St. Albans Fire

Chapter 1

Bobby Cutts lay on his bed, watching the bedroom ceiling, its shadowy surface painted by the downstairs porch light in a pattern he’d known forever. This room and the barn across the road had always been his sanctuaries-places of private celebration during high times, as when Beverly Cable allowed him a kiss in the eighth grade-and harbors to which he retired in pain, as now, when Marianne had once again suggested that they should try seeing other people.

He hated that euphemism, knowing too well what it meant. Marianne and he had been dating for a year, and it had happened twice already, counting this one. In fact, he’d been the one being “seen” when they first met, as she was dumping Barry Newhouse. He remembered the groping at the drive-in, the more serious stuff on her uncle’s office couch one afternoon, and finally those hours in complete silence in her bedroom as her parents slept down the hall. Recalling that night-the smells of her, the taste of her kisses, her willingness at last to let him remove all her clothes-ran at odds with his frustration now, lust interfering with indignation.

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, staring moodily out the window, his anger back on track, ignoring the winter chill radiating off the glass before him. He wondered who she was with right now, since sneaking boys into her bedroom had become a moot point, she being eighteen and her parents no longer caring. He ran a catalog of possibilities through his mind-from high school friends to some of the young men who worked on her father’s farm. No one fit. Everyone fit. His own mother had told him she’d seen Marianne kissing a boy in the front seat of a car in the supermarket parking lot. In broad daylight. He’d asked if his mom had recognized the guy. She claimed not to have, but he had his doubts.

He got up abruptly and reached for his jeans, the room suddenly too tight to breathe in. The barn beckoned to him with its panoply of distractions. He’d been on this farm for all his seventeen years, making the barn as natural an environment to him as a ship might be to a man raised at sea.

And right now he needed every distraction he could stand.

Bobby made his way along the short, dark hallway to the narrow stairs leading down, the wall of framed photographs beside him a celebration of the lives sleeping all around-his smiling parents, his sister, Linda, and her husband and two children. Also, himself as a child, and later posing for the yearbook in his football uniform, crouched down, knuckles on the turf, ball tightly tucked into the curve of his other arm. A life of rural Vermont, spent on a dairy farm, as snug as that ball in the crook of a culture dating back a hundred and fifty years. Bobby Cutts, for all his present anxieties, had that if nothing else. He was a young man as firmly ensconced in his society as farming was in the only world he knew.

He paused in the kitchen to add a log to the wood stove, losing himself for a moment in the red embers at the stove’s heart, the eddies of hot air reaching up for him as from the heart of a chunk of lava.

In the cluttered mudroom beyond, he removed his insulated coveralls from the hook on the wall, paying no attention to their pungent odor, and stepped into his equally soiled barn boots, all of which were banned from the rest of the house.

Encased in warm clothes, Bobby shoved the outer door open and stepped into the freezing night air, the shock of the cold a comfort to a boy who welcomed its biting familiarity.

By the porch light, he walked across the snowy yard, the soles of his boots creaking as he went, enjoying how his breath formed a cloud around his head with each exhalation.

Despite his dark mood, he paused halfway between the house and the hulking barn to take in his surroundings. His father had taught him this: Never just walk from one place to another. Take notice of what’s around you. The beauty you find there is God’s gift to the observant.

The full moon above him proved the old man right. Its colorless iridescence imbued the snow with an inner glow and touched the ridgepole of the barn ahead with a near electrical intensity. To the southeast, over the pale and featureless field next door and the trees barely visible beyond, the blackened smudge of a distant ski mountain was pinpricked by the tiny quivering of crisscrossing snow-grooming machines, crawling through the night like earthbound fireflies.

Try as he might to keep his anger stoked against Marianne, Bobby felt it dying down. If she was that eager to do all that seeing of other people, did it make any sense for him to want her for himself?

But then the image of her in the arms of some anonymous other flared up in him again. He resumed walking toward the barn across the dirt road dividing the property.

The entrance they used most was down the far embankment and through a tiny door into the milk room, an oddity given the size of the overall structure. This was technically a bank barn, built against the lower edge of the road to allow direct access to the second floor. It towered forty feet at its apex, ran ninety feet in length, and included a hayloft so vaulting that Bobby’s father, Calvin, had made room for a small, rough-floored basketball area to accommodate the occasional pickup game.

Bobby stamped his feet out of habit as he entered the sweet-smelling, warm milk room, although no fresh snow had fallen in over a week. Winter was on the wane, even in these upper reaches of Vermont’s northwest corner, and tonight’s cold notwithstanding, he knew from long experience that the year’s first thaw was not far off, and with it the accompanying flurry of the region’s fast and furious maple sugar harvest-along with the gluey mess of mud season.

By the glow of one of the night-lights placed throughout the barn, Bobby glanced at the glimmering steel milk tank sitting like a rocket’s spare part in the center of the room. This was nothing new-the use of milk cans and individual deliveries to the local creamery were long gone-but Bobby still found the holding tanks and their tangle of umbilical tubing disconcerting. In contrast to the rest of the barn, filled with livestock, hay, insects, and the smell of manure, the milk room was representative of a faintly menacing future-the tank looking more like an alien incubator than a simple repository.

