Winter Run (9 page)

He lasted only a week after he told me all this.

Matthew drove up, his pickup encased in dust. He had Robert Paine with him. Robert used to look at me sideways, but he was always there when something
big happened. Small and skinny under that deep black skin, he was full of enmity and humor. For once Robert was not smiling and didn’t have a thing to say.

“What about Leonard? Is he coming?”

“Yes sir, he gone to get the team,” replied Matthew. “He’s harnessing up now. He’ll be here.”

Next, to my surprise, came the hunting Smiths—three truckloads of them. They drove right up to the cattle guard. There were seven in all. The grown-ups all looked alike—sallow, with wispy blond beards and tobacco juice stains. They were called the hunting Smiths because they lived off the countryside, although Lyman, the patriarch, owned seventy-five acres up the valley. The three boys each had a house, more like shacks, along the creek that ran through the farm. But it wasn’t really a farm. Just some pasture and the rest woodland. They raised hogs and steers. But mainly they were hunters, year-round hunters. When I asked Matthew how they could hunt out of season he would change the subject, because in addition to the stock and the hunting, they made whiskey. They were the last of the whiskey makers. Some accommodation had been made. I never knew what. I had always been told to stay away from them. They would come to the village with their wives and half-dressed, dirty kids in the trucks, but they never stood around the potbelly to talk. The women would shop and return to the trucks while the men went across the road to the Texaco station to talk. I seldom went there. It was too dark. And
the man who ran the station looked at me funny. The Smiths kept apart from us and we from them.

But there they were: the old man, the three sons, and their sons, who were about my age. They had rakes and shovels. One had a bucksaw. They were ready to go. They arrived just as my father finished up with the professor. Lyman, the old man, spoke. “We’re here to do what we can, Mr. Lewis. Where do you reckon you’ll try to stop her? At the lane here?”

My father nodded. “Could two of you ride the bed of one of the trucks up the outside of the lane and cut off the main branches of the trees hanging over the field? … But then don’t you want to move your trucks back to Silver Hill? The wind might shift.”

“Naw sir, I reckon we’ll keep them near. Might need to get out of here in a hurry.”

Everyone turned to. Within an hour there were twenty-three men. Leonard plowed a ditch the width of the plow ten feet in from the road and then another one ten feet in from the first. The two huge mares were panting like sheep as they finished. Normally Leonard let them rest at regular intervals. But not today. The men raked and shoveled the ground bare until they had a firebreak, using the two plowed ditches. The branches that hung over the break were cut back. This was done from the cattle guard to the summer-houses, a distance of almost a half mile. It was ten o’clock.

• • •

The fire and the wind had waited for us. The fire crept closer, but with very little breeze, it kept to just a creep. Because of the light wind, my father had been tempted in the beginning to fight the fire right at the edge of the existing fire line. But he decided there was too much danger. All that was needed was a few puffs of air before the firebreak was complete, and the fire would be past us. So he kept to his plan.

We waited. At ten-thirty it began. The breeze freshened from the southwest and the fire advanced into the field, leaving the burnt-out pines behind, moving closer to the hog lot. Suddenly a burst of wind drove the fire to the cedar-lined fence and the whole thing went up with a roar. I felt sick at my stomach, thinking of the hogs. But just after the cedars went up—even above the fire noise—we heard them squealing in terror and the whole group shot from the gap Daddy and I had opened in the pen.

Everyone laughed. As they came up the hill toward us, we yelled that those were the fastest hogs in history. It looked like they were coming right to us, but at the last moment they veered off toward the cattle guard, went streaming over—luckily no hog legs went through—and headed for Silver Hill. I looked back at the hog lot in time to see it go up in something almost like an explosion. Then it was gone. And all that was left were naked trees and the old barbed-wire fence hanging from its virtually fireproof posts. The place looked like the skeleton of a fish on a beach. The ground was covered with ash until a moment later the
little spring in the center broke through, making a dark ribbon in the white ash as it made its way to the lake, as it always had.

