. “Stop it,” she said with the light in her eyes that always told me I had a place in this world.

“We’re gonna be okay, Mum,” I said.

Her eyes retreated toward their cocoon and she stroked the back of my head. “You’re like a little old man,” she said. She raised her eyebrows and nodded at the lamp, signaling for me to keep working. The nut that kept the lamp together was under the base inside a hole that was not quite wide enough to fit the wrench head. It took me a while to loosen the nut, but the rest went quickly. By the time I stripped the hardware the fire was not strong enough to burn something as big as Betsy.

“If we’re going to burn her, we’ll need to chop her in pieces or build the fire back up, but with what?” I asked.

My mother and I came up with a catalog of items we could sacrifice to get the fire hot enough to burn Betsy; it included the phonebook; the wooden nativity scene that was still on display in the living room; my nightstand. We could cut the handles off of shovels, rakes, and brooms. This went on for a while with each item pushing the conversation from desperation to the edge of ridiculousness. After I suggested burning the stairway bannister, I laughed and said, “But, I’d rather just let the fire die and put extra blankets on the bed.”

My mother smiled and nodded in agreement. “Me too,” she said.

We watched the fire burnout. Before heading off to bed my mother kissed my head and asked me to put Betsy on the hearth next to the fireplace. “We’ll keep her there to remind us that we’ll always be stronger than any bad thing that can happen to us.”