Synopsis
Book by McElroy Susan Chernak
Extrait
Firewalk
As we wake or sleep we grow strong or we grow weak. At last, some crisis shows us what we have become.
—Bishop Westcott
The raven circled the column of smoke, which went straight up, blossoming like a fat, black balloon in that windless January afternoon. I thought the bird was soaring over someone’s trash pile. Somebody’s really got a heap going, I told myself. And right above our house. Burn piles are commonplace in the rural Wyoming valley where I live. The dark, billowing clouds that always attend them celebrate the site of someone’s old haystack, garden clippings, or collapsed outbuilding. And yet something about this burn pile struck me as different. Something about the location. Where is it coming from? It must be the neighbors just up the road. No, that’s not quite right.
It was four days after the turn of the millennium, and I was returning home all warm and cozy after tea with a friend. The sun was dropping off the horizon, and the late afternoon shadows were dark charcoal. Aspens rested in the foothills, standing bare and serene, with trunks the color of campfire ashes. For me winter in Wyoming is a magic time. There is the cold, yes, but the mountains are so white that they shine even on days when the sun does not. And against that white, the blue of the sky is the color of oceans.
That particular day in early January, the winter landscape had me so captivated that I hadn’t noticed the black smoke balloon rising under the crest of our hill until I was approaching the final turn up the road to our house. For several moments I watched the raven playing tag with the smoke, wondering where the gray cloud originated. I felt irritated, imagining that it would waft its way up to our house, sending me into coughing fits when I went up to the barn to feed my horse and donkeys.
The raven abruptly wheeled and spun away to the east. Instantly my body clamped down upon itself. And with a furious and icy rush of dread, I knew. But for a few moments longer—for as long as my mind would allow me to believe that my life had not changed forever—I chose not to know. I do not remember driving the car. I do not remember putting my foot on the brake to slow for the coming turn. I do not remember anything until I spun my wheel to make the turn and saw my corner neighbor, Archie, old and bent like a stick of driftwood, come hurrying to my car, shaking his head from side to side. I looked at Archie’s face and then past his face to the columns of red flame moving like a breaking wave across the roof of my house. The raven was a tiny speck on the horizon. Opening the car window, I tasted the bitter chalkiness of smoke against the back of my mouth. Archie leaned in, his face close to mine, his head still shaking from side to side. Now his voice shook, too, and he said, “My God, Susie, I’m sorry. It looks like she’s all gone . . . all gone . . .”
In the nightmare of a living dream, I closed the window to block out the smell of smoke and opened my eyes wide, wide, letting the sight take hold, letting my throat clench. My home all in flames. Crowds lining the road. Cars milling everywhere. With my windows closed, it seemed as though all the chaos that I saw was unfolding in utter and eerie silence. The only sound that reached me was a curious muffled thudding, which I finally identified as the sound of my heart pounding like a fist against the walls of my chest.
In those first moments of terrible realization, I struggled to pull air into my compressed lungs in deep, sucking gulps. I could not get enough. My head felt as light and unsubstantial as soapsuds. In my head was a cry, running over and over like a circular tape: This is NOT happening. This is a dream. This is NOT real. Wake up . . . wake up . . . wake up . . .
You might think I would have stepped on the gas and careened up the road as fast as the winter ice would let me. I did not. I drove slowly, slowly. It was not only my eyes that were open like a ship’s portholes. It was my mouth, too, like a gaping maw, stretching to let out a groan that seemed to come from the very base of my spine. My hands splayed wide for an instant, before clutching the steering wheel only to open wide again. I felt as though I were trying, trying with each piece of my body, to open wide enough to take in the immensity of the horror.
Mom, Mom, Mom. She lived in an apartment downstairs. Dear God, my mom! The dogs, the cats!
