The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

The Oldest Runs Everything

The harvest bonfire in our family goes back longer than I have been alive. Grandpa started it, the last Saturday in October, after the combines were shut down and the corn was in the bins.

It was the one night with nothing that had to be done the next morning. The one night the whole clan stood in one place.

Everybody came. Cousins drove in from three counties. Neighbors who had helped each other through forty planting seasons stood around the flames with cups of coffee and told the same stories they told every year.

Kids ran in the dark at the edge of the light. You could count on it like you count on frost.

When Grandpa got too old to run it, Dwight took it over. That part made sense.

Dwight was the one with the equipment and the help and the flat ground to park on. He hauled the wood with his grain cart and he set the chairs and he lit the fire.

For a while it was the same bonfire it had always been. Just with Dwight’s hand on it instead of Grandpa’s.

But a thing changes when a man starts to believe it belongs to him because he is the one who runs it.

Dwight began to talk about the bonfire as his. His fire. His night.

He would call the cousins and tell them what to bring and what time to show up. He moved it off the creek bench the first fall after Grandpa died, up the hill closer to the gate. He said the bottom was too muddy to park on.

Last year was the one that stuck in me. I had started telling the little cousins a story down by the coolers, a true one, about Grandpa hauling the whole family out on a hay wagon one year to see a meteor shower after the fire burned down.

The kids were leaning in. Dwight came over with his beer and put his hand on my shoulder.

“All right, all right,” he said, loud, for the grown-ups to hear. “Don’t let Uncle Garrett talk your ears off. He gets going on the old days and we’ll be here till Sunday.”

He laughed and everybody laughed, because that is how Dwight ends a thing. The kids drifted off. I stood there with half a story in my mouth and nowhere to put it.

I did not say anything that first year, or the second. Grandpa was barely cold and I was not going to fight my brother over where to stand a fire.

I hauled wood when he told me to haul wood. I kept quiet.

That was my mistake, and I knew it even while I was making it. Keeping quiet with Dwight is not peace.

It is just the sound a man makes while he is being decided for.