Walk Through Fire (1964) Nonfiction, memoir
Dad
In the pond above our house, the surface could be smooth as glass, except for a few water skippers that glided across the top. My brothers, sisters, and I would gather large rocks, throw them into the still water, and watch the waves roll to the shore. One wave would come in, then another. The effect continued until somewhere along the way it softened, and eventually there was nothing more than a gentle lapping. Certain experiences in life soothe us like the soft caress of a spent wave, but others are forced upon us, hitting us like a stone breaking a still surface. At the age of five, my idyllic country life would be shattered, the calm broken by a sudden force followed by a series of crashing waves.
The day started as nondescript and ordinary as any other. We had gone to visit my mom’s mother. My Grandma Julia lived in Carlsbad, and we tried to get down to see her every couple of months. Driving back from her house, I heard my dad grumble to my mom, “gotta check on the Weed Tower cattle guard.” My brother and two sisters sparred in the back seat. My mother, Virginia, stared out the window. I could see the reflection of her downturned mouth.
But my dad’s short, clipped statement meant he was going to get the job done. For my siblings in the back, that signaled that they’d better quiet down. “You kids. Stop fighting, or someone’s gonna be crying.” What my dad couldn’t have known at the time was that our family would be irrevocably changed with that one decision. We would feel the sting of lost innocence. We would live through it, but the serenity of that insulated life would be gone.
My dad, Ronald, had been good looking. He was proud of his curly, dark hair and strong physique. He had worked hard in the potash mines for years. There had been a strike in ‘62, and subsequent layoffs had given him a chance to put that kind of labor behind him. After a short interlude in Phoenix, he took a job with the forest service and ranched his own land. He had built a good life in the bucolic mountains of New Mexico. He wanted us to be happy because his own upbringing had been less than perfect. He waxed in and out of depression, often becoming anxious and restless. One minute, euphoria, the next a deep melancholy that not even his children could pull him from. He’d talk of great men and their ability to make their mark on the world. He wanted to be someone, a man of prestige, clout, and affluence. Memories of living in poverty with his mother, Mayme, zapped my dad’s confidence. He didn’t realize that the people sitting in that Dodge sedan were everything he needed to be happy.
We had driven two-hours from Julia’s house and were headed to our home in Sacramento. In those days, cars had bench seats in the front and back. I could spread my five-year-old body out with my head on my mother’s lap and dangle my feet over the seat edge. But on this day, I kept pushing my heels into my dad’s side, and he kept brushing them away. His brow tensed and he snapped, “keep your feet down.” In the back seat, my sisters and brother, Duane, were still punching one another and laughing. My dad turned off the main highway onto the forest service road to Weed Tower. Rocks spit from the spinning tires and the engine growled as we climbed the mountain. He took the curves tightly, twisting around every so often to backhand one of my siblings. Duane bobbed and weaved, knowing he would be the one in dad’s sights when the car stopped. My mother never said a word. Discipline was dad’s domain.
After winding up the hill a little too fast and trying to subdue the troops in the back, he skidded to a halt. The car lurched forward as he put it in park. Without a word, he jumped out and walked over to the tented cattle guard. My mom waited with us in cold silence. In the west, cattle guards are used to keep cows in or out of a particular area. A deep pit is dug in the middle of the road then lined with cement. Parallel metal bars are laid long ways across the pit. Each bar is spaced four inches apart. The bars are sunk into cement at opposite ends. Above the ground, on each side, posts are strung with barbed wire fencing. The cattle guard replaces a gate; cars can pass over the metal bars, but cows recognize the potential hazard of breaking a leg and won’t step across.
It was one of my dad’s jobs to make sure the fresh cement didn’t crack in the cool, New Mexican evenings. We were at an altitude of 7,500 feet. When cement cures, it shouldn’t fall below fifty degrees fahrenheit. A fifteen-foot long tent was placed over the top of the cement with a furnace inside. My dad had to check the furnace in order to keep the temperature just right. He disappeared into the tent just as one of our neighbors pulled alongside the Dodge.
