The Keenan House Fire

We were on our way home from the dairy when the Keenan house caught fire. There'd been heat lightning overhead for at least half an hour, but no rain. When the lightning struck, the house went up quick, the whole right side swallowed in orange by the time we passed.My father was shouting, "Oh Lord, oh Lord. Mary, what do we do?""Drive on up to the Strawberry," my mother said, calm as she ever was. "They've got a phone."Two men on motorcycles passed us, turning into the drive. They were the first on the scene, the paper would report, heroic in their efforts, tying bandanas round their mouths to storm the front door. They got two of the cats and one dog, a few minor burns. They refused to give their names.The Keenans had three children—Carolyn, Cleo, and Clifton. Cliff was my age and we went to the same kindergarten, a small room in our church, full of sunflowers and praise. Carolyn was seven, I believe, and Cleo was just a baby, not even one year old. My father ran for the phone in the back office of the farm market (known always as the Strawberry for the large, smiling strawberry on its sign), and I thought of Cleo, the littlest one, so small.We stayed at the Strawberry much longer than we needed to, watching the volunteer fire trucks from every rural community within thirty miles rush to the flaming house. Neighbors had gathered."They won't be able to do anything," my father warned. "That house'll burn to the ground."He was wrong. Only half of it did.We waited for reports of injuries, for ambulances to join the fire engines, but they didn't come."That's a bad sign."My mother was selecting ears of corn for our dinner. "I completely forgot, dear." She didn't even look up as she spoke. "The Keenans aren't home. They're visiting Jeannie's relatives in Maine until next weekend." She bent to the corn, pulling back husks and silk to get a good look at the kernels. It was late May—corn and peach season. "What a horrible homecoming."Just the year before, the Keenans had poured a new foundation and moved their hulking farm house to the back forty acres of their land to get away from the traffic on 98. It'd been a huge endeavor, my father said. "A bad idea, if you ask me."Maybe the house wouldn't have been hit if it'd stayed in its original location. Maybe the Keenans would've continued their lives on the land Mr. Keenan's great-grandfather had farmed. Maybe the two cats and one dog that'd been saved (others hadn't) wouldn't have finished their days in the Baldwin County Humane Society. Maybe that would've been better.As it was, I didn't see the Keenans again, at least not there, at home. The land went up for sale within a month of the fire, the property listed "as-is" for half its rightful value. It sold quick, and the new owners let the soybean fields go to weeds, yellow coltsfoot clogging the furrows. They left the house standing half-burned.Rumors about the Keenans came down to us through the years. We learned that Mr. Keenan had gotten swept up in the organic farm movement, giving over his Southern agricultural skills to New England idealists, the venture surprisingly successful, affording them the pleasure of a lovely old home in a historic neighborhood. Those rumors made me think the fire was a good thing, pushing them off in this new direction.But then Cleo died on a playground. She died from a fall. As I listened to the adults talk, I kept picturing a baby in their descriptions, little Cleo, Cliff's baby sister in her frilly pink bloomers and tiny sunhats. In kindergarten, I'd envied Cliff that baby, coming to stand next to Mrs. Keenan when she picked Cliff up from school, staring at the baby in her arms."Put your finger in her hand, Jessie," Mrs. Keenan had said to me. "She'll squeeze it."I pictured those little fingers closing around mine, surprised by their strength. How could that tiny person fall from a jungle gym? She couldn't even walk.But the Cleo that died was five, the age I'd been when I watched her house burn, and she'd hit the back of her head hard enough on the metal structure that she'd caused her brain to bleed. Mr. and Mrs. Keenan hadn't thought it was serious. They'd leaned toward an assumption of safety rather than danger. We all want everything to be all right. But Cleo wasn't. When they finally did bring her to the doctor, no one could save her. All of this we learned from Mrs. Morgan, my music teacher, who'd taught both Mrs. Keenan and Carolyn, the oldest Keenan child, before the fire."That poor family," she said, looking over the sheet music, past the great lid of her piano. "Start over, Jessie. And if you ever want to start those violin lessons, you'd better start minding the tempo." She spoke in time with the metronome. I played. "Better," she said. "Again."I didn't hear about the Keenans again until I was at the conservatory."Make your father go to the doctor," my mother said to me over the phone. "He's being stubborn. Oh, and you'll never guess who's back—Carolyn Keenan.""Really?" I asked. "Why?""She's the new music teacher at the elementary school. We ran into her at the Strawberry the other day, and she recognized us. You'll have to get together the next time you're home."I was still angry with my parents for raising me in so small and isolated a part of the country, populated mostly by retirees and kids too cheap for the Florida beaches. How anyone could move back, I didn't know."What about the rest of the family?""Oh," my mother said. "It's really so terrible. You know Jeannie and Tom divorced after Cleo's accident. You knew that, right? And even though it was Jeannie's family in Maine, Tom stayed. He's still doing the farming thing and Cliff's doing it too, I hear. Anyway—didn't I tell you this?