Burning Down the House Read Online Free PDF Page A

needs the power. There is a good flow of water in the spring, though, when a bony species of alewife, fish named gaspereaux after the river they come home to, make their way upstream to spawn.
    On both sides of the Gaspereau are big, old-fashioned farmhouses, spread far enough apart to be buffered by orchards on both sides, the houses three-storeyed and square and covered with wood shingles. Houses with big porches and verandas and gingerbread cutouts on the gable ends. Houses built on foundations of fieldstone mortared together into rough jigsawed patterns that hold the remarkable weight of the three square storeys above them. Houses with four or five chimneys and a small fireplace or wood-stove chimney thimble in every room. Big and drafty, they burned a lot of wood or coal to get through the winter, so that in years past the big horses in the barns worked the orchards from spring to fall and then headed to a woodlot on the North Mountain to bring out fuel for the next winter. Their drivers—apple farmers or dairymen in summer and fall, loggers in winter—eventually switched from horses to tractors with long, fat-wheeled trailers that fit between the rows of squat apple trees but turned awkwardly with anything less than a practised hand.
    Those men all seemed pretty much the same to me: mostly big and slow-moving, with rough hands and very little to say. Capable and quiet like the firefighters, they had earned the weight of their presence. They were very different from a city kid like me. Like some of the firefighters, these were men used to fixing their own equipment, able to strip down small engines as a matter of course, blunt and opinionated and matter-of-fact. Felt red-and-black jackets and dirty jeans, sometimes overalls.
    They were men who bought fire insurance on their huge red ochre or weathered grey barns but who didn’t insure the fifty head of dairy cattle inside. The premiums for the cattle were too high and, besides, the farmers had the kind of self-confidence that allowed them to believe they’d always be able to get the cattle out in a fire. The firefighters would be there to take care of the building, the farmers thought, while they wrangled the big animals out. And we did, often finding ourselves fighting blazes up in the overstuffed lofts, moving tons of hay to find the hot little nucleus where some slightly damp hay had started to winkle itself into spontaneous combustion.
    Spontaneous combustion was the most frightening kind of fire, and even if you understood just how it worked, it was still like some mysterious agricultural alchemy—wet hay working on itself, decomposing into hot little fragments and making more and more heat in the process, until it finally started to smoulder, usually at the spot where the heating damp hay met dry, more flammable hay. It’s a fire that starts inside and eventually finds its way to the surface.
    You’d see or smell thin threads of smoke, but when air finally got to it, the fire would move quickly up the thin, hollow straws of the hay. Once it actually reached flame, it would start travelling in directions of its own creation—along the paths of least resistance, or the paths of driest fuel. There might barely be a hint of a problem, but deep inside the hay it could be working itself into a nascent furnace. The only warning, sometimes, was a thin, sugary smell reminiscent of caramel.
    It’s a lot like a peat fire in a dry bog. Hay fires can burn for days completely out of sight, travelling in any direction, up, down, sideways, branching out in forks like lightning, so that just when you think you’ve found the seat of the fire, you’ve really only uncovered yet another fast-working satellite.
    That was probably the most common kind of fire in barns. Sometimes there’d be electrical fires in the sparsely wired structures, strings of bare light bulbs on a single wandering and ancient circuit—even old knob and tube