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Violation: Collected Essays. Sallie Tisdale
Читать онлайн.Название Violation: Collected Essays
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isbn 9780990437093
Автор произведения Sallie Tisdale
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Every spring we had a spring parade. I had friends lucky enough to ride horses, others only lucky enough to ride bikes. But I rode the pumper and my father drove slowly, running the lights and siren at every intersection and splitting our ears with the noise. We had firemen’s children perched on the hoses neatly laid in pleated rows, bathed in sunlight, tossing candy to the spectators as though, at parade’s end, we wouldn’t have to get down and leave the truck alone again.
He would take me to the station. I saw forbidden things, firemen’s lives.
On the first floor was the garage with its row of trucks. Everything shivered with attention, ripe for work: the grunt of a pumper, the old truck, antique and polished new. And the Snorkel. When I was very small, a building burned because it was too high for the trucks to reach a fire on its roof; within a year the town bought the Snorkel, a basher of a truck, long, white, sleek, with a folded hydraulic ladder. The ladder opened and lifted like a praying mantis rising from a twig, higher and higher.
Above the garage was the real station, a single room with a golden floor and a wall of windows spilling light. The dispatcher lived there, the unmarried volunteers could bunk there if they liked; along one wall was a row of beds. No excess there, no redundancy, only a cooler of soda, a refrigerator full of beer, a shiny bar, a card table, a television. I guess I held my father’s hand while he chatted with one of the men. In the corner I saw a hole, a hole in the floor, and in the center of the hole the pole plunging down; I peeked over the edge and followed the light along the length of the shining silver pole diving to the floor below.
I remember one singular Fourth of July. It was pitch dark on the fairgrounds, in a dirt field far from the exhibition buildings and the midway. Far from anything. It was the middle of nothing and nowhere out there on a moonless night, strands of dry grass tickling my legs, bare below my shorts. There was no light at all but a flashlight in one man’s hand, no sound but the murmurs of the men talking to one another in the dark, moving heavy boxes with mumbles and grunts, laughing very quietly with easy laughs. My father was a silhouette among many, tall and black against a near-black sky. Then I saw a sparkle and heard the fuse whisper up its length and strained to see the shape of it, the distance. And I heard the whump of the shell exploding and the high whistle of its flight; and when it blew, its empyreal flower filled the sky. They flung one rocket after another, two and four at once, boom! flash! One shell blew too low and showered us with sparks, no one scared but smiling at the glowworms wiggling through the night as though the night were earth and we the sky and they were rising with the rain.
ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I seen how much more occurred, hidden beneath the surface of his life. I presumed too much, the way all children do. It wasn’t only lack of sleep that peeled my father’s face bald in a fire’s dousing. He hates fire. Hates burning mills; they last all night and the next day like balefires signaling a battle. He hated every falling beam that shot arrows of flame and the sheets of fire that curtain rooms. And bodies: I heard only snatches of stories, words drifting up the stairs in the middle of the night after a fire as he talked to my mother in the living room in the dark. Pieces of bodies stuck to bedsprings like steaks to a grill, and, once, the ruin of dynamite. When my mother died I asked about cremation, and he flung it away with a meaty hand and chose a solid, airtight coffin. He sees the stake in fire. He suffered the fear of going in.
I was visiting my father last year at Christmastime. There are always fires at Christmastime, mostly trees turning to torches and chimneys flaring like Roman candles. And sure enough, the alarm sounded early in the evening, the same bright squeal from the same radio, for a flue fire. There have been a thousand flue fires in his life. (Each one is different, he tells me.)
As it happened, this time it was our neighbor’s flue, across the street, on Christmas Eve, and I put shoes on the kids and we dashed across to watch the circus, so fortunately near. The trucks maneuvered their length in the narrow street, bouncing over curbs and closing in, and before the trucks stopped the men were off and running, each with a job, snicking open panels, slipping levers, turning valves. We crept inside the lines and knelt beside the big wheels of the pumper, unnoticed. The world was a bustle of men with terse voices, the red and blue lights spinning round, the snaking hose erect with pressure. The men were hepped up, snappy with the brisk demands. And the house—the neighbor’s house I’d seen so many times before had gone strange, a bud blooming fire, a ribbon of light, behind a dark window. Men went in, faces down.
My father doesn’t go in anymore. He’s gotten too old, and the rules have changed; young men arrive, old men watch and wait. He still drives truck. He lives for it, for the history and the books, his models, the stories, meetings, card games. But he’s like a rooster plucked; I have a girlish song for Daddy, but I sing it too far away for him to hear.
I wanted to feel the hot dry cheeks of fever and roast with the rest of them. I wanted to go in, and I kept on wanting to long after my father and the others told me I couldn’t be a fireman because I wasn’t a man. I wanted to be the defender, to have the chance to do something inarguably good, pit myself against the blaze. I wanted it long after I grew up and became something else altogether, and I want it still.
“That which has been licked by fire has a different taste in the mouths of men,” writes Bachelard. He means food, but when I read that I thought of men, firemen, and how men licked by fire have a different taste to me.
I live in a city now, and the firefighters aren’t volunteers. They’re college graduates in Fire Science, and a few are women, smaller than the men but just as tough, women who took the steps I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—take. Still, I imagine big, brawny men sitting at too-small desks in little rooms lit with fluorescent lights, earnestly taking notes. They hear lectures on the chemistry of burning insulation, exponential curves of heat expansion, the codes of blueprint. They make good notes in small handwriting on lined, white paper, the pens little in their solid hands.
Too much muscle and nerve in these men and women both, these firemen; they need alarms, demands, heavy loads to carry up steep stairs. They need fires; the school desks are trembling, puny things, where they listen to men like my father, weary with the work of it, describing the secrets of going in.
Harper’s, January 1990
My father was a high school industrial arts teacher—wood shop, metal shop, welding, electronics. But when people ask me what my father did for a living, I almost always say, “He was a firefighter.” Fire was one of the most powerful sirens of my childhood, representing a world of danger, power, mystery. I thought that getting close to fire would get me close to my distant and difficult father. It didn’t work.
I disliked Harper’s title for this piece, which was “Bound Upon a Wheel of Fire.”
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