The Fires

Irving, the widower, caught sight of the first fire from his window where he stood in his boots in a puddle of melted snow. This was at the beginning of winter and the snow was still clean and untouched on the hill. He’d just fed the pigs and washed his hands at the basin with lemon when he leaned closer to the warbled glass and squinted–a lick of orange, a curl of black. He dropped his towel and ran out the door, and on up to Mrs. Graves’ place.

The fire was near the shed in a pile of old fence posts, close enough that the shed was already blackened in a wide streak up its side. Irving grabbed a bucket and began scooping loads of snow onto the flames. He scooped until his muscles burned, and on until the fire was doused and the ground hissed like snakes. With one more bucketful, all was silent except for his heavy breath and the geese calling frantically as they passed him over. He wiped the soot and the sweat from his forehead and looked back to the cottage where Mrs. Graves stood at the bottom of the porch steps.

She was a wisp of a woman, soft-boned in her delicacy. Her face was narrow and her eyes cloudy blue and her feet, she though, must be so cold–bare in the snow. She hugged her white shawl to her body, and behind her, her house was white, and the fields were white around her. But her hair was black, cut blunt above the chin and threaded with silver. She turned to go inside, nudging the door wider with a quick glance over her shoulder. Irving followed.

This is how he came to be a regular visitor of Mrs. Graves throughout the winter, and these visits always began with a fire.

 

Mrs. Graves lives in a house of plants. The air smells green and humid and the windowpanes are damp. She collects the plants herself, so they would be, if anyone visited, familiar to them and extraordinarily common and gravely uninteresting–mosses and ferns, salal, bleeding heart, trillium and salmonberry. They sit on every sill and table and along the edges of the stairs, where a round skylight pours gray light in the winter and gold in the summer.

In the mornings, she dresses in gauzy layers of white, and colors that are close to white–blushing, silvery, or creamy. Her fingers are long and her cheek pale. Her cloudy eyes see poorly so that when she passes a mirror her features are dulled–features that she knows are long and slender and entirely against the current fashion of round and pert. On the first of every month, she cuts her hair and shapes her nails to fine tips.

Mrs. Graves keeps a rat in the house, that sits about quite at home, nibbling or sleeping or standing on its hind legs. The rat comes when called, climbs up her gauzy skirts to her shoulder or onto the palm of her hand. He’s no barn rat, she would tell people, if anyone visited. She paid top dollar for him when a pedlar came by with the rodent on his shoulder and she had no interest in his pots or tonics. She leaned in to catch a glimpse of those curious little bead-eyes and offered any price, and the pedlar seemed to have no problem at all with an arrangement like that.

 

Irving lives in a house of bones. So he thinks of it, and so does his daughter, who will soon be to visit now that the snow is melting. It’s a regular house, small and square, but bones are placed  about, attached to lintels (a femur or a fibula), the pull of an oil lamp (a knuckle), the knob of a door (vertebrae), along the chair rails (ribs)…

How is mother these days, says Violet, when she arrives in her husband’s bouncing buggy and steps large into the little house. I’m still unsure, says Irving, and his daughter shivers, and so does he. When she kisses him hello, he learns that she is very happy with her new life and also, rather hungry. She places her hands on her round belly and looks out the open door with a pleased sigh.

In the yard, Violet’s husband, Mr. Hawkes, unloads a basket and a carpet bag. His parents are freed slaves who, like Irving, raise pigs, only they do it in Nova Scotia. This, both Irving and Mr. Hawkes feel, is a fine coincidence that deserves some notice and the subject of pig farming is often raised between them.

But Mr. Hawkes chose a different path for himself as a travelling optician. His buggy is painted in smooth black, and on top is an enormous pair of spectacles, facing outward from the back, with large wooden eyes mounted behind the lenses. On the sides of the buggy, in gold letters, reads: The world’s a spectacle when you wear spectacles!

Irving is disturbed when his daughter leaves after her long winter visits–because he will miss her, of course, but also because the enormous eyes watch until she disappears, giving him the sensation that he is somehow wrong-fitted in the world, somehow worthy of long, unblinking observation.

 

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