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?