The wind backed a little more to the south and picked up. What was going to happen next became stunningly apparent. We were going to lose the summerhouses. The fire would bypass our break. And we would watch, helpless as it roared north through the field toward the high oak woods surrounding the little compound of cabins with the big wooden water tank standing on its tower in the middle.

It was like a military campaign. My father moved his troops to his next line of defense in the big field behind our barn on the other side of the summer-houses. When the fire struck, it was like a mighty wind sucking the woods up into itself, making them disappear, eating up the cabins. And then, with a crash heard all the way at the village, the water tank went down, sending up a huge cloud of steam, momentarily dousing the fire in the compound before it went on, slowly now, toward the village itself.

Matthew was standing next to us when the fire left the woods. “She going to miss the Corn House, ain’t she, Mr. Lewis? Wind done changed around some more. The village next, ain’t it?”

My father nodded in an abstract way.

Then he hollered, “Lyman! Lyman!”

Lyman, who was twenty yards away, turned, stopped chewing for a second, and looked at my father—speculation
written on his sallow face with its wispy beard. Then he spat and started toward us. Lyman wasn’t used to coming when someone called. It wasn’t his nature. You could see what must have happened or at least something like it—when one time his old man had called him to him and then whipped his ass good for some misdemeanor, and Lyman swore somewhere inside himself never again to get in the position of having to come when someone called and by guile and just plain brains never having to.

But there was need here, no doubt. And Mr. Lewis had a look on his face like a man who knew what he was doing, what with his khakis like a uniform and his face streaked with soot, and all. So he came—even against his inclinations.

“Yes sir?”

“We’ve got to set a backfire at the village end of this ridge, on this side of the creek. Ten feet in. But we have to wait until the main fire comes off the bluff. If we set it too soon, it might jump the creek and burn down the village anyway. So you see? We have to wait. Get ourselves all lined up along the creek, ready to go. Your trucks are close. Can you and your boys go to the village and buy six or seven five-gallon cans and fill them with kerosene? Come back to the bridge at Holly House and we’ll meet you there. Then we can spread out and lay the kerosene lines. We only have to go as far as the tracks. The fire won’t jump the tracks. Don’t worry about the money for the cans and
the kerosene. We’ll settle up later. If we don’t stop this fire, it won’t make a lot of difference … God knows.”

During this speech he stood with his hands on his hips, relaxed, with just a hint in his voice of the urgency he must have felt. Lyman smiled.

“I reckon we can do that. We going to have to set a line about six hundred yards, ain’t we? We better get going. I ain’t never seen a backfire, but I heard of one. Now I’m going to see one.” He was still smiling as he called for his boys and they trotted off toward their trucks.

My father rounded up the rest of the group, and we started down the ridge to the bridge where Lyman would meet us. It was almost three-quarters of a mile from where we were standing to the creek next to the village. The breeze had died down again, but it whispered straight out of the southwest, slowly moving the fire toward the village. If it had been a windy day, the show would have been over already.

The Smiths were five minutes behind us. They had the kerosene, six cans of it. There must have been thirty grime-streaked men standing around my father when he gave the orders. The gist of it was that the Smith boys would start at the bridge, pouring out a trail of kerosene until the first can was empty. That person would stay at that point and the next can would keep the trail going. And so on until the kerosene trail extended up the creek all the way to where it paralleled the railroad. When the time came and
Daddy gave the signal, the person with the can would light a rag or handkerchief and walk back down the line, lighting the trail—but not too fast. The whole line must be lit. Then we would find out.

The rest of the men were spread out between the backfire line and the creek, in case they were needed to keep the backfire from burning too close to the creek, which was only fifteen feet wide, bank to bank. Matthew and I stayed at the bridge at the upper end of the line.

