Coals Still Burning

by William Pomeroy

I.

One morning just before Christmas, my mother could not find her groceries.

She had carried in several bags then answered a phone call.

A few minutes later, she went to retrieve the balance.

They were gone.

It did not trouble her greatly: “Maybe someone needed them more.”

But we started locking our doors that night.

Our neighborhood always had been safe and comfortable: retirees with small plots near the river, borderline picturesque homes.

Our house was tan with green shutters and a white picket fence. When, months beforehand, an electrical fire destroyed our backyard woodshed, Mom had constructed a large one-room suite to fulfill her dream of a bed and breakfast. The waterfront view was enchanting until a giant, gray, prefabricated building appeared between and swallowed the open lot.

My older sisters implored Mom to be cautious, less than naïve enough to leave open her car—but it was Christmas. We lost ourselves in company, savoring rare treats that descried our collective love individually.

Swept away in Utopian peace by giving and receiving, we convinced ourselves that danger had passed. The crime was freakish, but isolated.

A thick snow fell on December 27 while my father and I hunted the creek beyond his farmhouse. Mallards, black ducks, scaup and Canadas poured in, visibility low, not detecting snow piled on backs of decoys. I crashed into the river sporadically to dip them, but there was hardly time between volleys to drink our thermos of hot chocolate. Scalding barrels warmed our hands as falling white powder hid their dark-gray smoke. And their burning stench alloyed the air while empty shells multiplied.

After carrying double handfuls of birds into the plywood shed and looping cord around their purple-tinted black and chrome green, bulging heads, slinging them over a crossbeam to age, I sat before the woodstove, devouring smoked salmon and homemade cinnamon rolls. Full and happily tired, I washed away the cold sweat of melting snow in a hot shower.

Thoughts of destruction were nowhere close.

The following night (December 28), my sister Josie’s roommate was visiting so we decided to see a film: the latest “all-star comedy.”

I sat comfortably among three very different looking women: my mother, brunette, Josie, blonde, and Michela, olive skinned.

Having been raised essentially by three mothers, my sister Eliza (the eldest) included, this company was familiar—and I needed attention, since I had lost recently, to another, my first serious girlfriend.

The film was amusing: we laughed, happy for the occasion, sharing playful looks and popcorn.

About halfway through, Josie signaled she would return.

I watched her disappear near the entrance.

Moments later, she came running down the aisle with our father and Wayne, Mom’s former boyfriend, on either side.

Josie gasped.

“Our house burned down.”

We kept silent as her statement fell.

Around us the crowd erupted in laughter.

Hands over her face, Mom declared: “I can’t take it.”

Outside, I excused myself and walked into a nearby alley.

Once beyond sight, I bashed my hand on a metal dumpster, splitting it open, and vomited on the pavement.

II.

Dad and Wayne waited for me. Next to each other stood my real father and one who lately had, to some extent, assumed his role.

Joined though incensed by their experience with Mom—resentful towards this connection—both men had acquired in minutes the look of days without sleep. Their sunken, dark eyes burned a hole in me: wretchedly sympathetic.

I rode with Dad while Wayne drove the girls. It seemed less awkward. Somehow those worries entered my head.

Dad tried hard to council me, bestowing examples of prior hardship: encouraging words. They swirled the cab in his truck, desperately clinging to empty space.

His intentions were moving, but as I started allowing them, a sickening thought entered: my great-grandfather’s gun was in the house. Dad gave it to me, his only son, as a fourth-generation present.

It was my coming of age.

III.

Our road teemed with police cars, their blue lights frantic. Against coal black sky, blankets of light gray drifted. Streams of people dispersed before me, likely shouting reports and orders—but I heard nothing. Time passed slowly as though lost to death. I felt myself hover like smoke.

As I neared the house, our neighbor ran to inform me the police removed my gun.

It was intact.

But unfortunately, I did not gather myself before seeing our home.

It was a jagged collection of embers decomposing. A few smoking beams remained upright. In horror I beheld a withered skeleton.

How did my sanctuary, where friends felt more at home than anywhere, the core warmth in my life, safest of places, just incinerate? Why did this happen? What am I going to do?

