The Burn My Father In Law Refused

Tuesday I drove to the county office on my lunch hour and got the burn permit. It was free.

It asked for the acres, the wind limit and a phone number somebody would answer, and Angie at the counter stuck Hal Corbett’s cell number to the form, as if I did not have it.

Wednesday evening I called Hal. He has been chief of the Cottonwood Falls volunteer department for twenty-two years and runs a cattle operation on the side that he talks about as if it were the hobby.

He answered on the second ring with his mouth full of something. “Katie Hendricks. Is somebody dead?”

“No. I need to burn the Isaacson pasture Saturday, and I need your department on the line.” I heard him put his fork down. “Wilfred burning his side?” “No.” “Wilfred know you are burning yours?” “He knows I am going to.”

“That so.” Hal was quiet. It was not the quiet of a man deciding whether to help. It was the quiet of a man doing math about weather. “How many acres?” “One sixty.”

“Saturday, nine o’clock,” Hal said. “Humidity is forecast at forty-two percent and the wind is south at eight, gusting twelve. I would take a south wind on that pasture any day of my life.

I will bring the brush truck and whoever answers my phone.” “Thank you, Hal.”

“Do not thank me yet,” he said, but not harshly. “Your dad and I burned together eighteen years. I would burn it for Harvey with a garden hose.”

I want to say something about how this works, because people outside this country picture a prairie fire and think of a wall of flame and a siren. A good burn is mostly patience.

You pick a day when the wind blows steady and the humidity sits above thirty, because dry air makes fire jump and wet air makes it lie down.

You mow a break along the boundary so the fire has to find its own way.

You wet the edge. Then you light a backfire along the downwind side and let it creep slowly into the wind, a low orange line the height of your boot, until it has eaten a black strip thirty feet deep.

Only then do you light the rest.

Thursday after my route I mowed a twelve-foot break along the north fence with Dad’s old tractor, and my mother filled the hundred-gallon tank on the Gator from the well hydrant, one slow sloshing bucket at a time.

She wanted to do the pump herself. I let her.

Mom came over that night, and we filled the drip torch cans at the kitchen table by the light over the stove.

Three parts diesel to one part gasoline, the mix my father swore by, because pure gas flashes too hot and pure diesel will not light on a cold morning.

She measured it the way he did, with the old quart jar that has a dent in the lip.

I put my arm around her. She is a head shorter than I am and she smells like Jergens lotion and wood smoke, and she let her head rest against me for the length of one breath.

Then she picked up the can and carried it out to the porch.

Saturday came up bright and cold, with high thin clouds and a south wind already moving the grass in long slow waves. Fifty-one degrees at seven in the morning.