The Fire in the Room

I woke at ten past two because the house smelled like a struck match, and that smell has one source and does not need a second opinion.

I put on my robe and went out into the corridor. The first door I opened was Mila’s, because that is the order my mind worked in then and works in now. She was asleep with one arm off the side of the bed and her mouth open, and the air in her room was clean. Otto was on the floor at the foot of her bed and he lifted his head at me and put it back down, which told me he had nothing to add. Then I went up the hall toward the front of the house, and the smell got heavier with every step, and under the door of the master bedroom there was a line of light that was the wrong color for a lamp.

I opened the door. The bed was on fire. Not the whole bed. The sheet at the foot was burning in a line, and the wool blanket had caught at the corner, and the curtain had started to run up the wall where the blanket touched it. He was on his side of the bed with his back to it, face down, one arm off the mattress. There was a bottle on the floor and a small orange prescription bottle beside it with the cap off, and those two objects told me most of what I needed to know about how the night had gone.

What I thought about first was not him. I thought about the wall. Which is to say I thought about the whole house and what it would take to put it back, and about the fact that a fire in a house like that one does not stop at a curtain.

There was a pitcher on the washstand. I threw it. It made a sound like one hand clapping and did almost nothing. So I ran to the bathroom at the end of the hall and filled the wastebasket twice, and the second time I came back with it I threw it over the sheet and the blanket, and that was the end of the burning in the bed. I dragged the blanket onto the rug and beat the last of it out with the poker that stood by the cold fireplace. I got the curtain down with my hands, which is how I burned them.

I did not call the fire company. The road in from the county highway is a mile and a half of gravel, the house runs on a well and a pump, and by the time a truck found the driveway the room would have been a chimney. That is my defense and it is also the truth. I have gone over it since, the way a person goes over any night they cannot do again.

He woke when the wastebasket water hit him across the shoulder. He came up out of sleep the way a man comes up out of water, and then he sat there on the wet mattress and coughed and looked at me.

“You are standing in my room,” he said.

“Yes. Your bed was on fire.”

“I see that.”

“Get up. The mattress is still hot and the smoke is in the ceiling.”

He got up. He was in a t-shirt and shorts and barefoot, and he stood on the rug like a man trying to remember which building he was in.

“Where is Mila.”

“Her room. She is asleep. The air in there is clean.”

He nodded twice. It was the first thing he had asked all night that he cared about, and I filed it.

We opened both windows and stood in the cold and let the smoke find its way out. It went out slowly, in ropes, and the room got cold and began to smell like a wet ashtray. He sat down on the floor with his back against the dresser. I sat on the window seat. That is where we had the conversation, at three in the morning, in our bare feet, with the curtain lying in the corner like something shot.

“How long have you been in this house,” he said.

“Since April.”

“That is not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked.”

He was quiet for a while. Down the hall a floorboard ticked the way they do when a house settles back down onto itself.

“Why did you stay,” he said.

“I stayed because I am paid to be here and because of Mila.”

“Those are two reasons.”

“They are both true.”

“They are not both sufficient.”

I told him the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the part I trust. I told him that on the thirtieth of the month there is a number in an envelope with my name on it and the number is mine, and that since April I have not had to guess what I would be eating on the following Tuesday, and that he does not know what that is worth and I do.

He asked me whether I was afraid of the house. I said no. He said then you are not paying attention.

“A man can burn his own house down,” he said.

“Not with a nine-year-old asleep in it.”

He was quiet again. Then he said, “That is the correct answer,” and I disliked him for it, because a correct answer is a thing you give a person in school.

“Do you know what I was doing,” he said.

“Falling asleep with a cigarette.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That is the definition of it.”

He looked at my hands, black to the wrist, and at the blisters coming up along the base of the thumb.

“Those will hurt tomorrow,” he said.

“They already hurt.”

“You could have shut the door and gone back to bed. I would have been a paragraph in a newspaper and the house would have gone to Mila, and you would have kept your job either way.”

I said that was not the kind of thing a person could eat breakfast after, and he looked at me for a long time, and I looked at the window because I had nothing else to do with my eyes.

At breakfast he was normal. That is the part that stays with me. He came down at seven, shaved, in a clean shirt, and asked Mila what the capital of Vermont was, and Mila got it, and he said good, and he went into the office off the front hall and shut the door.

Then at ten I heard him through the door of the back hall, and he was not normal.

Bernice had come up from the north wing for her shift and he met her in the passage by the kitchen stairs. I was in the pantry with a list in my hand. I did not move and I did not put the list down.

“You were paid to be on the floor at night,” he said. “That was the arrangement.”

“I was,” Bernice said. “And I was.”

“Then explain to me how this happened on your night.”

There was a pause. I heard a cup set down on a shelf. Then Bernice said it in the even voice she used for everything, the voice of a woman reading out a grocery order.

“There is a person living in there, Mr. Voss, and she has to eat, and she has to be washed, and she has to be watched, and I am one woman with two hands.”

“Do not say that in the hall.”

“Then do not say it in the hall at me.”

I stood in the pantry with the list and counted to forty. Then I went back to the schoolroom and taught Mila the sevens, and she got them, and I told her she had done well, and I did not say anything to anybody.

That night I wrote it in the notebook I keep under the lining of my suitcase. I put the date above it the way I put a date on a receipt. There is a person living in there.

The house smelled like smoke for three weeks, and nobody in the town said anything, because in that county a man’s house is his own business until it is not.

Sheets burn fast. I took the burned one out of the hamper before Bernice could get it into the trash, and I folded it small, burned side in, so that from the outside it was a square with nothing wrong with it, and I carried it out the kitchen door and down the back steps to the burn barrel behind the woodshed. I put it in and lit the corner with a match and stood there with the poker.

The fire took the edges first, which is how a fire always works, and then it took the middle, and the hole became the sheet. Ten minutes later there was nothing in the barrel but a black film with the wind moving it around. I turned the poker in it the way you turn something in a pan to see whether it is done. It was done. I went in and washed my hands and put salve on them and went to bed.