The Big Burn (8 page)

Jarrett asked, "What do cooks get paid?"

"Whatever we can get them for," Mr. Polson answered, a smile again flickering across his face. "At four dollars or better a day, they're making more than I do. Why? Can you cook?"

"Not for an army. Twenty-five cents an hour will do fine, just so you send me somewhere I'm needed. I'm Jarrett Logan, from Avery."

Mr. Polson put down the pen and sat back in his chair. "Samuel's brother," he said. "I heard you were headed to the Cool Spring Station. He didn't have work for you there?"

"Not really. That is, he could use a hand, but patrolling and all's not really what I came for, and anyway—" Jarrett broke off awkwardly.

Mr. Polson gave him a questioning look but didn't pry. "Well," he said, "there's certainly fireline work if you want it. Especially for fellows like you, showing up wearing decent-boots and work clothes. Some men we've hired..." Mr. Polson's voice trailed off, and he shook his head. "Pitiful, really."

An inner door opened, and a man walked rapidly through, nodding without stopping on his way outside.

"That was Mr. Weigle," Mr. Polson volunteered. "My boss and yours, now."

And Samuel's,
Jarrett thought.
Forest Supervisor Weigle, in charge of seeing the whole Coeur d'Alene doesn't burn up.
He'd heard Samuel say Weigle was doing his level best in a hard situation.

Mr. Polson logged Jarrett into the hiring book and wrote out a purchase order like he had given thé others.

"Buy yourself a shovel, and if the hardware store's got them, you might pick up a couple of picks and mattocks. I'm going to send you up to the Graham Creek fire, which is growing enough they can probably use the extra tools." He wrote out another form. "If you hurry you can catch the train going that way. This will get you a ticket."

"I'm taking a train to a fire?" Jarrett asked.

"Beats walking."

Jarrett arrived at the Graham Creek fire camp as everyone frantically rushed to control a blaze that had picked up and was threatening to jump a fireline. "Find a gap and pitch in!" someone yelled, running by.

Jarrett dropped his bedroll, grabbed his shovel, and headed toward the sounds of crackling fire, snapping branches, axes thudding into wood, and metal clanging against stone. His first sight of the crew was of fast-moving silhouettes working against pulsing curtains of crimson light.

Forcing himself not to shrink back from the fiery scene, he searched through the overwhelming confusion for someone who might say what exactly he was to do. The only person who even paused to glance his way just shouted, "Earn your pay!"

Jarrett struggled to grasp what was going on. This inferno was no more like the neat lightning strikes he'd worked with Samuel than a house fire was like a candle's glow.

The only thing that seemed the same was how the men striving to halt the belching onslaught stooped and stabbed, bent and dug. Jarrett moved into a space between two of the figures and smashed his shovel into a chunk of burning wood. He gathered up the pieces and flung them toward the flames, and then he stabbed at another piece of fire that he might throw back to the blaze. His shovel blade hit rock with a jolt that sent shock zinging up his arm. He caught his breath, waited out the wave of pain that quickly followed, and then he reached again for the same piece of fire and heaved it as far as he could throw.

Gradually, his work and that of the men around him began to pay off, as they protected and widened the threatened fireline, chopping off each groping finger of fire and throwing it back.

He'd never worked so hard or pushed his body so far. Breathing hurt deep in his lungs, and the shifting eddies of wind sent smoke swirling about his head, leaving him working blind for long moments.

He lost all feeling of time passing, until he began to wonder how much longer he could stand the hot aching in his shoulders or how his head felt like it was about to break open. Finally, the smoke blew away for a moment and Jarrett could see everything around him in light-edged clarity. He asked the nearest man, "How long do we go?"

"Until we get told to stop," the man answered. He appeared to be an older guy, stringy, lean. "Name's Elway," he said.

"Jarrett Logan."

They went back to work.

***

The order to knock off didn't come until the middle of the next morning, when their part of the fire finally seemed stalled where it was. Wearily trudging back to camp, Jarrett saw that Elway was even older than he'd first thought. The man's hair was gray under its coat of soot. Sweat running down Elway's face made it look like he'd painted himself with india ink.

