The Big Burn (22 page)

"For leaving?"

"For coming back."

Jarrett shrugged. "I don't know. Either both of us are fools or neither is, I guess, since we decided it the same way."

Seth looked puzzled, and then he started laughing. "The last time you and me decided the same way about a fight, you got beat up and I got guard."

"Yeah, I remember," Jarrett said, laughing with him. "We vere pretty sorry, I guess."

After that, through the rest of the morning, as the winds picked up, they worked together. They stayed as a team into the afternoon, when the winds blew more and more fiercely. Now and then Jarrett thought of the morning's laughter and for a moment forgot how scared he was.

Finally they helped torch the buildings on Avery's western edge. Jarrett was sad that Pop's house had to go, but it stood right in the area being sacrificed. The plan was to make a backfire as high and hot as possible. The hope was that the onrushing wildfire would draw in the backfire, and then the fires would knock themselves down in a no-man's-land of flame.

It seemed to Jarrett about as reasonable as wishing for the Pacific Ocean to pick itself up and dump itself down on the Coeur d'Alene Forest.

And then there was no more time to prepare. The fires roaring in along both sides of the river were almost upon them.

All around, men stopped what they were doing and edged toward whatever cover they'd prepared. Jarrett and Seth poured another bucket of water over the heavy piece of canvas they'd decided would be their shelter.

Then, side by side, they watched the fires.

On the south side of the river, a set of flames looking as tall as the sky was high rushed down a mountainside and reached across the water toward Avery.

On the Avery side another set of flames that Jarrett knew must have been born of the fires in Pine Creek and Big Creek, Slate Creek and Setzer Creek, roared down a mountain and stretched out to meet them.

For one last moment Jarrett saw the wildfires as separate from one another and separate from the backfire roaring on Avery's edge.

And then there was this...
sound.
Jarrett had no other word for it. Like all the air in the world was being sucked away at once. And his own breath got sucked away, too, leaving him gasping to fill lungs that felt as if they'd collapsed. Then a wallop of wind hit him as the wildfires pulled the backfire into them.

Unbelieving, numb with terror, he saw the three fires turn into one towering wall of flame.

A wall of flame big enough to burn up the world,
Jarrett thought.

He and Seth dived for the earth and pulled the wet canvas over themselves. Heavy as it was, Jarrett had to hang on to its edges to keep his side from blowing away. He felt Seth fighting to keep the other side down.

I'm going to die,
Jarrett thought.
We both are.

The wet canvas stopped ballooning above them, and Jarrett felt its heavy weight drop onto his back.

"What's going on?" he heard Seth ask. Jarrett realized he had
heard
Seth ask the question.

Where has the noise gone?
Jarrett struggled to take in what had happened.
Where's the wind?

***

He and Seth stayed covered for long minutes more, Jarrett still expecting fire to sweep over them. And then he heard someone cheer.

Not scream in fright.

Cheer.

And he heard someone else pick it up.

He and Seth lifted the canvas from their heads and looked around.

The wind really had quit blowing. The wall of flame, stopped at the edge of town, no longer touched the sky.

Jarrett couldn't have said where everyone found the voices to cheer—not after the night and day of smoke and work they'd come through—but cheer they did. They cheered and they cried.

It was too big a moment to experience alone. He hugged Seth and Seth hugged back.

Men all around them hugged and pounded one another's backs.

Sometimes, miracles do occur.

How else can one explain why, just as those three lines of fire met, the gale that had been blowing for two full days suddenly gave way?

It did happen. At three o'clock on Monday, August 22, abruptly dying wind and the convergence of wildfires and backfire combined to spare most of Avery and all of the defenders huddling inside the town.

And it wasn't just Avery and the people there who were spared. All across the forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, the winds shrank back that midafternoon. They would pick up again and blow fitfully for another couple of days, thwarting efforts to tame widespread fires. But the flame walls had gotten as big as they ever would and were already breaking up. After two days of wild wind, the blowup was over.

