The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

“Don’t worry about the bottom ground,” he said. “I’ll keep the taxes paid on it if you can’t. We’ll figure it out.”

He already had it planned in his head. The home place his, the bottom ground a problem of mine he would generously manage. He was not being cruel. That is the part that is hard to explain. He was just sure.

What the will did not say, because wills do not say such things, was why Grandpa gave me that particular forty.

I knew why. Dwight did not, or did not think it mattered, which came to the same thing.

Grandpa and I had cleared the brush off that creek bench together the summer I was fourteen. Dwight was seventeen that year and too busy with the baseball team and a girl in town to come help.

So it was just the two of us. A whole July of it.

We cut the deadfall with a crosscut saw because Grandpa did not trust a boy with a chainsaw yet. We dragged the brush into a pile and burned it in loads and watched the creek bench come clear.

He showed me how to read the wind off the water. He showed me the flat limestone rock down in the dirt and told me his own father had sat on it to watch the fire.

At the end of it we stacked the first bonfire there with our own hands. And he let me light it.

He stood beside me with his thumbs in his overalls and he said it. A fire on your own ground is a different thing than a fire on somebody else’s.

I did not understand him then. I was fourteen and it was just a fire, and my arms were sore, and I wanted my supper.

I understood him fine by the time I was forty-one.