But now, see, now, I’ve gone beyond almost. Now I read nothing when I wake up, I just put on my bathrobe and come down here. Nothing has happened to me when I sit down in this chair, except that I’ve made coffee and rinsed an apple and, at least on this unusual morning, washed a casserole dish. I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I’m wearing it. This whole room warms up from the fire I’ve made: all the surfaces in the room, the picture frames, the Chinese teapot in the shape of a cauliflower, the glass coasters with Claire’s grandmother’s initials on them, the small wicker rocking chair that my father gave to Phoebe when she was four years old — all of it is warming up.
It occurs to me that I haven’t described the fireplace. It isn’t a Rumford fireplace. Rumford was a clever count who figured out, two hundred years ago, how to build fireplaces shallower, so that they would throw more heat into the room. This fireplace is almost a Rumford, but it is an earlier design. It is about a foot and a half deep, with diagonal brick sides. In the fireplace is a cast-iron grate; it is like a small porch or bandstand that holds the logs behind a low railing. There are decorative cast-iron urn shapes on each corner. What happens is that the iron gradually gets hotter, and the row of ornamental uprights in the balcony’s railing radiates the heat out onto my feet. Because the grate holds the logs so steadily, I can put my feet an inch or so away from the flame in perfect comfort; only when the fire has really begun burning hard do I sometimes have to move my chair back.
The first year we lived here we were spooked by the chimney experts and didn’t have any fires. The man who sold us the house had stuffed quantities of pink insulation up all the openings. Once while I was unpacking things I heard an angry cheeping. I pulled on the insulation — a cloud of bird-dropping dust puffed out into the room. The cheeping got louder. I went to the bathroom, and when I returned I heard a nibbling sound along with an even louder cheeping, and I saw a bat crouched in a corner, wings half furled, furiously nibbling on a copy of Harper’s Magazine. The bat was angry, baring its teeth like a dog, and the teeth were surprisingly fangy. There had been an article in the paper about rabies and bats; I thought there might be some possibility that this one was rabid. When I imprisoned it under an upside-down plastic trash basket, it began chattering furiously and gnawing at the plastic. I called animal control, which turned out to be a cherubic town policeman of maybe twenty-two and his niece of ten who sat in the patrol car. He trapped the bat in a lunchbox container with a screw-on lid. It was too expensive to test it for rabies, he said; he took a shovel out of his trunk and went off to a far corner of our yard, killed the bat and buried it there. We thanked him and he and his niece drove off. I felt that we’d done wrong. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have been bitten by the bat, but now I think it probably wasn’t rabid, just exhausted and mad after its tangle with the pink insulation.
Once we started using the fireplace, the bats moved to a comfortable spot in the eaves and had babies. Claire was looking out at the dusky sky one summer night from an upstairs window and saw many young ones, she said, black liquid drops, one after another, emerging from a shadowy hole.
Consider for a moment what the chimney sweeps had to do. I bet they ran into plenty of bats. I read about them one morning in a book of essays by Sydney Smith — I fished the book up first thing from the floor beside the bed and opened it to the table of contents, and there in the dimness was a title: “Chimney Sweepers.” Sydney Smith had written the essay for the Edinburgh Review in 1819. The sweeps were boys of seven or eight or nine, who would show up at the appointed house at three in the morning and bang on the front door. The servants, still asleep, wouldn’t let them in, and so they would stand in the cold, no socks, chilblains throbbing, waiting. They had to be small in order to fit up the chimneys, of course, and they worked all day in those tiny spaces, carrying the sack of soot from one job to the next, and some got stuck and died in the dark high corners, and before they became hardened to the work their knees bled. One climbing boy — so they were called — told an investigator for the House of Lords that he climbed his first chimney because his master told him that there was a plum pudding at the top. A plum pudding is in effect a prune pudding, but that wouldn’t sound as good.
Now we think of Dick Van Dyke dancing his pipe-stemmed, long legged dance; real chimney sweeps today are chatty men of thirty-five whose trucks are expensively painted with Victorian lettering — they’re the sort of men who also like to dress up as clowns or magicians for children’s birthdays. But back in 1819, it wasn’t a good life, and I found when I read about the climbing boys that I wanted to right the wrong immediately — I wanted to mail letters urging legislative reform, as if the long-ago suffering could be fixed retroactively and all those lost lives redirected.
When we first moved here, we called a local chimney sweep — a software engineer who swept on weekends — who peered up into the brickwork and said that it was all rotten. No way could he sweep it until the chimney was rebuilt. A mason we talked to said the same thing: no fires until you do something radical. So we gave up on fires, and our first winter was very cold.
Then we invited Lucy, our neighbor, over for dinner. She scoffed at the mason and the chimney sweep. She said she used her chimneys every winter, even though they told her she mustn’t. Our house had been here, she pointed out, for more than two hundred years, without once having burned, and the fireplaces had all been in use until very recently, and the two brothers who had owned the place hadn’t installed woodstoves, which deposit creosote. It was unlikely that our chimneys would suddenly become terrible fire hazards; more likely that the experts were judging the old brick too harshly. Light a little fire and see if it draws, she said. Keep a blanket nearby — if you have a chimney fire, which probably won’t happen, stuff the blanket up the chimney and it will cut off the air supply to the fire and put it out.
So we made a small test blaze, clutching an old blanket, and the fireplace worked perfectly. We tried all the fireplaces — they all worked. There was no problem. And the brickwork is in better shape than before because the fires have dried it out.
Some crows are outside; I can hear them. I’m going to take a shower and then feed the duck. She hears me coming and makes her small querying noises, but these days when I flip back the blanket and take away the screen, she drops to the ice and is still. I think it’s because she has to wait until her eyes are adjusted to the daylight, and she wants to be motionless while the adjustment proceeds so as not to draw the attention of a predator. Yesterday, she riveted away at the food I sprinkled into the warm water, blowing snortingly through her beak-nostrils once or twice, and when I walked back to the porch she hurled herself into the air, honking loudly, and landed in a snow-pile, perfectly placed to hop into the porch. It was cold, so I let her come into the porch, and then into the house, where she followed me around, shaking her wings and tail. “Who do we have here?” said Claire at the top of the stairs. After the duck had a chance to get warm I carried her gently to the door and urged her out, feeling her small bones. She didn’t want to go. She can’t be an indoor duck because she leaves green duck artifacts everywhere in her excitement.