Read an excerpt of After the Flames by Jonathan R. Rose below, one of our featured summer reads! Don't forget to save 25% off this book when you use code FLAMES25 from July 25 - July 31, 2024.
MARCH 10, 1988
The weather in Cumberland Beach, Ontario, was frigid that Thursday morning. While the thermostat read minus seven degrees Celsius, the icy breath of the nearby lake pulled the actual temperature closer to minus twenty. Less than two weeks earlier, after fixing yet another pipe that had burst from the cold, Mike Hawkins had scrounged together enough money to purchase a new electrical furnace for the house he shared with his wife, Linda, and her sons, Joey and Danny. He was sure it would do a far better job heating the home than the old oil furnace they had been using. A few days after Mike removed the oil furnace and purchased the electrical furnace (which he was planning on installing himself in order to save money), a home insurance agent told him their policy was being cancelled. Mike demanded to know why. The agent told him a professional electrician had to install the electrical furnace. Also, provincial regulations required that for any house to qualify for home insurance, it had to have two secure functioning sources of heat, and with no installed furnace, the house was left with only one source: the fireplace.
At exactly 6:14 a.m., Mike Hawkins woke up. He rolled in the bed, basking in the warmth of his blanket for just a few more seconds before getting ready for work at the Vulcan Hart Industries factory in Orillia, where he started his shift at 7:00 a.m. Always cold, always shivering during the mornings that winter, Mike got dressed in the warmest clothes he had. He didn’t bother with a shower, knowing the water would be bitterly cold. Afterward, he went outside to turn on the car: a big, green, late-1970s Mercury Marquis. While he left the car running, hoping its engine would make it another day, he enjoyed a cigarette.
Meanwhile Linda, who drove Mike to work, had already woken up and started filling the wood stove and the fireplace with kindling, which she planned to light after returning home to give her and her two sons the warmth they needed. She then checked the wood stove to see if there were any hot coals inside from the night before, but forgot to shut the stove door when she was done.
At 6:35 a.m., the sun had yet to creep up. The drive to drop Mike off at work wasn’t going to take long: fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back. Linda would be home by 7:05 a.m., 7:10 at the latest, when she would make breakfast for her sons before starting her day.
Just a few minutes after his mother and stepfather left the house, fourteen-year-old Joey woke up to the smell of smoke. He jumped out of bed, but before leaving his bedroom he took off his pyjamas and put on a pair of jeans and a sweater. As soon as he walked into the kitchen his eyes bulged at the sight of thick smoke creeping toward him, pluming from flames growing larger and angrier. He rushed into his younger brother’s room and violently shook him awake. Unsure what was going on, Danny initially resisted his older brother’s actions, believing them to be just another example of big brother bothering little brother. After a few moments, however, Danny started smelling the smoke and feeling the heat from the approaching flames. Joey grabbed his younger brother, who was dressed from head to toe in pyjamas, rushed him to the window opened it, and tossed him outside. Joey didn’t follow. When Danny asked him why, Joey told him their mother might still be inside.
Joey re-entered the flourishing inferno, desperately shouting for his mother, hoping to hear her voice so he could use it as a beacon to guide him through the thick walls of smoke. He coughed violently. He felt light-headed. The heat from the fire was intense. Moving from room to room, he continued searching for his mother, his shouts of her name growing more muffled as he inhaled more and more black smoke.
When he realized his mother was not in the house, that it was only him and the flames, Joey tried to escape. The first route that came to mind was through the kitchen and out the front door, but that was impossible because the kitchen contained the fiercest flames. That’s where the fire had started. A piece of hot coal inside of the wood stove that Linda had failed to find had ignited the kindling she left inside, and by leaving the door open she had given the blossoming fire an opportunity to spread.
Joey turned around and ran to Linda and Mike’s bedroom on the second floor of the house, dodging whipping flames along the way. No longer coughing, but choking on the smoke, he didn’t have much time. He saw the window and threw himself through the glass. It wasn’t Joey that escaped the house, however, but a fireball with a fourteen-year-old boy in the centre. While he was finally out of the house, the fire refused to let him go. It continued relentlessly burning his skin. Meanwhile, his lungs were so full of smoke that, despite the pain, he was unable to scream.
Danny ran over to the house of Lynda Young, who was the closest neighbour. She ordered him to stay in her house before rushing to Joey. He was still on fire. When she tried touching him his skin melted in her hands. She saw that his jeans were the biggest source of the flames still ravaging his body. What she didn’t see, however, was that the denim had fused itself to his legs, as had the jeans’ March 10, 1988 metallic zipper, which melted into his thigh. So when she peeled the jeans off, burning her own hands in the process, she also peeled off a great deal of Joey’s skin. Afterward, she tossed the jeans onto the seat of a wooden swing set that immediately burst into flames.
Gazing at his deformed, melted hands, Joey pleaded with his neighbour, begging her to help him. That he was still speaking, that he was still alive, that he was still human in those moments came as an incredible shock that Lynda did not reflect upon until much later, when she also reflected on the actions she had taken, questioning if they were right or if they were riddled with costly mistakes.
It wasn’t long before other people came to help. Twice they tried to move Joey, but every time they did his still burning body started a new fire. Nearby trees, after feeling the touch or inhaling the heat from his body, were instantly set ablaze. On the third attempt they were finally able to roll Joey over and wrap him in blankets that bravely resisted the urge to combust the moment they touched him.
Lynda ran back into her house and dialed 911. Instead of hearing the voice of a person ready to help, she heard the voice of a groggy telephone repairman. She hung up the phone and dialed zero for the operator. After she had waited several painful seconds she knew were exponentially more painful for Joey, the operator casually asked where she wanted to be connected. Lynda shouted for the fire department, an ambulance, the police, anybody who could help. After she was connected to the fire department, they assured her that emergency responders were on the way. She hung up the phone, told Danny his brother was going to be okay, and ran back outside to Joey.
His body, still tightly wrapped in several blankets, puffed out thick billows of smoke. He looked at Lynda and told her he couldn’t feel his legs. She assured him that was a good thing because they were badly burned and, if he could feel them, all he would feel was pain. He also said he couldn’t breathe.
The ambulance, along with police and the fire department, finally arrived nearly thirty minutes after the first emergency call was made. It was abundantly clear to everybody present that the paramedics were going to be transporting either a corpse, or a living body that had yet to accept the inevitable fact it was not going to survive much longer. Meanwhile, the fire department started putting out an array of fires from the swing set and the trees to the house itself, which had already started collapsing under the weight of its own suffering.
According to all the newspapers, news broadcasts, interviews, and books, that’s what happened. That was the story people read, heard, watched, and talked about throughout 1988 and the years to follow. Except that story wasn’t entirely true.