The Fire This Time by Nathan Gunter

I don’t know where the bottle of Jack Daniels came from, but I have a guess.

My guess is that Dad went to the liquor store—probably to buy the bottle of Barefoot chardonnay I threw away when I cleaned out his refrigerator—and somehow ended up getting all the way home with a bottle of Tennessee whiskey he hadn’t paid for. Had it been bought by another customer and accidentally placed in his bag? Had he unintentionally shoplifted it? Was this an episode of The Simpsons?

Whatever had happened, it ate at him. He’d received something he hadn’t earned, and this was unacceptable. He’d deprived someone else of something they had earned, and that was even more unacceptable. He mentioned in conversations how much it bothered him. At any rate, at some point—I don’t remember when or why—my brother, my husband, and I had consumed that bottle.

So when we found the second handle of Jack at the bottom of one of Dad’s kitchen cabinets, never opened, bright orange price tag blazing like a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker, I assumed Dad had done what I, as his child, would have: He went back to the same liquor store and purchased a bottle of Jack Daniels. To try to even things up. But also to avoid having to tell the person at the counter, hey, I stole some liquor so can I just pay for it now? Because he’s eighty-four and doesn’t need those kind of problems; he just figured he’d do his best to make it as right as possible. Lower his lifetime ratio of bottles of alcohol stolen to those purchased lawfully.

So as we are wont to do, my brother John and I opened the bottle. We’d spent three days cleaning out Dad’s house once he’d decided—finally and after great consternation on the part of his five children and his ex-wife—after his most recent trip to the hospital, that living in the middle of nowhere by himself was no longer an option.

I hated the land immediately. I was thirteen when he bought it, and for two years afterward, we visited it almost every weekend he had custody. He was planning to retire, soon, he said, and move out here. Build a house. Be close to family. Hunt. Fish. Raise cattle. I told myself I hated this place: the rednecks, the humidity, the bugs, the Ouachita Mountains looming all around, the bugs, the bugs, the OHMYGODGETITOFF GET IT OFFF. 

The truth is, what I hated was that my father was moving three hundred miles away from the town where I was born and two hundred fifty miles away from the town where I was currently living. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t like it. I blamed the land. I blamed the skunk and her babies I ran across on a walk through the upper pasture. I blamed the poisonous, aggressive water moccasins that made it impossible to fish in the part of the Mountain Fork River that ran through the land. I blamed the seed ticks that climbed inside my portable CD player and all over my body.

But I never blamed my Dad. After all—everybody should get to do what makes them happy, right? And if you don’t want them to do what makes them happy, doesn’t that mean you want them to be unhappy? And who would want that? Especially for their parents?

We’ve been telling him for years that he can come live with whomever of us he chooses. We will take care of you, we say. We are worried about you, we say.

When he could still get around well enough to walk his land, Dad started sending me photos via email. He’d placed motion-activated cameras all around the property, and all day and all night, they captured images of wildlife. One photograph showed two bucks fighting each other during the rut. Many of them showed bears.

I hope you carry a gun when you’re out there, I tell him a million times over the phone. I don’t want you to get on the wrong end of a bear.

He tells me a million times, if I die out here, just know I died doing what I loved in a place I loved.

This is not comforting, I say. I am not comforted by this.

As his health has deteriorated, much the same message applies. I will tell you when I’m ready, he says without saying. Just like I told you when I was ready to come here, I will tell you when I am ready to leave. There will be nothing else to be said about it at that time and nothing until then.

Some of the family do not understand this. Fights are had. Strong words. Apologies.

Time is the bear now. There’s not a gun big enough.

So his heart gets funky, and he goes to the hospital, and finally, it’s—yes. I will come to live with all of you in the city. This will be the first time he’s lived in a non-rural area since he was a graduate student at Vanderbilt in the 1950s. 

And yes, he says. You may clean out my house.

The last time his heart got funky—when he needed what he called the bypass thing—Mom and I took a day while he recovered and drove from Little Rock back to his home, which we cleaned from top to bottom. 

I think I’m a hoarder, he said to me once on the phone not long after finally getting cable. I think I’m a hoarder; I’ve been watching that show.

You’re overreacting, I say. Everyone thinks they’re a hoarder the first time they watch that show. When I watched it, I threw out almost everything I own. I threw out things I loved.

Hmmm, he says.

