The Big Burn

by Jeanette Ingold

  "It's a good thing I did," Jarrett said. He got the fireplace poker. "Here, use this for a cane and put your arm over my shoulders."

  "I knew you'd show up, tail between your legs. Couldn't handle things on your own, could you?"

  Jarrett shook his head. Poor Pop.

  ***

  As he hurried his father to the train depot, Jarrett said, "I found Samuel. He's with the Forest Service. Got a ranger station near Wallace." Pop didn't react.

  "He asked after you."

  Pop, his face impassive, grunted. It was his only answer.

  ***

  They reached the station as the men's train was almost done boarding. Jarrett got his father into a car, and a soldier saw Pop's injuries and made people move over to give him a seat.

  "Bye, Pop," Jarrett said. "Good luck."

  "Aren't you coming with me? I asked you before, and you didn't say different."

  "I can't, Pop," Jarrett answered. "But once things get back to normal, I'll come visit. Maybe bring Samuel, too."

  "You needn't, neither one of you. I told you..."

  "Yeah, Pop, we do need."

  Pop folded his arms across his chest in a way that warded off a handshake, and hugging him was inconceivable to Jarrett.

  ***

  Mr. Blakeney happened by as Jarrett jumped from the train steps. "Why are you getting off?" he asked. "If the fires come this way, there'll be no saving the town and not the people left in it either."

  "What about the soldiers?"

  "They're still needed here. We'll get them out when we have to." Mr. Blakeney looked impatient "I can't stand here arguing, but you ought to get on the train, Jarrett" He hurried away.

  Jarrett wished he had more time to think. He felt overwhelmed by all that was going on and by how much he didn't know. It didn't make sense that the soldiers were needed but other firefighters weren't. And hadn't that Forest Service man said Avery could use help, if any place could?

  It would be so much simpler if Samuel or Elway was here to tell him what he should do. Jarrett had left Avery to start with because he'd understood his duty wrong once, leaving a job he'd been trusted with. He didn't want to get it wrong a second time.

  He heard a passenger shout, "Where's this train going?" and an army officer call back, "Missoula, Montana!"

  Out of Idaho altogether, Jarrett thought I'd be leaving more than my job.

  He walked along the line of cars and spotted the Reeses and Lao Li inside one of them. The train was jammed full by now, but still more men pushed to get on while soldiers fought to keep order.

  He saw Angio and Vito crammed up against windows in a forward car.

  Soldiers hurried up and down the platform, trying to find space for the men still scrambling to board.

  Then a warning whistle blew, and the train started vibrating. Men who hadn't made it into one of the cars now climbed on wherever they could. They clung to handholds on the engine; crammed into the tender. Some even climbed onto the train car roofs, where they clung to whatever they could.

  The train began moving with Jarrett still standing on the platform. Well, this was where his wish to battle the forest fires had come from. It would be as good a place as any to see the job through. He watched the windows of the passing cars, ready to wave when his crew and the Reeses went by.

  He got a brief glance of a black face almost hidden under a workman's cap. Jarrett wouldn't have realized that it was Seth if Seth's eyes hadn't happened to meet his. Jarrett saw a flash of recognition in them and then a look of shame.

  Avery

  August 21, Afternoon

  As the evacuation train gathered speed, Seth closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window. He wished he could keep them closed until he was a thousand miles away from anybody who knew who he was. And not just because Abel had said they needed to get away from people who'd recognize them for soldiers.

  Used-to-be soldiers, Seth thought. Soldiers slipping away from where they were needed. He was glad Sarge couldn't see him. Glad his dead father could never know.

  Deserters. Seth tried out the word silently. It tasted bitter even rolling around in his mouth unsaid.

  He wondered if Jarrett had realized what he was doing. Probably, Seth guessed. What other reason was there for a soldier to be hiding away out of uniform?

