The Coffee Can at the Station Door

The fire

We live four miles south of Cottonwood Falls on a gravel road, in a white farmhouse Josh’s grandfather built.

Josh works at the feedlot outside Emporia. He leaves at five and gets home around six, smelling like silage and diesel.

I cook at the school. Breakfast and lunch, two hundred and forty kids on a full day, five of us in a kitchen built in 1962. I have done it eleven years.

Every spring the Flint Hills burn. The ranchers burn the old grass off in March and April so the new bluestem comes up green for the cattle.

At night you can see the fire lines on the hills from the highway, orange and slow.

Most years nothing happens that anybody remembers. Then the wind turns.

It was the second Saturday in March. A neighbor a mile west was burning a pasture with a crew and a water trailer, and they did everything right, and in the middle of the afternoon the wind swung around out of the southwest at thirty miles an hour and the fire jumped the road.

Bryce was in the yard with Pete, our old blue heeler. Josh was at the feedlot because they were short a man that weekend.

I was in the kitchen making a double batch of sloppy joe for the freezer, with the radio on, and I did not smell the smoke until it was already in the house.

By the time I got out the back door, the grass in the ditch along our road was burning and the smoke was rolling over the yard so thick I could not see the barn.

I screamed for Bryce. He screamed back from somewhere I couldn’t see. Then I heard Pete barking, and then I didn’t.

Bryce had gone after him. Pete had run under the old hay rack at the edge of the pasture, the way he always did when the thunder came, and Bryce went in after him because Pete was his dog and he was nine.

I have gone over the next four minutes so many times. I was running toward the sound of his voice and the smoke kept pushing me back.

I could not breathe. Somebody grabbed my arm from behind and pulled me down to the gravel.

It was Dale Peters, who runs cattle north of us and has been on the volunteer department since before I was born.

The brush truck had come up our road with its lights going, the old one, the same truck the whole fight would later be about. Dale had seen me go into the smoke.

“Stay down, Cassie,” he said. “We’ve got him. Stay down.”

He and Mike Wendt went in with a hose line, Mike knocking the fire back off the hay rack and Dale going in low on his hands and knees.

When they came out, Dale was carrying Bryce against his chest, and Bryce was carrying Pete.

That is the picture I see when I close my eyes. Not the fire. A big man in a yellow coat carrying my boy, and my boy holding on to that dog with both burned arms.

Wichita

The ambulance took him to the hospital in Emporia, and from Emporia they sent him on to the burn unit in Wichita, an hour and a half down the turnpike.

He had burns on both forearms and a patch across his chest where his shirt had caught. The doctor called some of them partial thickness and some of them deep partial thickness, and the deep ones needed grafts.

I did not know any of those words on a Saturday morning. By Tuesday I could explain them to Josh’s mother on the phone without crying.

Bryce was in the unit for eleven days. They took skin from the top of his left thigh and laid it over the worst place on his chest, and they wrapped his arms every morning in a room where they gave him medicine first so he would not feel it, and he felt it anyway.

I stayed in Wichita. The school was good about it, but they only pay a cook for the days she cooks.

Josh could not stay. He had used his vacation in January when his dad had his knee replaced.

So Josh drove. He would get off at the feedlot, drive ninety miles to Wichita, sit with Bryce until nine, sleep a few hours in a chair, and drive back to Emporia to start at five.