The fire whispered its way toward us. Everyone was lined up. The kerosene trails were down. We waited. My father was halfway up the line, on the side of the little hill where everyone could see him. He was standing with his hands on his hips again, glancing from the fire to the men, with only a T-shirt on now, the khaki shirt torn up to make the torches for the kerosene. I stood close to Matthew. I could feel my gut drawing up, could hear Matthew’s breathing change as the breeze picked up and the fire hesitated before its final plunge down the hill toward us, and the village. Half the people of the village were on the other side of the creek watching. No one said a word.

Then Daddy let out a yell and the Smith boys started down their lines. The tinder broom sage flashed up as if fueled by gasoline, not just kerosene. In an instant the backfire took on a life of its own. Burning high off the ground, spreading both ways—
toward the creek and toward the oncoming main fire. We wondered if it would spread to the creek before it merged with the big fire. The breeze picked up again and the big fire roared down the slope.

Matthew and I watched from our end of the line. When the two fires were twenty-five feet apart, the backfire, sucked up into a maelstrom, stopped advancing toward the creek and leaped back into the arms of the big fire. It was an explosion when they came together. The roar became deafening. Everyone crouched to the ground, almost in terror. The fireball left the ground, having run out of fuel.

And that was all. There was quiet. The fire had eaten itself.

Then the cheering started, Daddy and Lyman laughing and shaking hands—the stranger and the native. People came streaming across the creek, women shouting at their men. Kids running to fathers. People stared at the blackened ground where only a few minutes ago the fire had threatened their livelihoods if not their lives, where now there was nothing.

For me what remained was my father, standing alone in the little piece of blackened bottom land, with his smile. It was as if I had never seen him before, a stranger come into our midst in time of need, a stranger who would probably leave as suddenly as he had come.

Gretchen was running from the road and then so was I. The three of us embraced and there were tears
from Gretchen and from me, too.

But even then, the voice in the back of my mind kept asking who he was and where he would go when he left, when Monday came, and he was gone again, on business.

The land was old and acid and used only for grazing and garden plots. Because it hardly ever snowed in that part of Virginia, the color of winter there was more often reddish brown than white. The fence lines had grown up in multiflora rose and cedars, and broom sage had become the main grass. The farming wasn’t much unless you were rich, but the hunting was good. During the war the deer had begun to come back, and now there was venison for special days. It was a time between times, although we didn’t know it.

In 1950 the winter began in earnest in December and was so different and so bad that it was known for years after as the Great Winter. No one died—but a fuel-oil truck slid across a lane down the bank into the creek and stayed there for two months before they
could get it out. Deep paths had to be opened up through the snow so the cows could get to water. And if you came from the cold into a barn insulated and made silent by snow, you made a sudden passage into a world so warm and secure you might remember it for the rest of your life.

Between storms Leonard Waits, who was a black man with nearly white skin, plowed out all the lanes in the neighborhood. His team of tall gray workhorse mares named Jewel and Queen were so strong they could pull the old wooden snow plow through the drifts so cars and trucks could get out.

Leonard also owned old Bat, of course. Most people thought she was at least twenty-five, although Leonard swore she was thirty-five, and worthless. But that was just his excuse for leaving her all winter at Silver Hill, because every spring he came and got her to plow all the gardens in the neighborhood, and charged people for it.

Old Bat’s brown body had begun to sag away from her absolutely straight backbone like a mountain shack whose ridge pole, against all odds, stays level as the shack falls in around it. But she was still spry, as you know, and liked to escape from her pasture and go on rambles around the neighborhood. Strangers had been known to rush into the store in the village to report an escaped mule only to be greeted with a bored and cursory nod.

When she wanted to go somewhere, she walked up to the fence, cocked her head to get the distance,
lowered her hind end, raised her front end, and hopped over—even if the fence was five feet high. She was best known for her bray. It began with the usual mule whistle, but the second part was spectacular and sounded something like a tenor tugboat. In spite of being an extra animal to feed, her braying made her welcome at Silver Hill each winter because Professor James said that Bat’s braying reminded him of the first cavalry charge at the second battle of Manassas. When Bat brayed at night, Gretchen, reflecting her raising as a strict Catholic, thought the old mule sounded like the end of the world.