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

Debra Gwartney
screen door slamming, then Mamie in her nervous way inched to
the side of my bed to see if I were awake. “There’s a fire,” she said
after she saw my eyes open. She sat near me and touched my arm.
“Grandpa went to help.”
By the time Mamie had brought me a steaming cup of hot
lemonade—her cure for cold symptoms—and baby aspirin, the siren
had stopped. We sat together with the light glowing on the bedside
table, and she pushed back my hair, staring out the window with a
weary expression. The phone had rung while she was in the kitchen
and now, in staccato sentences that weren’t aimed at me but at the
ceiling, she said that the operator had called to say the Crescent
Club was on fire, a bar on Main Street next to the Recorder-Herald.
Mamie fretted, their livelihood on the line, her husband in danger. I
didn’t know about the many layers of her anxiety back then, but I do
remember thinking I should stay awake with her. Except sleep pushed
against me, the specks of orange aspirin melted now on my tongue
and the cup of hot liquid in my belly. My eyes shut as the stinging in
my throat eased. I was sure my grandfather would stop the fire, and I
knew he, along with Grandpa Bob and other men in town, would do it
quickly. I opened my eyes briefly to see Mamie stare out the window,
unblinking, but the sight didn’t unsettle me. My grandmother was
coated with a sadness I’d become accustomed to. Like the wax around
some kinds of cheese, it was compact around her, bending to her shape,
so that I knew her sadness as well as I knew her.
At some point in my life I began to wonder if Grandpa Ron had
purged his grief over their four dead children in a sudden burst—the
first heart attack he’d had several years before I was born. As if the
sorrow he felt came out in one anguished crack, leaving him tired and
spent, but able to push on. He smiled more than my grandmother did,
and seemed easier with himself and with the world. His hands weren’t
jittery like Mamie’s. No one knew why their perfect, plump babies
had slipped away moments after birth, and I think now that even if
Mamie had understood the reason for their deaths—the Rh factor in
her blood discovered by scientists a few years later—she would have
been sunk. But Grandpa Ron had managed—at least in my mind he
had—to turn his full attention to the one child they had left, and to
the newspaper he made from scratch twice a week.
The night of the fire I was far into sleep by the time my grandfather
returned. The next morning, after he ate a plate of sourdough pancakes
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