The Field He Watches From His Sink

By early afternoon it was knocked down to a smoke and a smell, and the chief, a man named Ray who I have known since grade school, walked over to me pulling off his gloves.

His face was streaked black with two clean lines under his eyes where the sweat had run. He said, “Frances, I’m awful sorry. Looks like ten acres, maybe a hair more.”

Ten acres. He said it gentle, the way you give somebody a number they are going to have to carry, and I just nodded like it was a weather report.

I grew up on this ground.

My husband Dale and I bought the place from my mother when Grandpa passed, and the pine was the whole reason we stretched to do it.

Everybody around here runs cattle or cuts hay. Grandpa ran trees.

He was the only man in the county who looked at a wore-out hill pasture in 1981 and planted shortleaf pine on it.

He told my mother his grandkids could walk in the shade someday, and we did.

I walked in that pine my whole life. I was married under the north edge of it in a borrowed dress.

Now I was standing in a field of black sticks that were still ticking as they cooled, with gray ash drifting down and settling on my arms like the world’s worst snow.

What Len Said at the Fence

Len came down to the fence the next morning while I was walking the line with a clipboard, counting what was gone post by post.

He is seventy-one years old and he has lived on the quarter section north of us my entire life.

He taught me to drive a tractor when I was eleven because my own dad worked away a lot.

I want that on the record, because it matters to everything that came after. Len was not a stranger.

Len was the man who used to hand me peppermints over this same fence.

He stood there now with his coffee in a chipped cup and he looked out at the black and he said, “Terrible thing, Frances. Just a terrible thing.”

I said, “Len, that was your burn pile.”

He had been clearing a cedar thicket off his north draw for a solid week.

I had watched the smoke every single evening from my kitchen window. I knew exactly where it started.

He took a sip of his coffee and he did not look at me.

He looked out at the ruin of forty years and he said the thing I will remember until the day I die.

He said, “Well. Wind come up. That there’s an act of God, now. Nobody can help an act of God.”

An act of God. Like the hand that lit the pile was not his own hand.

Like he had not walked off to his dinner and left it going with a wind advisory on the county radio all afternoon.

I did not raise my voice.

My grandma always said a woman who yells has already lost the argument, so I just looked at him a long second until he had to look back.

Then I said, “There’s nine thousand dollars of fence gone with it, Len. Your side and mine both.”

He said, “Insurance’ll see to it,” and he turned and walked back up the hill to his house, slow, an old man with his coffee, and left me holding a clipboard with a number no insurance would touch.