Stories

By The Fireside

 

My great aunt Harriet sat beside the fire in our farmhouse kitchen every single day when I was a child. She was a fixture there, thin and old and frail. For as long as I could remember she sat there on a hard wooden chair that rocked with a faint creak, her old bones padded only by a thin red cushion. She came to the table for meals and went to church on Sunday mornings, but otherwise she just sat beside the fire.

It was her job to keep the fire going. One of the boys would bring her a bucket full of coal and she would feed the fire a few lumps of coal at a time. She would lift the coal with a large pair of tongs and toss them piece by piece, right where she wanted them to keep a nice even warm fire. It was not much of a toss and it looked easy but when we tried it we found it was hard to get the coal into the right place like she did.

Being a farmhouse, we often had baby animals who needed nursing beside the fire. In spring it was lambs, later it would be runt-of-the-litter piglets or maybe the occasional calf who had lost its mother. We had a basket, well padded, for them and a bottle to feed them. My mother would prepare the bottle and great aunt Harriet would hold it to the little orphan’s mouth and encourage it to suck. It never took her long to get even the weakest or sickest little piglet to feed. Then she would rock it almost like a baby and it would fall asleep on her lap.

Again it looked easy until you tried it. Some of these babies were too sick to nurse, some tried to guzzle everything down immediately and made themselves sick. Others were terrified and all they could do was struggle. I remember one calf, skinny but still a struggle for three of us kids to feed, that laid there content, not struggling at all while great aunt Harriet fed it.

Great aunt Harriet was there when we got up in the morning and she was still there when we went to bed at night. Looking back I don’t know where or if she slept. I don’t remember talking to her. I don’t remember anybody but my mother really talking to her. It would be like talking to the furniture. She was just there beside the fire, a part of our big busy kitchen.

One day when I came home from school she was not there. Her chair was empty. The fire was almost out and the house felt cold. I was shocked, just the way I was shocked when someone stole our truck. A piece of my world had been removed without notice.

“Put some coal on the fire,” my mother said.

My brother grabbed the bucket. It was half full of coal. He tossed it all on to what was left of the fire. A bunch of smoke made us all cough but it looked as if the little fire had been smothered and was about to go out. The piglet who had been asleep in the basket got up and began running around the kitchen squealing. This too had seldom happened before.

“Aunt Harriet is ill,” my mother said. “The ambulance took her to the hospital and I don’t think she will be coming home again.”

I was too busy chasing the piglet to pay attention to what she was saying. Of course great aunt Harriet would be back; the structure of my world required it. I caught the piglet and my mother gave me the bottle for it. My brother and I together struggled to feed it but we got more milk on our clothes than into the piglet.

We all went to great aunt Harriet’s funeral, our whole family, but it didn’t seem like anyone else had known her because no one else was there. The minister tried to make it sound like she had been somehow important, that her life made a difference. Coming home I thought about it and I knew that was not true. I was fifteen and I watched television, I’d been to the movies and I’d read the celebrity magazines. All great aunt Harriet had ever done was keep a warm fire burning and help little orphan animals stay alive. You couldn’t call that a life