Coal Heater

When it is this cold I always think of how cold I always was when I was little. I have beat the story of the coal oil heater in the house on Morley to pieces. That heater was like a monster to me. I ran from the thing in the snow bearfooted to call the fire department on it. It caught Daddy's sock on fire before it caught the house on fire. Makes me wonder if drinking and fire really does go together. You know there is a song, that has a line did I dance on the bar or start any fires. Our great men started lots of fires. Well, maybe they didn't start them all, but we did have fires. The heater on Morley was oil burning or that is what my small mind thought. I was bright enough to know it had to be lighted somehow, and Daddy had to do it. Seems that drunk men want to do things that should have been done before they got drunk. Sober they just do nothing, then give 'em a bottle and they see something that needs to be done. That was how he burnt his sock, foot and part of the house on Morley. The fire department came, because I ran across the yard to our Kentucky neighbors house; barefooted in the snow. I ran into their house screaming that the heater was going to blow up. Berta and Dewy Napier were their names. They were alot like my grandmother that visited sometimes to scrub the floors. She came from Alabama to clean. Well she came mainly to see how bad things were getting. They finally got really bad.

The heater/sock thing was close to the final notice that the morgage was not being paid. The man that came in the long overcoat was from the bank. The house payment was eighty dollars, alot of money in 1968 and Daddy not working anymore. In his mind I guess he figured there was not a need to clean the white foam that the firemen sprayed all over the kitchen and livingroom, since the fat man in the coat was going to put everything out on the snow covered yard. Mama was always the blame for the foam staying till we were kicked out of the house on Morley. She was to blame for not finding out what happened to all the stuff that was put out of the house. Mr. Grass took it to his garage, but he died before Mama checked on her stuff. His stuff was possibly taken by kin or sold. There wasn't a way for them to know that the stuff in the old shed belonged to us if anyone really cared anyway.

***************There are a couple of heaters, well more than a couple, I remember as a kid. Worry is something I can never remember not doing. Heaters were always a worry to me, more than a worry, I was scared what the combination of fire and who was building the fire was going to cause. After the coal oil heater we had in the house on Morley was the coal burning heater in the old house. The old house being the one before the new house that was built after the old house burnt down. In the old house was a cast iron black one that sat out from the wall and had a pipe to the chimney made of rocks. This heater was also a monster to me. A monster made mad by the men that feed it too much coal. When this happened the top of it would turn red like a stove eye. I would go outside stand as far away from the house as I could to get away from the possibility of fire.

 One very tragic one that my Uncle Bill, his wife and son all died in. My daddy would not let us lock the doors while we were sleeping, because it was told that Uncle Bill actually did not die from smoke or fire. He bleed to death due to cuts he recieved breaking the window to escape the fire. There will be more to tell ya'll about the fires in my childhood, I am sure.