The house where I grew up
Mayme
My earliest memory is when I was three years old in Phoenix, Arizona. These memories are cloudy, but the first is of my grandma Mayme in the kitchen with my mom. I’m crawling into the kitchen, even though I’m three. I can only think that I wanted attention. I got it, but not what I expected. My grandma said, “stand up and stop actin’ like a baby.” It was the first time I had feelings of shame and embarrassment. The next thing I remember is the face of Frankenstein’s monster on our black and white TV. I stood frozen in fear. I also remember my three older siblings coming home from school. My oldest brother, Ronnie, would later tell me, “we were destitute, and we all dressed in hand-me-downs, most of our clothes had been given to us.” We had lived eight months in Phoenix while my dad tried his hand at real estate. That career path did not materialize. My mom was tired of borrowing money from dad’s cousin, Dick, who had been quite generous. She insisted we leave.
Because dad didn’t want to go back to the mines in Carlsbad, he moved us from the hot, low deserts of Arizona to the cool mountains of Sacramento in 1962. Before my dad lost his job in the potash mines he and my mom bought a cabin with 200 acres from a family named Clark. The original structure consisted of a main room with a fireplace. There was one large upstairs bedroom. It was built in the late 1800s of hand-hewn beams with interlocking ends and plaster that filled the crevices. The Clarks had added one bedroom downstairs, with only a curtain separating it from the main room. It was rustic, but beautiful. I remember people coming up our drive just to take pictures of the old place.
When Ron and Virginia decided to move the family in, they added a porch, where my dad stacked wood for the fireplace, a bathroom (because there was only an outhouse), and a kitchen. About a quarter of a mile above the house was the pond, fed by an underground spring. In the summer, we would put on our swimsuits and jump into the frigid water. In the winter, it became a frozen sheet of ice. Growing up in a little mountain village–with cows, horses, pigs, our dog Rebel, beloved cats Tiger One, Tiger Two, and Toughie–was as good as it gets. And then we had our grandma just across the field.
The original structure without the porch and kitchen
My next memory is the move from Phoenix to Sacramento. We were in the Dodge climbing Denny Hill, a meandering switchback that took us to an elevation of 7,500 feet. I was delirious with a high fever from the flu. I was on my mom’s lap when I opened my eyes. I was met with millions of stars twinkling in the night sky. A coal black canvas created a backdrop for their luminosity. I would see this again and again while I lived in Sacramento. Stars so bright and so numerous set against a Stygian space. It was mysterious dark matter made beautiful by blazing celestial bodies. I must have fallen back to sleep because when I woke up, I was on the sofa at my grandma Mayme’s. Fever gone, ready to live a brand new life.
Mayme had met and married Frank Scott, and they had moved to Sacramento several years before our arrival. Frank was a different man than her first husband, Henry. He never had a lot to say, but when my siblings and I were around we seemed to make him smile. Even when he was watching his westerns on TV, and we were playing cowboys and Indians in the living room, he never told us to quiet down or behave. He just smiled. I remember him as a kind and loving grandfather. He adored us and he loved my dad.
Frank worked for the Forest Service, and Mayme gardened and gossiped. My grandmother had built dozens of raised beds where she grew hollyhocks, dahlias, mums, and a vast array of trees and shrubs. Not only did she have flourishing gardens, she now had five grandchildren some of whom could go with her on her forays into the village. She would take us on the gossip circuit from the Munson’s general store where Sadie Munson shared tidbits gathered from earlier customers. Often the Hill’s name came up. Their housekeeper complained to Sadie about the amount of dog fur she cleaned off the Hill’s sofa each week. As children living in this little mountain town, we were stunned that a dog actually lived in someone’s house. Rebel was never allowed inside our house. On cold nights he slept under the porch. Then after Sadie’s we would move on up the curvy incline to the Post Office where Mayme shared what she knew with the Postmaster, Patty. She was the only person in the Post Office and was quite a lot younger than my grandmother. But Patty had the knack for gathering and spreadings news, which I guess was kind of like sorting mail and messages into boxes. And finally back down a meandering slope where we would conference with Nona at the Calkins’s gas station and dry goods store. Nona’s husband Roy worked on cars while Nona sold a variety of canned beans and vegetables. Behind an old wooden counter with a nice glass front was displayed all the different penny candies and more expensive Snickers and Milky Way. Nona always gave us a piece of double bubble. We would make those rounds at least once a week so that Mayme could gather intel.
