Keep On (6)

The man looked at his watch again and then at the room.

He took it in the way he had taken in the little room downstairs. The calendar with the tractor. The phone face down beside the bread box, which he looked at a moment longer than the rest. The pan in the sink with the potato grease gone white in it.

"I drove past this house, Martin," he said. "More than once, over the years. You keep your porch light off. Hollis never did."

Martin didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything.

"Is there a box somewhere? A good one, with a lid."

"Hall closet. On the shelf."

The man went and got it. It was the box Martin's winter boots had come in, two winters ago, and he set it on the table between them and took the lid off and put the lid underneath it.

"What would you want to keep," he said.

"Keep."

"If you were going to the hospital for a while. If you weren't sure when you'd be back. What would you want with you."

Martin looked at the box. Then at the man's face, which was patient and told him nothing.

"The picture in the hall," he said.

The man went and got it. He came back holding it by the edges in his gloves and stood it in the box so that Bernie looked up out of it, squinting in her sun hat, holding up the fish too small to keep. He didn't look at it any longer than Martin ever had.

"What else."

There was the wedding picture on the dresser in the bedroom, and the other one in the nightstand drawer that Martin had put away and never taken back out. There was Bernie's recipe box, which he never used and couldn't have said why he kept. The man went and got each thing as Martin named it and put it in the box with the others, and came back and stood waiting for the next one, and every time he stood there Martin thought of another.

---

When the box was half full the man sat down again in the other chair.

"So what happened tonight, Martin," he said.

He said it the way you'd ask a man how his day had gone. He folded his gloved hands on the table.

"I fell down the basement stairs," Martin said. "Sunday night. I broke my leg, and I couldn't get up, and I found a door behind the heater."

The man didn't say anything. He got up and went into the front room and came back with the small picture from the top of the television, Bernie and her sister at the beach, and put it in the box. He sat back down.

"It's a long drive to Georgia," he said, mildly. "I've made it a good many times. It's quiet when you get there."

The refrigerator was off. Martin could hear the clock over the stove, which he had never in twenty years been able to hear over the refrigerator. He looked at the box. He looked at the man's gloves folded on the table, and at his own hands around the empty glass.

"So what happened tonight," the man said.

"I was lighting the pilot," Martin said. "On the water heater. It goes out."

"And then."

Martin didn't have the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open a little and nothing coming out of it.

The man nodded, as if that were fair.

"I had a fire, once," he said. "A long time ago. I'll tell you how it went, because people ask, and you want to have it ready." He looked at the box while he said it. "I was relighting the pilot on the water heater, and it caught. A man pulled me out. He carried me to the yard and went back in for a box, and he was gone before anybody came. I never got his name."

He reached over and set the lid on the box. Then he took it off again, as if he'd done it too soon.

"This is everything I got out," he said. "In here. People always want to know that, too."

He looked up.

"So what happened tonight, Martin."

Martin looked at the box. He looked at it a long time. Then he told him.

He told it the way the man had. He was relighting the pilot on the water heater, and it caught. A man pulled him out. Carried him to the yard and went back in for the box, and was gone before anybody came. He never got his name. He said it all the way through to the end, and when he got to the end he said, "This is everything I got out."

The man nodded.

---

He got Martin up out of the chair the way he'd got him up the stairs, from behind, and they went out through the front room with Martin's arm over his shoulders and the splinted leg held stiff off the floor, Martin hopping on the good one, the man taking most of it. The lamp was still on. Out the front door and across the porch. Martin heard the boards under them and thought of the room under the boards with the shelves in it and the chair he'd sat in.

Down the steps. Out across the yard, a long way out, almost to the hedge. The grass was wet and cold. The man let him down onto it slowly and pulled the afghan off the back of the couch over his shoulders, the one Bernie had made, which he must have taken on the way past without Martin seeing.

Then he went back across the yard into the house, and came out with the box, and set it in Martin's lap.

Then he went back in again, alone.

---

Martin sat on the lawn with the box in his lap.

The house sat in front of him with the one lamp on in the front room. The porch light was off. He could see the window wells down along the foundation, two dark little squares on the road side, and the man's car in the gravel drive, an ordinary sedan with its engine ticking as it cooled.

He waited. The cold came up through the seat of his pants. Overhead the stars were all out.

Then, low in the house, the left-hand window well began to change.

It went from black to the color of a match head behind a hand, and then steadier, and brighter. It was coming from the back corner, where the heater stood on its pad with the pegboard swung away from the wall and the little door open behind it. Where he had painted around the board and missed a spot.

The fire department will be here soon.

He heard it again the way the man had said it. In the kitchen, in Bernie's chair, looking at his watch.

---

The man came out the front door and pulled it shut behind him. He came down the steps and across the yard without hurrying. He stopped in front of Martin and held out Martin's phone.

Martin took it.

"Give it a minute more," the man said. "Till you see it in the front windows."

He looked at the house a while, standing there with his hands in his coat pockets. Then he looked down at Martin.

"Goodnight, Martin," he said.

He walked to the car. The door closed the way it had closed coming in, quiet, so as not to wake anybody. The headlights came on and swept across the yard and over Martin, and the car backed down the gravel and turned onto the road and went off toward the bend, past where Doris lived. Martin watched the taillights until there weren't any.

In the front room the lamp went orange. Then the glass in the front windows went orange too, all at once, and something inside the house let go with a soft deep sound like a breath.

He turned the phone over in his hands. Thursday at a quarter after seven Doris would be on her porch with her bag, and he would not come up the road.

He dialed.

"Nine-one-one, what's the address of your emergency?"

He gave it. The whole thing, the road and the number.

"Sir, what's happening there?"

"My house is on fire," he said. "I was relighting the pilot on the water heater, and it caught."

---

The woman on the phone kept him on the line until he could hear the sirens coming up from the bend. Later he told it again, to a young deputy who wrote it down in a small notebook and said that whoever pulled him out was a hero and it was a shame he hadn't stayed. Martin said yes, it was.

The trucks filled the drive. Men in coats moved in the light of the fire and the light from their trucks, and water went up over the porch roof in a long white arc and came down on the house he had lived in for twenty years and on the room under it.

One of the firemen came across the lawn. He crouched down in front of Martin and the box, with his helmet pushed back and his face wet, and put a hand on Martin's shoulder.

"Was anybody else in there, sir?"

Martin held the box.

"No," he said. "Just me."

 

~End~