Nothing Left to Burn Read online

  “Yeah, what’ll happen to the fire company?” I asked.

  “I’m sure things will be just fine,” my mother said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  I heard footsteps in the doorway. I turned to see Lucky and Helen. My grandfather strode into the room and jingled the change in the pocket of his pants. He stared at the machines, like he had seen all of it many times before. He stood at the foot of my dad’s bed. Helen held Lucky’s hand and, for the first time, her mouth was closed, that look of astonishment gone. I hadn’t seen either of them since Pap and Nena told me about Lucky’s past.

  “How you feeling?” Lucky asked.

  “Not feeling too bad yet,” my dad said. “But the doctors said this stuff will make me pretty sick, make me lose my hair.”

  “You’ll look like Pappy Varner,” I said. I made sure to say it loud enough for Lucky to hear.

  My father grinned. “I might.”

  Lucky glared at me, like he wished he could punch my mouth, and then turned back to my father. “Hell of a thing, outliving your own son.”

  “Outliving?” my mother said. She stepped toward Lucky. “He’s going to be fine.”

  Lucky waved his hand as if wanting her to go away. “You know what I mean. How’d that bone marrow biopsy feel?”

  My dad closed his eyes and shook his head. “Most painful thing I’ve ever had. They jammed a needle through my skin and into my pelvis just to get a sample. Dad, I can’t even describe it.”

  Lucky rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and looked about the room, as if he hadn’t heard a word.

  It was the first time I’d ever heard my father really acknowledge pain. Usually, if he hit his thumb on a hammer or banged his leg on a chair, he’d grimace and say, “That smarts.”

  “We just love our new house,” Helen said. “It’s too bad you won’t get to enjoy yours.”

  “I’ll be going home at the end of the week,” my dad said.

  “What day?” Lucky asked. “I’m going to build a pigeon coop in the backyard in the next week. Got the blueprints all done, just have to buy the lumber. Be nice if you could pitch in and help me out.”

  My dad stared at Lucky and then smiled. “Yeah, we’ll see how I feel.”

  “Do you think the fire department will be okay?” Helen asked. “You’ll still be the fire chief?”

  My mother sighed and shook her head. “Is that all you can think about? The fire company? What about Jay? What about his family?”

  Helen closed her mouth and hand-flattened some wrinkles on her dress. She looked at my father. “Of course I care about you and Jay.”

  For a few minutes, no one said a word. I wanted Helen and Lucky to leave so that my mother and I could have my dad to ourselves. Before Lucky turned to walk out the door, he looked at my dad, nodded, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll see you then.”

  They left, as always, without hugs, and they didn’t tell Dad that they loved him.

  My mother and I stayed in my dad’s hospital room past visiting hours. My dad asked me about school, if I wanted to go to Hershey Park again this year, and if I had listened to any good music. When it came time to leave, I hugged him and kissed his forehead. My mother slowly walked to his bed. She knelt down to kiss him but stopped. She cried and shook her head, apologizing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to cry. But I just don’t understand this. I just don’t know why.” She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “I know, I know.” He patted her back and held her. “We can’t think about that right now. I just have to fight this and beat it.”

  She looked up at him, nodded, and then kissed him good-bye for the night.

  “I love you, squirt,” he told me. “Be good for your mother.”

  Before we walked out of the room, a nurse entered and checked the machines. She asked if my father needed anything. He introduced my mother and me. She smiled, knelt down in front of me, and shook my hand.

  “You look just like your dad,” she said. “I bet you want to be a fireman just like him when you grow up.”

  On the drive home, my mother and I said little. It seemed that nobody understood how a man like Denton Varner could ever have cancer. I didn’t understand it either — people so young didn’t get cancer. They certainly didn’t die; at that point, I’d never known anyone who had died. It seemed unimaginable. But so did cancer.

  “When I had tonsillitis, I coughed up all that yellow stuff,” I said. “Will Dad be like that?”

