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  That summer I hadn’t had much time for my tree. One evening as my father and I walked past it, he said, “I remember you scrunchin’ into that tree when you were a little kid.”

  “I don’t,” I said sullenly.

  He looked at me sharply. “What’s got into you?” he said.

  Amazingly, I heard myself say, “What the hell do you care?” Then I ran off to the barn. Sitting in the tack room, I tried not to cry.

  My father opened the door and sat opposite me. Finally I met his gaze.

  “It’s not a good idea to doctor your own family,” he said. “But I guess I need to do that for you right now.” He leaned forward. “Let’s see. You feel strange in your own body, like it doesn’t work the same way it always had. You think no one else is like you. And you think I’m too hard on you and don’t appreciate what you do around here. You even wonder how you got into a family as dull as ours.”

  I was astonished that he knew my most treacherous night thoughts.

  “The thing is, your body is changing,” he continued. “And that changes your entire self. You’ve got a lot more male hormones in your blood. And, Son, there’s not a man in this world who could handle what that does to you when you’re fourteen.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I knew I didn’t like whatever was happening to me. For months I’d felt out of touch with everything. I was irritable and restless and sad for no reason. And because I couldn’t talk about it, I began to feel really isolated.

  “One of the things that’ll help you,” my dad said after a while, “is work. Hard work.”

  As soon as he said that, I suspected it was a ploy to keep me busy doing chores. Anger came suddenly. “Fine,” I said in the rudest voice I could manage. Then I stormed out.

  * * *

  When my father said work he meant work. I dug post holes every morning, slamming that digger into the ground until I had tough calluses on my hands.

  One morning I helped my father patch the barn roof. We worked in silence. In the careful way my father worked, I could see how he felt about himself, the barn, the whole farm. I was sure he didn’t know what it was like to be on the outside looking in.

  In the careful way my father worked, I could see how he felt about himself, the barn, the whole farm.

  Just then, he looked at me and said, “You aren’t alone you know.”

  Startled, I stared at him, squatting above me with the tar bucket in his hand. How could he possibly know what I’d been thinking?

  “Think about this,” he said. “If you drew a line from your feet down the side of our barn to the earth and followed it any which way, it would touch every living thing in the world. So you’re never alone. No one is.”

  I started to argue, but the notion of being connected to all of life made me feel so good that I let my thoughts quiet down.

  As I worked through the summer, I began to notice my shoulders getting bigger. I was able to do more work, and I even started paying some attention to doing it well. I had hated hole-digging, but it seemed to release some knot inside me, as if the anger I felt went driving into the earth. Slowly I started to feel I could get through this rotten time.

  One day near the end of the summer, I got rid of a lot of junk from my younger days. Afterward I went to sit in my tree as a kind of last visit to the world of my boyhood. I had to scuttle up eight feet to get space enough for my body. As I stretched out, I could feel the trunk beneath my feet weakening. Something had gotten at it—ants, maybe, or just plain age.

  I pushed harder. Finally, the trunk gave way and fell to the ground. Then I cut up my tree for firewood.

  * * *

  The afternoon I finished the fence, I found my father sitting on a granite outcrop in the south pasture. “You thinking about how long this grass is going to hold out without rain?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said. “How long you think we got?”

  “Another week. Easy.”

  He turned and looked me deep in the eyes. Of course I wasn’t really talking about the pasture as much as I was trying to find out if my opinion mattered to him. After a while he said, “You could be right.” He paused and added, “You did a fine job on our fence.”

  “Thanks,” I said, almost overwhelmed by the force of his approval.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re going to turn out to be one hell of a man. But just because you’re getting grown up doesn’t mean you have to leave behind everything you liked when you were a boy.”

  I knew he was thinking about my tree. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of wood the size of a deck of cards. “I made this for you,” he said.

  It was a piece of the heartwood from the river birch. He had carved it so the tree appeared again, tall and strong. Beneath were the words “Our Tree.”

