RED NIGHTS
567
on safety: "When you feel yourself falling don't topple like a tree, do
crumple like an empty sack, falling on the fleshy parts of your
body...." Grown men fall in the streets, great national leaders trip
over their own shoelaces, astronauts nosedive into bathtubs. The
fact that some of them kill themselves only makes it funnier. Learning
by experience becomes most comical when it involves loss of life,
although it's easier to laugh when it doesn't.
I will not include images of myself falling from a tree, from a
seawall, from a horse, from a cow, from the running board of an
automobile, nor of myself falling into the front door of a house, and
at a different time falling out of the same door, nor of the bloody
noses, cut foreheads and broken bones that resulted.)
I woke up when the wagon went by, creaking like a ship, passing
close, just on the other side of the wall by my head. Chip would be
driving, I knew, with Toad in back watching the cans. They never
spoke as they went by. Sometimes Chip would murmur to the
horses ... "haw, gee-aw." The traces rang quietly and the tall iron–
rimmed wheels splintered rocks under the snow.
It was hard to get out of bed. The air was cold. Water froze in
the bucket and the windows were coated with ice. The light was
gray, exactly the same quality as the twilight of the night before,
devoid of meaning. I cleaned out the stove, laid paper, a few sticks
of kindling and some coal, splashed kerosene over everything and
struck a match. With a great whoosh the stove filled with flames. My
teeth chattering, I rushed back under the covers. I fell asleep waiting
to get warm.
When Guy and my mother came through the door I woke up.
They seemed tremendously alive, bustling with energy, their voices
strangely loud.
"It's freezing in here. What happened to the fire?"
I sat up in bed. The fire had gone out, or more likely had never
caught after the kerosene had burned.
"You forgot to set the alarm," my mother said.
"No, I didn't."
She knelt and relit the fire. Guy stood in the open doorway,
knocking snow off his galoshes. He closed the door and sat on the