He was right, and I was wrong. His house was filled with dust and spiders. His oven was covered in the asphalt of bubbled-over pots that had hardened like tar. Without trash service on his dirt road, garbage tended to pile up. Mom and I cleaned it. We worked hard. We worked lovingly. It was fun.

He never let us forget it. I was looking for something, he’d say on the phone, a taste of grapefruit peel in his voice, and I couldn’t find it because somebody cleaned my house. 

So when he tells us we can clean it out, keep what we want, get rid of the rest—here’s a short list of things I want you to find and keep, please—we are giddy. We are pregnant with work ethic. We clean. We deep clean. We spend like lottery winners on cleaning supplies. I find his childhood Bible and hold onto it for him. I find copies of his dissertation, old photos, papers he’d published about the acidity of geothermal pools at Yellowstone National Park. Soon, there also is a pile of old tax returns and bills.

We’ll need to burn those, says my brother, the accountant.

So we build a fire. I open the bottle of Jack. We find more things to burn. Work memos saying Thanks for hosting the Okarche High School Physics Club on their field trip! dated March, 1977 and mimeographed in purple ink. Here’s the latest set of department policies. Remember to have your grades in by December 9. A thirty-year career as a scientist and educator, and here it all is, his whole desk, in a box. I keep more than I’m proud to admit. 

Most, though, goes in the fire. Mom, John, and I pass around the bottle of Jack while tending the fire, making sure it doesn’t catch the yard. I watch the record of this man’s life turn to white flags of surrender and blow away on the breeze. Soon, they’ll be part of the soil in the valley below the Talimena Drive. Someday, hopefully not soon, so will I—or at least, part of the soil somewhere. 

Dad hasn’t died, and yet we’re clearing his house of possessions as if he had. 

When I was twenty-three, I moved into an apartment with some friends. Dad came to visit the night we finished moving in. He took three steps inside, looked around disapprovingly, and said, Y’all may have too much stuff. Let’s go eat.

Now here’s all his stuff. Like all of it. Blowing away. Records of so much mundanity: bills paid, classes taught, thanks and well wishes and complaints and old grudges and achievements and failures and every-day everydayness. Into the wind, into the dirt, into the ground, back to the place it started. 

It’s like magic. Country magic: Whiskey and fire and memories and goodbyes. It’s a song.

The show Feud: Bette and Joan chronicled the famous rivalry between the actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Near the series’ end, there is a scene in which Joan Crawford, played by Jessica Lange, has died and is part of the “Those We’ve Lost” montage at the Oscars. Bette Davis, played by Susan Sarandon, is backstage with a group of stars from the era in which she and Joan ruled the box office. 

Joan Crawford’s photograph comes up on the screen, burns just long enough for viewers to read her name in script beneath, and then fades to black, replaced by the next person.

“Is that all she gets?” asks an astonished old friend.

Bette, her voice full of steel but trembling, says, “That’s all any of us get.” 

I thought about this scene as I watched my Dad’s stuff burn. I kept thinking about it over the next few days. I also thought about the word stuff. All my dad’s stuff. His stuffed house stuffed full of his stuff. I thought about all the boxes of sentimentalia I’ve kept over the years. Movie stubs, school notes, programs, tchotchkes. Someday, if I’m very lucky, a tired person who loves me will look at these things and say, I can’t do anything with these. Do you want them? I feel bad, but I think let’s just get rid of them. 

If I’m even luckier, that tired person who loves me will stand with other tired people who love me and make sure all my stuff burns up right so my identity doesn’t get stolen by opportunistic meth heads. They’ll pass around the bottle of Jack Daniels—one of them will correctly suspect I bought it just to fix an error and not because I actually planned to drink it—and stare into the fire that is consuming my life. The fire that consumes all our lives. They’ll think of me. They’ll tell stories I’d be mortified to hear if I was there. They’ll laugh. They’ll miss me. They’ll pack up what little they’ve decided to keep of me and go back to their lives. They’ll find a place for me on their shelves. I will stare out at them for the rest of their lives, and they’ll smile at the thought. Someday, someone else, preparing to make a fire for them, will see me on the shelf and say, I can’t do anything with this; do you want it?

And, smiling, I’ll go where everything goes, eventually. 

Nathan Gunter is a writer, editor, and poet who lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His writing has appeared in the Opinion section of CNN.com, the Times of London, This Land Press, two anthologies of the Woody Guthrie Poets, and many other print and online outlets. He is the editor-in-chief of Oklahoma Today magazine, and he is on Twitter and Instagram as @nathangunter.

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