Chess, Gilbert, and Willie went to scraping a line in the yard clear of brush while we poured water in a ring, eight feet wide, about twenty feet out from the house. I moved like a machine, thankful that Chess was there shouting commands and it wasn’t left to me. With every creaking noise of the pump handle, I whispered a thank-you for our well and the bountiful water that flowed from it. Even for Lazrus, who’d found it. Another prayer that the water would hold out, that the fire would jump us and all our neighbors and friends. Staying busy kept me from picturing my oldest son riding toward the range fire.
The air darkened to the pitch of night; the wind quit. Without a breeze to stir and thin it, the brown smoke strangled us. Most every breath I took, I coughed. We got rid of the kerchiefs and put heavy, wet dishrags on our faces to breathe through, and still it burned our throats. I pumped water until my arms would barely move, filling jar after jar, then handing them to the girls to haul and pour. Then we changed places, one of the girls taking over the pumping while the other girl and I hauled water.
I had just passed Chess another bucketful, when he dropped it and pushed me back into the house. “That sound,” he said. “Get in the house.”
I listened hard, though my ears felt as if they were full of cotton lint. There it was. A faint, distant rumbling, growing louder.
“Thunder!” Mary Pearl said.
Esther clapped her hands, saying, “Rain! It will put out the fire.”
Chess shook his head. “It ain’t thunder. Get the mattresses. Get as far into the middle of the house as you can. Pull them mattresses, boys. Get, get!”
All those cattle had been waiting down by Rudolfo’s hacienda to be driven north. A thousand head at least, waiting for more of mine to be pulled in. Jim Baker’s herd was there along with whatever number the Cujillos had added. On my range, I figured there should be another five hundred at one end, almost that many in the eastern section, loose and wandering and scared by the flames or the smoke or the black sky. The noise was the resounding hooves of two thousand head of longhorn and criollo, wild and rank as a desert whirlwind themselves, barreling toward this house.
This house had stood through hail and flood. It had always seemed like a good, soundly built house. I shooed the girls toward the bedrooms. The front door flew open and a man, black from head to toe, stumbled in and took off his hat. Charlie! “Ma!” he called. “Hanna’s lost his place and everything with it. It’s at Maldonado’s south border now and the wind is stirring it this way. I’ve outrun some steers, and the others are going every which way, some right into the fire. There’s no place to run.”
Esther sobbed and said, “Aunt Sarah, what about your cellar?”
Charlie shook his head. “If they bring down the house, you’ll be buried alive.”
At last, I found my voice, and it was a shout. “We’ll stay right here,” I said. “Get this furniture into the near corner of my bedroom. There are more walls between that area and the south. Make a bridge out of the armoire and surround the outer walls with furniture. Push it against the window. Use the iron frames off the beds. Put the mattresses all in the center and we’ll hide in the middle of that. Come on, son.”
Charlie grabbed his hat, shaking his head. “I’m going to try to turn them away from here. You all do what you can.” He vanished without closing the door. Gilbert and Willie bolted out behind him before I could tell them to stay inside and hide.
“You boys get back here!” I ran to the front door and stood on the porch, screaming, “Charles Elliot! Willie! Gilbert! Get in here! Boys!” Chess grabbed my arm hard. “Let me go get those boys,” I said, coughing.
Chess didn’t talk, just jerked me in the door and closed it, then shoved me toward the mattress fort the girls were making. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t make a sound. My boys! Running toward their deaths. I stood there blinking, watching Esther fret, and Mary Pearl, all grim and business, stacking furniture. I felt as lost as my mama looks sometimes. Maybe this was what it took to send me over yonder, into the distance, where I don’t have to feel this way, all scattered and tormented inside.
Mary Pearl said to Esther, “Mama and Papa will be safe. The sandy cliff at the creekbed will stop the cattle. The fire can jump it, but those steers can’t.”
