The Burn My Father In Law Refused

The sky was the clean hard blue we only get after a front, and the old grass stood a pale gold all the way to the ridge, with the first green hairs showing along the road ditch.

Three trucks came up the lane before I had finished my coffee.

Norm Gillespie, who has ranched the next place south since before I was born, had a rack of flappers in his bed and a fourteen-year-old grandson riding with him who looked like he had been told to stay quiet and was straining at it.

Becky Fairbanks came in her husband’s old Dodge with two backpack sprayers and a cooler of Gatorade. Eddie Moen, who is seventy-one and wears a red hunting cap sunburned the color of a brick, said only, “Wind’s good,” and began to unload.

Hal’s brush truck came last, with two volunteers in yellow turnout coats.

Hal got out and walked the north fence line its whole length without a word, kicking the mowed grass and studying the dry hillside beyond it, the Hendricks side, like a man reading a letter he did not like.

“Wilfred around?” Norm asked quietly. “On the ridge,” Hal said.

I looked up. On the ridge above the Hendricks pasture, a white Ford pickup sat parked with the engine off, tiny against the sky. I could not tell from that far whether anybody was in it.

I told myself I could not tell. I had known the truck for eleven years.

“Let him watch,” Eddie said, not unkindly. “People ought to see what they have got before they decide what to do about it.” Nobody said anything else about the truck.

My mother walked out to me in the grass with something in the pocket of her barn coat.

She had on her good boots and the green scarf she wears to church in cold weather, and her face was calm, and I did not like how calm.

She took my hand and put something in it.

Dad’s leather gloves.

They were stiff and old and shaped like his hands, and the left thumb was scorched black from some April before I was born, when he had burned himself and refused to buy new ones.

I turned them over. There was a small stitched R inside the cuff, her work, from some Christmas thirty years gone.

“Harvey never lit a line bare-handed,” my mother said. “Not once in forty-one years. Put them on.” “Mom, I cannot…”

“You can.” She folded my fingers closed over them. “He would want them in the grass.”

I put them on. They were a little big.

Something went through my chest and out my feet into the ground, and I stood there and let it, and nobody looked at me, which is a kindness that people in this country do without ever discussing it.

Hal gathered us at the tailgate of his truck and read the plan out loud, the way he does before every burn, with one boot up on the bumper.

Wet the line first. Back the fire into the wind along the north fence, with a sprayer and a flapper on every thirty feet.

Nobody lights the head fire until the black is thirty feet deep and he says so. If the wind swings west of south, everybody stops, no argument.

“Katie lights,” he finished. “It is her mother’s grass and her line. The rest of us hold it.” He looked at me a little longer than the sentence needed. I nodded.