In the winter we went sledding on Ballentine Hill. When we came inside again, the heat would make our fingers ache. There was an ice storm that closed Elm Heights Elementary for a whole day since no one could keep their footing. I stayed home with my mother and brother and father, as if it were Christmas already.
Uncle Wiggily said the Kinsers’ house would burn down and this happened in the winter. One Sunday morning, my mother answered the door. She was already up, cooking breakfast; I was lying in bed waiting for the house to get warm. I couldn’t hear what she said, but the tone of her voice made me get up and I met my brother in the hallway. The five Kinser children were crying in our kitchen. They were all in their pajamas, their slippers wet with snow, holding toys and books in their laps.
There’d been a fire in Meg’s closet, Barbara, the oldest, said. Barbara found it and then she had to hunt for Meg, who was hiding under her bed and didn’t answer for a long time. And then her mother wouldn’t let her go back and get Tweed.
“Where is the dog?” my father asked.
“She sleeps on the back porch,” said Barbara.
We could hear the sirens coming now. “I think you should wait,” my mother said, but my father went into the snow, his pipe in his mouth, sending streams of smoke around his face. We all watched him from the kitchen window.
He passed the Kinser parents, who were standing in the street watching for the fire trucks. They spoke to him briefly. The Kinser adults didn’t like my father, who didn’t go to church. The rest of my family didn’t go to church either — my brother and I considered it a great gift our parents had given us, our Sunday mornings — but my father drank and was noisy about it. Bobby Kinser, Stevie Rabinowitz, and I argued religion. Bobby’s family believed in God and Christ, Stevie’s in God but not Christ; my family didn’t believe in either one. Also, my father wouldn’t go to the local barbershop, because they wouldn’t take black customers. The barber was a friend of the Kinsers’. My father went up the steps of the Kinser house and in through the front door.
The fire trucks arrived and began unrolling the hoses. My father did not come back. Flames were visible through the glass of the upstairs windows. A net curtain burned, browning and curling at the edges as if it were newspaper. The glass cracked and black smoke came out, thick as oatmeal. The firemen spoke to the Kinsers; there were gestures and shouting. The ladder went up. And then, finally, Tweed bolted into the front yard with my father behind her.
My father had burned his hand, but not badly. The firemen were very angry at him. “You’re not just risking your own life,” one of them shouted. “Someone has to go in after you. You have children. Did you think about them?”
My father hardly paused. He came through the kitchen with Tweed. Tweed checked for each of the Kinser children in turn. My father went to my mother. He was still smoking his pipe. She put his hand under the water faucet. “You’re proud of me,” my father said to her. “You might as well admit it.”
“I shouldn’t be,” she said, holding on to his hand, smiling back at him. “Sometimes I just can’t help myself,” and suddenly, just like that, I was in love with fires and storms, thunder and wind. I can remember a lot of fires and storms in Indiana when I was growing up, but what I remember is that they were never big enough. No matter how much damage they did, I was never satisfied.
In the spring there was a green sky and a tornado watch. “A tornado sounds like a train,” our teacher, Miss Radcliffe, told us. “But by the time you hear it, it’s too late for you.”
“Then how do you know it sounds like a train?” asked Stevie. When the tornado came it picked up a horse trailer and carried it seven miles, dumping it finally in Bryan’s Park just six blocks from where I lived.
In the fall the Imperial Theater was struck by lightning and set afire. I’d seen Ben-Hur there and Old Yeller. Stevie and I biked over. We were unlikely to get permission to go to a fire so we didn’t ask. This was my first fire in the rain. The insides of the theater were gutted, but the outside was untouched. The police wouldn’t let us get near enough to see anything.
In the fall Elm Heights held a Halloween carnival. I wore a red cape with a hood and carried a basket for treats. My brother bought me a cake I wanted with his very own money. There was a booth where you could win a goldfish by throwing a ring over its bowl, and I won at this, too. Barbara Kinser organized all her brothers and her sister to spend their money at this booth. By the end of the evening they’d won thirty-three goldfish, all of which boiled to death in the winter when their house caught fire.
In the spring the nursery school where my mother taught held a picnic at Converse Park. Converse was forty minutes out of town, heavily wooded and big. It contained the Tulip Tree Trace, a twenty-two-mile hike my father took me and my brother and the Kinser and Rabinowitz children on in the summer. We weren’t very old, but we all made it, even Julia Rabinowitz, Stevie’s little sister. I remember my mother sitting on the hood of the car, waiting for us, smiling and waving when she finally saw us all walking in.
My father didn’t come to the nursery school picnic. He was fly-fishing on the Wabash River. He was camping out. He was to be gone the whole weekend. Stevie came to the picnic so I’d have someone my own age to play with.
Stevie said if we walked down the trace, but not all the way down to the sycamores, if we took a turn off to the right and went downhill again, there was a cabin his father had shown him. We went looking for it. My father was a botanist at the university and had been teaching me the names of trees and wild plants. I walked and named things for Stevie.
It took us a while to find it and then it wasn’t really a cabin, just the remnant of a cabin. The front door was gone, if there had ever been a front door. Weeds grew up around the windows, blocking the light. Inside was ghastly, a webby, musty place with one dim little room, a jumble of bad-smelling clothing on the floor, plates and cups and silverware for four on the table. The plates were of tin, the clothes old-fashioned. There was a black dress with a bustle.
“They left in the middle of dinner,” Stevie told me. “Without packing or anything. They left everything.”
I thought there must have been something awful to make them leave like that, something that really frightened them, but Stevie said no. It was gold. A wagon train came by and told them there was gold in California, and they left without even eating their dinner. The food got cold and spoiled and bugs ate it and eventually it just dissolved away, leaving only the chicken bones on the tin plates.
“The historical society keeps the cabin up,” Stevie said, but it didn’t look kept up to me. My mother’s parents lived in California. My grandfather was a dentist and he put gold into people’s teeth. Stevie didn’t have any grandparents at all.
It started to rain. We had about twenty minutes back down the trace to the picnic. The rain was light at first, then so heavy it was hard to walk in it. Water streamed down the trace over our feet, up to our ankles.
The nursery school party was gathered by the picnic tables, which were sheltered and on a hill. I found my mother. She dried my face with a paper napkin, never really looking at me, looking instead down to the gravel parking lot where we’d left our cars. Water covered the lot, deep and deeper. While we watched, our cars began to move, only jostled at first, but then lifted. They floated away, fifty, sixty feet downhill and piled up on each other in a big metal dam.
The city sent a bus and some firemen to pick us up. They stretched a rope across the gravel lot and carried the children, including me and Stevie, across the water. The adults and my brother came next, holding on to the rope. My mother was worried about my father, out on the Wabash in his inflatable boat.