The Burn My Father In Law Refused

I filled the drip torch at the can, three to one, and checked the cap twice.

A drip torch is a simple tool, a steel canister with a curved spout and a wick loop on the end, and it lets a thin line of burning fuel fall to the grass wherever you walk.

It rewards a steady hand and punishes a hurried one. My father taught me to use it at fifteen on the south forty, with his hand over mine and the smell of diesel in my hair for a week.

I walked to the northeast corner, where the black line had to begin. Becky and a volunteer named Kurt wetted the strip in front of me with the backpack sprayers, a dark stripe soaking into the pale grass.

Norm and his grandson stood twenty feet behind with flappers. Eddie rode the Gator slowly behind them with my mother in the passenger seat, one hand on the hose of the big tank.

I took a breath. I tipped the torch and touched the wick to the lighter, and the wick caught with a soft sound, like somebody exhaling. Then I turned my wrist and the fire fell to the grass.

It does not leap, a backfire. People expect it to. It simply takes the first stalk, and then the next, and then it leans against the wind in a low orange ribbon, flickering and patient, no taller than my boot.

I walked it west along the fence, a slow step and a drip, a slow step and a drip, laying a line the way you would lay down a thread, and the smell of burning bluestem rose up warm and sweet around me like a bakery in a barn.

Behind me, Norm said, “Good, Katie,” in a voice that was mostly breath. Becky followed with the sprayer and knocked down every lick that crept toward the fence.

The sound was the sound of a low wind, the tick of stems going, and a faraway crackle that was somewhere between rain and applause.

I had gone about two hundred feet when I heard the truck door.

I did not turn. I kept walking. But I heard it, a heavy Ford door closing, and then footsteps in the stubble, and then the voices behind me going silent one at a time as somebody came down the hill.

Wilfred Hendricks walked all the way down the ridge in his good canvas coat with his hands at his sides.

I could see him from the corner of my eye, across the fence, on his own land, which was thick with last year’s dead gold grass, dry as paper, the exact fuel that my fire was now walking toward.

He did not say anything. He stopped at the fence line about forty feet from me and stood there with his jaw working.

Nobody spoke. Not Hal. Not Norm. I think every person on that line was, in their own way, holding a flapper and praying. “Wilfred,” Hal said finally. It was not a greeting. “Hal.” “Come to watch?”

“I came to see it done right,” Wilfred said. His voice was rough. “Those ain’t thirty feet yet.” “No,” Hal said. “They are not.”

I stopped walking. I had a decision to make, and it was not about the fire. I could have said something. I had a good many things I could have said, and some of them would have been fair.