  * * *

  Leaving the Miami stadium that day, I saw the man and the boy walking toward the parking lot. The man’s arm rested comfortably on his son’s shoulder. I didn’t know how they’d made their peace, but it seemed worth acknowledging. As I passed, I tipped my cap—to them, and to my memories of the past.

  Originally published in the July 1998 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

  “Please Don’t Leave Me!”

  by James Hutchison

  Trapped in a blazing inferno, the young girl put her faith in a courageous firefighter.

  Let’s go, Mum!” Shirley Young begged her mother. It was Thursday, August 9, 1990—late-night shopping at the Manukau City Shopping Center in South Auckland. One of the highlights of the week for the 12-year-old Maori girl was to spend a few hours at New Zealand’s biggest mall with her aunt and cousin. Her mother, Gaylene, a single parent struggling to improve her job prospects, appreciated having a few hours by herself to catch up on her studies.

  Gaylene drove the trio to the mall in her sister’s white car, stopping at the curb on busy Wiri Station Road to drop them off. As Shirley headed across the car park to join the throng of shoppers she suddenly realized she didn’t have her purse. “Wait, Mum!” she yelled, running back. “I forgot my money.” Shirley opened the passenger door and leaned in.

  Further back along the busy road, Buddy Marsh shifted gears on his huge Scania tanker as he headed up the rise. The 39-ton truck and trailer held more than 8,700 gallons of gasoline destined for a service station in central Auckland. A cautious driver, Marsh kept well to the left of the two-lane road but, as he neared the mall, a taxi pulled out of the car park, blocking his lane. Marsh swung his rig away. A glance in his mirrors showed the trailer just cleared the front of the taxi. Then, as he looked ahead, Marsh gasped in horror. Not 20 yards away, directly in his path, was a stationary white car.

  Marsh yanked on the steering wheel and hit the air brakes, locking up several of the 14 sets of wheels. The truck slammed into the rear of the car, spinning it round like a child’s toy and rupturing its fuel tank. Gasoline sprayed both vehicles, igniting them instantly. Carried on by its massive momentum, the trailer jack-knifed, reared over the curb and toppled on top of the wrecked car.

  One second Gaylene was talking to her daughter; the next, she was whirling around in a vortex of crumpling metal. She sat stunned as flames poured into the car and a single, terrible thought rose in her mind. Shirley! Where is she? Gaylene groped frantically around in the darkness but the passenger seat was empty. Thank God. She’s made it out of here. An excruciating pain shot up her legs; her sneakers and track pants were on fire. Gaylene struggled to open the buckled doors, but they wouldn’t budge.

  “Brian!” Marsh called on his two-way radio to his shift mate Brian Dixon in another truck. “I’ve had an accident! I’m on fire! Call emergency services!”

  Marsh jumped down and ran around the front of the tanker to the burning car. Flames were licking the trailer’s tanks. Worse, fuel was leaking from relief valves on the overturned trailer and spewing from a hole in its front compartment. The whole rig could blow.

  Marsh reached the car just as a bystan
der hauled Gaylene out and smothered her flaming clothes with his own body. He and other bystanders then carried her a safe distance away.

  * * *

  Above the hiss of escaping compressed air and the roaring fire, Marsh heard a voice calling “Mum! Mum!” At first he couldn’t see anything. Then, as he searched underneath the toppled trailer, he saw a young, dark-haired girl trapped in a tiny space between a rear wheel and the chassis. “Mum!” she cried. “Mum!” Marsh grabbed her beneath the arms. “You’ll be all right. You’re coming with me,” he said. But he couldn’t budge her: her lower body was pinned to the ground by the wheel assembly. “I want my mum!” she wailed.

  A wall of fire ran the length of the tanker, threatening to sweep around under the trailer where Shirley lay. Then came a thunderous roar. An explosion tore a hole in one of the trailer’s four fuel compartments. An immense fireball ballooned into the sky. Shoppers in the car park ran for their lives. Shielded by the tanker from the full force of the blast, Marsh shouted, “There’s a little girl trapped under the trailer.”

