Friday Night

Friday night, my sister and I sat behind Mom’s garage, sipping diet sodas, watching stuff burn.

They were the last bulky objects to come out of the house and garage: A particleboard cabinet with a broken door, a wooden shelf from the basement suffering from a little rot and hasty craftsmanship. Albert’s truck was already full of junk and the transfer station was closed, so burning these objects – along with a small random collection of other wooden junk – seemed appropriate. The house is out in the county where no burn permits are required. The night was cool and windless, the patch of ground bare.

We sat on a log lumpy with burlwood, something Dad brought home from some adventure somewhere. It had always been at the house. I remember it posted in the back yard at our other house, near the sandbox. It had always been there. Now it was shorter, its bottom rotted. We probably should have thrown it on the fire too, but it was the only place to sit.

Everything else in the house and garage was either loaded up in cars and trucks or hauled off long ago.

The house is sold. The garage swept, the tools bundled up in my truck. The only resident of the house now, a lonely recliner that nobody had room for (my house, stuffed with stuff from Mom’s already looks like a consignment shop). A gift, then, for the new owners.

Footsteps, and a flashlight, to the side of the garage. I was standing because the burlwood was uncomfortable. We thought it was Albert, back from the dump.

“You got a phone? My radio’s not working.”

A sheriff’s deputy. Not Albert.

“Somebody saw your fire and called the cavalry,” he said. Indeed, across the field behind the house, we can see a lit-up fire engine approaching, sirens shouting into the darkness.

“I can see you’ve got a controlled burn here. Can I borrow a phone to call dispatch?”

I hand him my phone, and, like the rest of us, stumbles to dial the area code, a new requirement. He makes his call, hands back the phone, then wishes us a good night.

The fire truck arrives, lights still in Christmas glory.

I wander to the front to meet the deputy and a fireman coming back. The fireman, too, looks at our fire – much diminished from whenever the call was made – and agrees there’s nothing to worry about. “Just make sure you’ve got a shovel and a hose ready, just in case,” he said. They leave. I retrieve a shovel and a hose from the back of my truck, and we watch the fire grow dimmer.

The fire truck and deputy leave; the neighborhood has had its last bit of excitement from the Davidson family.

Mom, of course, died on August 18, seventeen years and seventeen days after Dad passed, or about seven years after he built the new house about a quarter mile from the one he built in the 1960s. We’d signed the paperwork to sell the house the day before the fire, and were there that day getting two sisters moved out and the rest of the stuff of generations boxed up and either taken home or to the dump.

It was my job to claim the tools. Should have been pretty simple, as Dad pared down the number of tools he had when he moved. But it took two loads in my tiny Toyota to claim it all, including the table I decided to take home to my own garage so I’d have somewhere to store all the new tools I’d collected. I am suddenly rich in socket sets and drill bits, and I need a place to put them.

So the tools are loaded. Next comes the bottles of automotive chemicals: Wiper fluid, fuel treatment, motor oil and paint polish. And can after can of spray paint. The county does a yearly chemical disposal day. I’ll have to store it all until then. I wanted to leave it to the new owners, but the drive now is to clear the garage of all but the bundles of shingles that match the house. So the chemicals come home with me. Maybe I can use some of them.

The firewood, too, is loaded up – Albert brings his trailer and his two boys, and we toss wood into the trailer until the garage is empty. Then with brooms native to the home and those brought from afar, we sweep the garage, inhaling dust from leaves and wind and mouse nests in the firewood. Far more dangerous than the fire that gets the fire department there. We throw the debris on the fire.

Albert and his boys leave. So does my sister. I sit in the dark behind the garage, watching the fire, embers now.

There’s the yurt. Albert and I agree it’ll probably be torn down by the new owners. That seems sad. But the round shed built by Dad, capped with half a five-gallon bucket, is showing stress cracks in its brick walls – Dad was a bricklayer, building a brick shed was natural. Inside it, a wheelbarrow. 

Between Albert and I, we have five wheelbarrows. So the wheelbarrow stays for the new owners.

The embers are dim. I’m tired of waiting. The hose from the truck won’t reach the pit, but I have a five-gallon bucket and I fill it ten times, dousing the embers. Then with Dad’s coal shovel I shuffle the coals to make sure there’s nothing glowing. Only a few little spots remain in the black beneath a sky washed of stars by the lights from the high school football stadium across the field.

I’m the last one at the house, and it’s quiet. The windows of the house are dark and the only light comes from the empty garage. I turn the lights off and drive my truck, loaded down like the Clampetts’ jalopy, home where, decades in the future, my own children will eventually have to do a similar cleaning out. I should probably teach a few of them how to use drill bits and socket sets, as I have plenty of those.