Nothing Left to Burn Read online

  “Next year, kiddo,” he said. “Scout’s honor. We’ll do it. I just don’t have the energy right now to spend a day walking around Hershey Park.”

  “We really wanted to take you,” my mother said. Her eyes looked sad. “Your dad just can’t do it.”

  I nodded. It seemed a small trade-in if it meant that my father might get better.

  By August, my mother and I were still visiting him in the hospital during his monthly treatments. Each afternoon, we watched CHiPs together at noon while we ate lunch in his room. Sometimes my mother brought him food from Wendy’s or McDonald’s. Friends from work and the firehouse stopped by to see him as well. They filled him in on whatever jokes he had missed at Overhead Door. Church members and deacons visited him also, leading us in prayers and asking God to cure my father.

  Rev. Goodman also stopped by the hospital to see my father. One day he led me to a waiting room so my parents could spend some time alone. We sat on the hard plastic chairs. For a moment, neither of us said a word.

  Finally, Rev. Goodman turned to me. “I know this must be hard for you, Jay. It’s hard on your parents. But if you ever need to talk, I’ll be here for you.” He spoke to me like an adult, not an eight-year-old.

  “Can God really cure my dad?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Rev. Goodman said. He smiled as if he had all the faith in the world. “God can cure anyone.”

  “Why can’t he just do it then?”

  “We pray that the Lord will,” he said. He talked slowly and looked me in the eye. “If we have faith and believe, the Lord can work in mysterious ways.”

  Mysterious ways — I remembered that line from Sunday school. “So, it’d be like a miracle?”

  Rev. Goodman raised his arms and looked up. “We pray that he will bless us with a miracle, yes.”

  “But I don’t know why my dad has to go through any of this,” I said. “Why did God let him get cancer?”

  Rev. Goodman nodded, as if giving my questions serious consideration. Finally, he said, “You can’t think that way, Jay. God allows all things to happen for a reason. He, and only he, knows why things happen on this earth. In the end, many, many years from now, when all of us get to heaven, it is only then that we will understand life’s hardships. But you must have faith. Do you have faith?”

  “Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t too sure. My parents did, and Pap and Nena too. Lucky and Helen attended McVeytown Lutheran Church, and though I had never heard them speak of religion or God, I guessed that they too probably believed.

  Rev. Goodman told me about some of the miracles Jesus had performed — turning water into wine, healing the blind. I decided that if I believed and prayed hard enough, maybe God would cure my father.

  “I’m reminded of Proverbs chapter thirty, verse five,” he said. “Every word of God is fire tried: he is a buckler to them that hope in him.” He sighed and tilted his head toward the ceiling. “God gives us hope.”

  “But then why does he make people sick?” I asked.

  Rev. Goodman looked back at me. He thought for a moment. “We can’t blame God. We must trust that he has done it for a reason. But God doesn’t cause sickness any more than Lucifer does.”

  “Lucifer?”

  “Satan,” he said. “Lucifer is another name for Satan.”

  I nodded — Lucifer almost sounded like Lucky. In Sunday school, we had learned that hell was filled with fire and ash. Some of the other kids asked what the devil looked like. The teacher described Satan as an angel of light, lacking flesh and blood, and capable of taking any form. We had been encouraged to imagine our biggest fear and multiply that by one hundred — not even that, the teacher said, compared to the terror Satan’s presence instilled. Nothing scared me more than Lucky, and in some way this connection made perfect sense.

  We didn’t see Lucky or Helen much that summer. Though I imagine that they probably visited my father at the hospital, I never saw them when I was there. I seem to remember my mother working out some kind of secret system. If Helen and Lucky visited him at the hospital on Monday nights, my mother and I simply wouldn’t go. They never visited us at home. It felt as if they cared about my father much more when he was healthy. It made sense — if Helen had wanted my father to become a fireman so that the family would look better, he must not have meant much to them while he wasn’t healthy.

