The Burn My Father In Law Refused

“I would have lost it all. And Joyce’s garden. And the south pond. I was so busy being right that I…”

He did not finish. I did not finish it for him. I want to be honest about that.

I could have said it, and it would have been true, and it would have given me a very small satisfaction that I did not want.

“Wilfred,” I said instead, “I have still got a line to finish.”

He looked at me then, really looked, as if for the first time since the drive. He wiped his face with the back of his glove and left a stripe of black across one cheek. “Where do you want me?”

I thought about it. It would have been nice to say something grand. What I said was, “Your side of the fence. Walk it with the sprayer. Anything that jumps, you catch.” “Yes,” he said quietly. “All right.”

He walked the Hendricks side of the north fence for the next four hours, shoulder to shoulder with a volunteer named Kurt, with the pump on his back and his eyes on the grass.

Twice more a spark came over, and twice more he met it, and the second time he said, in a voice so low I almost missed it, “Harvey used to say you never turn your back on a line, not even a good one.”

“He said that to me, too,” I said.

The black went to thirty feet at ten-forty.

Hal called it, and I lit the head fire along the south end, and the whole Isaacson pasture caught and ran north toward the line in a long, low, roaring orange wall that was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

The smoke rolled up into the blue like a pillar, black and tan and white. The flames came to the black strip and lay down at our feet like dogs.

We burned a hundred and sixty acres in three hours and ten minutes.

By one o’clock, the whole hillside was a soft black carpet with thin white threads of smoke rising off it, and the crew stood in the road with water bottles, looking at it.

My mother climbed down from the Gator. She had been sitting there since nine with her hands on the water hose, and she had not said a word.

She walked out onto the black ground in her good boots, which would never be the same, and she stood in the ash and looked up the ridge to the place where my father had once, she told me later, proposed to her.

Then she turned around and looked at the fence line, and at the man on the other side of it.

Wilfred had taken off his glove. He was holding it in both hands, working it, the way he had worked his cap in my driveway.

He stood on the Hendricks side of the fence and she stood on hers, two old people with ash to their ankles and thirty-one springs between them.

“Marilyn,” Wilfred said.

“Wilfred.” “I owe you an apology, and I do not know how to start it.”

My mother considered him with her head slightly tilted. I have known that look my whole life. It is the look she gave a tomato plant that was thinking about wilting.