The man with the sooty face stood in the dancing glow of flames and watched his home burn to the ground.

He stood with his arm around the shoulders of his sobbing wife and just watched it happen. His face didn’t express much, although I could see the muscles of his jaw bulging below the skin. You might have guessed that he was still too stunned to fully grasp what was happening, but I don’t think that was it. I think he understood it fully — and in his head he was taking a grim inventory.

The photo albums, the book collections, the trunk full of souvenirs collected during 30 years’ worth of family vacations.

The kids’ toys, the old report cards, the door frames on which each child had been measured.

The box of handwritten letters, his wife’s artwork, the tattered quilt his mother had made them a year before she passed.

And that’s not to mention the more superficial but equally profound losses. The familiar furniture, the creaky old bed, the ambling desk he had made himself during a brief fling with woodworking.

His clothes? All of them gone, including a T-shirt he had kept from college and an old bathrobe he inherited from his dad. His wife’s clothes, too, and the sheets they slept on.

As he watched these things succumb to fire, it seemed that his very memories were perishing in flames. Every now and then, a frowning neighbor in night clothes would wander by and pat his back. At least everybody got out all right, they would say. That’s the important thing.

“Yes,” the sooty man would respond. “That’s the important thing.”

All he really knew was that at 10:30 that evening, he had shut out the lights and slipped into bed next to his sleeping wife, kissing her on the forehead before he rolled over and went to sleep. That was the ritual, unchanged in three decades of marriage.

Only this time, before the clock had struck 11, their house was in flames and they had to flee with what was on their backs. Less than an hour after he had planted that kiss upon his wife’s brow, all that they had accumulated since the day he carried her across the threshold was gone. Every last bit of it, gone. Because fire is a beast in every sense of the word and fire is greedy. It takes everything it can and without compunction.

The fire took the big stuff that night — the 1969 Camaro he had been restoring in the garage, for instance — but it also made sure to devour his favorite razor. And the dog-eared book she kept on her nightstand. And the ragged afghan on the couch under which they had often cuddled. 

The fire would have taken them, too, if they’d given it a chance — and it would have taken them without remorse.

The flames that night burned 30 years’ worth of a family’s unique essence right out of existence and it took mere minutes to do so. Watching the man as he watched the fire, I wondered if he felt fragile at that moment — if, for the first time in his life, he realized that everything we spend our lives building can be taken away that quickly, and without any remedy for bringing them back.

“Everyone got out all right,” said the next neighbor to wander by. “That’s what’s important.”

“Yes,” said the man with the sooty face. “That’s what’s important.”

He hugged his wife a little tighter then, but his eyes never turned away from the punishing flames. As far as I know, he watched until the very last of them flickered out of existence, revealing in its entirety the blackened heap that used to be his world.

Roughly 15 years ago that was, but I think of it every time fire comes for another victim, chasing people out of the space they had called home for the bulk of their lives.

I always wonder where the sooty man ended up and whether he was able to recreate the home he lost that night. Or if recreating is even possible — maybe fire also takes a way a man’s will to accumulate material things. Maybe in the home that comes after, he resigns himself to little more than four walls and a roof, if only so that he won’t have as much to lose next time.

I thought about these things again last week when fire destroyed a home in Auburn, removing from the world all of the things a woman had gathered over the course of 89 years.

It boggles the mind: If you’re that woman, how do you ever make peace with it? How do you come to grips with the idea that the home that endured 90 years’ worth of days and nights could be reduced to rubble in mere minutes?

Maybe over time, it simply forces a new perspective, so that when people go about repeating that bit about the most important thing of all, you know with all your heart that it’s the truth.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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