Richard Ford - Wildlife

In the end, not very much happened — not what you would expect to happen when one man sets another man’s house on fire and gets caught doing it in front of a street filled with people and at a time when they are afraid of fires. People have been hanged for such a thing as that in Montana.

The two firemen who Warren Miller knew came up and looked at where the fire had burned the porch and around the side of the house. They did not put water on anything, and they didn’t talk to my father or me, though Warren told them that there had been a misunderstanding between himself and my father. Both firemen looked at us then, but just briefly. And then Warren Miller went back down to the street and sat in the back of the chief’s red car. They talked there while we waited. I saw that Warren signed something. The neighbors began to drift away back inside, and the man who had been hosing his house quit and disappeared. The fire trucks left, and the tall woman who had come out of the house with Warren got cold and went and sat in the Oldsmobile and started it to get the heater going. We were the only ones left outside, still sitting on the lighted porch in the cold snowy night. I could smell the smell of burned wood.

My father did not say anything while we waited. He watched the chief’s car, which is what I did, too. Though after a while, maybe fifteen minutes, Warren Miller climbed out of the chief’s car, walked down the sidewalk in front of his own house and up the driveway, where he got in his car, the one he’d been in with my mother and where the woman was waiting on him, and they backed out and drove away down Prospect Street into the night. I didn’t know where they were going, though I never saw him again in my life.

It was then that my father said, very calmly, ‘They’re probably going to arrest me. A fireman can arrest you, too. They’re qualified. I’m sorry about all of this.’

One of the two firemen got out of the chief’s car then. He was the older of the two who had come up and looked at the house. He was smoking a cigarette and he threw it in the grass as he walked up on the yard to where we were still sitting on the edge of the porch. We both knew not to leave, though no one had said that.

‘This is a misunderstanding up here, is what I’ve been told,’ the fireman said to my father when he was close enough. He looked at my father once and then looked past him at the damaged house where the fronts of most of the boards had been burned black. He did not look at me. He was a tall man, in his sixties. He had on a heavy black asbestos coat and rubber boots, and no hat on. I had seen him before, but I did not remember where.

‘I guess it could’ve been,’ my father said, calmly.

‘It’s your lucky day today,’ the fireman said. He looked at my father again quickly. He was just standing there in front of us, talking. ‘This man who lives here stood up for you. I wouldn’t have myself. I know what you did, and I know what it’s about.’

‘Okay,’ my father said. The fireman looked away again. I knew he hated the thought of both of us, and that it embarrassed him and embarrassed my father, too.

‘You ought to get killed for doing a thing like this,’ the fireman said. ‘I’d kill you if I caught you.’

‘You don’t need to say that. It’s right,’ my father said.

‘Your son’s seen plenty now.’ The fireman looked at me for the first time. He stepped toward me and put his big hand on my shoulder. ‘He won’t forget you ,’ he said to my father, then he squeezed my shoulder very hard.

‘No, he won’t,’ my father said.

The fireman suddenly laughed out loud, ‘Hah,’ and shook his head. It was a strange thing to do. I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. ‘You can’t choose who your old man is,’ he said to me. He was smiling, his hand still on my shoulder, as if we knew a joke together. ‘Mine was a son-of-a-bitch. A soapstone son-of-a-bitch.’

‘That’s too bad,’ my father said.

‘Come down to the fire station next week, son,’ the fireman said to me. ‘I’ll show you how things work.’ He looked at my father again. ‘Your wife’s probably worried about you, bud,’ he said. ‘Take your son home where he belongs.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘That’s a good idea.’

‘Your old man ought to be in jail, son,’ the fireman said, ‘but he’s not.’ Then he walked away, back across the yard and down the street to where his red car was and where the younger fireman sat in the driver’s seat waiting. They turned around in the street — just for that moment turning their flashing light on, then switching it off — and drove away.

Across the street a woman stood at her front door watching the two of us — my father and me. She said something to someone who was behind her, someone out of sight inside the house. I could only see her head turn and her lips move, but I couldn’t hear any words.

‘People think they live in eternity, don’t they?’ my father said. Something about the woman across the street made him say that. I don’t know what it was. ‘Everything just goes on forever. Nothing’s final.’ He stood up then. And he seemed stiff, as though he’d been hurt, though he hadn’t been. He stood up straighter, looking out over the houses across the street toward town. A light went off in the house across the street. ‘Wouldn’t that be gratifying,’ he said.

‘I guess so,’ I said. And I stood up, too.

‘This won’t stay important forever, Joe,’ my father said. ‘You’ll forget most of it. I won’t, but you will. I wouldn’t even blame you if you hated me, right now.’

‘I don’t,’ I said. And I didn’t hate him. Not at all. I could not see him very clearly then, but he was my father. Nothing had changed as far as that was concerned. I loved him in spite of it all.

‘You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better,’ my father said. ‘Don’t do that.’ He began to walk in a stiff gait to our car. It was parked where it had been the whole time, on the street in front of Warren Miller’s house. ‘That’s my one piece of good advice to you,’ he said. I heard him take a deep breath and let it out. Far off on another street I heard a siren begin again, and I thought there must be another fire going. And I started after my father, across the yard where it was not snowing anymore. I knew he was not even thinking about me at that moment, but about some other problem I did not figure in. Though I wondered where we would go next, and where I would spend the night, and what would happen to me tomorrow and the day after that. I must’ve believed that I lived in eternity myself then, that I had no final answers and none were being asked of me. And, in fact, even while I walked away from Warren Miller’s house that night in the cold October air, everything that had just happened was beginning already to fade from my thinking, just as my father said it would. I felt calm and I began to believe that things would not turn out so badly after all. At least I thought they probably would not turn out that way for me.

There are several letters my mother wrote me in the time after that–1960 and ’61. In one she said, ‘Try not to think of your life as being different from other boys’ lives, Joe. That would be a help.’ In another she said, ‘You may think that I am the unconventional one in this, but your father is very unconventional. I am not very much.’ And in another she said, ‘I am wondering if my own parents ever saw the world as I do now. We are always looking for absolutes and not finding them. You get an itch for the real thing, and you are not one yourself. Love, at least, seems very permanent to me.’