We turned over anything that could make a barricade, cobbling a little fortress out of my bedroom. The armoire went up against the window, and Mary Pearl was smart enough to take all the pictures and mirrors off the wall. She was scared, but she wasn’t crying. Esther sobbed aloud. We climbed in and pulled the mattresses around. A gust of wind rattled the window glass. There was the rumbling again. This time, we could hear cattle bellowing, howling their fear and terror and pain as they stumbled over each other and were trampled and gored and crushed. Chess bolted back to the bedroom and into our nest of mattresses. The ground shook. The sound came closer and closer, until a tremendous roar seemed to roll over the top of us. They were right outside the wall. Dust puffed through the walls and the furniture rattled. In another room, something fell to the floor and broke. Mary Pearl hissed between her teeth and said, “Aunt Sarah, I think I left your yellow milk pitcher on a chair.”
Charlie and Gilbert and Willie. Shorty and Flores. All my neighbors, all my family. And poor Rose, Dan, and Maize. Ringer and the others. Little Hunter. Touchy little Pillbox. Nip and Shiner. Four or five cats, good mousers all. Thirty chickens and four geese. My poor animals. What a sorry, sorry way to die. On the skin of my eyelids, I saw Charlie, looking blackened and strange, smelling of fire smoke, with that ring of white where his hat had been. Just like Jack. I’d held Jack’s head, whispered that I loved him, and smelled that smoke. Just before he died, I had touched his burned hair. It crumbled into my hands. Surely, surely, Providence would not allow a son to die like his father, torn asunder by exploding debris in a fire. Surely, Charlie would know when it was time to run. No herd of cattle was worth my son dying. And he would watch out for his brother. Surely.
When it got quiet, Chess decided to slip out and chance a look outside. He went to the porch and called the dogs. He called Willie, then hollered for anyone who was out there to come to the house. It was terrible, hearing that lonesome calling, not even a dog to answer him. The air was sooty brown and silent. This little house seemed like a lost twig at the bottom of a well. We were helpless ants clinging to the twig.
Another rumble started but then died down. The cattle were lost, dazed, running in bunches here and there. At least there was that. They were not in a massive flank two thousand strong, surging like a tide toward this house. Though the small groups could kill, they might be easier to turn. Just as they’d come close but not destroyed this house. I heard men outside, men whooping and whistling, shouting for their lives, trying to control the terrified animals.
Then it was quiet. A deep, thick quiet, as dark as the sky outside, but definitely not filled with maddened cattle. I stood up in the midst of our ring of mattresses. “I’m going to go outside and look,” I said. When I returned to them, I said, “I think we should get these girls home now. It’ll be safer.” Albert and Savannah have a house that’s mostly rock. It’s across the creek, and the sides of the creekbed will form a natural turn for the fire and the crazed cattle. All we have to do is get there.
After ten minutes of silence, Chess said he agreed. It would be safer by far to be up by Albert’s place. I pulled back a mattress so the girls could step out. My chest hurt—maybe from the strain of breathing through the wet rag, or maybe my heart was going to seize up and quit. Dirt in the house hung in the air as if it were suspended, as if the whirlwind that had hit Savannah’s porch that day had come back and taken up camp. We were covered with silt.
Chess and I took rifles from behind doors, as well as all the shells we could carry. If we came upon a roving bunch, taking down two or three lead steers could form a little ridge. The others would go around and we’d be spared. The air outside was still heavy and thick to breathe, and a wave of my hand made
it move in curls around me. The outbuildings, whose outlines I could see faintly in the smoke, were standing and whole. I heard chickens fussing and the speckled rooster crowing.
Chess pulled two saddles from the racks and I carried the blankets and pads. Mary Pearl said, “Don’t worry about my saddle, Grampa. Esther and I can ride bareback on Duende.” Esther stared at her, holding her hand over her mouth.
“All right,” I said. “But I want a saddle. I’ll get one of the cutting horses. I’ve got work to do after we get you girls home.” I wanted my whole rig so I could keep that rifle handy. Without it, I couldn’t imagine what would be our fate if we met up with a bunch of criollo on the tear, but a good cow horse and a rifle would give me at least a chance to keep them away from the girls.
Rose, the other old horses, and little Hunter clustered at the wall of the barn that made part of the round corral. That fence was stout as could be and parts of it had iron bars, too. Much of it was unseen in the smoke, but from the looks of things when we got closer to it, the cattle had moved against it, but the fence had held. The horses inside were safe, both young and old.