  “No,” she said. “The cancer is inside his body. It’s invisible to us.”

  “But the doctors can see it, right?”

  “They take blood tests and bone marrow. They can read that and see how sick he is.”

  It reminded me of a fire, the way my father taught me to feel a door for heat. This was what the doctors did when they tested my dad’s blood. And the chemo must be like water — it would wash through his bones and extinguish all of the cancer.

  When I explained my analogy to my mother, she smiled and began to cry.

  “That’s right,” she said. “His medicine will be like that. And he has good doctors. We just have to believe in them and have faith in God.”

  If my mother said we had to have faith in God, did that mean we would have to go to church even more? On Sunday mornings, my mother, Nena, and I attended church. My dad had always stayed at home, sleeping late or sometimes helping serve chicken and waffle breakfasts at the firehouse. For the first half hour of the service, we prayed and sang hymns inside a large sanctuary that smelled of oak and perfume. After that, the pastor dismissed the children for Sunday school. Much of church bored me — the songs all seemed similar, and in Sunday school, we only colored pictures and learned parables from the Bible. I didn’t like going and I didn’t understand why I had to go when my father could stay at home.

  That spring, perhaps in an attempt to distract myself from my father’s chemo treatments, I decided that I wanted to become a farmer. Both sides of my family had dirt in their blood. My mother told me stories of the summers she spent on her grand-father’s farm, helping milk cows and bale hay. She remembered his farmer’s tan and how he taught her to shoot an open-sighted .22 rifle — it all sounded like fun. And, best of all, as a farmer I would rarely leave home to work like my father always did.

  Much of my inspiration came from Hartley Oden’s dairy farm. It sat along Route 522, directly across from Little Brick Road and some two hundred yards from our house. It had always been there, but it seemed that I never paid much attention until my father got sick. Over the next few weeks, I learned the name of each piece of their farm machinery: the forage wagons, the baler, the hay cutter, the fertilizer, the rake, and the liquid manure spreader, which I called the stinky wagon.

  Hartley and his wife, Anna, lived in an old stone two-story farmhouse that rested on a slight hill along the highway. Across their dipping yard, a white, split-level barn held corn and hay bales on the top floor, cattle and milking stalls on the bottom. Two forage silos rose into the sky like pillars, so tall that I could see them from my swing in our backyard. On the other side of the barn, one of Hartley’s sons, Dan, lived in a small house with his wife, Patty, and their son, Ryan. Though Ryan and I were in the same grade at school and lived close to each other, we never played together. In fact, my dad forbade me to set foot on the farm. He told me the Odens didn’t watch their kids, and I knew that Ryan and his cousins roamed freely, running between the cows and machinery. And my parents told me a story that erased my romantic view of farmers. In 1983, Ryan’s five-year-old cousin Jonathan lost his arm in an accident on the farm.

  But it wasn’t just the accident that made my parents dislike the Odens.

  “They’re terrible farmers,” my mother said. “Don’t think that you’re learning anything from them.”

  Most of their machinery looked as if it belonged in a junkyard rather than on a farm. They left their tractors outside all year long, exposed to the elements until the g
reen and yellow of their John Deere tractors turned brown from rust. Their manure spreader leaked liquid dung onto the roads — sometimes the valve ruptured and spilled gallons of the stuff. At least a dozen times a year, either a tractor or wagon broke down in a field or along the road, sometimes sitting there for days at a time until Hartley or Dan repaired it. When I saw that a piece of equipment had broken down, I pointed it out to my mother.

  “Looks like the axle broke on the stinky wagon,” I said as we drove past it one day.

  “They’re the worst farmers I’ve ever seen,” my mother said. “They should never leave the machinery outside. That stuff is so expensive. My grandfather made sure that he took care of his tractors and equipment. Hartley Oden just doesn’t care.”

  “Do you think I can be a farmer someday?”

  “If you want to be one, sure.”

