It does funny things to people—a fire, that burning away of the thin crust. Kirby tells Mary Ann about two young men in 54 THE HERMIT’S STORY their thirties—lovers, he thinks—who, bewildered and bereft as their house burned, went out into the front yard and began cooking hamburgers for the firefighters as the building burned down.
He tells her about a house full of antiques that could not be salvaged. The attack crew was fighting the fire hard, deep in the building’s interior—the building “fully involved” as they say when the wood becomes flame, air becomes flame, world becomes flame. It is the thing the younger firemen live for—not a smoke alarm, lost kitten, or piddly grass fire, but the real thing, a fully involved structure fire—and even the older firemen’s hearts are lifted by the sight of one. Even those who have been thinking of retiring (at thirty-seven, Kirby is the oldest man on the force) are made new again by the sight of it, and by the radiant heat, which curls and browns and sometimes even ignites the oak leaves of trees across the street from the fire. The paint of cars parked too close to the fire sometimes begins to blaze spontaneously, making it look as if the cars are traveling very fast.
Bats, which have been out hunting, begin to return in swarms, dancing above the flames, and begin flying in dark, agitated funnels back down into the chimney of a house that’s on fire, if it is not a winter fire—if the chimney has been dormant—trying to rescue their flightless young, which are roosting in the chimney, or sometimes the attic, or beneath the eaves. The bats return to the house as it burns down, but no one ever sees any of them come back out. People stand around on the street—their faces orange in the firelight—and marvel, hypnotized at the sight of it, not understanding what is going on with the bats, or any of it, and drawn, too, like somnambulists, to the scent of those blood-rivers, those vapors of new birth that are beginning already to leak back into the world as that skin, that crust, is burned away.
…
The fires almost always happen at night.
This fire that Kirby is telling Mary Ann about—the one in which the house full of antiques was being lost—was one of the great fires of the year. The men work in teams, as partners—always within sight, or one arm’s length contact, of one another, so that one can help the other if trouble is encountered: if the foundation gives way, or a burning beam crashes across the back of one of the two partners, who are not always men; more and more women are volunteering, though none has yet joined Kirby’s crew. He welcomes them; of the multiple-alarm fires he’s fought with other crews in which there were women firefighters, the women tended to try to out-think rather than out-muscle the fire, which is almost always the best approach.
Kirby’s partner now is a young man, Grady, just out of college. Kirby likes to use his intelligence when he fights a fire, rather than just hurling himself at it and risking getting sucked too quickly into its maw and becoming trapped—not just dying himself, but possibly causing harm or death to those members of his crew who might then try to save him—and for this reason Kirby likes to pair himself with the youngest, rawest, most adrenaline-rich trainees entrusted to his care—to act as an anchor of caution upon them, to counsel prudence and moderation even as the world burns down around them.
At the fire in the house of antiques, Kirby and Grady had just come out to rest and to change oxygen tanks. The homeowner had at first been beside himself, shouting and trying to get back into his house, so that the fire marshal had had to restrain him—they had bound him to a tree with a canvas strap—but now the homeowner was watching the flames almost as if hypnotized. Kirby and Grady were so touched by his change in demeanor—the man wasn’t struggling any longer, was instead only leaning out slightly away from the tree, like the masthead on a ship’s prow, and sagging slightly—that they cut him loose so that he could watch the spectacle in freedom, unencumbered.
He made no more moves to reenter his burning house, only stood there with watery eyes—whether tears of anguish, or irritation from the smoke, they could not tell—and, taking pity, Kirby and Grady put on new oxygen tanks, gulped down some water, and, although they were supposed to rest, went back into the burning building and began carrying out those pieces of furniture that had not yet ignited, and sometimes even those that had—burning breakfronts, flaming rolltop desks—and dropped them into the man’s back yard swimming pool for safekeeping, as the tall trees in the yard crackled and flamed like giant candles, and floating embers drifted down, scorching whatever they touched. Neighbors all around them climbed up onto their cedar-shingled roofs in their pajamas and with garden hoses began wetting down their own roofs, trying to keep the conflagration from spreading.
The business of it has made Kirby neat and precise. He and Grady crouched and lowered the dining room set carefully into the deep end (even as some of the pieces of furniture were still flickering with flame), releasing them to sink slowly, carefully, to the bottom, settling in roughly the same manner and arrangement in which they had been positioned back in