The blowup hadn't ended in time to spare all of the Idaho and Montana towns in the line of fire—Falcon, Kyle, Taft, Haugan, Henderson, DeBorgia. Or to spare all of the people, mostly firefighters, that it caught unawares. Deaths on the Coeur d'Alene included the twenty-eight men of Ralph Debitt's crew who'd chosen to ignore his warning. The crews with Lee Hollingshead, John Bell, S. M. Taylor, and Ed Pulaski all suffered multiple fatalities. James Danielson and William Rock each lost one man.

But in Avery that afternoon, those who 'd expected to die and then found themselves alive must surely have thought a miracle had happened.

Early Wednesday, Jarrett sought out Seth to say good-bye.

The day before, Jarrett had continued to help with fire fighting until one of the rangers finally told him they had things enough in hand that he could leave if he wished.

He found Seth in a chow line, in the middle of an army camp so orderly it looked like its soldiers had done nothing the past few days but keep it that way. Another private, seeing that Seth had a visitor, offered to hold Seth's place in line.

Once they were away from the others, Jarrett told him, "I'm on my way to Wallace. I'm told the north fork has burned out enough that I ought to be able to go up through there."

"I wish you luck," Seth said. "I mean, with everything."

"And you, too," Jarrett answered, feeling as though there was a host of things he ought to be saying, except he couldn't think of a single one.

Then Seth asked, "What are you going to do once this is all over?"

"I don't know," Jarrett answered. "Stay up there, maybe, if I can work it out How about you?"

"I reckon the army will tell me," Seth said. "Or do you mean down the road? Probably stay in. I've been thinking about what happened around here—how this was the first time I saw a reason to
be
a soldier, besides that my father was a good one." Seth hesitated, looking embarrassed. "Don't you feel kind of proud about what we did?"

Jarrett nodded. "I do. Look, you want to keep in touch? I could write sometime."

"I don't read," Seth answered. He laughed a little. "Though maybe if I do stay in, I might go to some of those classes where they teach you how. Probably have to, if I'm ever gonna be more than a private."

The soldier holding Seth's place in line called, "Brown, you want cereal?"

Seth put out his hand for Jarrett to shake. "Anyway, you take care."

Jarrett's throat tightened, making it hard for him to say, "Yeah, you, too."

***

Next Jarrett sought out Mr. Blakeney, who told him Pop had sent word he would be returning to Avery and his job as quickly as possible.

Mr. Blakeney cleared his throat. "Jarrett, about what happened back in July ... perhaps I judged hastily."

"I made a bad call, leaving my section like I did," Jarrett said. "Anyway, it doesn't much matter anymore, does it?"

"I guess not," Mr. Blakeney said, appearing relieved. "So no harm was done, right?"

"I guess not."

***

Jarrett left Avery by the route he'd taken only six weeks earlier, but now he found nothing that looked like the green-timbered canyon he remembered. Smoke spirals rose from towering, blackened snags. Twisted rails sank into a charred track bed. Steep ravines were no longer spanned by high, snaking train bridges, although crews were already at work trying to save what was left of the trestles.

The going was so slow that by nightfall Jarrett had made it only as far as Moon Pass. He thought of the last time he'd slept atop the Coeur d'Alene divide. It seemed like years ago that he'd watched dry lightning streak above dense forests and wondered what the next weeks would bring. What Samuel would be like. What fire fighting would be like.

I couldn't have imagined,
he thought.
Which, I guess, is just as well.

Staring into the night sky, his blanket spread on black ground, he wondered what he'd find in Wallace. He drifted toward sleep wondering if Lizbeth was there and if she'd thought of him at all.

***

Cold awoke Jarrett just past dawn. He pulled his blanket closer around his shoulders, felt something wet brush his cheek, and opened his eyes to a light dusting of snow. Flames that flickered above smoking snags showed against a landscape briefly gone gray-white.

He looked at the desolate splendor a long time before resuming his walk. He wanted never to forget it.

***

When he reached Placer Creek, he was glad he had the morning's picture in his mind, for here the devastation was less grand and more personal.