—Jeannie moved to the Midwest with some younger man, and she wasn't there a month before she got into a horrible car accident.""Is she all right?""Sweetie, I swear I told you this. Mrs. Morgan told me right after it happened—they stayed very close, you know—I mean it's been years, Jessie. You don't remember?""You didn't tell me, Mom."My mother sighed. "The accident made an invalid of her. She passed away in a home last year, right before Carolyn moved back.""Jesus.""Jessie.""Sorry. It's just so awful.""Yes," my mother said. "But we can't know why things happen the way they do. Here, talk to your father."My mother has never lingered long with tragedy, her brushes with it always a step removed, something that's happening across the way, to someone else. I don't know if it's because she's truly lucky or whether her attitude simply forbids tragedy to enter her life, if she somehow has the ability to keep it away."Jessie!" my father shouted into the phone."Go to the doctor. You're worrying Mom.""Fine, fine. You'll be home for Christmas?""Of course," though my time in the Northeast had made me dislike my home even more—the humidity and bugs, the laziness, the billboards, the churches every quarter mile, the used car lots in people's front lawns. The first summer I went back, I saw four men erect a semipermanent carport on a cement slab, fill it with plastic chairs and coolers, and call it home for the few weeks I stayed.But at least the winters were mild, soft and sunny enough to grant me a short-lived tan, and there were drinks at Pirates Cove, gutted of tourists, frequented only by the resident dogs. I'd always liked it best that way. And so I came for Christmas and went to the Cove for a burger and a Dark and Stormy. I went to look at the bay and to sink one of my parents' rusted lounge chairs into the sand at the water's edge. I went to say hello to Gerry, the owner, a long-time friend of my father's, practically an uncle, and always behind the bar."Jessie," he cried when he saw me, and "Gerry!" I cried back, coming round the counter to hug his wide belly."Ruined yet?" he might have asked, and I probably said, "Not quite." Gerry'd been teasing me my whole life.I ate my burger and finished my drink, then ordered up a double to take out to the beach with its pirate flags and sunken ship's mast, its short trees and splintery picnic tables. Gerry's big dog followed me down. I was embarrassed to feel as at home there as I did.Though my mother kept pressuring me to, I didn't get together with Carolyn Keenan while I was home."You're both musicians," she insisted. "You'll have so much to talk about."But what could I have said to Carolyn Keenan? "I saw your house struck by lightning," or "Your dead baby sister used to squeeze my finger," or "I may have kissed your brother in kindergarten, though it just as easily could have been the other black-haired boy in the class." We could have reminisced about piano lessons with Mrs. Morgan, but even those were tragic in their way. "Remember Mrs. Morgan? The woman we never wanted to become? The old lady stuck renting her grand piano to kids who'd inevitably outgrow her instruction? Kids who moved on to the professionals at the university in Mobile even though the drive was an hour each way?" Mrs. Morgan never forgave my abandonment of her, and I imagined Carolyn Keenan building up the same resentments, aging away behind her school-issue spinet, the walls of her classroom hung with cartoonish staffs and notes.I knew Carolyn Keenan only by her misfortunes, and it was both too much and too little to know of a person. How could I possibly meet her for coffee?"You've gone to the doctor?" I asked my father when I was leaving."Yes, yes. All's well."I kissed him on the cheek at the airport. "Take care. Keep Mom in line.""It's the other way round." He kissed me back. "See you in the summer."But that Christmas was my last extended visit for five years. I had excuses every holiday, valid ones. There were budding-career excuses (the conservatory in England, the summer placements in other symphonies), and then there were fiancé excuses."We're spending Christmas with Greg's parents this year," I told my mother."But they got you last year.""Jill just had a baby. Next year, Mom. I promise."But the next year didn't work either. Greg's other sister had a baby, and the whole family was going to Mexico for the break anyway. Our tickets were paid, our rooms booked."I'm sorry," I told my mom."At least invite us to