RING OF FIRE

I don't know how old I was the night the trailer burned down — or if the rumor was true that Daddy was the one who set it on fire.

What I do remember is cracking open the back bedroom door of the single-wide trailer just the tiniest sliver and poking my nose through to see why everything had gone so quiet inside. I could see beyond the living room to the yellow porch light that was swarming with moths. And I could see the outline of Daddy's face.

I nudged my head out farther but still couldn't tell what he was doing, maybe just fumbling for another bottle of beer in the Styrofoam cooler set by the front door. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the needle lowering on the record player to start another twangy country song.

I shrugged my shoulders and shut the door with a thud.

"I don't know what they're doin', but they went outside on the porch for something," I said to Sister and Jamie.

I hadn't started school yet, and my sister, Gina, was sixteen months younger. Our cousin Jamie was four years older than me, and it was always a treat when Daddy brought us to visit her on a Saturday night.

Jamie lived in Rockford, a little town south of Knoxville, Tennessee, with her mother and stepdad — my aunt Glenda, who was Daddy's closest sister, and her husband, George. They lived in a trailer park called Rocky Branch, just down the road a piece from Aunt Glenda and Daddy's mother, Mamaw.

We'd paused our game so I could check on Daddy, like I always did. When my mama was working nights at Genie's Bar, Daddy had a tendency to get himself into trouble, so from as early as I can remember, I put myself in charge of making sure he was okay. He rarely was.

His presence usually meant there'd be drinking and loud music, since Daddy's inclination was to turn every kitchen into a certifiable honky-tonk. Through the wall, I heard the raspy voice of Tammy Wynette, so all seemed right with the world again. I knew that the adults would soon begin dancing around the kitchen or out on the front porch, smoking Winston cigarettes and clanking their bottles of beer while they jigged.

Daddy was always shirtless and half-lit, leading the drunken parade and hollering "Woo, doggies!" whenever the pure joy of it all hit him just right.

"Okay, let's start over then," Jamie said to my sister and me, always keeping us on track with our games. She had us corralled in the back bedroom to play Bonanza, our version of house inspired by the Cartwright family in the popular seventies television show.

"Gina, you play like Hoss is just coming home," Jamie said, ushering Sister over to the corner of the room that we designated the kitchen.

"I'll be married to Little Joe again, and Edie, you'll be married to Adam. Gina, you're living with Hoss, and we'll play like he's just come home drunk, wanting you to fix him some breakfast."

"Why do I always have to be married to Hoss?" Sister complained. "He's mean, and I don't like fixing breakfast."

"You're the youngest and you have to do what we say, and besides, fixing breakfast ain't that hard and he ain't that mean," Jamie declared.

Being the oldest, Jamie always got to be Little Joe's wife, he being the most handsome and respectable of the Cartwright brothers. As Adam's wife, I was treated well too. Although I didn't think he was as handsome as Little Joe, he never came home drunk trying to pick a fight.

In our game, Hoss seemed to be a composite character of all the worst men in our lives, a character who pretty much embodied some of Daddy's kinfolks. He was always pushing Sister down on the bed, cussing her out, busting out the windows, or making her cook scrambled eggs for him in the middle of the night — like we'd seen some of the men in our family do.

"Play like Hoss is throwing his work boots at you, Sister."

"I don't want him to throw his work boots," Sister said, sitting down on the bed with her arms folded in rebellion.

Just as Jamie picked up Uncle George's boots to throw them across the room, we heard Daddy yelling.

"Girls, hurry up and get in the car! We gotta blow this joint!"

I grabbed Sister's hand as the three of us bolted from the back room out the front door. We dodged empty beer bottles on the floor and ran by the record player, which was still blaring. The next thing I remember, I was standing outside, staring at the other end of the trailer, trying to figure out why everybody was leaving so quick.

Daddy herded us into the backseat of his white Plymouth, us girls still wondering what was causing the commotion. It was a crisp spring night, and we watched the tree swallows swarming around the power lines looking for a place to land. With the windows down, I could hear Tammy still twanging out her last song as Daddy shifted the car into drive and we began to move. Through the back window, it looked like flames were shooting out of the other end of the trailer, and I began to worry over what was going on.

"Daddy, what's wrong? Did something happen to the trailer?" I said, on the verge of tears as I always was when things went south, which they had a way of doing when he was around. Jamie went quiet, like she usually did when things got crazy, and Sister was oblivious, leaning her head on my shoulder.

"Nothin'. We're going up to your mamaw's," he said, wiping from his forehead the sweat that was rolling toward his eyes.

Mamaw's trailer sat on the side of Brown's Mountain and was the official gathering place in good times and bad for the clan — a group of un- and underemployed relatives, subsisting largely on government checks, government peanut butter, and huge yellow blocks of government cheese.

All the way to Mamaw's I worried about the trailer and especially about the Tammy Wynette album that I loved more than anything. Jamie and Sister remained silent beside me, staring out the window.

I was sniveling when Daddy turned onto Mamaw's steep dirt driveway, careening over the washed-out ruts and bringing us in on two wheels, with us kids bouncing up and down in the backseat like whack-a-moles.

