Town Burning (24 page)

They rode to Summersville, a hundred flat speedways, a thousand curves away, and he was numb, but not cold: numb as if his body ended below his shoulders and became the machine from there on down. The few cars they passed came at them backward and were lost behind. Loose gravel, in places where the road was being repaired, ripped away beneath his rear wheel, and he recovered only to remember later the fear-born reactions that saved his life. He followed the Riders all the way. They never lost him, and on the river flats again he came up among the leaders and was the first to see a steady ribbon of dark red flame streaming up from the gable of Pinckney’s barn.

He passed them all then, and as they watched him, surprised at his speed, he held out his arm and pointed to the barn. This time they slued into the dooryard, still in formation, one after the other. They ran, in the first shock of it, across the road, where they could see the flame silently reaching high above the two silos. The flame turned brighter, to a Halloween orange, and yet no sound came from the house. No one in the house had noticed yet. Slugger ran apart from them, half toward the house, half toward a wide field, and raised his arms.

“The barn!” he yelled. Wilma Berry followed him, frantically imitating his gestures.

“The barn! The cows! The house! Christ! Git! Git!” They all ran to the house, yelling incoherently as the upstairs lights went on.

John went into the kitchen, where the lights had been left on, and there it was, just as they had left it; white, cream-painted and modern in the profitable farm. An electric clock above the sink said four o’clock in the morning. The metal and formica table, the new refrigerator, the chrome and enamel cabinets remained in their places bright and steady—and yet the barn attached to the kitchen was burning, and in it for fuel was dry hay and the grease of cattle. The black telephone sat calmly on its little stand. He picked it up and listened to it buzz.

“Operator,” the girl said, and for a moment he wondered what to do, realizing that he had been about to give her his home number. “Operator,” she said again. Well, he wouldn’t want to wake them up at this hour. “Operator!” she said, and it seemed to him he could hear a slight crackling and a noise of rushing air.

“Fire,” he said. “I’m calling from Pinckney’s, on the flat. The barn’s on fire.” He could hear people running in the house, and the hoarse voice of Slugger’s father, saying, “What? Where?”

“Give me the firehouse,” he said calmly. And then he heard himself saying, “I don’t know the number.” The bright kitchen looked back at him calmly under fluorescent lights.

They burst into the kitchen, Slugger first, his father coming along behind, his mother in a blue nightgown among the Riders.

“The cows,” Mr. Pinckney said. “Git them cows out!” It seemed a long time before the firehouse answered.

“O.K., O.K.,” a voice said, “Do what you can. Git your cars off the road. We’ll be right out.”

With the door to the barn open the whoosh of wind was louder, a gigantic suction carrying with it dust and loose papers. He followed the Riders into the barn as the lights went on. Little straws were drawn up against the ceiling, found cracks and stuck there. Toward the rear of the long barn, down the rows of stanchions, cows were screaming under an orange light that came from above and was brighter than the electric bulbs. Two calves, their eyes rolling and insane, charged awkwardly on splayed hoofs down the manure-smeared cement. They were all forced to take cover beside the heaving cows, except for Slugger’s father. His hairy legs wide apart below his nightshirt, bare feet gripping the slippery cement, he raised his big arms and grappled with the second calf.

“Open the doors!” he bellowed, strangely like the cows behind him, “God damn! Open the doors! Open them stalls! Git them goddam critters out!” He had the calf around the belly, and wrestled it down the aisle, the calf kicking out its hind legs while the front legs slid along. The first calf was hopelessly tangled between an upright and the end stanchion, and the end cow had pulled loose and speared it through the ribs with her horn. They both lay heaving, necks twisted, the cow trying to get a purchase on the cement with her hind legs. Her full udder flopped and squashed each time she tried to stand. The calf’s mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out of it. Blood was black on the gray cement, and ran down into the urine trough.

The Riders ran down the aisle, John following, and began to open stanchions. The cows immediately backed out, still bellowing, and turned to crowd toward the front of the barn. Some fell to be trampled, to struggle up again, their hides steaming. The Riders stopped halfway down the aisle, raised their hands to their faces against the fire that fell in bonfire bunches down upon the backs of the screaming animals. The metal stanchions clanked and the stench of burning hair came in waves, lessening as the draft sucked it up into the hayloft.

