Burn It for Me

The swather had thrown a grease zerk somewhere in the last hundred acres. Tess Prine had been on her back under the header for twenty minutes, finding out which one.

August heat came off the machine's belly in a sheet. The creek bottom smelled the way it only smelled in the second week of the month — cut alfalfa going sweet in the windrow, wet gravel under the ditch bank, diesel, and the flat mineral smell of irrigation water lying in the corrugates where she'd shut the head gate that morning. She lay in the stubble with her hat off and her hair in the dirt, working the grease gun's nozzle onto a fitting she could feel and not see, and when it seated she pumped four strokes and watched the old grease come out grey and ringed like a tree. Something came down through the header and settled on the inside of her forearm, light as chaff. She brushed it off without looking. It was warm.

One hundred and sixty acres of creek bottom. Everything else on the Pothook was grass and rock and a lot of opinions about both, but the bottom was flood-irrigated and it made three tons to the acre in a decent year, and it was the only reason the ranch penciled at all. Nineteen hundred deeded acres, two hundred pairs, one swather, one owner. Second cutting was standing out there five days from ready, heavy enough to lay a shadow, and she had been telling herself since Sunday that if the weather held she would be stacked by the twenty-fifth.

She slid out from under the header, sat up, and looked north at the ridge, because she had been smelling something for a while that was not diesel.

The column was already up.

It stood over the Cedar Bend ridge four or five miles off, and it was not the thin white column of a lightning strike smouldering in a snag, which was what she had told herself last night's dry storm might leave behind. It was black at the base and dirty brown above that, and it was already leaning — leaning south, leaning down off the ridge, leaning at her — with a flat bruised anvil pushing out over the top of it into a sky that had been cloudless all day.

Tess stood up slowly. She put her hat on. She had the ridiculous, absolutely clear thought that she should finish greasing the swather, because the swather would still need greasing tomorrow.

Then the wind moved across the meadow toward her, and it came warm.

She was in the truck before she'd decided to be. The old Ford's door hung wrong and had to be lifted to shut; she lifted it and slammed it and had the thing rolling up out of the bottom in second gear with the grease gun still lying in the stubble behind her. The two-way under the dash was already talking, had probably been talking for ten minutes while she was under the header with her ears full of her own breathing.

"—Ostberg's got it in the summer grass on the north side, that's confirmed—"

"—say again the fuel type—"

"—all units, Cedar Bend, be advised the ridge road is closed at the cattle guard, do not—"

She turned it down. Turned it up again. Left it.

From the bench above the bottom she could see the whole geometry of her own place laid out like a map somebody had drawn to make a point. The house and the corrals and the hay yard sat on the flat with the creek behind them. North and east of that, running up toward the ridge, lay eight hundred acres of native grass that had not been touched by a cow since May and had not been rained on since the second week of June — waist-high, cured pale gold, standing thick as a wheat field and about as dry. She had two hundred pairs scattered through it. And beyond the last fence, where the ground began to tilt up into the rocks and the scattered juniper, was the ridge.

The fire was on the ridge, coming down.

She had watched fires from this exact spot four times in nine years, and every one of them had done what a fire in this country usually did in the afternoon: run hard along the top where the wind was, and then lie down at dark. She looked at the column for the length of one breath and understood, in the way you understand a horse a half second before it comes apart, that this one was not going to lie down.

The cows first.

She dropped the truck into the east pasture through the wire gate and left it open behind her, which she had never in her life done, and drove the fence line honking with her arm out the window. They came slow. Cows in August with calves at side and a full belly of grass come slow no matter what is behind them, and they came slower because the smoke was already sifting down into the draws ahead of her and they didn't like it and they wanted to go the wrong way, back up, toward the high ground, which is what cattle do and what kills them.

"No," Tess said out loud, wheeling the truck across the point of the drift. "No. Not today. Come on. Come on, girls."

She worked them for eighteen minutes she could not afterwards account for. She got out twice to shoo strays out of the willows on foot, and the second time she felt the ash land on her forearms, soft and warm, like the beginning of a snow that had gone wrong. She got the bulk of them turned and moving southwest, downhill, toward the creek and the black-dirt bottom where there was nothing to burn but irrigated alfalfa and standing water, and when the lead pairs finally strung out and went in the right direction of their own accord she let out a breath and felt her hands shaking on the wheel.

