My father walked to the top of the steps and onto the porch. He turned around and looked at the car and then above it at the town lighted beyond the street of houses and the river. Then he walked to the front window and looked inside the house, bent over so he could see. He didn’t try to hide, just stood in the window, looking, so that anybody who would’ve glanced at the window at that moment would’ve seen him.
He did not stay at the window long, just long enough to look around inside at the living room and at whatever he could see through there, the other rooms, the kitchen. Then he turned around and came back down the steps to the street and across to the car where I was sitting, waiting. He did not get in the car with me, only leaned in the window.
‘How do you feel now, son?’ he said. He looked in at me.
‘I feel good,’ I said, though that was not exactly how I felt. I felt nervous to be there, and I wished we could leave.
‘Are you cold?’ he said. He wasn’t talking very loud.
‘No sir,’ I said. I could hear the piano still going inside the house. And I was cold. My arms were cold.
My father turned his head and looked down the street. There was nothing to see. No movement. ‘Maybe I can’t be in love anymore,’ he said, then let out a breath. ‘I’d love to improve things, though. You know?’
‘Yes sir,’ I said. Then I saw Warren Miller. He came right to the window where my father had been looking inside. He stopped a moment and stared out, I thought, at our car, then walked away. He was wearing a white shirt just the way he had the night before. I wondered if my mother was inside the house with him, and if that was what my father had seen when he looked and the reason he’d said what he’d just said. And I decided that she was definitely not inside there, and that she was still at home where we had left her and would find her again if we would just go back.
‘Something’s going to happen,’ my father said, and he tapped his hands, both of them, on the metal window molding. He looked down at the street as if he was thinking. ‘I wish I didn’t feel that way.’
I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, ‘So do I.’
My father breathed out a sigh again. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ He was quiet for a moment himself while he looked down at the pavement. ‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘what would have to happen to make me ever leave your mother.’ He looked up at me.
‘Maybe nothing would,’ I said.
‘Nothing I can think of would. That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘Things do have to be able to surprise you,’ he said. ‘This is an odd day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s an important day.’
‘I guess it is,’ I said.
‘I feel exhausted by it,’ he said. ‘Just exhausted.’
And that is what I felt, too, and he must’ve known it. ‘Maybe we should go back home now,’ I said quietly to him.
‘We should. We certainly should,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that in a minute.’
He stood up then and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I looked back, but I couldn’t see what he was doing and did not hear anything. He didn’t say anything that I could hear. He closed the trunk lid, and when I looked out the side window I saw him. He was hurrying up the concrete steps towards Warren Miller’s white house, where the lights were on and piano music was coming out still. He was carrying something — I didn’t know what, but something I thought he had taken out of the trunk of our car. He held it in both hands in front of him. And I had the feeling I have heard about since then that comes with disaster, the feeling of seeing things from a long way away, as if you were looking at them through a telescope backward, but they are right in front of you, only you are fixed there and helpless. It makes you feel cold, and then it makes you feel warm, as if what you’re afraid of is not going to happen, only then it does and you are all the more unprepared to see it and have it happen to you.
What I saw was my father coming to the top of the steps and moving onto the little porch that ran partway along the front of the house. He turned and walked to the very end of the porch, right across in front of the window. I could hear his feet on the porch boards. I heard the faint sound of something being poured out of a bottle. And then I knew what he was doing, or trying to do. The music inside Warren Miller’s house stopped. And it was quiet except for the sound of my father’s boots and the noise of pouring out of a gallon jug, which is what he was holding. He was pouring whatever it was — the gasoline or the kerosene he had bought — out onto the house where the porch boards met the front wall. And I wanted to stop him, but he was moving fast, and I couldn’t move fast enough in the car, just couldn’t seem to work my hands fast or make a noise that would get his attention so I could tell him to stop what he was doing. I saw his silhouette as it passed in front of the window. Then the porch light came on and Warren Miller opened the door just as my father had gotten almost even with it. Warren stepped out onto the lighted porch — I saw his limp. He and my father were standing there together, my father holding the glass gallon jug of gasoline, and Warren holding nothing. It was a strange thing to see. And I thought for an instant that things would be all right, that Warren Miller would take hold of matters, which I knew he could do, and that my father would abandon whatever his plans were — to burn down Warren Miller’s house or to throw his own life and mine and my mother’s away as if they didn’t matter and could just as easily be given up.
‘What’s going on out here, Jerry?’ Warren Miller said, not very loudly. He took a step closer to my father as if he wanted to see better what was happening. And he must’ve smelled gasoline, because he took a step back. Gasoline must’ve been everywhere.
My father stood up straight and said something I could not exactly hear, although it sounded like he said ‘hat on, hat on,’ the same words twice. Then my father squatted down very quickly, exactly in front of Warren Miller, just as if he was about to tie his boot lace. But what he did was strike a match. And I heard Warren say, ‘What in the world, Jerry!’
And then the porch was on fire all around them. The bottle my father was holding was on fire inside and out; the boards where my father and Warren were standing were all on fire. A strip of blue and yellow flame moved in an almost lazy way back to the front wall of the house and then down along the porch to the end, and began to go up the wood siding where my father had first splashed gasoline. The house looked all on fire to me then, or at least the front of it did. I began to move myself out of the car in a hurry, because my father’s boots and the bottoms of his pants were on fire, and he was trying to hit it all out with his hands, and seemed frantic and was jumping.
Warren Miller simply disappeared. I didn’t see him go, but he was gone the instant the flames started. I guessed he was calling for someone to come and help. And my father was left on the front porch alone, trying to keep himself from burning up in the fire he himself had started by some act of jealousy or anger or just insanity — all of which seemed suddenly far in the past and out of any proportion to what was going on.
‘I’m on fire here, Joe,’ my father called out from the porch as I ran up the concrete steps toward him.
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. I certainly didn’t.’ He seemed both excited and calm at once, even though one of his boots was on fire. He had put out the other boot and the bottom of his pants leg with his hands. And he had moved from the place where he’d set fire to the edge of the porch, so that he was sitting with one leg over the side and the other one, the one with the boot on fire, beside him, and he was hitting it with his bare hand, not very hard but trying to put out the flame. Behind him, the porch was on fire. I could smell it burning and smoking. I could see the wood front of the house in flames, and feel the heat from it on the air.