‘Maybe so,’ my father said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He was staring down. Out in the town I could hear other sirens, ones that had nothing to do with us, but with other people in town who were afraid of fires starting.
‘She was throwing things up to see where they’d land,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It was over before you even knew about it. At least as far as I was concerned.’ He turned and looked at the street again.
Headlights from the fire trucks lit the pavement. I could hear the big engines throbbing. In the yard across the street a man was using a hose to wet his roof. Two firemen were walking out of the dark, wearing their big firemen’s hats and coats and boots and holding fire extinguisher cans and flashlights. The flames were all out on the house, now. Some neighbors were talking to the firemen who were on the truck. Someone laughed out loud.
‘What did you think?’ Warren Miller said to my father, who was sitting with his burned hands in his lap, his face beginning to swell from where he’d been punched. ‘Don’t you think this is a pretty big mistake? What do you think all these people think of you? A house-burner like this. In front of his own son. I’d be ashamed.’
‘Maybe they think it was important to me,’ my father said. He wiped his hands over his damp face then, and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I could hear it go out.
‘They think nothing’s important to you,’ Warren said loudly. ‘They think you wanted to commit suicide, that’s all. They feel sorry for you. You’re out of your mind.’
He turned around and limped out into the front yard where snow was beginning to frost up on the damp grass, and the firemen were halfway up toward the house, pointing their flashlights in front of them and smiling and beginning to talk. They seemed to know Warren Miller. Warren Miller knew people. And we, my father and I, and my mother, didn’t know anyone. We were alone there in Great Falls. Strangers. We only had ourselves to answer for us if things went bad and turned against us as they had done at that moment.
In the end, not very much happened — not what you would expect to happen when one man sets another man’s house on fire and gets caught doing it in front of a street filled with people and at a time when they are afraid of fires. People have been hanged for such a thing as that in Montana.
The two firemen who Warren Miller knew came up and looked at where the fire had burned the porch and around the side of the house. They did not put water on anything, and they didn’t talk to my father or me, though Warren told them that there had been a misunderstanding between himself and my father. Both firemen looked at us then, but just briefly. And then Warren Miller went back down to the street and sat in the back of the chief’s red car. They talked there while we waited. I saw that Warren signed something. The neighbors began to drift away back inside, and the man who had been hosing his house quit and disappeared. The fire trucks left, and the tall woman who had come out of the house with Warren got cold and went and sat in the Oldsmobile and started it to get the heater going. We were the only ones left outside, still sitting on the lighted porch in the cold snowy night. I could smell the smell of burned wood.
My father did not say anything while we waited. He watched the chief’s car, which is what I did, too. Though after a while, maybe fifteen minutes, Warren Miller climbed out of the chief’s car, walked down the sidewalk in front of his own house and up the driveway, where he got in his car, the one he’d been in with my mother and where the woman was waiting on him, and they backed out and drove away down Prospect Street into the night. I didn’t know where they were going, though I never saw him again in my life.
It was then that my father said, very calmly, ‘They’re probably going to arrest me. A fireman can arrest you, too. They’re qualified. I’m sorry about all of this.’
One of the two firemen got out of the chief’s car then. He was the older of the two who had come up and looked at the house. He was smoking a cigarette and he threw it in the grass as he walked up on the yard to where we were still sitting on the edge of the porch. We both knew not to leave, though no one had said that.
‘This is a misunderstanding up here, is what I’ve been told,’ the fireman said to my father when he was close enough. He looked at my father once and then looked past him at the damaged house where the fronts of most of the boards had been burned black. He did not look at me. He was a tall man, in his sixties. He had on a heavy black asbestos coat and rubber boots, and no hat on. I had seen him before, but I did not remember where.
‘I guess it could’ve been,’ my father said, calmly.
‘It’s your lucky day today,’ the fireman said. He looked at my father again quickly. He was just standing there in front of us, talking. ‘This man who lives here stood up for you. I wouldn’t have myself. I know what you did, and I know what it’s about.’
‘Okay,’ my father said. The fireman looked away again. I knew he hated the thought of both of us, and that it embarrassed him and embarrassed my father, too.
‘You ought to get killed for doing a thing like this,’ the fireman said. ‘I’d kill you if I caught you.’
‘You don’t need to say that. It’s right,’ my father said.
‘Your son’s seen plenty now.’ The fireman looked at me for the first time. He stepped toward me and put his big hand on my shoulder. ‘He won’t forget you,’ he said to my father, then he squeezed my shoulder very hard.
‘No, he won’t,’ my father said.
The fireman suddenly laughed out loud, ‘Hah,’ and shook his head. It was a strange thing to do. I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. ‘You can’t choose who your old man is,’ he said to me. He was smiling, his hand still on my shoulder, as if we knew a joke together. ‘Mine was a son-of-a-bitch. A soapstone son-of-a-bitch.’
‘That’s too bad,’ my father said.
‘Come down to the fire station next week, son,’ the fireman said to me. ‘I’ll show you how things work.’ He looked at my father again. ‘Your wife’s probably worried about you, bud,’ he said. ‘Take your son home where he belongs.’
‘All right,’ my father said. ‘That’s a good idea.’
‘Your old man ought to be in jail, son,’ the fireman said, ‘but he’s not.’ Then he walked away, back across the yard and down the street to where his red car was and where the younger fireman sat in the driver’s seat waiting. They turned around in the street — just for that moment turning their flashing light on, then switching it off — and drove away.
Across the street a woman stood at her front door watching the two of us — my father and me. She said something to someone who was behind her, someone out of sight inside the house. I could only see her head turn and her lips move, but I couldn’t hear any words.
‘People think they live in eternity, don’t they?’ my father said. Something about the woman across the street made him say that. I don’t know what it was. ‘Everything just goes on forever. Nothing’s final.’ He stood up then. And he seemed stiff, as though he’d been hurt, though he hadn’t been. He stood up straighter, looking out over the houses across the street toward town. A light went off in the house across the street. ‘Wouldn’t that be gratifying,’ he said.