THE FIRE

When Jenny was 11 and in the sixth grade, she often took the shortcut through fields on her way home from school. Margaret and she had done this many times. This was Margaret’s second year in high school and Jenny now enjoyed the solitude of the walk home, day dreaming and dawdling so that it would last longer. Sonny had been attending the adjoining school since the second grade. It was a warm day in March and she was carrying her jacket and her lunch pail. Before she came to the top of the hill, she saw clouds of black smoke in the direction of their home. At first she thought it might be their house, and her heart began to beat quickly, but as she got to the top of the hill, she saw that it was the pasture north of the windmill. Several figures were beating frantically at the fire with gunny sacks. She hurried to the fire and saw that it was Hank and Beulah and Mother and Daddy and someone she didn’t recognize, who had been passing by and had stopped to help. Their faces were blackened with smoke, but the pasture kept burning. She asked Mother what had happened.

Painters had been burning the high piles of Russian thistles, which some called tumbleweeds, from the fence rows on their side and a gust of wind caught a few of the burning thistle embers and blew them into the dry pasture on their side and the fire burned quickly in the March wind. Little animals were fleeing ahead of the fire and many ground nesting young, who were too small to leave the nests, had perished. The osage orange hedge had caught fire. Mother and Dad weren’t sure whether the fire was by accident or design, but they preferred to think it was accidental. Painters had said they were sorry and had tried to help put it out. A thistle fire can get away from anyone.

Mother thought maybe the hatchet had been buried at last. She and Warren forgave the incident, but the Painters weren’t ready to forgive the deeper wrong they were sure had been done to them. The pasture came back greener than ever that spring. The hedge remained blackened that year but it too recovered in a couple of years. Unfortunately, the rift in the friendship was much slower to heal.