In the summer and on weekends, we would have endless sleepovers at my grandma’s. On most of those sleepovers, we would play cards, go outside and play hide and seek, or settle down and listen while Mayme told ghost stories. She had lived in Kentucky and Tennessee as a child. One of those stories was about the creaking rocking chairs on her grandmother’s porch in Tennessee that seemed to have a life of their own. Her voice would hit a lower octave as she began, “the rockers moved continuously backwards and forward.” She would look around at each one of us. “The creepy part was that no one ever sat in those rockers. I remember the old timers saying that ghosts sat in those chairs.”
Our eyes and mouths would be o-shaped circles. She said, “You see spirits were waiting for passersby. And if someone saw one of those rockers stop–their heart stopped, and they became one of the dead who could not leave that porch. They eternally rocked backwards and forwards.” We would be transfixed. She would slowly raise her eyes and look past us and whisper, “who, who is that behind you?” We would all turn and scream and grab onto one another. Her robust laugh didn’t do much to calm the communal fear. She would quip, “you silly kids. You’re scaring me with that screaming.” We didn’t care how many times she told that story or any story. Just being there was enough.
She was a bit mischievous and she never followed the rules, which we loved. Every month she would extend an invitation for a special trip to the dump where we would find irreplaceable objets d’art. I remember picking up a catechism book. I thought it was a small bible. She made me throw it back, saying, “you don’t want that.” I guess Catholicism was taboo even at the junkyard.
On many occasions, we would sneak over to watch Elvis movies, mostly because my mom was in an extreme religious phase and didn’t approve of his gyrations or suggestive songs. My oldest brother Ronnie and I loved Elvis, and so did Mayme. As we hopped rocks to cross the gurgling creek to get to her house, she would stand with one hand on her hip and a KOOL cigarette in the other, watching, making sure we made the crossing safely.
Well in the far-left background
I loved my home. I embraced the beauty of it, and I remember my childhood as near to perfect as any could be. But my dad would weave in and out of depression and my mom would withdraw further into herself with little or no communication. When my parents fought and mom threw plates at my dad, I knew my brothers and sisters would take me to a massive tree swing where a thick-corded rope had been hung. We would swing and talk. Ronnie would reassure us that no matter what happened between our parents, he would take care of us. Eventually, after my mother’s temper calmed and the threat of flying plates was over, the white flag was raised. My dad would come up the hill and tell us, “mom has cooled off.” He knew he had once again pushed her too far. We had these crazy moments, but riding horses, running up hills, and of course hanging with Mayme made up for what was brewing under the surface. All of us, from the oldest child to the youngest, realized life in the mountains was precious, but not permanent. There was a hint of fragility to it all. Everything around us appeared perfect, but the feeling of apprehension pulsed like the rotor blades of a helicopter from far away. At first it was faint, but each day it got closer and the angry, frenzied blade slap grew louder. Before we were fully aware, it was upon us.
Our fireplace, the only source of heat
Dad
Charlie, one of our neighbors, must have been working up at the tower. He had been coming down the hill when he saw us and pulled up alongside our car and got out. We had known him for as long as I could remember. Sometimes we would go to his house where my parents would play cards with him and his wife, Pansy. I would play with their only son, Lonnie Joe. My mom occasionally babysat little Lonnie, but when he pulled his pants down in front of my sister Larena and me, she decided the babysitting arrangement was not for her, and apparently not for her girls.
My mom got out of the car, and she and Charlie chatted. I played with the blinker on the steering column, pretending to drive, when something caught my eye. I turned to look at the tent. The sides sucked in as if it were a living, breathing beast. Then, without warning, the tent exploded, exhaling fire high into the air. I watched a scene my mind could not comprehend. What I did realize all too soon was that my dad was still inside. We all saw it. My mom turned and ran toward the tent, shouting my dad’s name. Charlie grabbed her back. Just as suddenly, he took out his pocket knife and began cutting gashes into the canvas so there would be a means of escape if my Dad could find the holes. The fire burned Charlie as he kept slicing into the tent.
The trench underneath was engulfed in flames. Inside the car, Duane, Jeannie, Larena and I were four stoic soldiers. No one moved. The flames darted higher. “Ronald,” my mother’s voice tried to rise above the roar of the burning tent. She repeated his name over and over until all that came out was a ragged rasping. In the car, we held our collective breath. Suddenly a charred and blackened form staggered from the inferno. He couldn’t have been in there that long, but his appearance said otherwise.
