Caroline: Little House, Revisited(106)

Caroline watched Carrie kicking her feet in and out of a sunbeam. She was so different than her sisters had been at this age, with their dimpled knees and deep creases of fat like furrows encircling their wrists and ankles. Carrie was lean and narrow, a little jackrabbit of a baby. Yet Caroline could not look at her puncturing the air with her small sharp heels and think that she was not beginning to thrive in her own hardy way.

The sunlight dimmed between kicks. Carrie lay poised, her feet ready to strike. Slowly her kinked legs sank toward her belly as she bored with waiting. Caroline lifted her eyebrows and made an O of her mouth, in hopes the baby would mirror her surprise rather than be vexed. Carrie gurgled in agreement. The sunbeam had played a fine trick, melting into the air. The firelight seemed to brighten by contrast while Caroline stirred the pot of blackberries, until it might have been dawn instead of noon.

“I do believe it’s going to storm,” she said to the girls. But the light was wrong. Rather than clouding, it had shrunken somehow, turned down like the wick in a lamp. Yet through the west window, the sky was clear. A dissonant twang sounded in her mind. Caroline put down the spoon and went out to look. Halfway across the room, she saw. To the south, the sky was black.

The smell reached the cabin at the same moment as Charles’s shout: “Prairie fire!”

For one crystalline moment, it was beautiful. Like silk, like water. Orange and yellow, a perfect saturation of color writhing over the prairie. The great curve of flame caressed the earth, its long arms slowly undulating outward. The fire itself did not appear to move forward at all. The black spume of smoke billowed so high and wide, it seemed instead as if the landscape were surging forward, passing into it.

Her eyes feasted on the blaze, unable to deny its splendor, but Caroline’s mind made no concession. The radiant vista before her did not simply burn; it consumed. It fed on all that was put before it with the indifference of a threshing machine. If they themselves passed through it, there would be nothing left on the other side but the empty chaff of their bodies.

Caroline ran.

Bucket after bucket of water. Up from the well, into the washtub. Burlap sacks snatched from the stable, pressed down into the tub. The burlap would not take the water fast enough. It bubbled up around her hands, tried to float, even as the water beaded over the coarse fabric. All manner of creatures fled past her as she struggled. Rabbits, prairie chickens, snakes, and mice, dashing toward the creek. From them rose a nameless sound, a frantic rush of panting and scurrying.

“Hurry, Caroline!” Charles cried. He was tying the team to the stable, plow and all. “That fire’s coming faster than a horse can run.”

Caroline opened the mouth of one sack and dragged it through the tub like a dipper, scooping the water into it. Then Charles was beside her, taking up one handle of the washtub. Together they staggered toward the fire line. Faster! urged her legs. Mustn’t spill, warned her brain. Everything in the world moved in the opposite direction, even the fire itself. A jackrabbit leapt over the tub right between them, fearless in its panic.

A crooked gash in the earth framed the house and yard. Two slashes slanting south from the half-plowed field and a third joining them east to west. “I couldn’t plow but one furrow; there isn’t time,” Charles panted, and dashed back to the house.

One furrow. Fifteen inches of bare dirt to wall them off from the fire. The torn sod lay belly up, the exposed roots splayed in every direction. Those fine white threads would burn quick as hair, Caroline thought. She stood before the advancing curtain of smoke and flame, aware now of its warmth against her skin. Its roar was such that there was no other sound, almost no sound at all—only the faintest of crackling as it licked and chewed its way over the grass. One furrow, and one tub of water.

Charles came out of the house at a run with a stick of firewood held like a candle in one fist. His other hand shielded the small flame. He stepped over the furrow and touched flame to grass. Behind him the air shimmered.

The fire Charles set was so small, Caroline could have held it in the palm of her hand. It seemed made of a different element from the blaze that engulfed the horizon. These flames were not enough to cook over. They only lapped placidly at the blades of grass within their own circumference, oblivious to their freedom. “Burn,” she urged. Whispering, as though the big fire might be the one to hear and obey. “Burn.” Charles lit another, and another. The grass began to hiss and seethe. One by one, the little fires seemed to reach out and join hands. A thread of orange spread itself around the house. Ring around the rosy, Caroline’s thoughts sang. Ashes, ashes.

A hot current of air gusted from the south, and the little flames bowed down. Caroline watched as a clump of roots lit up. They looked like fine wires, all gold and copper. Like Charles’s whiskers in the light from the hearth. Then the flames were on her side of the furrow.

Put it out.

With the swing of the wet burlap, Caroline felt her mind unhitching itself. Shuuush went the sack through the flaming grass. Again. And again. She heard the sounds of her own exertion as she swung and stamped, felt the heaving of her chest as she grunted. Her heels bit into the soil as she ran to the next fire. When it was gone, there was another—two more, three. Where her thoughts had been, there was only clean space. Beyond that space was an awareness that the fires north of the furrow must not be allowed to spread. The children were north of the furrow. And the house, and the livestock. The command hung suspended in front of her, where she could not lose sight of it. The fire could penetrate her skin with its heat and her lungs with its smoke, but it could not touch that edict.