“Leave them be! Git the ones you can git!” Mr. Pinckney came running heavily down to them, to fall as if he had been struck on the head, then slid into the drain trough. He got up and limped back, motioning them out of the barn. A panicked cow came back the wrong way and he stepped aside and smashed his fist into her belly. John found himself beside him and helped to twist the cow’s neck back around, his fingers in her eye sockets. Under their combined strength she screamed and turned, a horn bruising John’s chest as she swung back toward the front of the barn. They let her go and she crashed, horns hooking, into the side of another cow. Something held the cows back, near the doors, and John brushed away a handful of burning straw as he ran toward the crush. The Riders were climbing over the stanchions to find their way back through the kitchen, and he had time as he ran toward the cows to think, There won’t be time.

He jumped up on the back of the cow he had helped turn, then scrambled straight over the angular ridges of their backs, half crawling, trying to avoid horns. A horn did thud against his knee before he managed to slide down on the far side. The end cow and the dying calf formed a barricade at the end of the aisle. The calf in a spasm had kicked its hind legs out to form a rigid fence against the upright. He tried to pull the legs away but they were like steel, only bending as the cows pushed from behind. He ran to the barn door and looked around. His eyes watered and he coughed in the stream of hay dust sucked up past him, but he found an ax in a chopping block. The draft helped pull him back into the bright hole, where he braced himself and brought the ax down on the calf’s hock joint, knifing a cow across the nose. The cow screamed, and he was showered by a spurt of blood as the barrier gave way. The calf’s other leg bent and broke and John ran limping on his hurt knee ahead of the stampede. He tripped on the chopping block beside the door and dropped the ax as two of the Riders grabbed him and pulled him out of the way. The cows streamed out and crossed the road, udders swinging, broke down a fence and rolled over in the grass, their backs smoking.

He stood in the dooryard, leaning against a young tree. The Riders were now carrying furniture out of the house. Every light in the house was on, and on the side toward the barn the white clapboards were orange in the light of the fire that streamed all along the ridgepole of the barn. The screams of the cows trapped below were higher, and as he tried to get his breath back, retching and spitting dust, the cows’ screams melted into the high singing of the fire.

Junior was driving the motorcycles across the road into the field, and he yelled to John to start them up for him. John tried to do it, but his knee wouldn’t work right. He found a hay fork and leaned on that, and managed to start the last two engines, then waited, once nearly fainting, until Junior moved them. Suddenly everything was a dirty brown—not just the fire along the roofpeak of the barn, but his hands, the lights of cars approaching from Leah, and Junior’s face as he returned.

“For Christ sake!” he heard Junior say. Then he was being dragged along the ground.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

A constant stream of bureaus, chairs, clothing on hangers, and cardboard boxes was being carried by above him, and Dianne Rousseau and Gussie Contois bent over him. Junior stood aside, wiping his hands on his pants. “My God! Look at him!” Junior said.

“It’s not all his,” Dianne said.

“What isn’t?” John said, wondering what he was doing on the ground.

“The blood,” Junior said, backing away.

“Not mine, I hope,” John said, and rubbed his hands over his face. They were covered with blood. “From the cow,” he said.

“Are you all right?” Dianne asked.

He looked up at their faces, saw that he would not faint again, and stood up, favoring his knee. “I’m not good for much,” he said. “You go and help. I better get out of the way.”

He limped across the road, stepping painfully over the fire hose which had been spilled from the hose truck on its way to the river. Chief Atmon straddled the hose, bulky and red-faced, shouting, his dark police uniform wet with sweat.

“Git them cars off the road! What the hell have you got into?” he said to John.

“From the cows—getting the cows out,” John said, and went past him. People were running toward the fire, some coming across the fields, their faces shining. A pile of furniture grew beside the motorcycles as more people joined the line to pass back chairs, boxes, and full bureau drawers. The cows ran all together to the far end of the field, then turned and gamboled as if they were playing, and came running back toward the barn.

