Charles came out of the house at a run with a stick of firewood held like a candle in one fist. His other hand shielded the small flame. He stepped over the furrow and touched flame to grass. Behind him the air shimmered.
The fire Charles set was so small, Caroline could have held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed made of a different element from the blaze that engulfed the horizon. These flames were not enough to cook over. They only lapped placidly at the blades of grass within their own circumference, oblivious to their freedom. “Burn,” she urged. Whispering, as though the big fire might be the one to hear and obey. “Burn.” Charles lit another, and another. The grass began to hiss and seethe. One by one, the little fires seemed to reach out and join hands. A thread of orange spread itself around the house. Ring around the rosy, Caroline’s thoughts sang. Ashes, ashes.
A hot current of air gusted from the south, and the little flames bowed down. Caroline watched as a clump of roots lit up. They looked like fine wires, all gold and copper. Like Charles’s whiskers in the light from the hearth. Then the flames were on her side of the furrow.
Put it out.
With the swing of the wet burlap, Caroline felt her mind unhitching itself. Shuuush went the sack through the flaming grass. Again. And again. She heard the sounds of her own exertion as she swung and stamped, felt the heaving of her chest as she grunted. Her heels bit into the soil as she ran to the next fire. When it was gone, there was another—two more, three. Where her thoughts had been, there was only clean space. Beyond that space was an awareness that the fires north of the furrow must not be allowed to spread. The children were north of the furrow. And the house, and the livestock. The command hung suspended in front of her, where she could not lose sight of it. The fire could penetrate her skin with its heat and her lungs with its smoke, but it could not touch that edict.
A dickcissel, wing tips flaming, streaked to the ground. Breast to the sky, it flapped, spattering flames into the yard. Caroline’s sack swooped down. The little bulge pulsed, heart-like, beneath the burlap. Caroline brought her heel over it and stamped. Beneath the crunch a single desperate squirm, then nothing. She ran to the next small blaze.
Her cheeks were dry and taut. Her feet were wet, and the hem of her dress. The line of sweat down her back met with the spray from the swinging wet sack. None of it had significance. There was only awareness. Each sensation briefly registered and then was dismissed. Only those things that might prevent her from beating out the next fire were retained. The lightening of the sack as the water evaporated. The blurring of her vision and the cough that cut her breath if she lingered downwind of the smoke.
The change did not sink in immediately. No more than one surface of her body had felt the approaching fire as it loomed up out of the south in a flat, pulsating wall. The heat intensified as it neared, but its shape never altered. No matter which side of her body faced the blaze, it met her squarely. Then Caroline’s cheeks felt the heat bend incrementally. It crept along the curve of her face, but her skin did not communicate the meaning of that fact to her mind until she became aware of the hot waves beating against both of her temples at once.
Caroline looked up and saw the fire breaking in two, the sky a blue-white knife between the wedges of flame. There was no backfire now. The two had fused some half-dozen rods south of the furrow, then split sideways, plain as a square-dance call. Forward and back, bend the line! Two lines of flame meeting, rotating, and parting.
Two flanks, east and west, rose on either side of the break. The cabin stood in a valley of orange and yellow. Above it, a narrow streak of pale, pale blue. Charles’s voice shouted: “West!”
Caroline flew to the washtub, doused a fresh burlap sack, and ran with it to the western furrow. She beat and beat at the ground. She trampled the grass, slashed at the bare roots with the heels of her shoes. That it was not yet burning did not matter. She would allow the flames no easy place to roost.
The first spark alighted in her hair. Caroline raked it loose and smothered it in her fist. There was no pulse or squirm like the dickcissel. It ceased to burn and was gone. More sparks, and more dropped from the sky as the western flank of the fire swept alongside the furrow. One and another and another, slow to burn, yet accumulating faster than she could extinguish alone. She ran and panted and swung, while all around her the heat built into something so dense it felt liquid. Beside her the flames roared and vibrated and reached.
The sack was no longer a sack, but a ragged, sooty flap. Her exposed skin seemed on the verge of blistering.
Then up from the south came a rush of cold so startling, it struck her like a splash of water. Caroline whirled.
Nothing there. Nothing at all—the fire was passing, leaving the air so cool against her skin, she might have been naked. As she watched, the head of the blaze reached the plowed field north of the house and veered off to the west. Away.
Four or five small fires remained inside the furrow. Caroline walked to them and put them out. As she did so, each shred of muscle in her shoulders throbbed to life. She lifted an arm and pressed her closed eyes into the crook of her elbow. They were gritty with soot, and the sweat stung. Cool air seeped into a torn seam where her sleeve joined her bodice.
When she lifted her head the land smelled scorched, like burnt bread. Through the haze of smoke she saw Charles moving toward the washtub. A flicker of red caught her eye, and Caroline’s body snapped toward the house, her sack raised. Red calico, and above it, two small white faces peeping round the doorway. As they moved cautiously forward Carrie appeared, dangling like a puppy from one of Mary’s forearms; in the other Mary clutched her rag doll.
Caroline felt a swelling within herself. It pressed against every edge of her body, so light she was utterly weightless. Relief.
She crossed the yard to the house and went down on her knees before them. Her fingers touched their cheeks, but her hands, sodden and dulled with the sting of burlap, could not feel them. Caroline put her lips to each of their foreheads in turn, poised in the shape of a kiss. With her lips she felt their presence. When she pulled away she saw the smudges where her chin had brushed their noses. The slight lift of her cheeks as she smiled squeezed two fat tears past her swelling eyelids. “The backfire saved us,” she assured the children. Her voice trembled as she said it. “And all’s well that ends well.”
Mary’s eyes welled. “I let the dinner burn,” she said.
Behind them Caroline saw the cookware on the hearth. The cornbread was charred, the pan of berries blackened beyond smoking. That was all they had lost to the fire. Her laugh came out a dry bark. It scraped her throat and watered her eyes. Caroline hugged Mary close, kissed the salt from her cheeks, and smoothed her hair. “You didn’t let your sisters burn,” she whispered.