At the top of the hill, Daddy hit the brakes, put his arm over the seat, and looked back at me. "Listen here, Nise. Don't start squawlin'; there ain't nothin' to cry over. Bad things happen and there ain't no way you can make it better by going on about it." Daddy nearly always called me by a shortened version of my middle name, Denise.

Daddy was right — bad things did happen — and I tried my best not to get worked up over it. But all the country records I loved were in the trailer, along with all the pretty things Jamie's daddy bought her when he won a card game, which would eventually make it to Sister and me as hand-me-downs.

And why were all the grownups acting so funny? Daddy was wrong when he said there was nothing to cry over.

I rubbed my eyes and dried my hands on my dirty navy turtle-neck and plaid polyester pants that were two inches too short, quietly asking Daddy, "Can we call Mama and tell her?"

Mama and Daddy were divorced, and Mama didn't like it when Daddy took us places he shouldn't or when bad things happened because he was drinking.

"Listen, Nise, ain't nobody hurt and ain't nobody crying but you," Daddy said as we walked up to the porch, his gait not quite as steady as it ought to have been.

Daddy didn't call Mama. He marched us up the porch steps in single file like soldiers going to war and pushed through the screen door to a trailer full of relatives. Papaw was in the corner strumming some Hank Williams song on his flat top guitar with his head down and his eyes closed. Uncle Gene, Daddy's brother, was nearly passed out over the arm of the couch. Daddy's sisters were there, too, as well as the fire victims, Aunt Glenda and Uncle George. Before long it felt like a regular old family reunion. Daddy told Mamaw to make a pot of coffee, which was always the answer to a family crisis.

Within a half hour, most of the clan was crowded around a table in the tiny kitchen and the adults were telling stories, like they always did when they gathered, Daddy's version, of course, being the most interesting and the most likely to be embellished. I glanced up at the wall where the oversized wooden fork and spoon hung slightly crooked, which reminded me I was hungry.

"Daddy, I'm starving," I said, peering around the television. I was trying not to listen too closely to what was being said, afraid I might hear things I shouldn't. I let it all become a jumble of noise.

"Daddy, did you hear me?" I said, walking up to tap him on the shoulder.

He gave a sort of nod, but after a few more futile attempts to get his attention, I gave up and crawled up on the couch in the living room. It felt like something heavy was crushing me as I agonized over things too complicated for a child to process. A strange sensation came over me and my eyes began to water.

It was as if I were floating above the room looking down on everyone. I could see their mouths moving amid the cacophony of voices, but the sound seemed to come from a million miles away.

Mama's finishing her shift at Genie's Bar right about now, I thought. I wish she was here with me. Daddy said nobody was hurt and there was nothing to tell her, and maybe he was right. But everything seemed better when she was around.

Sister and Jamie disappeared into the bedroom, but I stayed on the couch, hoping someone would fix something to eat. My stomach gnawed like it might bite a hole in my shirt — hunger mixed with sadness pulled by a strong longing for something I couldn't define.

The women stayed up most of the night rolling homemade cigarettes and drinking black coffee, while the men eventually passed out drunk from whatever was being sloshed around the room in a mason jar.

The sensation of being in another world eventually left me, and I was just a little girl again with dirt under her fingernails and cold, clammy hands. Before too long I fell asleep on the couch in my clothes, using Papaw's scratchy plaid wool coat as a blanket.

I woke up before dawn to the sizzle of fried potatoes cooking in lard, with the smell of liquor still floating around the room like a kite.

Daddy stood shirtless at the stove, waiting for the coffee grounds to boil. I watched him hitch up his faded blue jeans that always hung loose below the waist of his Fruit of the Looms.

"Well, if it ain't ole Edie Nise, up like her daddy before the crack o'dawn," he said, pouring coffee into his cup, grounds and all.

He grinned from ear to ear, whistling snatches of "Dixie" like everything was right in the world. I threw off Papaw's coat and rubbed my eyes to get the sleep out, then moved a chair over to the stove to help Daddy cook. Climbing up on the seat and leaning my head on his shoulder, I wished the potatoes in the iron skillet would hurry up so they could ease the ache that was burning in my stomach.

I had a feeling like something wrong had happened the night before, but there was no sign of it on Daddy's face so I tried not to show it on mine either. Besides, could anything really be wrong when Daddy was grinning and whistling, with dawn spilling like watercolors in the eastern sky?

The two of us sat at the table and ate a heaping plateful of fried potatoes apiece while the sun came up, taking turns sipping his black coffee, the bitter hot numbing my tongue.

We didn't talk; we just let the early morning wrap around us, somehow making everything all right again.

Later that afternoon, we went to the trailer site and dug through the ash heap with Aunt Glenda, looking for anything that could be salvaged. There was no sign of Jamie's canopy bed or any of her clothes or furniture. All we took away were two eight-track tapes and a smell so fierce it took up permanent residence in my memory.

A few weeks later, Jamie moved to a new trailer and Daddy never mentioned the night again.

No matter what the circumstances, the time Daddy and I spent together felt like time that stood still.

Mama said I was the apple of his eye from the minute he laid eyes on me.