We made our way around that toward the rest of my riding stock, the ones we’d moved away from the barn and penned on the east side for the roundup. When at last we got to them, the horses shied away until Chess and I pulled the dishrags down to our necks. It felt like forever, trying to saddle the horses, breathing air so thick with smoke that it puffed in and out of our mouths like we’d been smoking tobacco. We heard a shout: Gilbert’s voice. Chess called him to the barn.
Gil was out of breath and almost as black as his brother had been. “We need help, Grampa,” he said.
Chess said, “Sarah, I’m going with the boys. You take the girls home. If you run into bunches of strays, just run with them until you can turn off. If they’re coming right at you, shoot as many as you can.”
“Girls,” I said to Esther and Mary Pearl, “I’m going to get you home and come back for these horses. You find me a place for them there while I’m gone.”
“Bring ’em now, Aunt Sarah,” Mary Pearl said. “Please bring them. I’ll help you, and it will take less time in the long run.” The sun was a ball of orange in the amber-brown sky. Everything glowed yellowish, like the sulphur on Rose’s leg, but at the same time had lost its true color. The whole world was dim, like a picture in a newspaper, and yellowed, like the paper was old. The sun was close to level with my house, yet it seemed to be staying there, impaled against the void that was neither sky nor ground.
“Help me get them caught, then,” I said. We slipped a loop over Pillbox and another over Hunter, who got real agitated at it. By just opening the gate to the round corral and leading the two, the others would follow on a normal day. On this day, I felt I needed to cover the horses’ eyes and tie them all. Esther held the reins while Mary Pearl helped me get them all rigged. We rode carefully up a road so familiar to me, I could have done it blindfolded. I tried to give Baldy his head, but he kept leaning off to the left, then tossing his head and yanking the reins. We tried to go slowly, considering Rose’s leg. Behind me, Mary Pearl and Esther sat on Mary Pearl’s thoroughbred stallion, a young horse, full of more beans than sense, and he fidgeted and twisted the whole way, too. I listened so hard for the sound of hooves that the cottony feeling came back in my ears.
When we got to the house, Savannah called out and bustled the girls inside, where their older sisters surrounded them with kisses and hugs. I left the saddle and rig on Baldy. It wouldn’t hurt him to wear it for a little while. I turned off my string and led Pillbox and Hunter, still kicking and fearful, to Albert’s barn. Ringer, Maize, and Dan dragged themselves behind. Sweat broke out on my face when I saw Dan’s lead was hanging in the dirt. Rose had dropped off. She knew to follow, but Rose was hurt, and you couldn’t count on a horse in pain to behave rightly.
I went toward the barn door and hollered, “Rose? Rosie, sugar, sugar! Come on and get some sugar, Rose.” This time, I dipped into the bag of sugar they kept by the door for their animals. It was just some that had gotten dirty or wet or spilled in the house, but plenty fine for a horse to eat. I held it in my hand and stepped through the door, trying to see Rose’s shape in the brown smoke. “Rose! Sugar for you!”
The sun turned deeper orange, bloody-looking. The sulphurous sky moved like some great monster, ribbons of grays and browns and yellows flowing behind it. A shape moved in the smoke, and I smiled, thinking, there she is. A man stepped forward. Albert. He said, “Sarah, come on in the house. The girls are telling how they hid in the bed folds.”
“Rose didn’t come,” I said. “She’s nursing a snakebite.” If she didn’t just drop off here in the yard, she probably never left the corral.
“Poor old thing.” He just looked at me and nodded, waiting. I started toward the house with him, thinking that Rose would be safe if she’d stayed behind in the corral. That corral fence was like a fortress against the wild cattle. Then I stopped in my tracks. “But the gate’s open,” I said. “I left the gate open because I thought I had them all.”
“Sarah,” was all Albert got out of his mouth. I took hold of a hank of Baldy’s mane and jumped on his back without touching the stirrup. For a moment, I was surprised I could still do that—it’d been so long. As I pushed him toward the red sun, Albert called out, “You can’t save them all, Sarah. Don’t risk your own neck.” He said more too, I’m sure, although the same cottony quiet filled my ears and I no longer heard him by the time the shadows of their house and buildings vanished behind me in the smoke.
