World Made by Hand

Nineteen

Lightning played crazy patterns on the walls all night, though the storms stayed off in the distance and no rain fell. I kept waiting for it to come closer, work its fury, and be over. Even more, I longed for a cool front to drive off the relentless heat. At times I imagined that maybe it wasn’t thunder and lightning at all but a terrific battle beyond the horizon between whatever was left of the great war machines-though I hadn’t seen an airplane in the skies for years, civilian or military. In any case, the distant storms kept me awake, so I got out of bed and sat in a soft chair by the window to watch the sky until I was satisfied that it was indeed lightning and not Armageddon. I must have fallen to dozing there because I woke up with a jerk. I quickly recognized that the scream which woke me up was real, not in a dream, and noticed an orange glow reflecting off the side of Lucy Myles’s house next door. I strapped on my sandals and hurried outside.

Lucy was out in her yard in her nightclothes.

“Someone’s house is burning down,” she said.

An orange aura flickered over the nearby rooftops. A hot wind blew leaves and dust down the street, as if every loose particle in town was being prompted into motion by unseen forces. I rushed around the block toward the fire, joined by half-clad neighbors, till we all converged in front of the Watling house on Salem Street. Flames licked through the tall windows of the broom shop and up into a dormer. The fire visibly gathered strength in the few seconds that I stood there gaping at it. Bonnie Sweetland, the Watlings’ next-door neighbor, was screaming. Loren and Jane Ann, Jason LaBountie, Sam Hutto, Andrew Pendergast, Tom Allison, Terry Einhorn and his older boy, Teddy, the Copelands and their kids, Larry Russo the baker, who generally started work before dawn, and many others all soon arrived on the scene, some halfdressed, many carrying buckets. Even Heath Rucker and Dale Murray, the constable and our mayor, showed up. Bruce Wheedon, a foreman on Deaver’s farm, who was the nominal chief of our pathetic fire department, appeared with a huge box wrench, but was not able to open the valve on the nearby hydrant. Who knows how many years it had been since the valve head had been turned, and I was not aware that anybody went around testing them. The nut was rusted frozen.

Loren tried banging the wrench handle with a big rock. He only succeeded in snapping off the handle from the box end. Bruce cursed and there was some yelling back and forth, and Doug Sweetland dragged his garden hose over, which got everybody to stop yelling until they realized that we couldn’t fill the buckets fast enough with it, and then Charles Pettie, the town cobbler and bass fiddle player in our music circle, showed up with a yard-long Stillson wrench that must have weighed thirty pounds. Two men pushed and one pulled the long handle until the valve nut turned with a shriek and water started flowing out of the hydrant. Everybody cheered and rapidly formed a bucket brigade. But it was soon obvious that our flung buckets made no impression on the fire.

All this happened quickly, no more than a few minutes. Meanwhile, other women joined Bonnie Sweetland in screaming and pointing up into the end dormer where two figures, Britney and Sarah, were dimly visible huddled together inside. Tom Allison brought over an aluminum extension ladder and threw it against the eaves below the dormer. At the same moment, the needles of a big white pine tree close by the most involved end of the house reached kindling temperature and exploded into flame. Bruce Wheedon yelled at the bucket men to forget the Watling house and start wetting down the Sweetland’s place next door so it wouldn’t catch, and they all rushed to reform the bucket line there. Up on the ladder, Tom smashed the window in the dormer, but Britney remained frozen inside clutching the girl. I tossed my bucket aside, rushed around the back of the house, and slipped in the kitchen door.

My hand sizzled when I turned the doorknob, and there was a smell like grilled meat. The back stairway ran right off the mudroom, and I raced up into the smoke. They were in the little girl’s room, the wallpaper dirty pink through the smoke. Everything happened fast. In the confusion it seemed that Britney was trying to prevent me from helping her. I scooped up Sarah under my left arm like a meal sack and grabbed Britney’s hand so she would follow me out. But she resisted. I hollered, “This way! Come on!” By now, flames were probing into the hallway, and I doubted we could make a run out the back stairs. Tom shouted something from the window, where he stood atop the ladder, his words smothered in the rising roar. To hand Sarah to him, I had to let go of Britney. She slipped out the door back into the fiery hallway. I realized she didn’t want to escape. But the maw of flame deterred her long enough for me to reach out and seize her. She flailed ineffectively. I yanked her back into the pink bedroom and shoved her toward the dormer until I managed to push her out the window. Tom grappled her down with help from the boys below. By then flames had invaded the little room itself. The heat was ferocious. I launched myself through the dormer headfirst.

The next thing I remember was lying in the weeds hacking my lungs out with faces bobbing above me, and then I rolled over and vomited in the grass. Warm blood ran down the side of my head into my eyes. Someone pressed a rag against my scalp and then they were carrying me somewhere. Gray daylight gathered in the treetops as raindrops the size of marbles spiraled down from an infinite height and stung my face.