With a start, Jarrett realized his own face must look the same way.

As they came into camp, they passed another crew heading out. "Poor sods," Elway said. "You think we had it bad, son, them's on day work has got it worse. Hotter than hell, and no hope of doing more than holding their own."

A woman—a fireguard's wife, Elway said—stood behind a table in an open-sided tent, ladling out stew and handing sourdough biscuits to all who wanted breakfast Most did, but Jarrett felt too tired to stand up for another minute, much less hold a spoon and chew food.

"Anybody with sprains, burns, or cuts," the woman called, "I'll wrap ankles and put on ointment soon as I'm done here."

Jarrett decided that getting help for his blistered hands wasn't worth the effort of staying awake. Instead, he found a flat patch of ground a decent distance from the pack-mule string, spread out his bedroll, and lay down, expecting to fall asleep in an instant.

He hadn't counted on how being still would make him aware of the way his whole body hurt Smoke and soot jammed his head, his throat was raw, and when he closed his eyes it felt like sandpaper scraping his eyeballs. He wondered if any of the other men were too tired to eat or ached as bad as he did. He wondered if any of them were asking themselves the same thing he was: How could he ever go back on that fireline and put in another night like the one he'd just had?

One chore and then another had kept Celia from writing Dora Crane, until Lizbeth was sure her aunt was putting off the trip to the mail drop and ranger station on purpose.

Confronted, Celia finally admitted, "I don't want it looking like you're chasing after that boy."

"Why would it look any more like that than like you're chasing after Ranger Logan?" Lizbeth asked, regretting the words the instant she'd said them. "I'm teasing, Cel," she added hastily. "The way you and the ranger disagreed, he couldn't misunderstand."

Still, it took a newspaper left by a passing logging camp foreman to jolt Celia into action. She read an account of the Pine Creek fires spreading and then took out a sheet of writing paper. "Perhaps tomorrow we can go to church, mail this, and stop by the ranger station," she said.

"Thank you!" Lizbeth exclaimed. Then she sobered. "Are you very worried about Mrs. Crane?"

Celia answered, "I'm not worried so much as I'd just like to hear she's all right."

Lizbeth pictured the large motherly woman who had befriended them during their first winter in Wallace. Between Dora Crane and old Mrs. Marston, they'd quickly been made welcome.

Mrs. Marston, who owned a boardinghouse, had given them a room and meals in exchange for help with the cooking, an arrangement they'd returned to each winter since.

Dora Crane, in Wallace with her own children for the school year, had introduced Celia to shopkeepers and Lizbeth to teachers.

Lizbeth and Celia had missed Dora Crane ever since several Pine Creek families put up a schoolhouse so they could stay on their places year-round.

Lizbeth hoped Mrs. Crane and her big family were all right.

***

While Celia wrote the letter, Lizbeth made a mincemeat pie. She wasn't nearly as good a baker as her aunt, but she gave it her best effort.

She hoped the ranger and his brother wouldn't be away on patrol. Surely, Lizbeth thought, the Forest Service gave Sundays off.

She tested the oven's heat with her elbow and then put the pie in. While it was baking she scanned the fire stories scattered across the newspaper's eight pages, looking for any fires close enough they might be a threat to her and Celia. She wondered if Jarrett Logan had got involved in fighting any of them.

She'd liked how he'd understood her feelings about this place. How he hadn't laughed at her wish to make a go of things or her ideas for how it could be done.

With a sigh, Lizbeth turned back to the newspaper's front page and began reading it more carefully. For once she was seeing a paper that was current—out just Thursday, and here it was only two days later. Most of the time, living so isolated, she didn't know what was going on elsewhere until after it was long done and over.

On Graham Creek, Jarrett was partway through another shift of cutting fireline.

One of the first things he had learned on his new job was that night and early morning were make-progress time on a wildfire. The still air, higher humidity, and cooler temperatures let firefighters go on the offensive.