The radio said, "Pothook, Cedar Bend dispatch. Tess, you on?"

Roz Kettleman. Sixty-two years old, a grey braid, eleven fire seasons running the association's radio and its coolers and its men out of the back of a flatbed, and the only human being on earth who could make a call sign sound like a hand on your shoulder.

Tess picked up the mic. Put it down. Picked it up again.

"Pothook. Go ahead."

"You looking at it?"

"I'm looking at it."

"You got cows on the east?"

"Had," Tess said. "They're coming down. I'll have them on the bottom in twenty minutes."

There was a pause with weather in it. Behind Roz's voice Tess could hear the flat squawk of the county channel and a diesel idling and somebody laughing, once, the way men laugh at four in the afternoon when they are getting their gear out and pretending not to be scared.

"Who's with you out there?"

"I'm fine."

"That's not what I asked you, sweetheart."

Tess watched the smoke come off the ridge. It had stopped being one column. It was fingering down the draws now in three or four places, and where it came down it was pushing a low grey shelf ahead of it along the ground, and that shelf was moving faster than the smoke above it.

"There's nobody with me," she said. "Because there's nobody. Same as Tuesday. Same as every day since May."

"You want a crew."

"Roz."

"I'm not asking if you're going to say you want a crew. I know better. I'm asking whether you want one, because I'm the one writing it down and I've got two ranches in this thing and one crew, and I would dearly love to be able to tell the boss that the Prine outfit picked up her radio and used it like a normal person for once in her—"

"I've got a water truck," Tess said. "It's full. I've got a disc on the tractor and I can put a line in on the north side of the hay yard in an hour."

"An hour."

"Forty minutes."

"Tess." Roz's voice went down out of dispatch and into something older and more tired. "Honey. Look at it."

She was looking at it.

She had been looking at it, she realized, for four solid minutes without blinking, and in those four minutes the thing had crossed the last of the rocks on the shoulder of the ridge and gotten into the first of the grass. There was a difference, and she had never seen it this close, and she saw it now: on the rock the smoke had been lazy and vertical, and in the grass it laid over and ran, and it ran with a sound.

She could hear it. Five miles, and she could hear it — a low, wide, continuous sound, no crack or roar in it, more like a river going over a lip of stone somewhere out of sight.

"I'll call you back," Tess said, and set the mic down without waiting to be released.

She drove to the house. Everything at the Pothook could be described from her own yard, which was one of the things she had always liked about it and did not like at all right now: the low white house her father had put a bad roof on in 1994; the corrals; the shop; the hay yard with a hundred and seventy tons of last year's carryover and this year's first cutting stacked in six rows under blue tarp; the fuel barrel on its stand; and behind all of it the creek, and the cottonwoods, and one hundred and sixty acres of green.

She backed the water truck out and set it by the hay yard with the hose laid out. She hooked the disc to the tractor and got as far as the gate before she understood what forty minutes of discing was going to be worth. She stood in the yard with the tractor running and the smell of her own place changing around her — hot dust and manure and cottonwood going over to something sweeter and much worse, a smell with sap in it, a smell that got in behind her teeth.

Then, at four o'clock, the wind swung.

It came out of the northwest all at once, the way it does in this country in August, no build and no warning, one gust and then a steady hard shove that bent the cottonwoods along the creek and took her hat and rolled it under the flatbed. It hit her broadside and it was hot as an oven door.

She turned to look at the ridge and the ridge was gone.

Where the fire had been running low along the ground in the grass it had found the juniper and the standing timber on the shoulder, and it came up into the crowns all along a half mile of front in the space of a breath — a wall of orange going up two hundred feet with black boiling off the top of it, and the sound arriving a beat late, and that sound was not a river any more.

Ash was coming down on the yard, and some of it was not ash. Some of it was still lit.

Tess Prine stood in her own yard with the tractor idling behind her and her hat gone and did the arithmetic that anybody who has ever lived under a ridge can do: eight hundred acres of unbroken cured grass between that and here, downhill, with the wind behind it.

Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.

She walked to the truck, and picked up the mic, and could not make herself say the word, and put it back on the hook.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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