He passed a work crew hauling a dead horse from the water, to drag it up a bank where other carcasses were already stacked.

He passed a homestead that he might have missed seeing if an iron bedstead and stove hadn't caught his attention. Black and twisted, they were the only things standing in a small circle of rubble.

He had no need to wonder if there was any chance that the Whitcomb place had survived. Near the turnoff to it, he saw patches where the ground was nothing but ash.

Then, amid all the black, he saw a bit of flashing yellow.

He waited for a few minutes, hoping the bird would fly back into view. He was sure that he was too far from the Whitcomb land for it to be Lizbeth and her aunt's canary, Billie, but it might be somebody else's pet. He quartered an apple he'd planned for his lunch and impaled the pieces on branch stubs.

When he was fifty feet along the trail, he looked back and saw the yellow bird already eating the fruit.

Lizbeth checked in at the hospital, where Samuel Logan was progressing well enough that Celia was again lending a hand with other patients. Lizbeth had noticed, though, that they were all patients in the same ward as Samuel, so that Samuel was rarely out of her aunt's sight.

And, Lizbeth had noticed, now that the ranger's bandages were off, most of the time his eyes followed Celia.

He'd been too groggy to talk much sense during Lizbeth's last visit, but today, after greeting her, the first thing he asked was, "Any information about Jarrett?"

"None that I know of," Lizbeth answered, "but the Forest Service is still trying to sort everything out" She tried not to sound as worried as she felt "After I buy a few groceries, I'll stop by headquarters and ask again."

Mrs. Marston had wired instructions to open her boardinghouse to anyone who needed a place to stay, and now Lizbeth had two families of refugees to see to. They provided their own food, but Lizbeth had begun baking desserts to add to it. The displaced children, especially, seemed to be comforted by the sweets.

***

Since the only things on her list were brown sugar and some walnuts, Lizbeth finished her shopping quickly. Then she paused to read a notice posted at the newly opened relief headquarters on Sixth Street It said that fire victims might get free meals, help obtaining sleeping quarters, and possibly aid if they were stranded financially. Along the wall donated sacks of coal were lined up free for the taking.

Lizbeth went in and added the address of Mrs. Marston's boardinghouse to the lodging list "We've two families already, but we can squeeze in more if needed," she told the woman in charge.

It didn't occur to Lizbeth until she was outside again that, technically, she and Celia were among the fire victims the relief headquarters had been set up to help.

Hearing someone say, "Newspaper's out," she went in search of one. It would be the first time Wallace's weekly
Idaho Press
had published since the blowup, and right on time. She joined a crowd gathered in front of a copy that a store owner had hung in his windows.

The main front-page headline said:
MISSING MEN LIST NOW NUMBERS
400.

Lizbeth was waiting her turn to get close enough to read the story under it when she heard her name called.

Jarrett had just reached the turnoff to the Cool Spring Ranger Station when he met a work crew going the other way. One of the men on it knew Samuel and said he'd heard the ranger was in a Wallace hospital.

Jarrett felt as though he'd been hit in the stomach. Somehow, as much as he'd worried and as bad as things had been the past few days, he hadn't really feared that his brother would be hurt. Not Samuel, who seemed more able to take care of himself than anyone Jarrett had ever met.

"Is he hurt bad?" Jarrett asked.

The man shrugged.

"Do you know which hospital?"

"No."

***

When Jarrett saw Boone on guard by the hospital's front door, he knew he'd found the right place. Someone had put bandages on Boone's ears, and his mournful eyes said all wasn't right with his world. Jarrett rubbed the dog's neck and promised to give him more attention later.

Inside, an Irish nurse with a heavy accent directed Jarrett to the ward where Samuel was.

He found his brother and Celia Whitcomb going through one of Samuel's scrapbooks. When they saw him, they dropped it, and Celia jumped up and hugged him.

"We were so worried!" she said. "But you and your brother want to talk. And then you really do need to find Lizbeth, because she's out trying to get word of you and..." She broke off, laughing warmly. "Anyway," she said, "I'll just let you two alone."