Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

172 ◆ Crab Orchard Review
Debra Gwartney
was, by then, on the verge of leaving for the funeral home. I was still
huddled on the last dark step, looking up at this thirty-four-year-old
mother who had one of my sisters in each hand. In front of her, my
brother pulled at his tie, and, outside, my dad honked the horn of the
car. “Can’t you do this one thing for me on the hardest day of my life?”
In Salmon, Idaho, exactly at noon, there’s a minute-long siren.
It starts off as a moan, and then wails upward. The sound meant fire
when a blaze sparked in the dry hills anywhere within county limits.
In the town of Salmon at noon it signified a break in the day, a time to
eat and rest. Great-Granddad at the hardware store flipped the closed
sign at the door so he could walk up the street for his bowl of cod
stew or a bacon sandwich. In the back of the shop, Grandpa Bob lay
down his welding tools and took off his mask, wiping the black smear
around his eyes, and made his way to the City News Stand to drink
coffee and eat at the counter while his wife, my Grandma Lois, sat
at the teacher’s table over at the high school cafeteria for her meal.
Down the street, tucked in between the Crescent Club and Wally’s
Cafe, Mamie and Grandpa Ron shut down the linotype machines and
the press while the newspaper’s employees slipped out of their heavy
aprons for an hour’s break.
On the days I was at the newspaper when the whistle blew, I went
to lunch with my grandparents. Particularly fine were the times I was
without brother or sisters, an only child again for the briefest of moments.
I hopped in the back seat of the tan Wagoneer and rode along to the
sagebrush-covered bench that rimmed the town, up to their green house
surrounded by greener lawn to eat hamburger patties and cold cottage
cheese, tomato and cucumber slices, and slippery canned peaches.
I often spent the night at their house, as well, in my mother’s old
bedroom. I remember one of those evenings when I was six or seven
and sick, my throat burning into my ears each time I inhaled. A cold
had been coming on all day, and the sticky ache of a fever deepened as I
lay in the dark wishing for Mamie. I’d rolled into a ball, half-awake, so
somehow it made sense when the alarm went off not at high noon but in
the dead of night. At last, I thought, a sound to wake my grandparents
and bring them to me.
Mamie and Grandpa, in their room across the hall, rose and
shuffled across the floor. They spoke softly, though I heard urgency
in my grandpa’s growled whisper. I snuggled into the bedcovers that
had been my mother’s and waited. Grandpa Ron left the house, the