Alone I pondered these questions. No one can give us the strength we need. But I was scarcely a legal adult: when my great-grandfather promised I would “learn to truly feel, and truly see.”

All I had were quandaries pounding my brain like a hideous chant, rubble to sift, and the clothes on my back.

IV.

In our neighbor’s living room I sat with Mom, Josie and Michela.

We devoured pizza on paper plates.

Staring past each other, we barely wiped our mouths.

People called incessantly, offering beds, most confirming the rumor: “victimized” by curiosity. My ears rang hearing, “Is it really true?”

Eliza and Chris (my brother-in-law) were rushing down from Baltimore—but we concealed that Beau, our black and white cat, was missing.

Fire fighters were skimming the rubble and spotlighting trees. While pursuers assured us cats stay close, we prayed Beau would come running.

But time elapsed, drawing Eliza near—so Mom and Josie decided to walk the neighborhood calling his name.

After they left, a policeman and deputy fire marshal came forward, asking if I had been last to exit our home.

“Yes, but my sister Josie was on the steps.”

They said thanks and departed, appearing satisfied.

Moments later, these civil servants resurfaced to casually request a written statement.

“Would you mind sitting in our car? Everything is there already.”

In the backseat of their Crown Victoria I projected honesty. Believing they wanted details, I jotted down my routine of checking kitchen appliances, the back door, windows and lights before locking and closing the front door behind me. As I filled a page with sloppy, adolescent handwriting, the deputy fire marshal complained about “the wife and kids” to his partner in the driver’s seat, about whom I remember nothing except his police uniform and sips from a Dunkin Donuts cup with militant regularity.

But this deputy I recall loathsomely clear. He wore unmarked black and thick glasses. His precisely trimmed, brown mustache and stout cheeks drooping past his neckline like a bulldog spewed aloof entitlement.

I should have noticed long before his cavalier indifference.

He snatched the clipboard and greedily read my statement, glasses rebounding light from a streetlamp; then—“just a formality”—he carefully Mirandized.

“Tell me what really happened.”

“I already have. Twice.”

“I know you’re hiding something.”

“No, I told you everything. Why would I have something to hide?”

“We have your gun in the trunk. If you don’t tell me, you won’t get it back. Don’t start pissing me off.”

Why is he doing this? Why am I being targeted? My age? Having long hair and a beard? Could I resemble an arsonist?

I reeled in shock, watching the attack, and briefly wondered if someone else was under scrutiny.

It sank in gradually, slow cooking hatred. His cynical, drooping face and lifeless stare inflamed my skin while I repeated details like a broken record.

There is little more infuriating, I had learned, than being forced to protest innocence during tragedy.

But the deputy kept threatening and, facing me, contorted in his seat, making violent gestures, striking air, he paused to offer me a doughnut.

I could barely answer “No.”

His flippant courtesy in the midst of accusation was grotesque.

So when he started inventing facts, “You left separately, ten minutes after your family”—I boiled over.

“That’s it. I have cooperated fully. You took my property to ransom a confession. Every resident of this block will confirm I left beside my sister…. Don’t tell me when and how I traveled. You were not here. Clearly you were at Dunkin Donuts. My name is on the deed. Get off this property…. I’m sending Wayne for my gun. Hand it over and, unless you want your badges gone for this heinous shit, this fucking joke of an investigation, drive away immediately. Leave us alone!”

I was not close to ready, but for months I would have to survive.

V.

After a sleepless night on Wayne’s pullout couch, I found myself where, yesterday, our house existed. Still in soot-covered jeans and a Christmas sweater, I stood before the wreck, my breath heaving shallow in rawboned air.

Eliza and Chris were piling residue as Mom spoke with insurance agents and Josie drove home Michela. Hers was a short, baneful visit. And I wondered how insurance talks remained specific: all but my gun had been lost.

Exhausted, I glanced at harried sky above decay then offered help.

I could no longer watch suspended motion flailing like a silent film.

Every waterlogged slab felt heavy while clearing the living room floor near our hearth. Casting aside broken glass, shards of metal, ripped tarpaper; as rancid water bled on scorched foundation, I heard my cries to awake from this nightmare ignored—lost in backwards draft spiraling up the fireplace.

