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Nothing Left to Burn

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Chapter One

Just two days earlier I had somehow convinced Elizabeth, the newspaper's editor, that I have the "nose for journalism" the advertisement for a reporter's position demanded. I know how to write a story, I told her, leaving out the fact that I had taken only one journalism class in college. I told her there are the sacred five Ws - who, what, where, when, why - but beyond that, there are human stories. These are real people with real lives and I would be indebted to tell the truth. When I stood to leave, Elizabeth shook my hand and apologized about forgetting my scheduled interview; I wore a suit and tie while she stood in purple sweatpants and a T-shirt silk-screened with butterflies.

My first afternoon at the Sentinel, Elizabeth leads me through the newspaper's small office. The low ceilings hold buzzing fluorescent lights - there seem to be no shadows cast onto the worn, brown carpet. The only natural light that seeps into the building comes from the glass facade at the front of the building. However, none of that light makes it to the newsroom because it is eclipsed by the tall, carpeted walls of cubicles that make up the advertising department.

Elizabeth introduces me to my fellow reporters, then finally shows me to my cubicle. The walls are waist high and it feels as spacious as a shoe box. Sitting on the desk is a computer that looks to be fifteen years old, perhaps a remnant from the Reagan administration. Next to the computer sits a police and fire scanner that beeps every few minutes, just like the red Motorola pager my father used to clip on his leather belt. A streak of tones, vacillating in pitch and frequency, whine from the tiny black scanner. Dread singes my nerves - I know that sound too well already.

"Why the scanner?" I ask.

"Figured we'll start you out on police and fire," Elizabeth says. She narrows her eyes, as if examining me. "That'll be okay, right?"

"Sure," I say. "Yeah, that's no problem."

As I stare at that scanner, I think of my father who had been McVeytown's volunteer fire chief. Each time I pass the McVeytown Volunteer Fire Company and see a few of the guys standing outside, I don't swell with the pride that most people in small towns feel for their volunteer firemen - I feel the same way about them as I feel about my father. Those men abandon their families. The firehouse was my dad's excuse to miss dinner, skip out on my elementary school's open houses, and break plans to play baseball or take me fishing. His commitment to his job as fire chief exceeded expectations - it seemed a guttural obsession, perhaps an addiction.

My dad left home for fires, car accidents, flooded basements, company meetings, seminars, training exercises, and conventions. Even when he worked himself raw cutting glass at his factory job and complained of sore joints and bloody knuckles and stomach problems, when he was called he bolted to his feet and went out to save the day, like one of the superheroes I watched on afternoon cartoons.

He jumped from his chair at dinner, lunged out of bed in the night. He raced past cars on the highway in his pickup truck - the red strobe light on the roof flashing, the speedometer climbing, sometimes my mother and I sitting beside him and grasping the vinyl seat. One such day, he pulled into the firehouse parking lot, slamming on the brake and jerking the truck to a sudden stop. He popped the door, jumped down, and ran toward the station house.

"Just drive it home," he yelled to my mother before he dashed into the engine room.

It was scary, amd sometimes frustrating, but there was something exciting about it as well. It was as if he kept the entire town safe, as if somehow none of us could survive without him.

My complicated history with fire seems unknown to my newsroom co-workers, many of whom are in their early thirties and probably never even heard of Denton Varner, my father. But lots of other people in Mifflin County still love him and consider him a hero. Fewer people remember, or perhaps conveniently forget, that my grandfather Lucky loved to ignite fires. I don't say a word to Elizabeth about my family's past, afraid that if I decline the police and fire beat, I will be fired from a job that I desperately need. Most of my friends in the class of 2003 began working jobs when we graduated three months earlier - places like insurance companies, corporate front offices, and national magazines. None of them still live in their hometown and write for their local daily newspapers.

Later that first night, I learn how to write obituaries.

Ken, the newsroom clerk, sits next to me as I type my first batch of obits. He tells me the formula on how to write up the dead. The most important things come first: name, age, address, and time and place of death. Then a new paragraph for the background: date of birth, place of birth, parents, and spouse. The next paragraph lists the survivors. There is an order to this laundry list of family members as well: The most important (usually the children) come first. Aunts, uncles, or cousins come last. The rest fall somewhere in between. There are exact rules, wordings, and euphemisms that must be followed.

Ken scratches his goatee while I type. He seems to genuinely enjoy the order of death. Faxes from the funeral homes provide the specifics of the deceased. All I have to do is arrange the information.

"We used to include the words public viewing," Ken says. "But now it's friends may call instead. Someone who was doing these forgot a letter once and wrote pubic instead of public. The family didn't like that."

"This is bitch work, isn't it?" I ask. "The lowest job for a reporter?"

"Look at it this way," he says, and taps a finger on the desk. "You're guaranteed to have your stuff read. People want to know who died. They read these obituaries every day."

When I finish for the night, I walk through the newsroom, past the tiny lunch room and the cubicles of the circulation department, and slip out the back door for a cigarette. The night looks still and haunted. A fat moon, two days past its prime, spills a blue tint over the wooded knob of a nearby hill and washes down onto the parking lot. Lightning bugs glow to life, then fade, like the flashing beacons of the radio relay towers stuck on distant ridges. In a few weeks the fireflies will disappear from the night along with the heat. It feels as if everything will go out with the summer but me.

One of the guys from the press room opens the door and steps outside for a breath of air. His blue uniform clings to the heft of his frame. Ink stains his fingers and...