The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

Lighting It First

People started coming at dark, the way they always do. Headlights swinging in off the county road and bouncing up the lane toward the gate.

They parked up top, where Dwight’s pile was. That is where the chairs were and that is where everybody had come for two years.

I could hear doors slamming and voices, and a couple of the kids already running. I could hear my brother’s big laugh.

He was up there in the dark by his unlit pile, holding court. Waiting until enough people had gathered to make a show of touching it off.

I did not wait for him.

I went down to the creek bench alone, got down by the base of my pile, and lit the match. The hedge caught and climbed, and in a couple of minutes I had a real fire going.

A tall one. Snapping and throwing sparks up off the bottom into the cold.

For a minute nothing happened up the hill.

Then I heard somebody say, “Who’s that down by the creek?”

And somebody else say, “That’s Garrett. That’s down on the old bench.”

Then a quiet came over the top of the field. The kind of quiet that is really everybody deciding something at once.

I did not look up the hill. I fed my fire and I waited.

My hands were not quite steady. I made myself stand still on my own ground and let the night decide.

The first one down was my cousin Jeff, with a boy on each hand. He walked up to my fire and looked at it and looked at me.

“This is where Grandpa always had it,” he said. Not a question.

He set his boys down by the limestone rock and they put their hands out to the heat. He stood beside me and did not go back up the hill.

The Drift

They came down a few at a time, the way water finds the low ground.

An aunt and uncle first, picking their way down the slope with a flashlight. They said they could not get warm up top in that wind, and my fire was in the lee of the wagons.

Then two of the older cousins. Then Roy and the other men Grandpa’s age.

The ones who had stood at this fire on this bench for forty years. The ones who had been coming down the hill in their hearts the whole time and just needed a reason.

Roy got to my fire and stopped. He looked around at the wagons and the rock and the timber black behind us, and his face did something I will not forget.

He had buried his best friend two springs back. Here was his best friend’s fire, lit again in the right place by the right hand.

“Earl’s bench,” he said, to nobody. “Lord, it’s been three years.”

Somebody carried the coolers down. Somebody carried the chairs.

Within half an hour the whole bonfire, the real one, the family, was standing on the creek bench in the heat of my hedge fire. Up the hill Dwight’s square pile stood tall and dark and unlit against the sky, with nobody around it.

I did not gloat. There was nothing in me that wanted to.

I kept feeding the fire and I let the men talk. The talk turned where I had hoped it would turn. To Grandpa, to the old harvests, to the year the creek came up over the bench and they had the fire anyway on the tailgate of a truck.