  My dad’s doctors had a different kind of faith than Rev. Goodman. They had been encouraged by my father’s progress through the treatments so far. The cancer seemed to be disappearing. I tried to imagine what the cancer looked like inside my dad’s body, but could still only picture flames burning under his skin, charring his bones. Somehow, the chemo smothered the fire, and soon maybe all of it would be gone.

  My mother explained that cancer turned my father’s cells against his body. That was why his white blood-cell count had been so low — the cells are produced in the bone marrow. The white blood cells protected his body from infectious diseases so it was important that he have them to get better.

  My father’s main oncologist, a tall and lean Nigerian-born doctor named Ricardo Fawcett, remained optimistic. Dr. Fawcett had seemed a kind of hero — my father talked of him with awe, as if Dr. Fawcett were magic.

  “Ricardo’s going to fix me right up,” my dad said. “That guy is good. I’ve been to enough doctors by now to know what’s good and what’s not.”

  One afternoon, while my father and I watched CHiPs together in the hospital, Dr. Fawcett walked into the room to check my dad’s chart. I turned to my father — he had dozed off in bed. Dr. Fawcett smiled and raised a finger to his lips.

  “We can let him sleep a bit,” he said quietly. Dr. Fawcett looked up at the television screen for a moment — Ponch rode his motorcycle along a California freeway — and then turned back to me. “Can I show you something?”

  He picked up the remote from my father’s bed and changed the channel. Two tennis players lobbed balls across the court.

  “Ah, this is what I love,” he continued. He hugged a clipboard against his chest, as if the very sight of the sport brought back warm memories. “Tennis. Have you ever played?”

  I shook my head.

  Dr. Fawcett smiled. “Well, your father will have to take you for a lesson when he gets better. It is very good exercise and much fun.”

  “Can you make him better?” I asked.

  “I am trying as hard as I can. So is your father. The medicine will work. He has already improved. I have faith that we can get the cancer into remission.”

  “What’s that?” It sounded like something that should be in a car.

  “That is when the cancer stops growing,” he said. “It is still there, but it does not keep spreading. If he goes into remission, then your father will be in good shape.”

  “And then it’ll all be gone? He’ll be better?”

  “Mmm, no. With this cancer, it is never entirely gone. But your father would be able to live for a long, long time.” He patted my head and smiled at my father. “Don’t worry. He is as strong a man as I have seen.”

  Dr. Fawcett read over my dad’s charts and checked the chemo machine. He told me good-bye and walked back out into the hallway.

  Something didn’t add up about this faith business. Rev. Goodman had told my father that God would help — so had Nena and my mother. Yet my dad’s doctors said that medicine would cure him. I wondered if both could help or just one of them — and if it were just one, would it be God or the drugs?

  I still idolized the Odens and their farm. It seemed that I marked the passing of that year by the Odens’ field work. In the cloudy springtime, my heart raced at the first sight of their tractors. They sprayed cow manure and fertilizer over the corn and alfalfa fields, readying them for planting. As the film of summer spread over the ridges, I watched the corn grow knee high by the Fourth of July and continue climbing into September. When the green stalks turned brown and dried, they harvested the fields late into the frosty fall eveni
ngs.

  But I loved the hot days of summer the most; home from school, riding my swing, watching the Odens mow their alfalfa fields. Pap and Nena bought me die-cast metal John Deere tractors just like the Odens drove, except much smaller. I had pushed the tractors through the house, pretending that each room was a different field. Outside, I pedaled my metal mini-tractor under the ceiling of oak leaves in the backyard. Like the Odens, I partitioned sections of the lawn for corn, alfalfa, and sorghum.

  That fall, under the gray evening skies, Hartley Oden cleaved corn rows in his forage harvester. Strings of brown stalks stuck like flesh in the machine’s jagged teeth. When the rumbling engine of the diesel tractor faded at night, I worked on homework at the kitchen table while my mother washed dishes. Outside, the wind rustled the branches of the English walnut tree next to our house, a prelude to a looming Pennsylvania winter, one in which my father would be largely absent. As Dr. Fawcett had hoped, my dad’s cancer lapsed into remission. The cancer hadn’t been killed entirely, but it was no longer spreading.

