Richard Ford - Wildlife

‘Something’s going to happen,’ my father said, and he tapped his hands, both of them, on the metal window molding. He looked down at the street as if he was thinking. ‘I wish I didn’t feel that way.’

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, ‘So do I.’

My father breathed out a sigh again. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ He was quiet for a moment himself while he looked down at the pavement. ‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘what would have to happen to make me ever leave your mother.’ He looked up at me.

‘Maybe nothing would,’ I said.

‘Nothing I can think of would. That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘Things do have to be able to surprise you,’ he said. ‘This is an odd day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s an important day.’

‘I guess it is,’ I said.

‘I feel exhausted by it,’ he said. ‘Just exhausted.’

And that is what I felt, too, and he must’ve known it. ‘Maybe we should go back home now,’ I said quietly to him.

‘We should. We certainly should,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that in a minute.’

He stood up then and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I looked back, but I couldn’t see what he was doing and did not hear anything. He didn’t say anything that I could hear. He closed the trunk lid, and when I looked out the side window I saw him. He was hurrying up the concrete steps towards Warren Miller’s white house, where the lights were on and piano music was coming out still. He was carrying something — I didn’t know what, but something I thought he had taken out of the trunk of our car. He held it in both hands in front of him. And I had the feeling I have heard about since then that comes with disaster, the feeling of seeing things from a long way away, as if you were looking at them through a telescope backward, but they are right in front of you, only you are fixed there and helpless. It makes you feel cold, and then it makes you feel warm, as if what you’re afraid of is not going to happen, only then it does and you are all the more unprepared to see it and have it happen to you.

What I saw was my father coming to the top of the steps and moving onto the little porch that ran partway along the front of the house. He turned and walked to the very end of the porch, right across in front of the window. I could hear his feet on the porch boards. I heard the faint sound of something being poured out of a bottle. And then I knew what he was doing, or trying to do. The music inside Warren Miller’s house stopped. And it was quiet except for the sound of my father’s boots and the noise of pouring out of a gallon jug, which is what he was holding. He was pouring whatever it was — the gasoline or the kerosene he had bought — out onto the house where the porch boards met the front wall. And I wanted to stop him, but he was moving fast, and I couldn’t move fast enough in the car, just couldn’t seem to work my hands fast or make a noise that would get his attention so I could tell him to stop what he was doing. I saw his silhouette as it passed in front of the window. Then the porch light came on and Warren Miller opened the door just as my father had gotten almost even with it. Warren stepped out onto the lighted porch — I saw his limp. He and my father were standing there together, my father holding the glass gallon jug of gasoline, and Warren holding nothing. It was a strange thing to see. And I thought for an instant that things would be all right, that Warren Miller would take hold of matters, which I knew he could do, and that my father would abandon whatever his plans were — to burn down Warren Miller’s house or to throw his own life and mine and my mother’s away as if they didn’t matter and could just as easily be given up.

‘What’s going on out here, Jerry?’ Warren Miller said, not very loudly. He took a step closer to my father as if he wanted to see better what was happening. And he must’ve smelled gasoline, because he took a step back. Gasoline must’ve been everywhere.

My father stood up straight and said something I could not exactly hear, although it sounded like he said ‘hat on, hat on,’ the same words twice. Then my father squatted down very quickly, exactly in front of Warren Miller, just as if he was about to tie his boot lace. But what he did was strike a match. And I heard Warren say, ‘What in the world, Jerry!’

And then the porch was on fire all around them. The bottle my father was holding was on fire inside and out; the boards where my father and Warren were standing were all on fire. A strip of blue and yellow flame moved in an almost lazy way back to the front wall of the house and then down along the porch to the end, and began to go up the wood siding where my father had first splashed gasoline. The house looked all on fire to me then, or at least the front of it did. I began to move myself out of the car in a hurry, because my father’s boots and the bottoms of his pants were on fire, and he was trying to hit it all out with his hands, and seemed frantic and was jumping.

Warren Miller simply disappeared. I didn’t see him go, but he was gone the instant the flames started. I guessed he was calling for someone to come and help. And my father was left on the front porch alone, trying to keep himself from burning up in the fire he himself had started by some act of jealousy or anger or just insanity — all of which seemed suddenly far in the past and out of any proportion to what was going on.

‘I’m on fire here, Joe,’ my father called out from the porch as I ran up the concrete steps toward him.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. I certainly didn’t.’ He seemed both excited and calm at once, even though one of his boots was on fire. He had put out the other boot and the bottom of his pants leg with his hands. And he had moved from the place where he’d set fire to the edge of the porch, so that he was sitting with one leg over the side and the other one, the one with the boot on fire, beside him, and he was hitting it with his bare hand, not very hard but trying to put out the flame. Behind him, the porch was on fire. I could smell it burning and smoking. I could see the wood front of the house in flames, and feel the heat from it on the air.

I took off my jacket when I got to my father, and I put it over his boot foot where it was burning, and I held it down hard and put my arms around it to close out the flames.

‘I can’t really see myself now,’ my father said. ‘That’s good.’ He did not seem excited anymore. His face was very pale, and both his hands looked black as though they’d been burned. He placed them in his lap, and I thought that maybe he didn’t know what he had just done, or that he had burned himself and could not feel it. ‘Your mother’s not in there,’ he said to me very calmly. ‘Don’t worry. I established that.’ Light snow was beginning to collect on both of us.

‘Why did you light this?’ I said, holding on to his foot.

‘To get things back on track, I guess,’ he said, looking down at his hands in his lap. He raised them a little for some reason, then put them back down. Far away I heard a siren begin. Someone had called the fire department about this. ‘My hands don’t hurt,’ my father said.

‘Good,’ I said. And I let go of his foot and pulled my jacket from on top of it. It looked fine. It did not look like it had been burning even though I could smell the leather and the gasoline that had soaked it. ‘Do you want to get in the car,’ I asked, because that is what I wanted.

‘No,’ he said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do now.’ He turned and looked at the house behind him. There were still flames on the porch and up the boards of the front wall. The bottle he’d had with him had broken. But the fire was dying off from the damp wood and was smoking more than burning, and it did not look to me like the house would burn much more, and would not burn down as I had thought at first. ‘This is all unnecessary,’ my father said, when he turned around to me. ‘Uncalled for. Your mother doesn’t trust me. That’s all. This whole thing is a matter of trust.’ He shook his head and wiggled all ten fingers in his lap as though he was trying to feel them but couldn’t, and it made him nervous, and he wanted to do something to feel them again. They were related in his mind to something important.