  He felt the train swerve into the turn up the North Fork canyon, and the babble of voices in the crowded car got louder. Then someone yelled just as sudden brightness showed through Seth's eyelids. His eyes jerked open, and he saw flames leaping from a deep gulch on his side of the train. Out the windows on the opposite side, he saw long fingers of fire reaching out from the hillside, seeming to come right at him.

  I didn't get away. I got in worse! Seth fought back panic. He wanted Abel to tell him it was going to be all right. That they'd be through the fire soon, and safe.

  Only, Abel was in another car, keeping away from Seth like he'd said he would, so people wouldn't remember them together.

  The train plunged into the blackness of a tunnel and then out again into light. And then from underneath came the shriek of wheels braking to a stop.

  Someone rammed down a window and leaned out to look. "Tree across the tracks!" he shouted.

  A conductor pushed open the door. "I'll need men to clear the tracks," he announced.

  He sounds like Sarge giving out work, Seth thought Just as calm.

  "You, boy," a man said, prodding Seth. "You look strong. Lean to it."

  Seth was closest to the conductor. He couldn't not get up without calling attention to himself.

  At least he didn't have to take on the work alone. A dozen men piled out with him. They got the tree shoved aside in less than a minute and began the scramble back aboard. Seth, toward the rear of the huddle, swung his gaze across the burning hills hoping to see some end to the flames. Maybe they did give out up ahead, which was what they were all counting on.

  And then movement on the bank above him caught Seth's eye. He was almost into the car now, turning to grasp the grip bar and pull himself aboard. It must be an animal, he thought, looking back. Another bear, maybe, running from the fire.

  Except the skittering figure was too small and the wrong color—not a fur color but bright blue.

  Seth's heart pounded hard as he realized he was watching a little girl scramble toward the train. "Wait!" he yelled, as a woman appeared behind the girl. She was carrying a smaller child, and as Seth watched, she tripped and the child went flying from her arms.

  Seth ran to the spot he'd seen the child land. "Go on!" he shouted to the woman. "I've got this one!"

  He heard the train start to move behind him and realized that the engineer didn't know what was going on. Seth grabbed up the child—a little boy—and turned and ran with him, reaching the moving car just as the woman and the girl were pulled aboard. Seth, trotting alongside, handed the child up to reaching hands that swung him to safety. Seth saw the woman take him, but she was looking down at Seth. Thank you. He couldn't hear her words, but he saw her mouth form them.

  And then that car was sliding past and the next approaching. Men stood at its door waiting to haul Seth aboard.

  Seth started to run, matching his speed to the train's and trying to gauge the right moment to jump for those hands. If he missed, he wouldn't get to try again.

  I won't get another chance. The scared, fleeting thought that the train might go without him turned upside down. If I make it, I won't get another chance.

  Seth's steps slowed, and when the waiting men reached for him he shook his head and watched them pass on by.

  He glimpsed Abel looking out a window, his face distorted with anger, his mouth saying, "Fooll"

  Avery

  August 21, Afternoon

  Avery seemed to have become a ghost town. Almost all the residents had left, and now soldiers patrolled the streets and checked buildings for people who couldn't account for themselves. The soldiers couldn't protect places outside tow
n, though, and Jarrett was sure that some homes and mines in the hills would be looted before they burned.

  And burned they would be.

  And, probably, the homes and buildings in Avery, along with them.

  That seemed increasingly certain as Sunday wore on and fierce winds picked up strength, defeating attempts both to fight the fires and to escape them.

  The efforts blurred and overlapped in Jarrett's mind, until he hardly knew which was which.

  He and others tried following the Milwaukee tracks into the North Fork canyon, but fire soon drove them back. A man couldn't battle flames that shot hundreds of feet high and covered the width of a gorge.

  Jarrett huddled by the river, occasionally slipping into the water to escape showers of burning brands. Clogged with downed trees, the river was a drowning danger in itself.

