Home Fires

6

Storm Alert! Isaiah 29:6

—Pleasant Grove Freewill Baptist

“It must be Balm of Gilead,” I said as we sped through the lane behind Rudy Peacock. “Where that Mr. Freeman preaches.”

“Yep,” said Daddy.

Despite the warm evening, we had the pickup windows rolled tight to keep from breathing in the clouds of dust Peacock’s truck was kicking up. It was like driving through fog and Daddy kept his beams on low so he could see the way.

When we reached the blacktop, our windows came down and we heard sirens converging from all directions. We followed as Mr. Peacock made another quick turn onto a clay road with deep, sunbaked ruts that hadn’t been scraped since the last heavy rain. A car was ahead of him and another turned in behind us. The red clay made it even dustier than the lane we’d just come from, and at that speed we were jounced around so hard that we had to shout to hear each other. Between rising dust and falling darkness, it was hard to make out the old converted gas station until we were right on it and could see the front lit up in kaleidoscopic flashes from the red lights in a couple of volunteers’ pickup trucks.

Flames were already jetting through the back left corner of the roof and Daddy pulled in behind Peacock just as the West Colleton volunteer fire truck swung in next to the building itself.

Ignoring Daddy’s command to stay in the truck, I jumped out to see if I could help salvage anything from inside.

Like hundreds of small two-pump gas stations built in the 1940s, this one had the usual low-pitched A-line roof that extended out over a narrow pull-through to cover the gas pumps plus a smaller pump for kerosene, none of which was still here.

A fireman called out, “Reckon they’s still any gas in them old tanks?” and I hoped Daddy had heard and that he’d stand well back in case something set off the tanks that were probably still there beneath the ground.

Two barred windows flanked the center door, and I followed a burly volunteer in protective gear into the large open space once lined with shelves of canned goods, sugar, flour and cereal, with room for a counter to one side, a drink box at the front and a potbellied stove in the middle. A narrow door at the rear would have provided cross-ventilation in summer.

Now the single room held ten or twelve long wooden pews, an old-fashioned upright piano and a homemade wooden pulpit, and the cross-ventilation fed the flames blazing in the far left corner. I saw that one of the pews was ablaze on its own in the middle of the room, but what with the heavy pulpit Bible and grabbing up anything else I could lay my hands on, I was too busy to think just then what that might mean.

“Get out! Get out! Get out!” cried the man with the pulpit on his shoulders, but there were hymn books scattered along the pews—how could this impoverished congregation buy new ones? And fans. No air-conditioning here—I had to save the fans. Sparks showered down, stinging my bare arms.

Gasping for air, choking on smoke, I heaped hymnals and fans on top of the huge pulpit Bible and stumbled through the door just as rafters began to crash down behind me.

I was no sooner out into the fresh air than Daddy grabbed me roughly as if I were ten years old again and he meant to shake some sense into me.

“Don’t you never do nothing like that again as long as you live,” he raged as he brushed at the singed places where burning sparks had fallen onto my hair.

Between coughs to clear my lungs and trying to assure him that I wasn’t hurt, I almost didn’t see those ugly words spray-painted in dark green across the front of the white clapboard structure.

As soon as I did see them though, I knew that this was no accidental electrical fire. Those letters were too similar to the ones sprayed across the Crocker family cemetery. And while I still didn’t think A.K. had written either set, I could only pray that he’d spent the evening repenting in his room tonight and that he hadn’t stepped foot out of the house since he got home from court—that he hadn’t been out with any racist friends.

“Back! Get back!” shouted the young man who’d rescued the pulpit. He was sweating profusely inside his heavy fire suit, but his eyes flashed with excitement as he ordered us further away. The interior was now such a fiery furnace that even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego couldn’t have rescued anything else from its depths.

The rear of the building suddenly sagged and the rusty tin roof crashed in with sharp creaks and bangs. Geysers of sparks shot up twenty feet or more into the night sky, and the old dry wood beneath the tin burned like heart pine light-wood. Rafters pulled loose from their nails and sheets of tin buckled in the heat as more oxygen fed the flames. Clearly there was no saving any of the building and now the firemen turned their efforts to confining the fire to the structure itself as they drenched the scorched trees and bushes around the edges to keep them from catching.

There was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn to the ground.

More cars and trucks had pulled in, several of the arrivals members of this small congregation. Tears trickled down the face of a gray-haired black woman as she filmed the blaze with her video camera, but there were angry mutterings from others of the men and women standing apart from us whites.