  “Just don’t tell Dad,” I said. “He wouldn’t like that. He’d want me to be a fireman, just like him.”

  Spring burned into summer. It seemed years had passed since my dad had that nosebleed. Cancer had become a white noise in our lives — I could barely remember what life had been like before it. My dad’s white blood cells had rebounded — a good sign, the doctors said — but he would still need chemo. Every month, the doctors performed another bone marrow biopsy and my dad came home sore, unable to even sit in a chair, forced to lie facedown on the floor or bed.

  During the afternoons, he slept for hours on the orange recliner in the living room, weakened from the chemotherapy. He had taken a medical leave from Overhead Door, but he still mowed our grass and attended meetings at the firehouse. He even went on calls with the fire department, but the doctors told him only to watch from a distance — no air packs, no hoses, no work. And still, no matter how tired he felt, each time his pager beeped, he crawled up from the La-Z-Boy, put on his gear, and drove away.

  The chemo was taking its toll though. Most of his hair fell out — what remained looked like peach fuzz, including the mustache he refused to shave. His skin sallowed and his once thick muscles corded. His cheeks hollowed, and his eyes looked glassy and tired. Sometimes he kept a trash can next to his chair in case he vomited after a dose of chemo.

  On tepid summer evenings my dad and I sometimes went to McVeytown for ice cream. Ice cream seemed the only thing that didn’t upset his stomach. My father would roll down the windows in his truck and blast the oldies station on the radio so loud that everyone in the parking lot of Harshbarger’s Sub and Malt turned to look at us. Inside the shop, we ordered two teaberry cones and then walked outside again and sat in the truck.

  As daylight gave way to darkness, the fluorescents outside Harshbarger’s flickered to life. At one time they’d been bright white, but years of use had faded them to a dirty, jaundiced color. Gnats and mosquitoes fled the banks of the nearby Juniata River and showered the lights. Sometimes my dad and I just sat in silence, but one night we talked about what I wanted to be when I grew up. He encouraged me to go to college or to a trade school. Above all, though, he stressed that I should do whatever I wanted, whatever would make me happy. After a moment, I decided to test the water for his reaction.

  “Dad, do you think I could be a farmer?” I asked somewhat tentatively.

  “Sure, if you want to be one,” he said. “It’s hard work, though. Just be careful you don’t end up like Irvin.”

  “Who’s Irvin?”

  “Irvin,” my dad said. “You never heard of Irvin? Irvin’s Hill? Irvin’s Light?”

  “No,” I said. I sat up straighter, intrigued.

  “I can’t believe that,” he said. “You know back beyond our house, there’s that hill, about a mile away, where the old shale pit is?”

  I nodded, remembering the Sunday drives we sometimes took past that old shale quarry, where only the cement walls of the mining company’s buildings remained. It had always looked haunted.

  “Well, a while ago, before I was even born, this Dutchman named Irvin lived on Irvin’s Hill. ’Course it wasn’t called that yet. The guy had a wife and two kids. He farmed the fields up there. One night, Irvin went crazy. He murdered his wife, the kids, and then went to that tree in the middle of the field. You know what tree I mean?”

  “Yeah, that big, tall one,” I said. “It’s the only one there.”

  “That’s the one,” he said. “Well, Irvin rode his horse there, tied a noose to the tree, put his neck through, and then kicked the horse. When it galloped away, Irvin fell off the horse and the rope snapped his neck.”

  Goose bumps tickled my arms. We lived only a mile away from where all of this happened, I thought. “What about the light?”

  “Well, the light, that’s the interesting part.” My dad chewed his ice cream cone — he loved to tell stories this way, relishing his control as the listener anxiously awaited the best part. “When they found Irvin after he hung himself, he was holding a lantern in his hand. No one could figure it out. He should have dropped it. But ever since then, people report seeing a light up there. They say it’s his ghost, walking through the fields, looking for the family he murdered. We used to go up there all the time when I was in high school.”

  “Did you ever see it?”

