Good Examples

CW: Non-graphic depictions of child abuse and domestic trauma.

There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the fire department would get to the house in time to save it. By the time the red lights and sirens barreled down the long gravel drive, the flames were licking what was left of the support beams. The walls had long since turned to charcoal.

Momma always said that our house was perfect. She cursed the suburbs and their neighbors with their opinions. She said folks do things different there. She said our house, with its miles of forest on every which side, was real freedom.

Still, I was happy to see her emerge from the smoking house not too worse for wear. Her nightdress was singed at the bottom and her hair was a right mess, but she wasn’t limping or nothing. It took a lot of effort on my part not to laugh and give my hiding place away when I saw her tugging Andy out of the flames with her right arm and clutching Daddy with her left.

The fire wouldn’t have hurt him none anyway, seeing as he was already ashes in a silver urn.

Andy looked worse than Momma. Soot masked his face like county fair paint, except where his tears had exposed big gaping rivers of freckles. Even after he turned away from the house, the flames were reflected in his eyes.

I panicked about Pepper, but I told myself that a black cat would have been hard to spot in the dark. I imagined her escaping the house at the first whiff of smoke before I saw that she was cradled in Andy’s arms, the gentlest I had ever seen him hold anything.

Her yellow eyes were wide, but it was hard to say what was more shocking: the fire, or Andy treating her nice. He was always chasing her with lit matches or pulling at her legs. Now, she wasn’t looking at him like prey usually looks at a predator. For once, they both knew what it felt like to run from something bigger than themselves.

The roof collapsed into the flames with a sick crack, louder than Daddy’s belt. The inferno shot into the sky in red glowing ribbons and the melting shingles left a pungent smell in the nighttime air.

Momma and Andy stared as it became more fire than house. They were probably counting their lucky stars they had gotten out before it got so bad, even though I knew they would. I think it was probably the shock that kept Momma from realizing I wasn’t standing out there with them until she finally did. When she did try to push her way back inside, the firefighters had to hold her back.

I couldn’t hear what they said, and I watched them start to lead her behind the truck to Andy, but her knees wobbled right before she got to him. She dropped Daddy as she fell, leaving a golf-ball sized ding in his chrome. She left him rolling there on the gravel and held both arms out to Andy instead, gripping his sleep shirt like it was a buoy.

Before Daddy died two years ago, Momma held me kindly too. She was the one that would patch me up after I got disciplined, running when she heard his belt buckle jingle. She said Band-Aids ain’t work unless you close them with a kiss. Sometimes, she’d reach me before Daddy could and the look she gave him sent him slinking back off to his armchair and beer.

After the bottle killed him, she didn’t stop buying his favorite. Maybe she was just trying to keep his spirit alive. Goodnight kisses became slammed doors at bedtime, and soon, gentle touches became open handed slaps.

“You got to set a good example for Andy,” she told me once when Daddy had been rough. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t there, if Andy broke a dish or made the cat screech, I got punished. “Really,” she said, “it’s your fault he ain’t know better in the first place.”

Like this morning, Andy was wailing up a storm after he lit a match to burn Pepper’s whiskers and dropped it on his own lap instead. I watched Momma seal his Band-Aid with a kiss, tell him to go get an ice pack, and then tan my hide for letting him play with fire.

“That ain’t setting a good example,” she said, gripping the wooden spoon like Daddy was guiding her hand.

I took the beating without yelping once, and I didn’t mention that for the first time, Andy had actually set a good example for me. The matchbook I had snatched from him was hot in my pocket and there was a spark in my head. Something about freedom, an ember that Momma fanned with every strike until I was stoking a little flame that only I knew about.

I stuck around until the leaves on the trees melted into the darkness instead of reflecting the red flames. Once the heat had gone, the cold night air felt electric on my skin. Andy and Momma had driven away in one of the trucks with the firemen long before the fire was out.

There was nothing left but a smoking pile of coals, and soon they would realize I wasn’t among them. I had to get a head start through the woods. I hoped Momma was telling the truth when she said it was another world out there.