“The good thing about being up here is that it’s never really too difficult to find what you need to start a fire,” he said. “That won’t be the case everywhere, of course. I’ve started fires in places where there probably should have never been a fire.” He kicked more stones, and there was a slight bit of frustration in his movements. “I really don’t want to have to do this with a pair of sticks,” he said, a hint of laughter at the end of his sentence. “Takes forever and, while I won’t say it’s not worth the effort—because if you ever get into a situation where you really need a fire, any amount of effort is worth it—today’s just one of those days where I don’t really think it’ll give us what we’re looking for. You know?”
“Yes, sir,” Wash replied.
“Aha!” Tom shouted, squatting into a pile of brush. “Here’s what the doctor ordered.” He stood holding a pair of small rocks. He brushed the dirt from them. “Yes,” he said, “these will work just fine.” He came back into the center of the clearing and kneeled and began stacking the bits of wood and grass together. He stretched out on his belly. “It’s difficult,” Tom said. “More difficult than people ever really understand. Everybody thinks that, if they had to, they could start a fire. But the truth of it is that there are few people who could really do it. Not many folks understand the amount of nurturing and care it takes. Every moment it’s on the verge of dying on you. Every single moment.”
“Yes, sir,” Wash said. He found a stick and traced absentminded patterns back and forth in the dirt.
When Tom had arranged the pine needles and grass in a satisfactory pile he held up the two rocks for Wash. “Come here,” he said. “Come and look at what I’ve done.”
Reluctantly, Wash went over and kneeled across from his father.
“The key is to think upward,” Tom said. “The fire has to start at the bottom so you put your thinnest, driest stuff at the bottom.” He struck the two rocks together. A small spark danced in the air, and then disappeared. “If the wind is high,” Tom continued, “you’ve got to be sure that you’re out of it. Block it with something, or pick a better place. You wouldn’t try to start a fire like this out here in the open if it were windy. Wouldn’t ever work.”
“You can also use glasses,” Wash said.
“What’s that?” Tom answered, striking the stones together, his attention focused squarely on the dry grass at the bottom of the pile.
“If you wear glasses, and if they’re thick enough, you can use them to focus the sunlight,” Wash said, an ember of excitement in his voice. “It’ll focus the sunlight enough so that it heats it, just like a magnifying glass, and that’ll start the fire.”
“That sounds like something you read in a book somewhere,” Tom said. “I don’t know which one, but I guess it’s true enough. Just be careful of believing what you read in books. Books are okay enough, I suppose, but too many people forget that there’s a real world out there and that they can touch it, feel it, smell it.” He continued striking the stones together and, slowly, a small thread of smoke began to rise from the pile of brush. “There it is,” he said. He began blowing gently into the base of the fire. “There we go,” he whispered.
But Wash did not see. He looked off into the distance and thought of all the books he had read, all the places he had visited in his mind, all the stories that swirled around inside of him each and every day, like an ocean he had been building up inside himself over the years, page by page, word by word. The ocean was vast and limitless, filled with joy and sadness, terror and betrayal, the deaths of friends and the final fate of enemies. And it was at this moment, as his father lay on the ground, making a fire, as he kneeled across from him, watching the man huff and puff gently into the growing fire, not looking up, not looking around at the world, but only looking into the fire, into the immediate obstacle before him, this was when Wash understood both who his father was and who his father was not.
“There we go,” Tom said, smiling. The small thread of smoke had grown into a long, silver chain rising up out of the air. Tom took more small pine needles and placed them on the growing flame. The fire sizzled and the flame leaped up. “Now we’re making something happen,” he said. “Now we’re building a future.”
For the rest of the day Wash did not ask his father about singing or about books. He gave up talk of folk songs and he did not make any more references of characters he’d read about or scenes he had enjoyed. He only listened as his father talked about fire and all the different ways to build and maintain it. He answered “Yes, sir,” at the proper intervals. He smiled when he felt it was what is father wanted. He spent the afternoon watching the dream of who he thought his father would be if he ever came back to him die, piece by piece, in the firelight.
Yet he could not deny the way that being with the father who had been gone for so long made him remember the family they once were. He remembered the small things: the lavender scent of his mother’s hair, the roughness of his father’s hands as the man lifted him into the air and spun him the way fathers sometimes did. He remembered the sugared strawberries his mother used to make. He remembered the way his father argued with sports announcers while watching football games. And he remembered how it all ended.
They were in the car together, rumbling over the highway with Tom behind the wheel. He was a construct of muscles and brown hair staring out through the windshield and chatting, now again, with Wash’s mother about what she picked out for dinner. Wash was buckled into the backseat, barely tall enough to look out of the window. He lolled back in the seat and watched the clouds as they passed in their predictable patterns, punctuated now and then by the upper quarters of buildings that he remembered from previous shopping trips. His mother turned on the radio and sang along with it and he sang along when he could. There was the sound of their voices mingled with the music and the sound of cars passing from time to time as the blue sky swept along silently, stretching out over the entirety of the world.
And then there was a squeal of the tires and Tom cursed and the sky turned at an awkward angle. The angle steepened until the boy could understand that the car was rolling, over and over. The car trembled and Wash was thrown back and forth in his seat belt and he was frightened. And then, as quickly as it started, everything came to a silent stop. The car was on its side and Wash was crying and calling for his mother. She hung from her seat belt at an awkward angle with her arms swinging limply like pendulums back and forth above the earth.
“Mama! Mama!” Wash called.
“Stay still, Wash,” Tom said. He was on the side of the car that was on the ground and he wrestled with his seat belt until it unfastened. Wash cried and rubbed his eyes and grappled with his own seat belt. “Just stay where you are for a second, son,” Tom continued. There was a tremble in his voice, a wince of pain. It was then that Wash saw the blood.
The glass of the car window had broken and there was a large open wound stretching across the side of his father’s face. Tom reached up with one hand and touched it and grimaced and the blood was beginning to flow. Wash had never seen his father bleed. It felt like a broken promise.
Wash’s mother still hung limply in her seat belt. Tom put his arms around her unconscious body and carefully cradled her neck and, after some effort, released the seat belt. She fell like a marionette doll into his arms. He collapsed beneath the weight of her, barely able to stand. Wash cried harder. “It’s okay, son,” Tom said. “I’m coming to get you. Let me just get Mommy squared away.” He placed her gently at his feet—he was standing on the passenger’s side door, still getting his bearings in the sideways car. Then he maneuvered his way back over the front seat and unbuckled the boy’s seat belt and caught him when he fell. “We’re going to be okay,” he said.
But