Bobby quickly passed into the long, low stable where he spent most of his time, his nostrils instinctively flaring in the damp, cloying atmosphere. In the half-light, he could make out the rows of cows, tied in their stalls, many of them settled on their flanks, back sides overhanging the full and gleaming gutters running down each aisle. A cheap battered radio played softly on the far wall, soothing the cows with an endless cycle of innocuous love songs.

Bobby unconsciously let out a sigh at the sight of the room, its floor permanently wet with urine, near-liquid manure, and the water used to routinely wash it all away. Everything was encrusted with manure and/or mud, administered from floor to ceiling by the flickings of cows’ tails and the rebound splashings from their round-the-clock voidings. Had it not been for the almost seductive nature of its odor, this whole place by rights would have smelled like a sewer. Instead, to Bobby as to so many others, it ran from being almost unnoticeable to pleasantly familiar.

He glanced over his shoulder at the several portable milk suction units hanging beside him, designed to be moved from cow to cow with a minimum of fuss, and made sure they’d been properly stored. Bobby Cutts might not have been directly in line to inherit all this-his sister and brother-in-law, Jeff, were before him-but he still had a family member’s proprietary interest in making sure things stayed shipshape.

That was one of the things that had so disappointed him with Marianne. He’d envisioned her here, with him, working by his side in the barn, sharing a lifestyle that he’d been taught by his father and which he cherished as among the best in the world. But that was before he’d woken up to her true nature. It was pretty clear now he’d been fantasizing from the start, fueled entirely by his hunger for her.

Unconsciously, he reached out and laid his hand on the smooth haunch of a nearby cow, taking comfort from its warmth. Now that he was here, surrounded by all that gave him sustenance, he recognized how foolish he’d been, and how, in fact, he might end up having to thank Marianne for dumping him.

Not that he was quite ready for that yet.

A sudden lowing from near the stable’s far wall made him move quickly in that direction, both the sound and his experience preparing him for what he soon saw. A large cow was lying in a calving pen apart from the stalls, her benign expression at odds with the obvious tension rippling through her body. From her hind quarters, a glistening, milky white sack, the size of a duffel bag, was working its way into the half-lit world.

Gently, Bobby entered the stall. “Hey there, Annie,” he said quietly, “you’re rushing things. You were supposed to wait a few more days.”

He positioned himself behind her and cradled the wet, slippery sack as it continued to emerge from the birth canal, the calf’s front feet and nose visible through the thin membrane. Excited and fearful at his lucky timing, Bobby seized the feet as the sack ripped open, and half caught, half eased the bundle onto the hay-covered ground, straining against both the weight and the awkwardness of his package.

Now on his knees, covered with blood, viscous fluid, and the wet, powerful smell of afterbirth, he struggled against Annie’s large, inquisitive nose as she tried to push him out of the way to conduct a maternal inspection.

“Easy, girl. Let me do this,” he urged, struggling with the small, slimy creature in an attempt to lift its hind leg and check its sex. Successful at last, he smiled at what he found. “Nice, Annie-a future milker. Good girl.”

Free to get to work, Annie’s enormous tongue immediately began rasping against the calf’s nose and eyes with surprising force, cleaning it off as it snorted and shook its head.

Bobby moved back and sat on his haunches, smiling broadly, all thoughts of Marianne banished, and admired the scene, pleased not only by the sight but also by the fact that he’d worked without direction or help. In the morning, he’d surprise his father with this tale of serendipity.

Which thought brought him back to reality. His job wasn’t done yet, and what he had to do was way beyond Annie’s capabilities. After cleaning up the mess and spreading more sawdust, he traveled back the length of the stable to the milk room and opened up the cabinet housing the drugs and medicines. After setting out two buckets to be filled with tepid water for Annie, he prepared one 2 cc syringe for injection into the calf’s nostril and loaded a pill gun so he could deliver a bolus of medicine straight down its throat. He then returned to the pen and distracted the mother with the water, which she gulped down in a thirsty panic while he set out to medicate the newcomer.

Now he was done, he thought, stepping back at last and slipping the syringe into his breast pocket for later disposal. Almost.

Still smiling, he made for the nearest shortcut to the vast hayloft overhead: a broad wooden ladder punching through an open trapdoor in the ceiling. The least he could do was supply the happy twosome with some fresh hay.

Climbing with the ease of a seasoned sailor up a ratline, Bobby broke through to the hayloft floor in seconds, its suddenly enormous, domed, black vastness emphasized by its emptiness. So late in the season, there was but one towering pile of bales left, against the far south wall. The rest of the expansive floor space was bare, aside from a six-inch layer of chaff rustling underfoot.

He started walking toward the bales, feeling confident and restored, when he froze abruptly, suddenly concentrating. Like most people brought up in a world dependent on tools and machines, he had an ear for mechanisms in action and often monitored this ancient and gigantic barn as much by ear as by sight.

