Issue 2, Spring 2024

Fiction

Fired Up

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

I was sitting upstairs in my family’s new “house.” They had moved to a converted Odd Fellows hall while I was away at school. I’d set up my bed and desk in a large space upstairs. The wood floor was unfinished, and decorative paper covered the walls and ceiling.

Next to the outside wall was a potbellied stove. A smoke pipe ran from the top of the burner to a chimney. I opened the hinged-metal door and discovered the stove was empty. The main compartment looked like it could be used, so I fetched some sticks from a brush pile behind the house, laid the sticks on newspaper in the firebox, and lit the tinder.

My brother and sister came to look at the flames. “Can we toast marshmallows?” my sister asked.
My brother went to look for the candy. He found some dried puffs in a plastic bag and brought them upstairs. “We can use this,” he said, offering a long metal fork.

I skewered a marshmallow and held it over the fire. My idea was to brown the outside and soften the inside, but the white puff caught fire and turned to ash.

At that point, my father showed up. “The chimney is full of soot,” he said. “You could start a flue fire.”

*

I sat on the concrete front steps of the building and looked out. Two farmers, a father and son, passed in front of me. One was driving a tractor that had a wagon hitched to it. The other was walking between rows of corn, pulling ears off stalks and throwing them into the wagon. When they passed in front of me, they looked at me with recognition but made no gesture of greeting.

I looked to the left, down the one street of the town. There was an intersection a few hundred yards away. It was T-shaped, with a county road ending at the town’s one street. My family’s former house stood there, but I couldn’t see it. Other houses and full-leaved trees were in the way.

*

At supper, my father told us how he had acquired the building. “It was up for auction,” he said. “I put in a bid of two thousand dollars. The next-highest bid was five hundred.”

We were sitting in at the back of the building, where a kitchen and a small dining area had been added.
“It was a meeting hall for a fraternal group,” my father continued. “Did you notice the peepholes in all of the doors? It was a secret society.”

“The building had no plumbing,” my mother said. “There’s an outhouse in the back. It reminds me of the latrines we had in China.”

“I hired a contractor to dig up the yard,” my father said. “A backhoe made a trench for a septic tank. That project cost twenty thousand.

“They should install plumbing in the countryside,” my mother said. “It’s not healthy to put human waste on the fields.”

My father picked up a beer bottle from the spot next to his plate. “I got the money from my mother,” he added. “My father was a banker. Now that he’s gone, she has all the cash.”

*

My brother and sister and I invented a routine for entering and leaving rooms. The one entering would knock, and the two inside would respond. “Is someone at the gate?”

The “gatekeeper” would flip open a peephole cover and look through the lens.

“Is it a trusted Fellow?”

“Yes, a faithful Odd Fellow,” the gatekeeper would reply.

“Open the gate.”

“Honorable Fellow, the gate is open.”

The faithful attendee would then enter the meeting hall.

*

I had brought my belongings in a used car my father had given me for my last year of college. The car was almost twenty years old, and it didn’t move fast. Its top speed was sixty. I’d piled my possessions onto the seats and into the trunk. I had clothes, books, and a bulky stereo system. I took everything out and made a pile in the room where I was staying.

I was planning to go to New York, where a college roommate had extra space on his floor. To stay there, all I needed was a sleeping bag and some clothes. I wouldn’t need the car, so I offered it to my sister, who had just gotten her driver’s license. “Do you want this car?” I asked.

“Does it run?” my sister asked.

“If you can change the tires and the fan belt, you can keep it going,” I said. “The alternator might freeze up, but you’ll be able to drive about fifteen miles before the engine stops completely.”

“I’ll take it,” she said.

*

At night I could hear my father’s voice coming through the floor: “He’s a flower child.”

“What do you mean?” I heard my mother ask.

“He’s a delicate flower. He wants to put blossoms in his hair; he wants to find peace and love.”

“I haven’t seen that in him.”

“He wants to go where there are lots of flower people. Well, he can go there, and they can grow their own garden.”

*

I started another fire in the potbellied stove. This one was larger than the first. I’d found some sizable pieces of wood and had jammed them into the fire holder.

Presently, I heard a neighbor yelling, “Fire!”

I looked out a window and saw a woman waving her arms. Her children were with her, and they were all jumping and shouting.

I ran outside and saw flames shooting from the chimney at the side of the house. My brother and sister soon joined me. My father was sleeping off his latest binge, and my mother was away at work. I went back inside and struck at the fire in the stove with an unburned stick, but that didn’t stop the flames in the chimney.

Momentarily, a fire truck arrived and firefighters propped a ladder against the house. They climbed to the top of the chimney, pointed the nozzle of portable extinguisher into the opening, and unleashed a white cloud of chemical foam. Some of the particles came down the flue and into my room.

Later, I gathered what I needed for my trip to the city. My belongings were still intact. I had been home a total of two weeks, but I was ready to hit the road.