  “Let the firefighters handle it,” a policeman replied. “Clear the area now!” Truck, trailer and car were now lost in a cauldron of fire. “That poor little girl,” Marsh said, holding his head in his hands. “She didn’t have a chance.”

  With a blaze of sirens, a pumper and rescue trucks from Manukau Station arrived. Immediately the vehicles stopped, and senior firefighter Royd Kennedy pulled an armful of hose out of the locker as his partner was lugging foam containers down behind him. Driver Tod Penberthy was sprinting to connect the pump to the nearest hydrant. Waiting for the water, Royd saw his boots, fireproof overtrousers and the rubber on his breathing apparatus begin to singe. When they turned the hose on the fire, the heat was so intense that the water steamed away before it reached the flames.

  The tanker was burning end to end, shooting flames 100 yards into the air.

  Senior Station Officer John Hyland, in charge of the initial response, had never seen such potential for disaster in 19 years of fighting fires.

  The tanker was burning end to end, shooting flames 100 yards into the air. Gasoline poured from holes and relief valves into a widening lake and a river of fire raced down the road into stormwater drains.

  Only a few yards away were 550 other potential fires—the cars in the crowded car park.

  Within minutes of blowing up, a great fuel/air vapor conflagration—known to firefighters as BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion)—reaches out for hundreds of yards and incinerates anything in its path. Only 100 yards from the burning tanker was the mall, packed with almost 20,000 late-night shoppers.

  More fire crews arrived. “Concentrate on pushing the flames away from that tanker!” ordered Divisional Officer Ray Warby, who had arrived to take control. As if to underline his words, the fuel in another compartment exploded in a monstrous fireball, forcing Royd and his crew mates back 20 yards. The vehicles in the car park around them had begun to melt, plastic bumpers and mirrors sagging, paint bubbling.

  As the firefighters readied themselves for another assault, a long, high-pitched wail cut through the night. At first, it was dismissed as the sound of expanding metal. When the eerie sound came again it raised the hair on the back of Royd’s neck. I’ll be damned, he thought. It’s coming from the tanker. Shielding his eyes, Royd peered into the glare, but saw only a flaming wall 50 yards high. Then, for a split second, the flames parted. From beneath the trailer he saw something waving. It was the hand of a child.

  “Cover me!” Royd shouted. He dropped his hose and ran straight into the inferno.

  * * *

  For ten minutes little Shirley had been slowly roasting in a sea of fire. It’s hopeless, she told herself, no one can hear me in here. Giddy with pain and gas fumes, she felt her mind begin to drift and suddenly saw a vivid image of her grandfather and grand-uncle—both of whom had died years before. They are guardian angels now, she thought. They’ll be watching over me. The idea gave her new strength. Straining to see through the wall of fire, Shirley glimpsed moving figures. I’ve got to let them know I’m here! Mustering every ounce of strength, she screamed louder than she had ever done in her life.

  As Royd neared the flames, the heat hit him like a physical blow, stinging his face through his visor. Shielding his head with his gloved hands and fireproof jacket, he crawled under the trailer. Shirley was trying to hold herself up by clutching a cable over her head, but her hips and thighs were under the wheel assembly and her legs were twisted up, like a grasshopper’s next to her chest.

  “I’m scared. Please don’t leave me,” she wailed. Royd tucked his air cylinder under her shoulders to support her upper body. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll stay, I promise you.” Royd meant what he said; he had always made it a rule never to break promises to his own three kids.

  “My name’s Royd,” he said. “We’re in this together now, so we have to help each other.” He reached into the tiny space and cradled the small body in his arms. Having fended for himself since his teens, he knew what it meant to be alone and afraid. “Is my mum alright?” Shirley asked. Royd replied: “She’s a bit burned, but she got away. My mates will soon get us out, too.”

  The air was so thick with fumes that the two of them could barely breathe. Royd knew it would be only seconds before the vapor ignited.

