The Night the Whole Town Tipped Back
The Fire on Route 12
Two years ago this past spring, I was driving home from a closing shift a little after midnight when I saw the orange glow behind the Kowalczyk place, the old hay barn that sat about sixty yards back from Route 12.
I know now, because the fire marshal told me later, that it started from a faulty breaker in the tack room. I did not know that then. All I knew was that the barn was fully involved, flames already through the roof on the east side, and there was a woman in the yard screaming a name I will never forget, over and over, pointing at the barn like her arms could reach through fire.
Her daughter had gone in after the cat.
I did not think about it the way people think you think about it in a moment like that. There was no slow motion, no clear decision tree. I was out of my car and running before I had finished registering what I was running toward.
I found the little girl in the second stall, curled against a support post, coughing so hard she could not answer me. I got my arms under her and I got her out through a gap where part of the wall had already burned through, and I got her to the yard and put her directly into her mother’s arms.
Her mother was already turning back toward the barn.
I told her to stay. I do not think she heard me. I do not think anything in the world could have kept a mother out of that barn while her daughter was safe in someone else’s hands and she still believed, for one more second, that she had time.
I went in instead of letting her.
I do not remember most of what happened next in any order that makes narrative sense. I remember heat that did not feel like heat anymore, past a certain point, more like pressure. I remember calling her name and not hearing anything back. I remember a groan from somewhere above me that I understood, half a second too late, was the loft giving way.
Part of the ceiling came down across my left leg below the knee.
I do not remember the ambulance. I remember waking up in a hospital in Wausau three days later and a nurse telling me, as gently as anyone has ever told anyone anything, that they had not been able to save the leg, and that the woman I went back in for had not made it out.
That little girl lost her mother that night on Route 12.
I lost my leg trying to change that, and I did not.