There didn’t seem to be anything amiss. Bobby could feel more than hear the fans and pumps and motors throughout the building, as soft and delicate to him as the inner workings of a living entity. But he could swear that he’d heard a hissing of sorts-clear and distinct. And, more important, all his instincts were telling him that there was something very wrong.

He stood absolutely still in the near total blackness, searching for some form of confirmation. Slowly, as lethal as the message it carried, the smell of smoke reached his nostrils.

A farmer’s nightmares are full of fire, from a carelessly tossed match to a spark from a worn electrical wire to a fluke bolt of lightning. Even the hay itself, if put up too damp and packed too tightly, can spontaneously ignite and bring about disaster. More than one farmer in Bobby’s experience, Calvin Cutts included, wrapped up every day by giving the barn a final fire check before bed. To say that such vigilance smacked of paranoia was to miss the larger point: Fire to a farmer was like a diagnosis of cancer-survivable perhaps, but only following a long and crippling struggle, and only if you were lucky.

Bobby had two choices: to investigate and perhaps stifle the fire before it got worse, or to run back to the house, raise the alarm, and get as many people and as much equipment coming as possible.

Typically, but unsurprisingly, he yielded to a young man’s faith in his own abilities and set out to discover what was wrong.

Bobby’s sense of smell led him away from the bales and toward the sealed-off so-called fuel room that Calvin had built as far from any flammable materials as possible. Here was kept the gas and oil and diesel for their machines, locked behind a heavy wooden door.

He could hear more clearly now, as he approached that door, the hissing sound that had drawn his attention. But as he unhooked the key from a nearby post and freed the fire extinguisher hanging beneath it, he remained convinced of his course of action. It was a closed room; whatever lay within it was contained and could thus be controlled.

Which is when he heard a second sudden hissing behind him, accompanied by a sharp snap-harsh, like the bite of a rat trap-far across the loft.

He swung around, startled-frightened. He’d been wrong. The noise beyond the door wasn’t his only problem. And this second one, he realized with a sickening feeling, was accompanied by a flickering glow. A second fire had started near where he’d just been.

Bobby Cutts began to sweat.

Distracted now, not thinking clearly, he clung to his initial plan of action. First things first. Ignoring the heat radiating from the lock as he slipped in the key, he twisted back the dead bolt, readied the fire extinguisher, and threw open the door.

The resulting explosion lifted him off his feet and tossed him away like a discarded doll, landing him on the back of his head with a sickening thud. His mouth was bleeding copiously from where the extinguisher had broken several teeth as it flew from his hands.

Dazed and spitting blood, a huge, curling fireball lapping at his feet, Bobby tried scrambling backward, screaming in pain as he put weight on a shattered right hand. He rolled and crawled away as best he could, the smell of his own burned hair and skin strong in his nostrils. In the distance, at the loft’s far end, he could see a second sheet of flame working its way up the face of the stacked hay bales.

He got to his knees, staggered to his feet, and began stumbling back toward the ladder, his remaining instincts telling him to return below and free as many cows as possible before escaping himself.

It wasn’t easy. His eyes hurt and weren’t focusing properly, he kept losing his balance, disoriented from a brain hemorrhage he knew nothing about, and as he reached the top of the ladder, the injury to his hand returned like a hot poker. The only saving grace was that he could see anything at all, the hayloft being high-ceilinged enough that the red, glowing smoke stayed above him.

He grabbed the ladder’s upright with his good hand, fumbled for the first rung, and began his descent, hearing the tethered animals starting to get restless.

Halfway down, just clear of the inferno overhead, he stopped for a moment to adjust to the stable’s contrasting gloom. There, hanging by one hand, praying for salvation, he watched in stunned disbelief as all around him one bright rope of fire, then two, then three, magically appeared on the walls from the ceiling and dropped like fiery snakes to the floor, shooting off in different directions and leaving lines of fire in their wakes, stimulating a loud, startled chorus of bellows from the frightened creatures below him.

The fire spread as if shot from a wand, in defiance of logic or comprehension, racing from one hay pile to another. Bobby watched, transfixed. The cows had panicked in mere seconds and were now, all sixty of them, struggling and stamping and heaving against their restraints, lowing and roaring as the encircling fire, progressing with supernatural speed, changed from a series of separate flames into the sheer embodiment of heat.

One by one, the animals broke loose. Stampeding without direction, corralled by fire, they began generating a stench of burning flesh in the smoky, scream-filled vortex of swirling, lung-searing air. A broiling wind built up as it passed by the dying boy, the trapdoor directly above him now transformed into a chimney flue. Bobby Cutts clung to his ladder as to the mast of a sinking ship, weeping openly, the fire overhead filling the square opening with the blinding, blood red heat of a falling sun.

His hair smoking, all feeling gone from his burning body, he gazed between his feet into the twisting shroud of noise and flames and fog of char, no longer aware of the contorting bodies of the dying beasts slamming into his ladder, splintering it apart, and uncaring as he finally toppled into their midst, vanishing beneath a flurry of hooves.