Chapter 26
The first fire
I have to admit I felt pretty optimistic that afternoon. Marc and Nicole invited me to continue staying at their house. The hotel might still be dangerous. But what we were really thinking was that it might all be over. The blizzard had cleared the bad guys out of town. In a day or two I would be able to drive back to Green Bay.
I called Elise that afternoon and spent a long time describing the blizzard and the hotel and talking about how I might be on the road back to Green Bay as early as tomorrow. Wow, was that wishful thinking. But it wasn’t completely fanciful. We knew some men had left – maybe most of them. Possibly all of them. Elise and I even talked a bit about a theater event we would attend in Green Bay the next week. Not much happened in Green Bay in January, but more happened there than in DeSmet, and apparently more than happened in Arkansas. It would be good to be back home – and back together.
That was the general attitude we had that evening through dinner. I remember sitting at the table, lingering really, talking about Green Bay and about Elise, when we heard the sirens. They were distant, but there is so little noise in DeSmet, we could still hear them plainly. We listened to one, and then another, and then it sounded like several were wailing at once.
“Fire.” Marc sat with his head turned toward the sounds. “They must be sending all the trucks in town.” He turned to me. “The hydrants don’t work when it is so cold. So they have to take water with them. Even so, a house fire this time of year almost always means the house is lost. It is just too hard to get water to the fire.”
Marc’s cell phone rang then. He listened a few minutes, saying almost nothing in reply. When he was done, he asked Nicole to get the boys. Then he was up and unlocked a closet in the kitchen. I saw several rifles and a shelf full of ammunition. When the boys arrived, he gave each one a rifle and a box of ammunition. They loaded their weapons without comment. He also gave Nicole a rifle. As she loaded it, she asked what had happened.
“The house that is burning was empty. Someone thought he saw several angry-men near it just before dark. Our people are checking the streets to see if there are other men out there. They asked me to join them. Shawn will go with me. The three of you know what to do.” Marc and I got our coats on while the boys moved to other ends of the house. Marc took a rifle and handed me a pistol. When I hesitated to take it, he said, “If this gets bad, you may want it.” I had no idea what “bad” might be, but I decided if he was worried enough to give it to me, I should be worried enough to take it.
We found several men waiting for us about a block away. The fire was west, and we walked that way, traveling silently and watching carefully in every direction. Several blocks later we saw another group of men and hesitated until they were identified as local. They too were walking west, toward the fire.
We had no trouble seeing the fire from blocks away. It was clear the fire department was not going to save the building. Flames were many feet in the air, and smoke poured into the sky. A block from the house we turned south down another side street. There were street lights, but they must have been low wattage (typical French junk), so we saw little. But we walked on, looking between houses and up alleys.
We never did see the men, but we heard them. There were running footsteps on the icy snow, then truck doors slamming, and an engine roaring off. We ran in the general direction of the sound, but the best we could do was catch taillights flashing briefly around a corner, and they were gone. We fanned out from there to see if others were around. I walked up one alley by myself for two blocks, my hand in my pocket wrapped around the pistol Marc had given me. I was desperate for two things – that this was the last alley I would have to walk down alone, and that my damn boots would stop making so much noise as they crunched on the snow.
I got lucky at least on the first wish. We met up at a corner, everyone reporting in whispers that he had seen nothing. We stood silently for a full ten minutes looking around us and listening for more running. We never did hear anything, but we smelled it –wood smoke. At first we thought it might have been smoke from the house the firemen were at. But as the smell intensified, we guess it was a second fire. But where? So far we saw nothing.
We split into two groups, both moving upwind – west. The smell intensified for the first block, and then seemed to attenuate. Where was it? Had we rushed right by it? We backed up a few houses and then stood and looked. There had to be smoke coming from somewhere, but in the weak light we just weren’t seeing it.
“Don’t look at the houses,” Marc said. “Look at the sky. We may be able to see the smoke against the stars.” It sounded like a good idea, and we all tried it, but as it turned out, we barely had our faces raised when the whole thing became academic. We heard a loud pop and shattering glass. The fire had gotten hot enough to blow out a window. It was in the next block.
While one man got on his cell phone to the fire department, the rest of us ran to the house. We pounded on the doors to awaken anyone inside. The men who went around to the back discovered the door had been propped open to feed air to the fire. They ducked inside briefly but came out quickly.
“The back part of the house is empty. It looks like the place is abandoned.” Those of us banging on the front door noticed the pile of old newspapers on the porch and concluded he was right. The house was unoccupied. But the adjacent houses might be lived in, so we ran to surrounding houses and banged on doors, shouting. Pretty soon lights started coming on.
A minute later a fire truck arrived with four men. They carried small extinguishers and rushed to the house. We shouted about the open back door, and they used it to enter the house. They were in barely five minutes when they were out again. “It’s too late. The fire is too big for these.” One of the men said. He tossed his extinguisher into the snow.
“Get the tanker down here.” Someone shouted.
“It’s empty. We used it all on the other house. They took it back to the station to refill. We are going to lose both houses. The most useful thing we can do is warn people around here, and monitor the fires in case they spread. Help me do that.” Several men quickly ran through mounds of snow to pound on more doors.
Marc walked over to one of the firemen who was standing near his truck, trying to catch his breath. “This house was empty.” He told the fire fighter. “Do you know about the other one?”
“Empty too. No furniture. Seemed to be an unused rental.”
“Okay, so at least no one was hurt. I wonder if there are other empty houses near here…”
“Good point. I see where you are going. I wonder if the police would know. Let me call the station.” He pulled out a phone and had a quick conversation, shaking his head as he talked. “It’s the middle of the night. They guess there are other empty houses in this area, but they don’t keep a record of them, and it will be morning before any rental agents are in their offices.”
“We don’t need rental agents.” I was suddenly brilliant. “We can find out which houses are empty just as quickly as the arsonists did – look at the front porch.” I pointed to the news papers and assorted flyers, the detritus of advertising.
“That’s it.” Marc now took charge. There were probably thirty or so local men gathered by now. “Let’s put four men in each group, each group takes a different street, and we go down block by block looking for junk on the front porch. If we see anything, we check the back door to see if it has been pushed in. OK?” That made such sense to everyone, the groups seemed to form instantly, assign themselves a street, and take off at the run. Marc and I and two others stayed on the current street. We split into pairs and worked each side of the street.
Now that we knew what we were looking for, we could move about as quickly as we could walk. We took a quick look at the front of every house. If we saw any accumulation of papers, we ran up on the porch to give it a closer look. Twice w
e pounded on doors, only to find the houses were occupied. We explained there was a fire down the street, and the people seemed to be glad we had warned them. I said nothing about their littered house front.
Using this new process we covered nearly ten blocks in the next half hour. We were all out of breath from moving fast in such cold air, but it felt good to have accomplished something. We met up with the other groups who reported similar experiences. They did have four addresses of abandoned homes, and several men wrote those down to share either with the police or with other watch groups.
By now it was after two and everyone was cold and tired. Everyone agreed that it was time to end the search. I was certainly ready to go home. My feet were half frozen and my ears hurt. And I was tired – bone tired. The other men might be in better shape, but I guessed they were pretty tired as well. We agreed to break up and head home, going slowly and carefully as we did so, just in case there were arsonists still on the prowl.
There was one final comment from the group just as we were about to disperse. “Do you think we should burn down the hotel on the way back? That would be the quickest way to end this.” He got no response. No one agreed with him, but I also noted no one disagreed with him either. Men just walked away and left that thought hanging there. I wondered how much longer it would be before others had the same idea.
The Canadian Civil War: Volume 3 - West to the Wall Page 26