  When night came he watched the entire western sky turn a beautiful, terrible red. Fires burned in the hills to the south, and fires burned behind him and to the north, but it was those wind-fed fires advancing from the west that looked most dangerous.

  When it appeared inevitable that Avery would bum, the soldiers and some other men hooked a boxcar behind an engine and left, headed west Jarrett would have gone with them, if he hadn't been watching the conflagration long enough to know there wasn't any staying alive that way.

  ***

  Seeing a small fire blaze on the edge of town, Jarrett thought perhaps the town would burn ahead of the forest fires reaching it Then he realized someone was attempting a small backfire. It won't help, he thought. Not against what's coming.

  A telegraph operator said he was going to send out word that Avery and the people in it were doomed.

  Jarrett believed it.

  He couldn't remember why he was still there—why he hadn't caught a train out while he could.

  Avery

  August 21, Night

  Where's everybody gone? Seth fought down panic as he walked Avery's main street. Hot wind blew burning things about and a cat ran by, but he couldn't see any people moving in the weird light thrown down from the red sky.

  Did they all leave while I was trying to get back? It had taken him hours to work his way out of the fiery canyon after he'd let the evacuation train go on without him. He'd been scared he'd burn up out there without anybody ever knowing what had become of him. He'd worried that if he did make it to Avery, he'd be arrested before he could get back in his uniform.

  He just hadn't thought of this—that everybody would be gone away and him left.

  I surely messed up this time, he thought. It won't be nobody's fault but my own if I die here, which I likely will. He started up the hill to the shack where he and Abel had changed into civilian clothes. But maybe I can at least do that right.

  ***

  Seth, again looking like a soldier of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, even if he didn't feel like one, considered what to do next. Expecting to die was no excuse for not trying to save himself. Maybe he should go down to the river?

  Metal clanged somewhere, but Seth didn't pay it much mind. Just the wind blowing things. But then ... the noises became too hard and sharp. More like someone using a sledgehammer.

  The sound seemed to be coming from the rail yards, past the depot. Seth started walking that way, and then he saw the lights of swinging lanterns and began running.

  As he neared he made out soldiers moving in the space between a boxcar and an engine tender. And then he saw that the boxcar doors were open and the inside was crammed with men. Men in uniform.

  My company!

  ***

  They went west, hoping to escape by racing through fire that burned from the mountains, across the railroad tracks, down to the river.

  Seth, wedged into a corner of the boxcar, felt about to suffocate from the press of soldiers packed around him; from the smoke, from the smell, from the roar and heat, from the air so acrid he could hardly breathe it.

  And then word passed along that the train was almost to the flames, and someone slammed shut the boxcar doors. As the train sped into a place that seemed all terrifying roar, more than a few men screamed.

  Seth, staring through cracks between floorboards, saw cross ties burning and waited for the car's belly to catch fire, only it didn't. And then the roar lessened. Someone cautiously cracked open the boxcar doors and then threw them wide.

  Another soldier stepped back to let Seth move down to the doorway and take a turn breathing outside air. Seth drew it in, in long, shaky gulps. He could hardly believe that the train had made it through the inferno.

  He looked up at burning hills. Looked behind, to where the sheets of flames they'd come through towered so high they hid the mountains. Looked to the curving river, sparkling with the small fires that flickered in the logs floating down it.

  He looked ahead, to the fiery trestlework of a bridge they'd have to cross. And beyond that...

  "Dear God," someone breathed.

  Beyond that was a wall of flame even higher than the one they'd come through.

  FIELD NOTES

  Sunday night and Monday morning, for seven hours, give or take, the train with the Twenty-fifth Infantry's G Company shuttled back and forth along an ever-shortening length of track. It would go as far as it could one way, until flames at a burning bridge or culvert stopped it. Then it would back up until it was stopped again, blocked in the other direction.

  It stopped so men could roll burning trees off the tracks.

  It stopped while men cleared away rocks that the fires had dis-lodged from hillsides.