  “How long can it stay like that?” I asked my father.

  “They don’t know. Maybe the rest of my life, maybe just a few months.”

  My father had decided on another option — a bone marrow transplant. He explained that it was similar to a blood transfusion. The doctors would replace his old marrow with harvested stem cells from a donor. These cells would flood and rebuild his old marrow and drive 99 percent of the cancer from his body.

  “If I get this done, they said that I could live another twenty years,” he said. “If I don’t, there’s a much higher chance that the cancer will come back and I’ll be sick again.”

  Twenty years was almost unimaginable. It seemed like infinity — I would be twenty-eight then, my father fifty-one. My father would travel to Philadelphia for the transplant, the closest hospital that performed the procedure. Afterward, he would have to stay there for three or four months, which also seemed unimaginable. At least with the chemo, he had only been gone for a week at a time — but months?

  Each field that Hartley Oden harvested brought us one day closer to December, when my father would leave. But my dad looked healthier. Without the chemo, his hair had begun to grow back. He began to look like my father again, before the tests and hospital stays.

  He hunted buck again that year and this time actually shot one, a beautiful eight-point. I watched as he dressed the deer and cut open the belly with his hunting knife.

  “I’ll show you all of this when you go out hunting with me in a few years,” he said. “But see where I shot it.”

  He pointed to a small, red hole in the deer’s brown fur.

  “Right behind the shoulder blade. Aim for that spot. The bullet goes in, hits the heart and causes it to explode. The animal’s dead instantly. It’s the humane way to do it.”

  On the Saturday before he left for Philadelphia, he called Dick Bartley, the radio deejay, and requested a song. He sat next to the radio for an hour, waiting to turn up the volume. Finally, Bartley said, “This one goes out to McVeytown, Pennsylvania.” This time, my parents didn’t dance. My father sat on his chair, tapping his foot but looking forlorn as Merle Haggard sang that if he could just make it through December, he knew that everything was going to be all right.

  Eighteen

  On the night before he left for Philadelphia, my dad hugged me as he tucked me into bed. I squeezed my arms around him and began to cry into his shirt. If I held on tight enough, maybe he wouldn’t have to leave.

  “This is going to make me better,” he said.

  “Why’s it have to be so far away?” I asked.

  My dad looked at the floor and shook his head. “That’s just where the doctors are. It’s a good hospital.”

  My parents asked if I wanted to ride along on the trip, but I had decided that leaving my father behind would be too painful. Instead, I wanted to go to school just like every other day.

  “Think you’ll be okay tomorrow?” my dad asked.

  I nodded and cried harder. My dad pulled me close to his chest and gently rocked me back and forth. When I woke the next day for school, my parents had already left. That night, when I returned home from school, my mother told me about what had happened.

  Lucky and Helen drove them to Philadelphia, a three-and-a-half-hour trip. My mother spent a few hours with my father in his hospital room and then told him good-bye. He said that he loved her and they cried together.

  Lucky and Helen looked on, seemingly unmoved, and said a simple good-bye to their son and left — no hugs, no “I love you,” nothing. My father’s brothers, Curt and Russ, met them at the hospital as well. They walked my mother out of the hospital and talked about the operation. In the lead-up to the operation, the doctors had hoped that Curt, who shared my father’s blood type, could also prove a match with my father’s bone marrow.

  “When I found out that I didn’t match, Erica and I went out and celebrated,” Curt told my mother. “I just couldn’t imagine how painful it must be to have a needle shoved into your hip.”

  When my mother told me this, she shook her head. “This is the operation that could save his brother’s life, and he celebrates because he couldn’t help him.”