  “Some friends of mine did,” he said. “We should go up there sometime.”

  “Yeah, can we? We could go tonight.”

  He smiled, happy I had eaten up the story faster than my ice cream. He nodded, started up the truck, and backed out of Harshbarger’s. We drove on the curvy back roads, rising quickly over hills and gliding back down. The paved road turned to dirt and my dad slowed down, barely creeping along until we came to a stop. Before he turned off the truck, his headlights washed over that tall tree where Irvin had died. We sat there together for an hour. We didn’t say a word, just scanned the darkness before us, looking for light.

  On the ride home, my father said, “You know, the Oden farmhouse is haunted too.”

  “Really?”

  My father told me that the house had been a hotel during the last years of the nineteenth century. Travelers could stop for the night, eat a meal, take a bath, and have a drink. One night, a man was murdered in front of a fireplace in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Supposedly, if the carpet was pulled back, you could still see the bloodstains on the hardwood floor.

  “Now that, I did see,” he said. “Used to go there a lot when I was a kid, before the Odens even moved in.”

  “Can you take me someday?”

  “I can’t just burst into someone’s house,” he said. “Unless there’s a fire. But maybe one of these days, I’ll see if we can see it.”

  Seventeen

  One Sunday morning that summer, my father stood in the living room dressed in brown khakis and a red polo shirt. He smiled at my mother and me.

  “Think I’ll go to church,” he said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “You never go.”

  “Well, maybe I should start,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  My mother’s unblinking eyes looked glazed over. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m just shocked.”

  That morning, we walked into church together for the first time ever. Inside the sparse vestibule, we shook hands and said hello to some of the other church members. Everyone looked toward my father and smiled as if they were happy to be in his presence. Some of them whispered to one another, and I thought that they were probably talking about my father. I looked up at him and tugged at his hand.

  “Dad, you look spiffy,” I said.

  “Yeah? Well, tell your mother she looks nice too. Sunday is the only day she ever wears a dress.”

  We filtered into the sanctuary with the rest of the congregation when the organ music began and sat down in one of the burgundy-carpeted pews. When the pastor dismissed the children for Sunday school, I stood, but my dad stopped me.

  “He goes to the children’s room,” my mother whispered.

  My dad looked at me and winked. “I think he’s old enough to sit with the
adults.”

  Until that day, whatever the main congregation did while I was in Sunday school had always been a mystery. What I learned was that real church didn’t seem that different from the kids’ Sunday school. No one colored with crayons, but the sermon had Bible stories and we still sang hymns.

  After the service ended, my parents and I filed out of the pew and back toward the vestibule. The pastor, Rev. Goodman, stood at the door, shaking hands and smiling. He stood tall and straight. His slicked-back white hair made him look wise, but his voice quivered, as if he were weak and tired.

  My dad shook his hand. “Great message today.”

  “Oh, Denton,” Rev. Goodman said. “It so good to see you here. We’re praying that you get through all of this with God’s help.”

  “Thank you.” My father nodded slowly. “It means a lot to have everyone’s support.”

  • • •

  That summer took on a kind of routine. My dad slept for hours during the day. Then we went out for ice cream each night, and on Saturdays we listened to Dick Bartley’s American Gold over the radio. My dad sang along to Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” but inserted his own lyrics: “I found my thrill on Irvin’s Hill …” We opened the windows and let the warm breeze flow through the house — like the old trailer, the doublewide felt like a kiln in the summertime. My father continued to attend meetings at the firehouse and to go out on calls, though he insisted he only supervised. Sometimes my mother pressed him: why did he have to go to the firehouse every day? She said that she worried about his health. My father nodded and quietly said, “Why should I let cancer keep me down?”

  For the first time since I could remember, we didn’t go to Hershey Park. My parents sat me down at the dining room table one night and explained that my dad was simply too sick to walk around the park for an entire day.

  “Dad, you promised we’d ride the Superdooperlooper together,” I said, disappointed.