“Building a Fire,” by Maxine Scates - The New Yorker

Audio: Read by the author.

Staring at the flames of the woodstove fire
guarded by its glass door, I’m trying to remember
what I’m good at—surprised when it occurs to me
I’m good at making this fire out of kindling
I’ve split, plus one piece of fir and two of oak, cut
from the large branches of the neighbor’s oak
that fell across the road two years ago
on a winter evening. We were driving home
when we saw the flashlights telling us to slow,
the road impassable. It was then I lost my glasses
climbing over a downed tree, and when we
reached our house I called my neighbor,
not yet home from work, to tell him his tree
had fallen and, at first, he thought it had fallen
on his house, as if he already saw our oak glancing
off his roof a year later during the ice storm,
when it seemed every oak in the neighborhood
fell at the same moment. By then, our neighbor

had enough wood and so we cut our old oak
and hauled it up the road. All our ricks
are overflowing now, filled with oak
and four fir trees that died over four summers
due to drought or sunburn, the man who cut
them down said, the consequence, no doubt,
of the woods in front of us being clear-cut to build
a house free of the hazards of trees. Today,

I had jury duty and the D.A. asked me if I thought
economic hardship could impact a relationship
and I said yes, I certainly did. And when the defense
attorney asked about domestic violence, I said
I’d grown up with it, it being the shout and stumble,
the raw confusion of the shove and slap . . .
though it was all I said, and then I said I’d listened
to the charges and the judge’s emphasis on the phrase
“beyond a reasonable doubt” and thought I could
be fair, perhaps because, like my fire contained
in its iron box, for a moment I believed in the clarity
of language, its unblurred definition. I should

have known what I’d said was enough
for the defense attorney to want me gone from
that grim room where the jurors’ chairs did not face
the defendant, accused of harming two people
who shared his name, and the bailiff’s shoes
were scuffed and the judge seemed to be looking
at his computer screen most of the time. And when
I picked up my belongings to go, even as the judge
was thanking me, I hurried, feeling as if I’d done
something wrong, to the door, where I realized
I didn’t know how I’d gotten there because
the bailiff had led us, so for a while I walked down
hallways where each door opened to a courtroom
where people’s lives were changing one way
or the other. Then I came home and built this fire,

and my brother called to tell me my mother
had done just fine with the physical therapist until
she started to shake because her muscles tire. They
both live where there is no need to build a fire on
a cold night though the hills around them
are rimmed by the glow of fire pushed by warm
winds in this dark December. I doubt they think
of those long-ago nights in our small house,
nights grown distant enough that even I thought
I could judge the facts as if they were discrete—
and free of unending consequence.

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"fire" - Google News
December 16, 2019 at 06:01PM
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“Building a Fire,” by Maxine Scates - The New Yorker
"fire" - Google News
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