  In the parking lot of the hospital, the Varners exchanged Christmas gifts. My mother watched, thinking about her sick husband inside, wondering how his family could even think about something like Christmas at a time like this. Russ had given Lucky a cassette tape of Christmas music and as Helen’s Buick sped along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she and Lucky took turns trying to jam the cassette into the car’s console. They argued and bickered on how to work the tape player. Finally, Lucky threw the tape onto the floor and drove in silence.

  “Sometimes I’ve wondered about your father’s family,” my mother said. “On that ride, I thought for sure that he just had to be adopted. How could he ever come from such an awful family?”

  Fortunately a bone marrow match was found, and the operation went forward. While my father recovered in Philadelphia, Rev. Goodman and some of the deacons from our church came to visit us each Tuesday night. They sat on our couch and chatted about the weather or what they had read in the daily newspaper. Then the serious business began.

  “I don’t know why he has to go through this,” my mother always said. “He’s so young.”

  “God has a plan for everything,” Rev. Goodman said. “He has reasons too. We have to put our faith in him that these are the best things for us. I know that might be hard, but he knows what is right for us.”

  I didn’t question what Rev. Goodman said. My mother taught me never to question God’s way no matter how unfair his grand plan for us may seem. I was told that one day, and maybe not on this earth, I would understand life’s hardships.

  “Right now, I believe that he will be healed in Philadelphia,” Rev. Goodman continued. “I think that it is God’s will for him to be there.”

  Not long after that, Hartley Oden called my mother and told her that the machines in his basement could save my father’s life. All he would need was a piece of hair or a fingernail clipping to exorcise the cancer from my father’s body. Hartley explained that his machines offered cures without a single incision or needle prick: my father would no longer be subjected to piecemeal chemotherapy treatments. He said the transplant was a waste of money. Doctors can’t be trusted, he said; they only want our money, just like the government. When my mother recounted all this, she shook her head in disbelief and told me Hartley Oden was crazy.

  Christmas seemed empty. It was our first holiday in the doublewide, and my mother and I decorated the tree, something my father had always done with us. By Christmas Day, it felt as if my father had already been gone for years. We called him that night and talked. Afterward, my mother and I sat in the living room, not speaking. We turned off the lamps but the tree lit the room — twinkling strands of red, blue, and green reflected off the windows like a kaleidoscope. I turned on the local oldies station and we
listened to Christmas music. Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” came on and it seemed the deejay had somehow known to play the song for us. Darlene Love sounded so solemn and lonely as she belted the lines “They’re singing ‘Deck the Halls.’ But it’s not like Christmas at all.” At the end of the song, her baby hasn’t returned.

  Just like us, I thought.

  Back at school, after the start of my new year, my entire third-grade class made get-well cards for my father. Miss Kaufman, my teacher, dedicated an entire afternoon to the project.

  “As all of you know, Jay’s father is very sick right now,” she said. She clasped her hands and smiled, still seeming chipper. “I thought it might be nice if all of us could make cards for him. Jay, what are some things your dad might like on a card?”

  “He likes fire trucks,” I said. “He’s the fire chief. His favorite color is red and he listens to old songs. And he likes Dalmatians.”

  I thought for a few moments. My best friend sat next to me and I could recite every television show, movie, and band that he liked. But not so for my father — suddenly it seemed that I barely knew him. When he came home, I promised myself to make him do things with me. I would hide the keys to his truck so he couldn’t leave; I’d tie his boot strings together.

  At school, my friends, teachers, and school secretaries asked about him. One of the teachers, Mrs. Fagen, a special education teacher I had never spoken to, stopped me in the hall. She knelt next to me and talked softly and gently.

  “How is your father doing?” she asked. “You tell him that everyone is thinking of him. We’re keeping him in our prayers. And I know the fire company can’t wait for him to return.”

  Though I knew that was true, my mother and I also wanted him back home with us. I didn’t understand why the teacher wasn’t more concerned for my mother and me.

  Someone placed a sign in front of the McVeytown firehouse: THINKING OF DENTON AND HIS FAMILY.