Winter Run (8 page)

The rest of it came in a rush. Just as he was coming down the stairs with his sweater, Charlie heard the crash and knew what had happened. Not in his thinking mind, but he knew just the same, knew that he had made the rope too long. Then he was running, dropping the sweater in his haste. As he rounded the loading chute, he saw from the corner of his eye old Bat at the foot of the hill, walking toward him. Brown, too, had heard the strange noise and was coming in a hurry.

She was upside down on the outside of the barn with the door still closed and the rope lead still tied inside, short enough that it held her head half way up the door as she thrashed and thrashed, her hooves hitting the door like sledge hammers.

Charlie knew he could not go close enough to free her. Her feet were dangerous beyond any willfulness on her part. In fear and anger and with all her strength, she was trying to free herself. Her eyes were unseeing.

From high above the barn, the red tail whistled. Brown went half crazy. He bounced around the pony on stiff legs, darting at her, barking—suddenly caught up by some deep part of his nature that saw her as a grass eater, helpless, prey. Charlie screamed at him.

She had gashed her side on the sharp edge of one of the old boards on the door as she had jumped out. Blood was mingling with the dirt as she struggled. Then the rope broke and the pony leaped up. She stood stiff, legs apart, her tail swishing back and forth, spreading the blood along her flanks, turning them a dull red.

The dog came to his senses and Charlie approached the pony. She raised her head and looked as if she would let him catch her. But Charlie hesitated as he reached for what was left of the lead rope. She jerked back and trotted off around the barn and up the hill, still swishing her tail. The boy followed, calling her name. But she didn’t stop. He knew where she was
going. He could have taken a shortcut and arrived before she did. Instead he followed her along the old path. She slowed to a walk, but he made no effort to catch up.

Once in the boneyard she would go to her tree and turn to face him. He would approach her with his left hand outstretched, holding a little grass that he had picked up along the way, patting the grass with his right hand, calling her name. The bleached bones in the clearing would be shining in the late morning sun. Her ears would be forward, the rope from her halter hanging to the ground, her tail steadily swishing the blood along her flanks. There would be a breathless pause. Then he would reach for the rope. At the last moment, she would pull back. Just beyond his reach. Again and again. Ever receding, as if into a dream. And the young hawk circling overhead would be watching through mysterious eyes.

It began that spring as a whisper, a dry rustling of last year’s leaves across our landscape. There was dust everywhere. The corn came up, but by the first of June it stopped growing. Sunrise and sunset turned red. A sudden spurt of rain in late June helped the corn shoot up a little more—but that was all. The first cutting of hay was the last one for the season. People began to worry.

The pastures at Silver Hill were all broom sage, but in the spring they usually turned green for a while with the new growth. But not that year. By August the state began to put signs along the roads warning of fire hazard.

All the important people in my life were gardeners: Matthew grew vegetables, and Will, my godfather
priest, and Gretchen, my mother, grew flowers. It was more than a hobby for all of them. Somehow the growth of the plants had a hold on them. They measured a part of their lives by how the gardens were doing. By imitation, so did I.

It was during that first summer of the drought that I heard the prayer for rain. And from then on—because the drought seemed to last forever—I heard the prayer every Sunday: “Send us, we beseech thee, in this our necessity, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth to our comfort, and to thy honor …” In times of trouble or doubt, the words still play in my mind, as if that lack of rain summed up all trouble; and colored Aunt Millie somehow had the last word when in response to the question how she felt would say, “Well, it ain’t rained yet. But the Lord will provide in due time. But it don’t feel like anytime soon.”

People began to worry about their wells and springs. By the second summer, some went dry. Not ours, though. Our spring had been developed to supply water to the locomotives that stopped at the depot. It was the most powerful spring in the area. So there was plenty of water, particularly after the steam locomotives went out. There was even enough that Matthew diverted some to irrigate a patch of corn below our barn.