Charlie grabbed an old horse blanket from his truck and extinguished the last of the flames from my dad’s body. “Help me put him in the backseat.” My mom opened the door and gingerly guided my dad to sit down. He winced and sucked in his breath with every move. He was laughing, crying, burbling like a baby. My mom jumped into the driver’s seat. Charlie shouted, “I’m going to the White’s house. They have a phone and I’ll call for an ambulance to come from Alamogordo.” My Mom nodded. To us, she croaked, “Kids, you’ve got to look for the ambulance! I just need to concentrate on driving.” Then we were gone. She pressed the accelerator and we sped Weed Tower hill and then down Denny Hill, descending 1,200 feet in a matter of minutes. The Dodge was a big V-8 with fins. My mom let it fly.
Dad sat in the back with my brother Duane and my sister Larena. My oldest sister Jeannie had moved up front with mom and me. Dad kept talking, his words fast, repetitive. He’d gasp, then he’d whistle. His body shivered and shook. He was cold, but couldn’t stand anything near his burned skin. The flesh on his fingers hung in loose ribbons. I looked back at him. Like a movie in slow motion, the moment pressed into my mind: the sight of burned skin hanging off of his hands; his once handsome face, red and swollen, now unrecognizable. The sickening stench of cooked flesh mixed with the singed hairs of the horse blanket. He kept saying, “It’s going to be okay, kids. Don’t worry about your old dad.” Instinctively, I knew nothing would be okay. The stone had crashed through the surface of the pond, the waves rushed and roiled out hard and fast. The grave repercussions of this one incident would echo in our lives for years to come.
We made it to Alamogordo, never passing the ambulance that Charlie called. Later we heard that they had taken a different road, which can happen in the country. My memory is vague after that. I was five. But I do remember my Grandma Mayme being with us. We were sitting on the lawn of the hospital, and it was dark. Mayme said, “look up at that window. That is where your dad is, and you need to say a prayer for him.” It’s hard for a five year old to know what to say to God when your Dad has just walked through fire. In a moment like that I should have cried. Mayme did. This was her child. As far as I know, none of my siblings moved, cried, or questioned. We were stuck in a moment where we just waited and watched.
After almost a year of hospitals and skin grafts, my dad finally came home for good. He had third degree burns over ninety percent of his body. He had no hair, no eyebrows, and barely any eyelids. Skin had been grafted to rebuild his nose. I wanted to run up and hug him, but my mother stopped me. “You can’t; it’s too painful.” The new skin on his hands continually cracked and bled. Eventually his hair grew back, but his nose looked like stretched putty. Raised patchy welts (which would later become raised patchy scars) covered his arms and legs. His skin was a mottled red and pasty white. It would be years and many surgeries later before he healed physically. Mentally, the process would falter.
He stayed home for some time after the accident. When my mom went to work, my dad felt like half a man. Then came the assumptions that she couldn’t face his appearance, then accusations that she wanted someone else. When a person’s identity is torn away, they say and do hurtful things. He had lost who he was. That handsome and physically strong man was now weak and broken. His insecurities mounted day by day. When my mom worked late, we stayed with dad, and I dreaded his sulking, surly tirades. After the fire, he could be quite mean.
We stayed in Sacramento two years after the accident, and then my mother could no longer deal with the depression–his or hers. After much debate, and to Mayme’s anguish and disapproval, we left our mountain paradise to move to Carlsbad, where my mom and dad found jobs. By that time the marriage had been damaged even more than my father’s features. My dad got his job back in the underground potash mines, and he hated it. My mother took classes to become a nurse in the ER. We came to a town where people looked at my brothers, sisters, and me like hicks from the hills (and we were). When my parents divorced, the separation wasn’t just between them; it split us all. Soon we dispersed like ants out of an anthill. My oldest brother left for Texas, and Duane took off on his chopper for California. My sisters married too young, exchanging opportunity for an endless cycle of child rearing and bad decisions. My path was circuitous, from California to Albuquerque, with its share of self-inflicted suffering.
The crash of the waves continued to hit again and again, and we fought to stay afloat. Tragedies visited, encroaching upon our vague recollections of a peaceful mountain existence. Each of us would be tested on our separate journeys–sometimes through fire where we rose the best we could from the ashes–and sometimes through the gentle lapping of water, where peace and contentment were just a memory away.