the wedding. If there ever is one.""What does that mean?""You've been together for years, Jessie, and living together for most of them."In her calm way, my mother was infuriating. I thought of her saying, "Oh, I just remembered—the Keenans aren't even home." Oh, I just remembered—you're shacking up with a man who'll never marry you."How's Dad?""Oh, he's fine. And how is the music life?" My life was always a different life—my mother made sure to identify it as something foreign, something people usually didn't do."I should know about the New Jersey position in the next couple days.""Is that the temporary one?""Yes, but it could easily grow into something permanent. Most of them are temporary anyway, when you're just starting.""But you've been out of school five years now, haven't you?""That's not very long, Mom.""Oh, you're right. I don't know what I'm talking about anyway. Enjoy Mexico, dear."I did enjoy Mexico. Greg's family had a favorite resort on the Caribbean side of the Yucatan, everything about it swept and tidy, even the sand, and I spent a lot of time holding babies, my nieces as I called them, kids I would watch grow up. I let waiters bring me drinks on the beach, where I lay on a teak lounge, Greg often beside me on a lounge of his own, occasionally reaching across the sand to rest his hand on my leg.When I was in New Jersey, I ran into a boy I'd grown up with. Brad was his name, which I know because he reminded me. We'd gone to the same schools all the way through, but I remembered him only by his freckles, and the time he'd gotten in trouble for putting his sandwich in the hamster's cage in third grade. He was the one to see me on the street, to grab my arms in a nearly threatening way."Jessie!""Yes?""Brad Jones. Remember?"In another month, my fiancé would leave me. My father would tell me he had kidney cancer. I'd go home, even though I'd sworn I never would. I had nothing yet to remember."From Lillian," he said."Oh, right. Brad."His hands still gripped my upper arms, and he pulled me into a hug I didn't feel he deserved, though I put my arms around him all the same."Jessie," he said."Brad.""I've thought about running into you.""Really?" I pulled away from him."Who doesn't think of running into their first kiss?"I smiled at him, a half-smile out the corner of my mouth. I have no recollection of ever being alone with Brad Jones, of ever liking Brad Jones, or finding him attractive, crush-worthy, a boy to discuss with my girlfriends. I couldn't even remember if my first kiss had been with Cliff Keenan or that other dark-haired boy. Maybe I'd kissed them both, and now Brad too."Are you well?"I told him about my position with the symphony, about all the future positions I was applying for, already steeped in auditions. "And you?""Great." He put his hand on my arm again. "You wouldn't like to grab a drink, would you?""I'm meeting my fiancé in just a bit." I looked at my watch, an unnecessary gesture. "Sorry."He was clearly disappointed, and there was part of me that was disappointed too, part of me that wished I remembered this past of his, this poignant memory that would make him significant."Sorry," I said again and squeezed his arm, like he'd squeezed mine. "Take care, Brad."He nodded, and I left him standing there.Greg and I laughed about it that night over dinner."You don't remember him at all?""Not in that context.""Poor bastard," Greg said, and I agreed. Poor Brad.When she collected me at the airport, my mother remarked on the number of suitcases I'd brought. "You're staying a while?""Just until Dad's better.""That could be a while, dear.""Yes," I said. "I'm staying a while." I hadn't yet told her about Greg.I rummaged in their garage for a chair and went to Pirates Cove. It was slow enough that Gerry waited on me out at the edge of the bay, refilling as I went."You need some water yet?" he asked after my third."Not yet."He took my empty glass. "Should I bring you one more and then cut you off?""Maybe."The waves slipped past my ankles, nudging at the thatched nylon of my chair. The cicadas were quiet in their cypress trees, their metallic buzz cooled by the weather. There was no one around, the RV court empty, the docks bare, the sailboats battened down under their canvas tarps.When he brought my drink back, he asked after my father."He's all right. Anxious about the surgery, but that's to be expected. Mom says there's barely any risk at all."Gerry nodded. "I haven't seen them in a while.""I think they're staying in more."He nodded again, and stood there next to me, his eyes out on the water."It's changed down here, Jess." I looked up into his weathered face, a little more lined than it'd been when I was a child, but the same face it'd always been. And the place around him, the bar and the beach and the water—it hadn't changed at all."How's that, Gerry?""The houses, the people. It's not the same."There were more people, new houses along the bay, along the county roads, new subdivisions that'd sprouted up in pastures. The old Keenan place had turned into one, at least the front forty acres along 98, the old rows replanted