By August of the second summer, everything but that little irrigated patch had turned to tinder and the broom sage pastures at Silver Hill crinkled as you
walked or rode through them. The quail moved into the bottoms next to the two little creeks. The incessant calling of the bobwhite was reduced to the one covey behind our barn. People were on edge, short with each other. There was a suspense to life, a waiting. I felt it, young as I was. We all knew the facts: we needed rain. Something had to give. And on August 16 of the second year, it did.

The cousins of the professor had moved back to town from the summerhouses. They had decided that the heat would be more bearable in town than on the hill beneath the oaks with the breeze, because day after day the breeze was over ninety degrees. Finally they had had enough, and were gone. So they weren’t to blame.

The sixteenth was a Saturday. I was still asleep when Matthew came to the kitchen door and hollered for my father. Our house was built on the side of the hill with the kitchen below and the bedrooms upstairs, and we were all still in bed. I knew Matthew’s voice in all its tones. I had never heard him sound like he did that morning. It was fear that I heard. And before my father had pulled on his pants, I was on the side porch in my underwear, hollering down, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

But I already knew. I could smell the smoke. I don’t know why I hadn’t smelled it in my little back bedroom under the bank unless the bank and the hill behind
somehow diverted it. I was angry that I hadn’t smelled it, that I had missed something so important.

“Where’s your daddy, Charlie?” he hollered from below. “I need your daddy right now!” My father came to the porch, pulling on his old uniform khakis left over from the war and tucking in the khaki shirt. Gretchen was standing behind him in the doorway keeping her housecoat together with one hand while pulling her heavy hair away from her face with the other, still sleepy.

“Wait a minute, Matthew, I smell it!” he yelled and ducked back into the bedroom for shoes. By that time I had gotten into a pair of blue jeans and an under-shirt and was therefore ready for a normal summer day.

“Charlie Lewis, you get back in that house and put on some shoes, right now. You hear me? This here’s fire, and you ain’t going to no fire barefoot.” I glanced at my parents. No one was surprised that Matthew had said it first. It often fell to him to keep me in line, even though I was white and he was colored and it was almost the fifties. But our world was different—older and newer than the rest of the world back then.

Gretchen looked as if she might not let me go at all. But I dashed to my room and pulled out some school shoes, put them on without socks and tied them. By the time she was really awake and ready to intervene, the three of us were at Matthew’s truck. I jumped into the middle, ready from habit to shift the
floor shift as I often did when there were three of us. But Matthew was in a hurry and snatched the lever down into first and then to second before I was organized to help. No one said a word to start with, and by the time we got to the cattle guard above the lake no words were needed.

Because there it was. Just on the other side of the head of the lake, five hundred yards away from us. It was like being in church, but here you could see it. The fire looked alive and the noise was like a living thing speaking in tongues about its hunger and need for movement. The fire line was about a quarter of a mile wide, in a mature stand of field pines. A gentle southwest breeze was easing it steadily toward us and the fifty-acre broom sage field with the five-acre hog lot in the middle—with seven sows and a boar in it that summer. The summerhouses were to the north-northeast at the top of the hill, to our right, and the Corn House was straight ahead of the fire to the northeast over one hill behind where we were standing. Silver Hill was off to the east on the hill above the Corn House.

“What you think, Mr. Lewis? Better get Miz Lewis up to the big house. Something got to give here. Corn House. Big house. Summerhouses. At least one going to go. Maybe all of ’em. And the hogs. We going to lose them sure.” He was almost breathless.

Then silence. Nothing but the fire and my father looking at it from under his dark brows. Then he slowly turned to Matthew and spoke in a voice entirely
new to me. Slow, deliberate, and sure. Like a person walking a hazardous path for the twentieth time. Dangerous but sure.

“Go get Gretchen, Matthew. Take her to the big house. Then go to the village and get everyone you see and tell them all to go home and get a hard rake and a shovel. Tell them to leave their trucks behind the big house and come on foot from there. No use burning up half the trucks in the village if this thing gets away from us. Is Leonard’s team in the pasture behind the big house? Get him to hook to the plow and come on. Ask Mr. Dudley to call the forestry people. They could bring a truckload of shovels and rakes, if nothing else.” There was a pause. “That’s it … No. Bring a couple of bucksaws, too.”