“Keep them cattle out of the road!” Atmon screamed from his commanding position astride the slack hoses. But the cattle stopped short next to the broken fence and stared white-eyed at the burning barn. People began to gather in little groups in the field with the cows. All faces pointed toward the fire; the flames were reflected by cheeks and foreheads as if each face were another small fire in the dark field.

John stood leaning on a motorcycle. The barn still stood straight and plumb, fire visible through every crack in the shrinking boards. At each end fire poured out and up, a thick river of pure flame. Even though he stood a hundred yards away the heat pushed against his face and hands and licked at his sweat. Then the ridgepole began to sink, and firemen scrambled off the kitchen roof, holding thick blankets of woven rope toward the fire and throwing down their little hoses. The tank truck backed away as the hoses reeled in, and the side of the house turned brown all at once. A flurry of running men, then a small group pushed their shields back again, as if they were climbing up a steep cliff toward the house, and managed to play the small hoses on the brown clapboards. The big hoses of the pumper still lay in dry folds down the road toward the river.

The ridgepole jackknifed all along its span as the purlins and the beams burned through. The barn folded in on itself like a huge flower closing, imploding down and then exploding upward again in an unbearable pillar of flame, as if the whole barn had turned into pure flame. The people all ran backward in the fields, not able to take their seared eyes away from the fire, but moving back. Nearer the house, a fireman danced in pain and rubbed his face. A shower of white ash began to fall like snow on the field and the people, twisting and billowing in the wind. The firemen crept back again, pulling the large hose. Finally the river water began to come through it in a thick, muddy fountain strong enough to reach the scorched house. Steam swirled along the gutters, and the windows cracked into nothing at the first touch of the water. The fire still rose and whistled in the red mound where the barn had been, but
the house was saved. In the few
seconds of
the
barn’s collapse the house had not quite burst into flame, and the kitchen, a fuse leading to the house itself, was now being adequately doused with river water.

John began to realize how frightened he had been as the flame had climbed higher through the barn and into the sky over the flats, insatiable and violent. People were carefully examining the fields for sparks and Atmon had organized a patrol to guard the standing hay, sparse as it was, on the flats. No one had thought for a minute that the house could be saved, and yet immediately the big hose had begun to work they were carrying the furniture back inside again, slower this time, more careful of things, slack-armed and weary. He could not go and help them because of his knee, which refused to support him, and he was grateful for the thickening blood, like the campaign ribbons of a soldier, on his face and clothes. He could honorably wait and watch.

As the fire died down, the people began to go home. Firemen still sprayed the house and kitchen, and formed a ring around the barn to scrape a ditch clean against grass fires. The day came hot and hazy, and the wind still crossed the river from Vermont. The Riders straggled out of the house and came over to him. Their uniforms were dirty, torn and sweat-stained. Mr. Pinckney came with them, pale under the deep wrinkles of his face, sick with fatigue. He wore overalls over his nightshirt and his feet sloshed around in old overshoes.

They all turned to look at the farm, too tired to speak.

“You saved the house,” John said.

“Saved the house,” Mr. Pinckney said, breathing deeply and yet jerkily as if he were about to vomit. “We got insurance—some. Ain’t too worried about that. Just hate to see that barn go.”

“Damn’ good barn,” Bob Paquette said, he being the only farmer, beside Slugger, among the Riders.

“Straight, warn’t it?” Mr. Pinckney said.

“Straight’s a die,” Bob said.

“No use crying over spilt milk,” Mr. Pinckney said, and then looked around until he found John. “I want to thank you, John,” he said in a low voice, as if he were embarrassed. “I mean what you done there, quick’s a wink. Like as not you saved us twenty head of cattle. Now I ain’t trying to overdo it nor underdo it. Maybe we would’ve got around in time, maybe no. Maybe none would have thought fast enough to take the ax to that calf and chop off her leg. We lost twenty head in the fire. We could’ve lost forty head. Insurance never come near covering that. You used your head and you done right. I want to thank you. How’s your knee?”