Mind the Fire

Devin James Leonard

Daryl Fox was fast asleep on the couch in front of the wood stove, sweating under a heavy blanket, and dreaming of murder, when he awoke with a jolt and noticed the fire was smoldering. At first, the boy’s presumption was an instinctive alarm had gone off in his slumber, his brain somehow in time with the fire his father had entrusted him to keep burning.

The room was black, and the flames were weak, providing no light. Daryl got up and felt his way through the darkness, reaching for the stack of firewood in the corner, and hefted two logs. He opened the hatch, tossed them onto the coals, and just then, footsteps thumped on the porch steps outside. Next came the distinct sound of his mother’s giggles, followed by a deep, masculine chortle. Daryl didn’t recognize the manly laughter, but he knew for a fact that they did not belong to his father. Whenever Thaddeus Fox got drunk, he’d leave his son to supervise the wood stove while he was upstairs sleeping off his drunk, which was what he was doing at this moment while Daryl was minding the fire in the living room and his mother was coming home with another man.

From behind the foggy glass door, Daryl watched his mother stagger up to the porch landing, and trailing behind her, shrouded in the darkness, a bearded man a foot taller than her.

Daryl closed the stove door, locked the hatch silently, and quickly returned to the couch, hiding under the blanket, face and all. As the back door opened, his mother whispered to her guest to keep quiet.

Daryl didn’t move. He pretended to be asleep.

Tiptoeing feet approached him and then went away.

“He’s passed out,” Daryl’s mother whispered to the man. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Upstairs, Daryl thought, where his father was sleeping off his drunk like a hibernating grizzly bear. Wake him up and he’d attack like one, too.

Daryl heard the squeal of the wooden staircase and pulled the blanket off his face. His mother and her guest were on their way up. He caught a glance of the man, who in the dark resembled his father—the same clothes, height, and similar beard—but had his mother gotten so drunk that she mistook some other barfly for her husband? She’d been drinking at the local tavern down the road for hours, so it was possible. Why else would she bring a man home and take him upstairs to the bear’s den? There would be hell to pay for anyone who disturbed Thaddeus Fox, especially for someone who dared to sleep with his wife.

Daryl discarded the blankets and stood up fast. It occurred to him, now, that his mother hadn’t seen him on the couch. She must have assumed it was her husband. Because that was where Daryl’s father slept on cold winter nights. It was Thaddeus Fox who would stay in the living room and monitor the fire. And Mom, she’d been at the bar since before dark, had taken off long before Daryl’s father had started drinking and, when he couldn’t stand any longer, had instructed Daryl to watch the stove.

The bear was on the couch—that’s what Daryl’s mother must have thought.

Another alarm went off in Daryl’s twelve-year-old brain, this one of distress. Let the fire burn down, you’d get yelled at. Wake up the old man, you might receive a smack upside the head. Bring a strange man home and, well, that was a death sentence. Thaddeus Fox would kill the man, and likely Daryl’s mother, too.

But what if Daryl killed the man first? He could save his mother before his dad woke up, tell him it was an intruder he killed, and get his mother to play along. It could work—something or other close to that—if he moved soon. There was no time to think it through. They were already upstairs. It was time to act.

The hatchet used for splitting kindling wood lay on the floor near the stack of logs. Daryl wrenched it up, scuffled across the hardwood floor, and jumped up the stairs three steps at a time. The bedroom door at the opposite end of the narrow hall was open, the lights off. He could hear his mother’s drunken giggles and the huh-huh-huh chuckles of the deep-voiced bearded man.

Daryl crept to the doorway and listened. The bed frame squeaked, what he imagined being his mother and the stranger falling on top of the sleeping bear that was Thaddeus Fox. But no grunt or shout came, just more playful giggles. Daryl’s father must have drunk himself into a coma if all that racket wasn’t waking him.

It meant Daryl still had time to save his mother.

He gripped the hatchet with both hands and stepped into the room. All he saw were shapes and shadows in the dark, but from what he could tell, there was a cluster of bodies amidst the bundles of blankets on the bed, his mother’s feet sticking out over the edge of the mattress, and a much larger figure kneeling on top of her, his back to the doorway. Somewhere in all those twisted limbs and sheets was his father still asleep, but Daryl could not tell where he was.

He still had time.

Daryl tiptoed forward, silent, the hatchet raised high above his head, and approached the dark shape hunched on top of his mother. When he reached the edge of the bed, he let out a roar and swung down on the man’s back—Thunk!—and the man howled as he straightened and whipped an arm back and knocked Daryl to the floor with a cold, hard slap across the face.

“Son of a—!” his father screamed.

The bear was awake now.

The bedside light switched on. Thaddeus Fox was on his knees on top of his wife, clinging to the back of his flannel shirt like he had an itch he couldn’t reach to scratch. There was no one else in the bed, only Daryl’s parents.

Thaddeus spun off the mattress and got to his feet, his flannel unbuttoned, pants halfway off, and stood over Daryl. Wincing and hissing, he removed his hand from his wound and held it up to his eyes. There was no trace of blood. “Boy, what the hell’s gone wrong with you?” he shouted angrily. “What’d you hit me with, a hammer?”

Daryl lay on the floor, panting with adrenaline. His face stung from the smack his father had dealt him, and throbbed as though the hand were still pressing against his cheek. “Hatchet,” he said, and handed over his weapon.

Thaddeus spun the hatchet handle in his grip and tapped the flat part of the ax blade against his palm. “You must a hit me with the wrong side,” he said, his voice calmer now. “Lucky me, but what the hell gives? You damn near cracked my shoulder off.”

“Thought you were an intruder.”

Thaddeus frowned. “You didn’t see us come in?”

Daryl shook his head.

“You wasn’t awake when I left?”

Daryl shook his head faster.

“Thought you was—when I said I’d be right back to pick up your mother. The roads were slick, and she can’t drive drunk in the snow the way I can.”

Thaddeus held out his hand, and Daryl took it, and his father pulled him to his feet.

“The hell’d you think was going on,” Thaddeus said, “to make you come in all half-cocked ready to kill me?”

“I thought you were someone else,” he said, “and was hurting mom.”

Thaddeus ruffled his son’s hair and, with a smile bright enough to light the entire Fox house, he handed the hatchet over, saying, “When you get older, I’ll teach you a little something about the hurtin’ I’m about to put on your mother. For now, take your ass on back to the couch.”

On Daryl’s way out, his father said, “Mind the fire, and don’t come back, no matter what you hear.”

In the living room, Daryl tossed two more logs on the stove before nestling into his place on the couch and crawling under his blanket. The ceiling above him crackled like embers in a lively fire, and he shut his eyes, listening to the grunting and moaning of his father hurting his mother. It almost sounded like she was enjoying it, but what did Daryl know?