I pulled into the driveway, the car jerking along the ice-rutted drive, my feet numb on the pedals, my knees locked. In the shadow of the firestorm stood my husband, Lee, with his arm around my mother. Sitting beside my mother were our two dogs, Arrow and Strongheart. As soon as Arrow saw me, she ran up happily beside the car to welcome me home, her glorious brown collie fur dancing in the ghostly light of the flames. So long as her mother—me—was there, she was delighted. She thinks this is a bonfire, I thought. A party . . . From the car I saw Strongheart, my huge white Anatolian shepherd dog, lean his head protectively against my mother—a position he would not abandon for the coming six hours. A Turkish livestock-guarding dog, he was putting his heritage to work caring for the most fragile in our human herd of three. At a sit his head reached to the middle of my mom’s chest. Unlike Arrow, he seemed deeply affected by the flames and the noise of the fire. His wide brow was furrowed, and his kind, bold face registered a mix of distress and concern.
I realized that I needed to make space for the fire trucks, which didn’t seem to be there yet. In a daze, still gasping for the air that would not come, I pulled forward, then reversed, then turned around in a circle. My head was beginning to pound. Where to go? Where was there to go? I parked the car on the street and walked on stiff legs to my family. My head was shaking from side to side in stunned disbelief. My family’s eyes were wide, like my own. Their mouths were tight. “What happened?” I gasped. They shook their heads. We didn’t know. Days later we would learn that an extension cord had shorted out and sparked the fire. We used that cord to plug in the block heater of our plow truck, and the plug and cord were located just to the left of a neck-high stack of firewood stored on the porch by our garage. The firewood had provided ample fuel to torch the rest of the house.
Mom rubbed her hands together. She was standing in the snow in a thin pair of knitted slippers and seemed completely oblivious to the freezing cold. She had escaped with Arrow and Strongheart and with Flora and Dinky—two of our four cats. I could hear a thin edge of guilt creeping into her voice. Two cats still remained in the house: Red, Mom’s beach ball–sized orange cat, and Mirella, my beloved, dainty, silver tabby. Red was old, almost thirteen, and Mirella just a baby at four.
I ran up to the volunteer firemen, who were waiting helplessly for the fire trucks to arrive, and in blubbering tears begged them to let me enter the house to search for my cats. They stood protectively near the front door in full gear with tanks strapped to their backs and would not let me pass. Lamely I told them I would hold my breath. They shook their heads and motioned me back. After what seemed like days, the fire trucks pulled into the driveway. The firemen grabbed hoses as thick as boa constrictors and plunged into the house.
I shouted after them to search in my office, hoping the cats would be there, praying that they would be there: my office was the room farthest away from the flames and smoke. Red loved to sit on the office couch while I worked, licking his feet and purring like a jet engine. Mirella frequently napped on my desk or swatted at the rocks and figurines atop my office altar table. If they were in my office, perhaps I would see them alive again.
As the firemen disappeared into waving curtains of smoke, I felt a familiar hand rest lightly on my shoulder. Turning, I looked into the weathered face of David, my Cherokee friend and spiritual teacher. Somehow, in this small and tight-knit community, word had reached him about the fire, and he had come from his cabin on the mountain to stand vigil with me. His silver hair shone in the firelight. Around his neck the signature bear claw shimmered back the reflection of the flames. He told me softly that everything would be OK.
When life strikes me broadside, I field the blow by diving swiftly and completely into action. I’m not saying that I am effective in my action—only that I stay busy. Facing the fire, I wanted nothing more than to keep busy and, most of all, to keep from thinking. I ran everywhere, talking to all the firefighters, telling them where the roof accesses were, telling them again where I thought the cats might be. Lee stayed at the other side of the house, giving directions from there. Parts of the house were beginning to collapse in his direction, and for a moment I feared they would fall on him as he struggled to move some of our outside belongings away from the path of the fire.
The firemen reached my office and from an open window shouted to me that they could see nothing beneath the furniture. I couldn’t tell if they meant that there was nothing there or that the smoke was too thick to see anything. While they were still in the office, I told them to throw my computer, research books, and file cabinets out the windows and onto the snow. Piling the stuff onto blankets donated by our neighbors, I hauled the heap that represented all of my working life away from the blazing house and onto the driveway.
Around the side of the house, I discovered Flora and Dinky, our other two cats, huddled fearfully together at the bottom steps to my mom’s apartment, trying to get back inside. “Not a good idea. . . ,” I said, grabbing them and stuffing them inside my jacket. Flora had survived leukemia as a kitten. This nig...
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