Read Online A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicholson Baker
Tags: Contemporary
Ads: Link
year we lived here we were spooked by the chimney experts and didn’t have any fires. The man who sold us the house had stuffed quantities of pink insulation up all the openings. Once while I was unpacking things I heard an angry cheeping. I pulled on the insulation—a cloud of bird-dropping dust puffed out into the room. The cheeping got louder. I went to the bathroom, and when I returned I heard a nibbling sound along with an even louder cheeping, and I saw a bat crouched in a corner, wings half furled, furiously nibbling on a copy of
Harper’s Magazine
. The bat was angry, baring its teeth like a dog, and the teeth were surprisingly fangy. There had been an article in the paper about rabies and bats; I thought there might be some possibility that this one was rabid. When I imprisoned it under an upside-down plastic trash basket, it began chattering furiously and gnawing at the plastic. I called animal control, which turned out to be a cherubic town policeman of maybe twenty-two and his niece of ten who sat in the patrol car. He trapped the bat in a lunchbox container with a screw-onlid. It was too expensive to test it for rabies, he said; he took a shovel out of his trunk and went off to a far corner of our yard, killed the bat and buried it there. We thanked him and he and his niece drove off. I felt that we’d done wrong. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have been bitten by the bat, but now I think it probably wasn’t rabid, just exhausted and mad after its tangle with the pink insulation.
Once we started using the fireplace, the bats moved to a comfortable spot in the eaves and had babies. Claire was looking out at the dusky sky one summer night from an upstairs window and saw many young ones, she said, black liquid drops, one after another, emerging from a shadowy hole.
Consider for a moment what the chimney sweeps had to do. I bet they ran into plenty of bats. I read about them one morning in a book of essays by Sydney Smith—I fished the book up first thing from the floor beside the bed and opened it to the table of contents, and there in the dimness was a title: “Chimney Sweepers.” Sydney Smith had written the essay for the
Edinburgh Review
in 1819. The sweeps were boys of seven or eight or nine,who would show up at the appointed house at three in the morning and bang on the front door. The servants, still asleep, wouldn’t let them in, and so they would stand in the cold, no socks, chilblains throbbing, waiting. They had to be small in order to fit up the chimneys, of course, and they worked all day in those tiny spaces, carrying the sack of soot from one job to the next, and some got stuck and died in the dark high corners, and before they became hardened to the work their knees bled. One climbing boy—so they were called—told an investigator for the House of Lords that he climbed his first chimney because his master told him that there was a plum pudding at the top. A plum pudding is in effect a prune pudding, but that wouldn’t sound as good.
Now we think of Dick Van Dyke dancing his pipe-stemmed, long legged dance; real chimney sweeps today are chatty men of thirty-five whose trucks are expensively painted with Victorian lettering—they’re the sort of men who also like to dress up as clowns or magicians for children’s birthdays. But back in 1819, it wasn’t a good life, and I found when I read about the climbing boys that I wanted to right the wrongimmediately—I wanted to mail letters urging legislative reform, as if the long-ago suffering could be fixed retroactively and all those lost lives redirected.
When we first moved here, we called a local chimney sweep—a software engineer who swept on weekends—who peered up into the brickwork and said that it was all rotten. No way could he sweep it until the chimney was rebuilt. A mason we talked to said the same thing: no fires until you do something radical. So we gave up on fires, and our first winter was very cold.
Then we
Harper’s Magazine
. The bat was angry, baring its teeth like a dog, and the teeth were surprisingly fangy. There had been an article in the paper about rabies and bats; I thought there might be some possibility that this one was rabid. When I imprisoned it under an upside-down plastic trash basket, it began chattering furiously and gnawing at the plastic. I called animal control, which turned out to be a cherubic town policeman of maybe twenty-two and his niece of ten who sat in the patrol car. He trapped the bat in a lunchbox container with a screw-onlid. It was too expensive to test it for rabies, he said; he took a shovel out of his trunk and went off to a far corner of our yard, killed the bat and buried it there. We thanked him and he and his niece drove off. I felt that we’d done wrong. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have been bitten by the bat, but now I think it probably wasn’t rabid, just exhausted and mad after its tangle with the pink insulation.
Once we started using the fireplace, the bats moved to a comfortable spot in the eaves and had babies. Claire was looking out at the dusky sky one summer night from an upstairs window and saw many young ones, she said, black liquid drops, one after another, emerging from a shadowy hole.
Consider for a moment what the chimney sweeps had to do. I bet they ran into plenty of bats. I read about them one morning in a book of essays by Sydney Smith—I fished the book up first thing from the floor beside the bed and opened it to the table of contents, and there in the dimness was a title: “Chimney Sweepers.” Sydney Smith had written the essay for the
Edinburgh Review
in 1819. The sweeps were boys of seven or eight or nine,who would show up at the appointed house at three in the morning and bang on the front door. The servants, still asleep, wouldn’t let them in, and so they would stand in the cold, no socks, chilblains throbbing, waiting. They had to be small in order to fit up the chimneys, of course, and they worked all day in those tiny spaces, carrying the sack of soot from one job to the next, and some got stuck and died in the dark high corners, and before they became hardened to the work their knees bled. One climbing boy—so they were called—told an investigator for the House of Lords that he climbed his first chimney because his master told him that there was a plum pudding at the top. A plum pudding is in effect a prune pudding, but that wouldn’t sound as good.
Now we think of Dick Van Dyke dancing his pipe-stemmed, long legged dance; real chimney sweeps today are chatty men of thirty-five whose trucks are expensively painted with Victorian lettering—they’re the sort of men who also like to dress up as clowns or magicians for children’s birthdays. But back in 1819, it wasn’t a good life, and I found when I read about the climbing boys that I wanted to right the wrongimmediately—I wanted to mail letters urging legislative reform, as if the long-ago suffering could be fixed retroactively and all those lost lives redirected.
When we first moved here, we called a local chimney sweep—a software engineer who swept on weekends—who peered up into the brickwork and said that it was all rotten. No way could he sweep it until the chimney was rebuilt. A mason we talked to said the same thing: no fires until you do something radical. So we gave up on fires, and our first winter was very cold.
Then we
Similar Books