with squat brick squares, identical as the crops that used to grow there.I'd driven by earlier, running errands for my parents, getting their cheese and their produce. The road from 98 had been paved years before, a black cable stretching out through the fields and orchards, over the red clay, and I knew the back forty only by the end of the new homes. There was little to recognize the home site by, its drive overgrown in the twenty-five years it'd stood empty, its yard gone wild, its pecan trees craggy with spent branches. The half of the house that'd stayed standing had caved in on itself within a couple years of the fire, and the boards had settled themselves into piles, mulching toward dirt."What's wrong with a little change?" I asked Gerry.He shook his head. "You give your father my best."Several days after my father's surgery, I got a call from a small but respectable orchestra in Minnesota, somewhere I'd never imagined myself going, but a place that has suited me well enough. I even like the cold in the winter now, the way it crisps my breath."I got a job," I told my father when I visited him in the hospital. He'd be in for another week, long enough to be sure his remaining kidney could take up the slack, that his system would carry on. He'd start a short round of chemotherapy another week later. "In St. Paul.""And Greg's all right with Minnesota?""He has family there."My father nodded. He was tired and thick, his normally lean face swollen strangely, a flap on his neck that cradled his jaw. His feet bulged in their anti-clot socks; his hands seemed incapable of any function, great meaty paddles, the fingers fused together. He'd played the violin when he was a boy, at his mother's insistence, but he'd given it up when the choice was his own. My first violin had been his."Your mother will be happy to hear it. She's been worried.""That I'll stay?""No—of course not." He coughed, the effort causing him pain, forcing both of his hands to his stomach as though to hold in his guts. He took a breath through his nose. "We love having you here, but we know you hate it." His face smoothed itself, wrinkles sliding back into his bloated skin. He let his hands slip to the sides of his body. I looked away from him, to the greeting cards that lined the windowsill."Grab that one," he said. "With the music notes on the front. You'll appreciate it."The printed message was all jingle, and it made little sense—something about hitting those high notes again—but the signature caught me."Is this from Carolyn Keenan?""She's a Douglas now, but yes. Sweet of her, huh?""Are you close?""No, not really. She's been filling in on the organ at church through the summers for the last few years—Linda and Rob have been taking off in their motor home—so we've gotten to know her some." My father smiled, thinking of Carolyn. "She's married, you know, with a little girl—Hettie. She's growing like a weed."I was surprised my mother hadn't told me that Carolyn Keenan was a Douglas, a wife with a weedy little child."You remember when we saw their house burn?" my father asked. "You must have been about Hettie's age."I stood Carolyn's card back up on the sill. "It's the only time I've seen lightning strike."My father was staring at me when I looked back, a smile on his face like the one I'd given Brad back in New Jersey—humorous as it was condescending."What are you talking about, Jess? That house didn't burn from lightning. It came from the inside, something electrical, they thought.""Really?"My father's smile slipped, but he nodded. He was tired. He needed to sleep. I reached out and squeezed his pulpy hand, soft with water.When I tell people the story of the Keenan house, of watching it burn, I say, "I saw the lightning strike." There is my father racing to the Strawberry, calling it in, my mother with the corn, the small talk, the fire trucks. I can see that lightning, like I hear Mrs. Morgan's voice and feel baby Cleo's hand. These small pieces are my childhood. They are all I have to define the pressure of that place, the boiled sense of it, the closeness of the air, the low-hanging sky.It is possible that the Keenan house didn't burn from lightning, that its destruction was much slower—the gradual wearing away of a wire—just as it's possible that, without the fire, the Keenans could have scattered in just the same manner. Cleo and Jeannie could have died their respective deaths. Cliff and Tom could have become New England farmers. Carolyn alone could have returned."Do you need me to stay?" I asked my mother. "To help with Dad?""Oh, no, sweetie. Your father's fine."I think I knew, even then, that he wasn't."How are you?" I asked her. We were in the kitchen, my mother tearing lettuce leaves. I'd fly out the next morning."I can't wait to hear about the wedding," she said. "You'll keep me apprised of your plans?" That was her answer. That's how she was.She knew there would never be a wedding, my marriage her house fire, a story that wasn't even hers. I suppose we're alike in that way—holding on tight to other people's lies because they keep us from looking at our own.