He sounded like he was reading from a list, doing a daily procedure—my father who was always away on business during the week and was an outlander, my shy father who was often unsure around the people of the village. There was a small smile on his dark face.

Matthew took off.

“Is there a gap in this end of the hog lot, Charlie?”

“Yes sir, but it’s hard to get open.”

“Let’s go.”

We trotted down the hill. In a hurry, but not rushing. We got it open.

“Don’t we have to run the hogs out, Daddy?”

“No, when that fire gets closer, the hogs will come out of there on their own. They’ll be all right. But God
knows where they’ll end up. Matthew will know what to do about them.”

At the summerhouse lane we stopped. He looked up and down figuring, talking his plan out loud. The lane was where he would try to stop the fire, using the lane as a break, but there were problems. The locust and cedar trees along the lane might catch and let the fire jump across. It all depended on how fast he got help and what the wind did. Of course, at the time I couldn’t tell if he was talking to
me.
All I knew was that the fire had transformed my father into someone new to me. To a little kid, he was like a wizard peering out from under his brows, sometimes shading his eyes with his hand and squinting to get a better view, looking into the distance, although the fire was only five hundred yards away.

The breeze had all but stopped. The fire died down because now it had to move without the wind. It still looked alive, but resting, preparing for the future. It was waiting for something. It was waiting for the wind.

The professor arrived, out of breath. He looked at my father and saw the change in him and said, “Is there anything I can do, Charles? Gretchen is with us. I wouldn’t be much help here what with my asthma … You know my family has lived in that house for 126 years. I would hate to lose it.” Looking up at my father with a wistful smile on his seventy-year-old features, he said, “I know you will do everything you can.”

“Of course, Professor. You know I will. It depends on the wind. We’ll keep you posted.”

His tone sounded military. But there had been no forest fires on the ships where he had been, in the Pacific, at Okinawa.

The questions arise: Why was he in charge? What qualified him? The answer certainly was not apparent that day. Much later, years later, he told me the story.

I was taking him to a consulting internist, and as we walked the halls of the hospital to the doctor’s office, slowly, I heard myself saying, “Hurry up, Daddy, we’ll be late.” Then looking at his movement from the corner of my eye, I abruptly realized that he couldn’t hurry up, that his time of hurry was over, that he would die, very soon. I knew this even before the internist took me aside, after examining him, and told me that his heart had grown big as a football and the time had come and I realized I still didn’t know him.

Later in the hospital, I asked—demanded, in a way, “Tell me about the beach at Okinawa. When you got the medal.” I knew only the outline from the citation that I had read many times. He’d been the deck officer on the 150-foot gunboat—a ship so humble that it had no name, just a number—off the port side of another gunboat, both on radar picket duty, when a kamikaze struck the first one just behind the conning tower. It blew the side out of her. She was a goner.

Now I got the details. My father had brought his
ship alongside her, got all the pumps going, tied his ship to her at the risk of everything if they didn’t get the fire out quick. It was the fire that almost got them all, with another kamikaze coming in. Both ships were loaded with ammunition. The way he described the chaos, I could see it: every gun on both ships blazing away at the kamikaze while the men fought the fire, and the pumps kept the crippled ship afloat—maybe both ships because he had tied them together. Daddy would have been on the conning tower, facing the suicide plane, firing away with his .45, surely the ultimate gesture of futility. But the big guns hit the plane good and, at the last minute, it swerved off to the side and went down clear of them. And then everyone on both ships was cheering and the fire was finally put out. That night, when they had backed out of the little bay, he and his men cut a steel plate from the deck of the injured ship and welded it into the hole in her side, against all the rules—“They could have court-martialed me for altering the hull of a ship without permission.” But the ship went back on duty the next day, and they gave him a medal instead. I have kept the faded picture of him standing on the after deck of the ship, saluting.