For almost a week now, he'd been part of a day crew steadily carving an ever longer trench designed to starve the advancing fire of fuel. At first he hadn't been able to see beyond his own job. Then, as he'd been put on one task and then another, he'd started to understand how the various jobs fit together.

This was his first time as an axman, pushing the fireline into new territory by chopping down brush and small trees.

Not far behind, sawyers using crosscut saws took down the bigger stuff, cutting through downed logs and dropping trees with branches that hung over the fireline's path.

A third group followed them, raking away all the small, burnable fuel—pine duff and sticks, leaves and grass—and scraping the line down to bare soil.

And word was, when conditions were right, a low blaze would be run along the inside of the break to widen it with a charred black line.

It was all backbreaking, arm-numbing work, but Jarrett had built up calluses and lung power, and that helped. And the crews were working far enough in front of the main fire that its heat didn't blast them the way it did when they had to dig hot line, laboring close to the flames.

Of course, working so far ahead of the spreading fire also meant they had to cut a longer trench than they would have closer in, and Jarrett had asked Elway the sense in that.

"Buys time," Elway had answered. "What you want is to strike a line just big enough so you can get it done before the fire can outflank you."

"Sounds reasonable."

"Just theory," Elway had said. "Me, I'd put money on the losing side of a fixed fight before I'd bet on outguessing afire."

Now the foreman called, "Take ten!"

Jarrett leaned his ax against some saplings he was cutting down and sank gratefully to the ground. Up and down the line, men guzzled water, tamped tobacco into pipes, and swatted at the plaguing wasps.

The routine had become so familiar, Jarrett found it hard to believe he'd ever done anything else. Or that he had ever been as raw as he was his first night out here.

Remembering, Jarrett smiled. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

Elway, resting nearby, asked, "You thinking of a good joke?" The two of them had partnered up, and they were getting a name for being a reliable team.

"I guess, with me the butt of it. Elway, you think we're doing any good? We're working our hearts out, but from what I hear, this fire just keeps jumping in new directions. I think it's bigger than ever."

Elway shrugged. "At least we're still in the battle. The thing to be scared of is a fire you can't fight"You think this one could get like that?"Yeah," the old man said. "Enough things go wrong, any fire can."

"I'm really not sure this is appropriate," Celia said when they finally pulled up at the hitching post in front of the ranger station. She surveyed the neat cabin and outbuildings without making any effort to climb down from the wagon.

"Aren't we going in?" Lizbeth asked. "We can't just leave the pie on the porch and take off."

"I was just thinking—it seems hard to believe this place and ours have been cut from the same woods."

Impatience and frustration warred in Lizbeth. "That's what I've been telling you, Cel. We could make something of our place, too, if you'd just give us a chance."

"No. This place doesn't have to make money. Ours does. Well, are you coming?"

Celia, Lizbeth by her side, knocked on the cabin's closed door. Then she stepped back, apparently just then noticing the poster that said Wife Wanted.

"Oh, lord," Celia said. "I knew this was a mistake. What kind of man ... Lizbeth, let's go."

Samuel Logan and his dog came around the side of the house. Boone ran up and greeted them like people the ranger had already cleared, while the ranger himself showed surprise and pleasure and then concern. "Mrs. Whitcomb—Lizbeth—are you all right? Is there a problem up your way?"

"No," Celia answered stiffly. "Not at all. We had things to do in town and just thought to stop by..."

"To give you this," Lizbeth said, holding out the mincemeat pie. "It's not as good as the pies that Celia makes, but it was her idea. It's to say we're sorry you didn't get a more polite welcome at our place."

"That's enough, Lizbeth," her aunt said. "Ranger Logan, we'll just leave it and be on our way."

The ranger nodded, appearing relieved. "Thank you. It looks delicious," he said. He started to take it but then drew back his grease-coated hands. "Shop work," he said. "Would you mind setting the pie inside? I'd say to put it down out here, but even Boone's got his limits."

Lizbeth opened the door and went in, leaving her aunt standing red faced in front of the Wife Wanted poster.
She's probably wondering if he thinks she's come to apply,
Lizbeth thought
Serves her rig/it.