  Whooosh! The firefighter braced himself as the air exploded around them. This is it, he thought. Now we’re goners. Shirley whimpered. Royd felt sick with helplessness as the flames washed over her. Then, for a moment, the fire drew back. “This is pretty rough, eh, Shirley?” he said, unstrapping his helmet. “Put this on.” At least it may help save her face, he thought. He cinched the strap tight under her chin and flipped down the visor. As he hunkered down, he thought: Where the hell is my cover?

  The station officer was running through the car park to the rest of their team, yelling at the top of his voice. “Royd’s under the tanker. Get that hose up here!” Struggling with the water-filled hose, they took no more than a minute to get within striking distance, but it seemed an eternity.

  A second wave of fire washed over Royd and Shirley. Then more explosions rocked the trailer, and Royd’s heart sank. We don’t have a chance now, he thought. He looked down at the girl’s tortured body. I won’t leave you. That I promise. Then he wrapped his arms tightly round her and waited for the final surge of flame that would surely immolate them both.

  Instead of fire, they were hit by an ice-cold waterfall. “My mates are here!” yelled Royd. Divisional Officer Warby appeared through the curtain of water. “Don’t worry, we’ll get things moving,” he told Royd, then he took quick stock. The two were shielded from the full force of the main fire above and beside them, but the burning wreckage of the car was in the way, hampering the firefighters’ efforts to protect and rescue the pair.

  Warby crawled out and ran to Peter Glass, the officer in charge of a rescue truck. “Get that girl out. I don’t care how you do it as long as you do it fast!”

  As four firefighters sprayed the life-giving water that kept fire away from Royd and Shirley, they were exposed to the full radiated heat of the main tanker blaze. It gnawed through their multi-layered bunker coats as if they were tissue paper, blistering their skin. But they didn’t dare back off. If the spray wavered, fire would instantly sweep back over. Even changing crews was too risky.

  Ironically, now Shirley and Royd began to shiver violently: 20 gallons of freezing water were cascading over them each second. Soon they were in the first stages of hypothermia.

  “I’ll get someone to relieve you,” Warby yelled. “No,” Royd retorted. “I must stay with her. I made a promise.”

  Glass brought his rescue vehicle in as close as he dared while a crewman sprinted to the car and hooked a winch cable to the windscreen pillar. The winch was not powerful enough to drag the car out so they rigged it to the rescue truck’s crane and, using it like a giant fishing rod, hauled the burning wreck
away.

  Assistant Commander Cliff Mears, from the fire brigade headquarters, had set up a mobile command post and called in a fourth, then fifth alarm. Any vehicle in the city that could be useful was on its way to the scene. However, the firefighters were facing yet another potential catastrophe. Fed by tons of fuel, a torrent of fire was pouring into stormwater drains in the car park and on Wiri Station Road. But what route did the drains take?

  The answer came with a deafening explosion. A manhole cover blasted out of the ground at the main entrance of the mall, narrowly missing a woman and flinging her shopping cart into the air. Rumbling underground explosions began lifting and blowing out manhole covers all over the complex. A mile away, stormwater drains emptying into the Puhinui Stream sparked five separate fires in the scrub on the stream’s banks.

  The entire shopping center was now permeated with gasoline fumes. “Evacuate the center. Quick as you can,” Mears ordered.

  * * *

  Back at the burning rig, Warby approached a paramedic from a waiting ambulance crew. “There must be something we can do to ease the girl’s pain—do you think you could make it under there?” he asked.

  Biting back his fear, the paramedic donned a bunker coat and helmet and headed into the inferno. As he crawled into the tiny space where Shirley and Royd lay, he realized he wouldn’t have room to get an IV drip going. He considered administering a painkiller, but decided against it: Shirley seemed to be coping and side effects such as suppression of her breathing might hamper the rescue operation. Trauma victims need to get to hospital within an hour of injury—dubbed the “golden hour” by emergency services—to have a decent chance of survival. Crawling out, he was conscious that timing was vital. Shirley had been under the tanker for more than 30 minutes. With her massive injuries, burns and now the cold, she could easily slip into shock and die.