the last analysis I was my father’s son, a notion I rejected with all my heart; and satisfied that I’d made a clean escape from a happy family, I lurched across the cobbles and plunged into the conflagration.
Gagging from the heat and smoke, I pulled a bandanna from my pocket and wiped my watering eyes before tying it over my face; then hearing what I took to be gunshots, I dropped to all fours before realizing it was only the pop-pop of bursting bottles. While the fire raged in the galleries, the thick walls of the ground-floor lockers still provided a degree of insulation, though maverick flames had penetrated far enough to flick the odd slab of meat—which caused the fat to drip from the roasting chuck or tenderloin, further feeding the blaze. The herring barrels had their crowns, the hanging game their ruffs and skirts of flame, and in one locker I saw a ten-point stag with its antlers on fire. A ladder on the mezzanine was limned in incandescence before disintegrating into ash; a freight elevator dropped its open cab into coruscating cinders. The ice ramparts were melting in a niagara that flooded the well of machinery, thereby cheating the flammable gases of their chance to detonate—not that there was any want of combustion. All around me the fire waved in sheets, whirled in flutes and funnels like classical flourishes.
Against a stack of smoldering bushel baskets I spied a lone hand truck and made to grab it, but the steel frame was too hot to touch; so I removed my slicker and wrapped it around the handle. Then I began pushing the two-wheeler ahead of me like a battering ram, dodging sparks and falling debris in a furious slalom through the burning plant. At the far end I careened toward the sanctum, ordinarily distinguished from the other refrigerated chambers by its coffer-size padlock, though tonight the lock hung loose and the door was wide open. Skidding to a stop at the threshold, I beheld a scene I had to rub my smarting eyes to make come clear: for there stood my humpbacked papa in his collarless shirtsleeves, his shed sheep’s pelt on the floor at his feet, gibbering to himself as he tugged at a rope like Quasimodo hauling on his bellpull. The rope described a taut triangle running up through an overhead pulley, then down to the ancient casket mounted on trestles, whose girth it encircled. The weathered planks were lacy from the perforations of termites, the casket’s contents leaking (despite the visible zinc lining) through its many holes. How my father planned to remove the box once he’d lifted it from its horizontal repose, an impossible task from the look of it, was anyone’s guess—unless he was expecting someone to arrive with a vehicle to cart the thing away.
Leaving the two-wheeler in the doorway I stepped inside the Keep, where the air was scarcely cooler than in the warehouse proper, and grabbed hold of the rope alongside my papa. Turning his head to look at me, his eyes salmon pink in the absence of his spectacles, he seemed to see a stranger; then he turned away only to look back momentarily, taking advantage of my occupied hands to pull down my mask—whereupon he gave my torrid cheek a pinch and grinned a foolish grin. Again taking hold of the rope, he resumed muttering what sounded like a mix of devotions and numerical formulae. Together we did make some progress, managing to elevate the coffin a few inches from its bier, but a plume of smoke with a flaming pistil had invaded the locker, promising to turn the place in a matter of minutes into a crematorium. At the same time flames from the ceiling were sliding down the rope, which sizzled as it snapped in two, dumping the casket back onto the sawhorses, which, themselves on fire, crashed to the floor in a dazzle of embers. Stymied for no more than a heartbeat, my papa attacked the casket as if he thought he might wrestle it upright with his bare hands. Judging his effort useless, I took hold of his shoulders to pull him away from his unavailing labor, but he twisted out of my grasp with a violence that made me shudder, so much did his rage remind me of my own. I realized I would have to knock him senseless in order to haul him out of there, but before I could move forward