  In the cars men sweated and gasped for air and probably vomited and prayed. Certainly, they must have feared that they would be burned alive, because as each westward shuttle ended a little sooner, it became increasingly clear there would be no escape that way.

  Finally, thought, just before dawn, the flames behind them, in the east, lifted long enough that the train was able to retreat to where it had started from.

  G Company returned to Avery.

  West of Wallace

  August 22, Morning

  Hank Sickles left Wallace at dawn to guide a search party going after Samuel Logan.

  Hank had reached town only a couple of hours before, but he'd brought all of Samuel's men with him. A few had minor injuries and all were hungry, but they were safe. Just exhausted from their pell-mell race before a firestorm; from a night spent evading the blazes that sprang up on all sides; from hiking in circles.

  They were lucky to be alive, and they knew it. Just as they all knew Ranger Logan's escape plan was the reason that they were still breathing.

  All the way in, Hank had hoped to find Samuel waiting for them. Samuel had never caught up like he'd said he would, but they'd had to change routes so many times it would have been easy for him to miss them.

  But Hank's old buddy wasn't in Wallace, and no one had heard from him.

  At the Forest Service office, Mr. Poison had told Hank to get some sleep while he rounded up a search party.

  "I want to lead it," Hank told him, before stretching out on the floor along the back wall.

  ***

  Going on 8:00 A.M. Hank and the other searchers reached the camp area—there wasn't much left but some shovel blades and dented pots—and fanned out from there.

  Hank was the one who eventually spotted an expanse of rocks about where Samuel had described. When he saw the remains of a large horse near its base, his heart sank. What had Samuel called him? Thistle?

  Hank was about to shout for the others when he heard a dog whine. He followed the sound to where Samuel's dog stood over what at first glance looked like a burned log almost buried in charred earth.

  Boone, walleyed and hair singed, the tips of his ears gone, tensed to attack, but then tentative recognition showed in the dog's glazed eyes. He stood rigid a moment, seemed to judge, and then he relaxed and let Hank approach.

  Hank gently touched the burned form on the ground, intending to say good-bye to his friend. Then he real
ized that what he'd thought was burned skin was, instead, a badly scorched blanket. An empty canteen protruded from under one corner and an empty water bag from another.

  "Samuel?"

  Hank felt the figure move.

  Wallace

  August 22, Morning

  Along with everybody else in Wallace, Lizbeth had half expected Sunday's winds to turn the fires back on the town again, but that hadn't happened. Instead, as firefighters continued to stagger in, and rescue crews formed and went out, people had turned to worrying about whether the water supply was safe and where to put the refugees coming in from burned-out mines and lumber camps and homesteads.

  Lizbeth wondered what other towns were doing with the refugees they were getting. Word had finally come in that the hospital train had made it to Missoula, and she hoped Mrs. Marston was being taken good care of.

  First thing this morning she'd sent Mrs. Marston a short telegram saying that the boardinghouse, Celia, and she were all fine.

  Lizbeth was still looking, however, for a chance to tell Celia that Mrs. Marston was safe and to pass along Mr. Polson's warning about Samuel.

  Celia, busy at the hospital, hadn't returned to the boardinghouse the night before. So now, Lizbeth went to the hospital to find her and to again offer her own help.

  "When I see your aunt, I'll say you're here," the nurse with the Irish brogue told her. This time, instead of sending Lizbeth away, she put a scrub brush in her hands. "If you'll keep after the floors," she said, "I'll be that grateful."

  ***

  Lizbeth didn't see her aunt until almost lunchtime. Celia, although she looked exhausted, seemed hardly able to hold still long enough to eat a sandwich.

  "I'm glad you didn't let me take that train out," Celia said. "What would all these men have done if everyone had left?"

  Lizbeth put a hand on her aunt's arm. "I've got something to tell you."

  Celia ignored her. "Of course, I'd be more help if I knew more about medical things. I've been thinking that maybe some training ... once things are better, of course..."