It was torched as charcoal, yet above the brick our pendulum clock, black with gold hands and lettering, lay slumped against the corner of a dislodged wall. Longingly I reached for another surviving good—but its edges and facing had melted in gluttonous heat—eight minutes after our departure.

Gazing at boils and sharpened points, my hands nearly their color like a gloveless chimney sweep, I stared at paralyzed hands on this melted clock—until I remembered:

“Police said a neighbor called at five of seven?”

“I think so” Mom replied, still negotiating.

“We left at quarter of seven.”

“Yes?”

“That deputy fire marshal swore I left ten minutes after you, accusing me of the crime…. Not only had our fire been reported, this clock melted at 6:53…. Those bastards were stupider than I thought.”

Nobody cared.

Mom and Eliza were outraged, demanding I “shut up” before insurance agents grew suspicious and threatened our claim.

Eliza approached, resembling Mom but smaller, her blue eyes perplexed. She informed me Dad was coming: I would take a break and help gather oysters.

I stood outside wondering: How could they? No one else sat in that car.

Apparently interrogation scars were just disruptive.

This was not how I planned to escape.

VI.

But the river was calming, tranquil on the surface though roiled beneath. In harsh light its churned depths glowed faintly: what heaven could summon in raucous December.

A low tide exposed pearl-white, translucent edges of worthy oysters. I snatched them greedily with metal tongs and filled buckets caked in mud as my wooden skiff glided through seething current.

Speaking rarely but powerfully there, Dad let nature heal—which, on his farm, never had failed.

Nothing would banish my anger—but as I stopped to rest and breathed deeply, I realized it had quieted.

Staring at nothing, into horizon, light waning, I greeted the river: a world apart, that primal awareness: salt in my lungs, slowly purifying.

As we shucked oysters, Dad’s radio played Neil Young performing “Old Man.” Rashly I had disregarded this song, thinking it overrated: people rarely like greatness.

But I felt raw enough to listen. While opening chords rang, Dad said “I loved this long before I was twenty-four.” Now I would.

The pain in his voice, channeled with clenched fists through subtle poetry, confessed in ethereal vocals, was riveting. I knew Young had truly suffered (rare in artists today), but it was understated: not proclaimed or hidden. Revealing experience for its own sake, he laid bare the “mileage” of volatile life at twenty-four.

This is how it would feel, I thought—and felt understood.

VII.

In no hurry to visit debris, I stayed on Dad’s farm, fitfully sleeping a few hours.

Images of smoldering ash plagued me, along with questions: Who or what caused the fire? How did it start and progress so quickly? Where was our cat?

Answers evaded as I writhed under blankets: mentally back in our rotting home, sensing peril.

The next morning, I waded through swollen chunks of former decoration: couch springs, broken portrait frames, iron candle fixtures blackened. Now I recognized goods that once absorbed our surrounding happiness.

Footsteps heavy, I moved like a Dickens specter through gray air filling charred outlines: a funeral march for lost childhood.

The kitchen was littered. I resolved to clear more black waste.

A terrible scream pierced unquiet stillness. I lunged toward our backyard.

Eliza was in the old utility room, hunched forward, staggering to avoid a fall into rubble. I caught her first, gripping above her elbows.

Two more screams rang while I clutched her: irregular explosions, devastating like a gun being emptied, variations of “No!”

Then a similar, anguished word escaped her twisted body.

It was the name Beau.

His legs and tail sprawled beneath sheets of fallen ceiling.

A Cause and Origin man later explained: Beau ran once the fire started, but collapsed near the back door from smoke inhalation. Housing then crashed on his body, shielding Beau partially from ravenous flames.

Our cat was dead.

I threw my arms around Eliza, holding my last strength against what broke her.

As ruins spun around us, black shards hanging like smiling teeth, we clung to each other and quieted vertigo.

A friend rolled Beau into a piece of carpet then carried him away. His singed tail protruded like that of a rabid fox.

Eliza withdrew and thanked me, wiping her eyes.

Timidly she looked up and said: “This is so unfair.”

It was the kindest I had seen her.

Hours later, I received a message: Beau was in the ground.