Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

Once we started using the fireplace, the bats moved to a comfortable spot in the eaves and had babies. Claire was looking out at the dusky sky one summer night from an upstairs window and saw many young ones, she said, black liquid drops, one after another, emerging from a shadowy hole.

Consider for a moment what the chimney sweeps had to do. I bet they ran into plenty of bats. I read about them one morning in a book of essays by Sydney Smith — I fished the book up first thing from the floor beside the bed and opened it to the table of contents, and there in the dimness was a title: “Chimney Sweepers.” Sydney Smith had written the essay for the Edinburgh Review in 1819. The sweeps were boys of seven or eight or nine, who would show up at the appointed house at three in the morning and bang on the front door. The servants, still asleep, wouldn’t let them in, and so they would stand in the cold, no socks, chilblains throbbing, waiting. They had to be small in order to fit up the chimneys, of course, and they worked all day in those tiny spaces, carrying the sack of soot from one job to the next, and some got stuck and died in the dark high corners, and before they became hardened to the work their knees bled. One climbing boy — so they were called — told an investigator for the House of Lords that he climbed his first chimney because his master told him that there was a plum pudding at the top. A plum pudding is in effect a prune pudding, but that wouldn’t sound as good.

Now we think of Dick Van Dyke dancing his pipe-stemmed, long legged dance; real chimney sweeps today are chatty men of thirty-five whose trucks are expensively painted with Victorian lettering — they’re the sort of men who also like to dress up as clowns or magicians for children’s birthdays. But back in 1819, it wasn’t a good life, and I found when I read about the climbing boys that I wanted to right the wrong immediately — I wanted to mail letters urging legislative reform, as if the long-ago suffering could be fixed retroactively and all those lost lives redirected.

When we first moved here, we called a local chimney sweep — a software engineer who swept on weekends — who peered up into the brickwork and said that it was all rotten. No way could he sweep it until the chimney was rebuilt. A mason we talked to said the same thing: no fires until you do something radical. So we gave up on fires, and our first winter was very cold.

Then we invited Lucy, our neighbor, over for dinner. She scoffed at the mason and the chimney sweep. She said she used her chimneys every winter, even though they told her she mustn’t. Our house had been here, she pointed out, for more than two hundred years, without once having burned, and the fireplaces had all been in use until very recently, and the two brothers who had owned the place hadn’t installed woodstoves, which deposit creosote. It was unlikely that our chimneys would suddenly become terrible fire hazards; more likely that the experts were judging the old brick too harshly. Light a little fire and see if it draws, she said. Keep a blanket nearby — if you have a chimney fire, which probably won’t happen, stuff the blanket up the chimney and it will cut off the air supply to the fire and put it out.

So we made a small test blaze, clutching an old blanket, and the fireplace worked perfectly. We tried all the fireplaces — they all worked. There was no problem. And the brickwork is in better shape than before because the fires have dried it out.

Some crows are outside; I can hear them. I’m going to take a shower and then feed the duck. She hears me coming and makes her small querying noises, but these days when I flip back the blanket and take away the screen, she drops to the ice and is still. I think it’s because she has to wait until her eyes are adjusted to the daylight, and she wants to be motionless while the adjustment proceeds so as not to draw the attention of a predator. Yesterday, she riveted away at the food I sprinkled into the warm water, blowing snortingly through her beak-nostrils once or twice, and when I walked back to the porch she hurled herself into the air, honking loudly, and landed in a snow-pile, perfectly placed to hop into the porch. It was cold, so I let her come into the porch, and then into the house, where she followed me around, shaking her wings and tail. “Who do we have here?” said Claire at the top of the stairs. After the duck had a chance to get warm I carried her gently to the door and urged her out, feeling her small bones. She didn’t want to go. She can’t be an indoor duck because she leaves green duck artifacts everywhere in her excitement.

Good morning, it’s 5:14 a.m., and it’s cold, and the only creature stirring is the cat: he’s just had an extended session in his litter box, scraping and scraping. He’s got one of those litter boxes with the roof and the side hole: he climbs in and is able to turn smoothly around, and then he holds still with his head out the hole, slitting his eyes, until he is finished, and then the compulsive digging begins, the scrape of claws on grey plastic.

I woke up this morning and went into the bathroom and pulled down my pajama bottoms and silently peed, shivering, for a long time. I can accumulate a remarkable amount of urine. It’s been almost fifteen years since I took to sitting down on the toilet to pee at night. Someone I worked with was complaining about her husband’s bad aim in the bathroom, and someone else said her husband sat down and always had, and I was struck by this. Just because during the day you stand, does that mean that you must stand during the night as well? Of course not. There’s no shame in sitting down, and here’s what happens if you don’t. In the middle of the night you don’t want to turn on the light, because it hurts your eyes and makes it harder to go back to sleep, so you decide to go in the dark. You think you have a pretty good idea where the toilet bowl is. So you stand there in the dark, straining for cues and luminosities, saying to yourself that it’s a very large bowl anyway and the chances are good that you’ll hit the mark. And yet of course you’re sleepy and you may have a slight nonsexual stiffening and you’re clumsy. So you let some pee down into the darkness. You listen for the sound. Is it the sound of a fluid stream hitting water? That’s good. Then you’re fine. Is it, on the other hand, the sound of a coherent fluid stream hitting porcelain? That may be good or it may not be good, depending on whether you’re hitting the porcelain of the actual inside of the bowl, around the water, or the porcelain on the edge. A doubt arises. Very probably it’s the porcelain near the water. You’ll know that it is near if you make a tiny left or right adjustment and hear the confirming sound of water. And you wonder, Which way do I adjust the aim? It seems like I might be aiming a little too much to the left. So you correct by directing the stream a little to the right, and the sound changes, and now you’re in trouble, because it’s the sound, you’re pretty sure, of pee hitting rim and maybe even floor, so you quick jerk back to what you think is your original position. But it isn’t the original position. You’ve lost your bearings now, you’re wandering in an unknown forest, and you have a suspicion that maybe the stream has split into a V; when that happens, no amount of course correction will help. You clamp off the outflow and turn on the light to take stock. If you can’t see anything on the floor, you’re okay, but if there’s an obvious small pool, then you have to get the undersink sponge going or use bunched-up toilet paper to dab it up, and the bending with the bunched toilet paper sends blood to the head, further waking you up. Now you’re much more awake than you would have been had you turned on the light in the first place. Not all of the pee will be cleaned, either, because it is the middle of the night, and nobody cleans things up that well in the middle of the night. Eventually over some weeks a faint smell will arise. That’s why I recommend sitting.