Chapter Sixteen #3
The air smelled charred. The trucks and his tricycle and the cart were black.
All that was left of the house was a dark shell.
The wall that had run alongside the staircase was nothing more than a lace of ash that was somehow still standing to the height of the second floor.
As he watched, it cracked, collapsed into the basement, and sent up a fresh cloud of ash.
—
Several people called the Jenkins house that morning to tell them there’d been a fire out on Compton Road, and word was that it was Everett’s place.
Cal was heading out the door after the first call when Roman, who monitored the local fire activity on his police scanner, pulled into the driveway in his Cadillac.
Even before they turned onto Compton they saw the smoke—a faint column laid across the light-blue sky like a teased-out skein of yarn.
An ambulance was parked on the gravel. The paramedics were leaning against the hood, talking.
One of the fire trucks was still there, its lights off and its hose spooled, and a police squad car was parked at an angle in the yard.
But there was no house. No garage behind it.
And not much spared in the yard. Two firemen were walking around the house’s stone perimeter with shovels, leaning in, digging cautiously through the rubble that almost filled the basement.
In case they found Everett, Cal realized.
Or what was left of him. One of them waved at Roman, and Roman looked at Cal. “You okay?”
Cal nodded, and Roman made his way over to the fireman.
The ash was wet and still smoking. Cal walked up to what had been the bottom step of the front porch and pushed the tip of his cane against the frosted board; it broke like piecrust. A chill spread across his shoulders and up into his neck. Aw, Pop, he thought. What an awful, awful way to go.
The deputy came over to tell Cal what a mess this was, and that he was really sorry, then speculated it must have been all the stuff in the yard that conducted the fire to the garage, and the chickens probably got away, and the Fords must have had empty gas tanks or they would have blown sky-high.
Cal was about to tell him, Okay, enough, stop talking, when he raised his eyes from the remains of his childhood home he spotted a figure in the woods.
Not very far in, sitting on a fallen tree, facing the smoldering ash and the fire truck and the squad car, staring but not appearing to see any of it.
His eyes didn’t even register Cal’s approach.
“Pop!”
Everett flinched and looked at Cal, surprised to see him. “Oh, son,” he said, seeming mystified by his own concern, “I think I might have burned our house down.”
—
He wanted them to know the dog had died before the fire, the dog had gotten a proper burial, he hadn’t killed the dog. They assured him they understood.
Temporarily, they moved him into the guest room Cal had occupied for several months eight years ago.
Other than the clothes he had on, Everett had nothing to bring to it.
They dressed him in Cal’s clothes—the two of them were the same size—and bought him new toiletries.
Cal brought him to the barber, and for the first time in his life Everett let someone else trim his beard.
They took him to Lafferty’s and bought him shirts, pants, underwear, socks, tennis shoes, work boots, and a pair of loafers that had leather tassels he removed with a pocket knife as soon as they got home.
Becky found him a bolo tie with silver aiguillettes and a turquoise slide, much like the one he used to own. He wore it most every day.
No other solution presented itself for what to do with him.
They couldn’t afford a retirement home, they couldn’t afford to rent him his own place, and he wasn’t about to go into a veterans’ facility.
They weren’t even sure his paperwork existed anywhere.
It was Cal who walked through the options and concluded they were stuck with the old man.
He was reluctant to tell Becky, but when he did, she said she’d expected as much, and it was okay, she understood.
In truth, she was filled with reservations.
For one thing, she worried Everett might burn their house down—with them in it.
She suggested a no-smoking rule for being inside.
Everett, who hadn’t rolled a cigarette since the fire, was fine with that.
She also got rid of all the liquor in the house, not that there was much, and hid the kitchen matches.
For the first week or so, she watched him askance, quietly keeping tabs on him.
Her other big reservation was about the atmosphere in their home.
Cal and his father hadn’t gotten along the whole time she and Cal had been married, and there was nothing to suggest that was going to improve.
Cal tensed up around him. Everett grumbled and snapped.
Several times during that first week, they barked at each other—about what condition to leave the newspaper in, how loud the television should be, what to throw away versus what to keep—in ways that made Becky wince and Skip widen his eyes.
When Cal was at work, it was a different story.
Everett roamed the house in the quiet hours of the day like a man in a museum.
He peered at the knickknacks, the army of mismatched ceramic owls, as if they were archeological treasures, examined the jackets of the record albums as if they were sacred texts.
The grandfather clock, when it chimed, both alarmed and fascinated him.
Becky came upon him opening kitchen cabinets and drawers and inspecting their contents—without touching anything.
“Can I help you find something?” she asked.
He shook his head. “You have nice things. So organized.”
That night, he and Cal had a disagreement about how to operate the recliner—though it was hard to tell what they couldn’t agree on, since there was only one handle and it did only one thing.
So it went for a while, until one early evening when Skip was out on his bicycle and Becky, upstairs, heard an explosion of voices from the living room.
When she was halfway down, she saw them both on their feet, inches apart, red-faced, looking as if they wanted to land blows.
She never found out what sparked the argument.
She got them to sit down, at least, and argue like civil people.
Something about sitting down to fight—a new concept to both of them—made the fighting productive.
Things came up from decades ago. Cal told his father how awful it had been to grow up with a drunk.
Everett accused Cal of being a whiner and a Puritan.
It all seemed to boil down to Cal’s having moved out of the now nonexistent house on Compton Road when he was eighteen.
Cal had felt like Everett had deliberately crowded him out over the years—choosing stuff over him.
Everett had felt misunderstood and abandoned.
