Chapter 10 After the Burnover

The black held. That was the whole of Bryn's plan and she knew how thin it was, but it was a plank she had stood on before. A recently burned patch will not burn again. The fine fuel is gone, the heat is out of the ground, and a flame front arriving at the edge of it will look for something to eat and find nothing, and if you are standing in the middle of it you will live through a fire that would kill you fifty feet away. It was the oldest trick in the book and it worked often enough that people forgot how many it had failed. They lay in the burned meadow for two hours while the fire went around them. It came in from the northwest, not as a wall this time but as a long, fast-moving series of fingers, each one probing the field and finding the same dead ground and withdrawing. Twice a finger came close enough that Bryn felt the heat on her face and saw the flames run along the edge of the black like water along a curb. Twice she said, "Stay down, don't move, don't get up," in a voice she kept absolutely level. The boy Judd lay with his burned arm out from his body and his eyes open, watching. Delmar lay on his back with his hat over his face, which was either courage or the end of courage, and Bryn did not ask which. When the fingers stopped coming she raised her head. The meadow was black in every direction, smoking in the stubble, and beyond it the timber stood where the fire had not reached. The air was clear enough for twenty yards and then it was smoke again. The wind had gone slack and turned a little west, and it was almost dark, and somewhere far off a tree was still torching with a sound like a flag snapping in a gale. "Everybody up," she said. "Slowly. Feel the ground before you put weight on it." They stood. Judd's arm was worse in the open air, the skin tight and shining over the burn, and he had gone quiet in a way that worried her more than the noise he had made in the ditch. Delmar put his coat around the boy's shoulders even though it was not cold. Bryn opened the medical kit from her pack and did what she could with a burn dressing, and she kept her hands gentle and her voice ordinary, because panic was a thing that traveled and she was not going to be the one to give it to the boy. "We're on foot now," she said. "The truck stayed behind." "It's still there," Judd said, pointing. It was. The truck sat on the road exactly where he had stopped it, and it had been through the whirl and through the fire, and it was a ruin: tires burned off the rims, glass gone, paint bubbled and black, the cab a melted shell. Even the steel of the flatbed had warped in a slow curve, the way wax bends. It looked like a thing that had been left in an oven overnight. "Not anymore," Bryn said. "We walk." They walked down the road, which was black on both sides and clear in the middle, and after a quarter mile the road ran past a barn that had not made it, its roof fallen in and its timber burning low and orange in the dark. The fire had crossed here and moved on. Beyond the barn was an old equipment yard where the county kept a fuel tank and a couple of dead graders, and in the yard there was a flatbed truck with a water tank and a family standing beside it, and Bryn recognized them: the woman with the three dogs from the creek road, her husband, and two children, and the young man in the T-shirt who had told her the valley got smoke every summer and shut the door in her face. They had not gotten out. Their car was in the ditch with a blown tire and a water can's worth of water gone. "You," the young man said, when he saw her. He looked at the burning barn and then at her, and his face did the thing faces do when a person catches up all at once with something he has spent a day refusing to believe. "You told me. You stood on my step and told me." "Yes," Bryn said. "Is anyone hurt?" He shook his head. His voice went small. "The kids are scared. The dogs are in the truck bed. I don't know which way to go." "That's because there isn't a good way to go, and I'm not going to pretend there is." She looked at the road ahead and behind, at the black ground and the burning barn and the smoke that had closed over everything. "We go on foot to the school. It's a mile and a half and it's downhill and it's the biggest building in the valley and the ballfield is green. If any building in Harkwood is still standing it's that one." They made the group of them, ten souls and three dogs, and Bryn put Delmar at the front with the boy and the young man at the back with the family, and she walked the middle and kept the count, because a count was a thing you could hold when nothing else would hold. They went slowly and the boy went slower and the sky over Harkwood glowed from a direction Bryn did not like. Halfway down the road they met Emmet Danner and his road crew coming up out of the smoke on foot, four men, one of them carrying a chainsaw and another carrying a shovel and all of them carrying the fixed expression of men who had watched their equipment burn and walked away from it because standing by it would have killed them. "The dozer's gone," Emmet said. "Caught it on the upper road. We got out with what we had on our backs. What are you doing up here?" "Collecting people," Bryn said. "How many behind you?" "I don't know. Six, eight, scattered." He looked at the family, at the boy with the burned arm, at the old rancher. "You're going to the school?" "I'm going to the school." "Then I'm with you," Emmet said, "because you're the only one up here who knows which way the fire's going to move, and the last time I didn't listen to somebody who knew, I lost a dozer." They went on down the valley together, thirteen now, and Bryn kept her eyes on the glow above the rooftops and her ears on the wind, and she did what she had done since the first night on the ridge, which was to hold the picture in her mind and update it with every step: wind, slope, fuel, the fire's reach, and the shrinking fact of the people who still had to get out before the picture turned. ---