The smoke near my place lay close to the ground. The whole of the sky had gone a different red-brown tinge, and the sun had vanished. Surely, it hadn’t already set and left the sky stained with this ocher light. Then like some kind of miracle vision, the smoke parted and stars showed through. A black velvet sky hung like a curtain behind the ocher-colored smoke. I reined in Baldy and cut around the barn, hopping off as he came to a stop, like we’d just dallied a calf with a rope. For one full minute, I stood looking at what spread before me, unable to move.
The smoke had settled and lowered because the fire had come clear across four miles and was at the hill behind where the new windmill stood like a guard post. It was a ghost of a guard post, for its blades were gone and the splintered metal spokes of them stuck out like a spider’s legs.
Beyond the house, men were shouting, and I saw riders, hats over their heads, driving terrified cattle over a ridge where the ground smoldered. The sound of burning, crackling wood filled the air. The fire had come to my land like a disease, eating all it touched. Flames in a line, jagged as courses on a map, flickered and lapped at the ground and the very stones. The leading edge of it looked small. So small to have caused all this! There were patches behind it where nothing was burned. I saw a mesquite tree explode like it had dynamite in it. Then I remembered that tree and how it had been thirty or more feet at the top. Everything was all out of perspective. The flame wasn’t small at all. It was taller than the house. Taller than the windmill. Wafts of new smoke, driven forward by the wind, came toward me. The fume was black, chalky, and more bitter than before, stiff and strong, instead of being brown and blanketing.
I searched the yard. “Rose!” I called. “Rose, come here.” I whistled, then called again. I pushed open the barn door, and a flock of pigeons and doves whirled around inside but stayed up in the rafters. Bats flew through the open door. I couldn’t see the corral. In fact, I couldn’t see more than six feet ahead. I listened for her but heard nothing. Maybe she’d gotten out after all and had wandered out the open gate, away from the path of the fire.
I made my way to the round corral. I called again, and this time a horse gave a snort. Keeping the rails in sight, I stepped away from the edge but walked the circle. There she was, at the far end by the trough. She nickered when I touched her. She nudged me, but I hadn’t thought to bring sugar. I tugged at her mane. “Come on, Rose,” I said. Without a halter, all I c
ould hope was that she’d follow me. She made a grunt deep in her throat. Rose’s leg was badly swollen, held at a angle. Part of the bandage had come undone and was dragging behind her, filthy and tangled. “Come, now. Don’t be ornery.” Black clouds engulfed us. I couldn’t see the horse, although I felt her with my hands.
I hurried to the barn and got the cotton-wrapped training bridle and got it over her ears and nose. I looped a rein in the chin buckle and yanked. Rose stood her ground, planting her front feet. The air grew dead still, silent, and heavy, as if steam had come from the scorched land, like when you’re ironing a damp shirt. I pulled again, not gently, jerking her head, then pushed and slapped and punched on her behind. She kicked out at me with the hurt leg and let out a horrible squeal, then fell to the ground and thrashed. She kicked and wallowed and screamed, then twisted herself upright again. On her feet but rollicking and mad, she wouldn’t let me near her at all.
I saw fire overwhelm the chicken coop. The little building burst open with flame. Sparks and ash, still glowing, showered through the air. Feathers puffed from it like they’d been blown from a pillow, and the oily dark smell of burnt feathers added to the smoke. Half a dozen pitiful chickens flapped away from the fireball, their bodies like torches. They fell in seconds and lay still. All around the yard, greasewood bushes that we’d let grow wild now exploded like the torches Chess had said they’d be. Tumbleweeds shot across the yard like rolling cannonballs of fire. They looked alive, as if they were purposely propelling themselves to do havoc with their fiery heads as they met up with a shed, then the bunkhouse. As other tumbleweeds piled up behind them, flames shot up the sides of the wooden buildings. The bunkhouse windows went red and then shot out showers of blades.