There was no resolution because there was nothing, really, to resolve (neither of them possessing a time machine), but they said what they never had before, and after that, tensions eased a little.
Over the coming weeks, Everett had a chance to observe Cal as a husband, and as a father.
The simplest things could hold Everett rapt and cause him to reflect in ways he wasn’t used to.
The complete absence of alcohol in his bloodstream contributed to this phenomenon.
When Skip couldn’t get the knot out of his shoelace, he brought his shoe to Cal, who untied it.
Everett asked Cal if he’d ever done that for him, growing up.
“Unknotted my shoes? I don’t know. You probably just found more shoes.”
Everett watched Becky and Cal take turns helping Skip make a birdhouse for shop class, and the next time he and Cal were alone, he said, “I suppose I never built anything with you. I’m sorry about that.”
“You did,” Cal said. “We built things. We built a soapbox racer together, remember? The steering wheel came off and I got a bloody nose.”
“That’s right,” Everett said, smiling.
“You don’t have to look for stuff to apologize for, Pop.”
But the more Everett witnessed this family—his family, he was coming to realize—the more he saw a disparity between them and him.
Or between them and the person he’d recently been.
His memory of his pre-fire behavior was spotty.
On the couch one afternoon, watching Skip watch television, he said, “Did I ever call you a bad name?”
Skip thought about it. “Shitbird!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Didn’t bother me,” Skip said, his attention already back on the television. “I used to call you the Ogre.”
Another time, Everett observed Becky sitting at the table cutting coupons out of a circular and, turning to Cal, said within her earshot, “I should have been happier about you marrying her.” Cal flushed, but Becky heard the compliment.
She gently tried to reteach her father-in-law some of the table manners he’d stopped bothering with long ago.
No need to use his sleeve when they had napkins (like Cal used to do).
No need to eat beans out of a can when they had plenty of plates and bowls.
At dinner one night he dropped his fork without realizing it (his ears didn’t register the sound it made when it hit the floor), and after glancing around for it, he began eating his meatloaf with his hands.
“What the heck are you doing?” Skip said.
Cal glared at him. Skip rolled his eyes and gave Cal the Cagney look. After pulling the boy by his arm into the kitchen and closing the swinging door behind them, Cal explained that it was rude to ask a houseguest “what the heck” they were doing.
“He’s not a houseguest. He’s my grandfather! Plus, he lives here now.”
“He’s an elder, above all, and you should show some respect.”
“Elder hillbilly.”
“You’re not too big to be put over my knee, mister.”
“I kind of am, though. I wouldn’t fit on your lap.”
“You can be sent to your room, then. Without dessert.”
Skip considered this. “What are we having for dessert?”
When they came back to the dining area, Everett was eating his meatloaf with a spoon.
—
To his own surprise as much as anyone’s, Everett didn’t feel devastated by his monumental loss.
He didn’t miss booze, which surprised him, or tobacco, which astounded him.
He didn’t miss most of his possessions. It was as if he’d been carrying on his back all the things he’d been collecting over the years, and with their combined weight suddenly gone, he was able to lift his head.
He did, however, miss his typewriter. When he mentioned this to Becky, she dug out of the hall closet the portable Smith Corona she’d written her term papers on in high school.
Everett sat in front of it at the kitchen table, ran his fingertips across its smooth body, peered down at its letters, its symbols, its punctuation marks all level in their rows.
He’d never seen such a beautiful typewriter.
Did she have any paper he might use? She had only a box of lilac stationery left over from her days at the stationery store, and he was fine with that.
He rolled one of the half-sheets onto the platen and immediately began pecking out a letter to the secretary of state.
He also missed his Zane Grey books. Those twenty novels with worn, butterscotch covers and foxed pages.
He’d read each of them several times and had planned on rereading them for the rest of his life.
When Becky found this out, she took him to the library, got him a card, and showed him how to use the card catalogue.
To Everett’s astonishment, Zane Grey had published forty additional books during his lifetime that Everett hadn’t read, and another dozen or so after he died in 1939.
Most of them were there, in handsome editions stamped with the author’s initials, the end pages patterned with horseshoes.
Because he was focused on just one author, Everett would always finish choosing his library books before Becky chose hers, but he was happy to sit down at one of the tables and read while he waited for her.
One day he met another man there: a fellow veteran from the First World War who’d grown up in Tiffin and had been in the Bonus Army, like Everett.
He had but a wisp of white hair on top of his head, and his left hand wouldn’t open all the way—which he said had nothing to do with the war.
His name was Lee, and he was reading Rogue River Feud.
Everett was reading Shadow on the Trail.
Lee said he knew a couple of other veterans in town who were also Zane Grey readers.
The librarian shushed them. Everett leaned down and in a whisper suggested that he and this man and those other two men get together someplace where they could talk.
“About what?” Lee loud-whispered back.
“The books,” Everett said.
Within a week they’d arranged to get together, and within a month the four of them were meeting every other Thursday afternoon, in a booth at Fink’s.
They agreed ahead of time on what book they would read—often a reread—and when there was only the one copy available, they worked out a system wherein each of them would get three days with it, then tape a nickel inside the book’s cover and leave it in their mailbox.
Skip would then collect the nickel and carry the book on his bicycle over to the next house, where he would leave it in the mailbox and put the flag up.
At the drugstore, the four men shared their reactions and thoughts.
“What is this?” Mary Lisnik asked, a few Thursdays in. “A church thing?”
“We’re discussing westerns,” Everett said.
She refilled their coffee cups and said to let her know when they felt like discussing food.
They ate nothing, drank coffee. They called themselves the Zane Grey Boys.