Fire

I was in the 7^th or 8^th grade when we replaced our coal furnace with a natural gas one. By the time I was about in the fourth grade, at about the time John F. Kennedy was assassinated, filling the coal stoker and removing cinders from the furnace became my chore. I remember having this chore around the time Kennedy was assassinated because it was also about the same time I could have burned the house down.

I was fascinated with matches and we kept boxes of wooden matches in the basement and they were especially fascinating because I could strike them against the basement’s concrete walls, the concrete floor, my zipper, and any other rough surface and they would burst, like a shooting star, into flame, emitting a sweet sulphur smell. For weeks, when I would go to the basement to shovel coal into the stoker and claw cinders out of the furnace, I was satisfied to experiment with different surfaces to see if striking it would ignite the match. I tried the faces of different dolls, the side of a white toy fire truck, cardboard boxes, the tops and sides of Nalley’s chili con carne cans, canning jar lids, the embossed “Ball” on canning jars, cedar and pine scraps, the side of the utility sink, the washing machine control dial, the furnace door, and countless other surfaces, teaching myself match lighting as if it were an art. For weeks, I was satisfied to light single matches, but then I became fascinated with multiple matches, two at a time, three at time, working my way to a fistful at a time, in awe of the flash of indigo, scarlet, white, and yellow, as if holding the sun.

I learned one evening, though, in November of 1963, that pride does precede the fall. I crossed over from being pleased with lighting matches to quenching my thirst to light things. Mom had a cotton stringed floor mop in the basement and I leaned it against the wall and lit the white stringy tendrils. In a flash of flame that turned fascination into panic, smoke and stench billowed around the basement and I hustled the fire into the utility sink, trembled open the tap, and killed the fire. No further harm ensued.

Dad was out that night, most likely bowling. I crept up the basement stairs. Mom was on the sofa, grading schoolwork or studying for her night class or watching “Bewitched”, and I confessed, ashamed of the pall of fear that blanched Mom’s face. After going down to the sink to survey the crisped mop strings and opening doors to air out the house, Mom held me and told me about the infamous Kellogg boy, Paul Matovich, who had had a fascination with fire and several years earlier had burned Gault Hall and killed three students at the University of Idaho. She told me that he was a pyromaniac and an arsonist and was in prison and that I did not want to be like that.

Later, the following week, John Kennedy dead, we had a mournful Thanksgiving dinner at Jerry Turnbow’s house. Jerry took me into the master bedroom by myself and told me that he heard I was having a fire problem and to cut that shit out. He asked me if I knew about the infamous Paul Matovich burning down Gault Hall and did I want to be like that and be put in prison for arson. I told Jerry I did not want to be like that.

I did not want to frighten my mother. I did not want to anger Jerry Turnbow. I did not want to be an assassin or an arsonist. I did not want to burn down a university dormitory. I did not want to destroy with fire, but I loved the way a struck handful of matches flamed out. Something in me longed to burn.