Chapter 21
Bonnie arrived at the fire line in time to see the county’s road grader rumble into sight, and to hear the cheer that went up from close to a hundred sweaty, tired volunteers.
In that moment she understood something about small towns that she’d been too close to Cobbler Cove see for the past four years.
Nobody had called a meeting. Nobody had filed paperwork. Nobody had formed a committee or consulted a manual or waited for authorization from a higher authority. A fire was burning toward Cobbler Cove, and the town had simply come.
Men and women, young and old. People she didn’t recognize. People she did—from the diner and the post office and the school pickup line. They did backbreaking work together in a field with shovels because someone had called for help and they showed up.
An eight-foot wide strip of sod climbed the curved blade and did a summersault to one side of the machine. In its wake, a wide swath of bare earth was uncovered.
The grader picked up speed, and dead grass rolled up in front of it like a brown wave and fell aside in ragged windrows. It was doing in minutes what the shovel crews had been working at frantically for the better part of an hour.
She parked behind Tucker’s ambulance and got out. The wind hit her face, unnaturally hot, carrying the smell of smoke and the sharp, acrid smell of burning grass. It coated the back of her throat and made her eyes sting.
The fire was visible now. Not just as smoke but as actual flame. A long orange line moving across the valley like a serpent, bending and surging with the wind, eating the dead grass with a roar of consuming hunger she could hear even from here.
Abruptly, she understood in a visceral way how eight men had died in that barn. Fire was fast and merciless, and it did not care about the things in its path.
She found Gray on the running board of the fire engine, phone in one hand, binoculars in the other, directing the operation with focused intensity.
He didn’t look like a man playing at being a firefighter. He looked like a man who’d found his calling.
“I need someone at the south end to coordinate with Cooper,” he called out to no one in particular. “He’s got no way to tell the grader operator where his crew down there needs help.”
“I’ll go,” she replied from behind him.
His head snapped up. Their gazes met. A flash of something crossed his face—gratitude, pride, fear for her—the complicated tangle of loving someone who was about to walk toward a fire line. It lasted less than a second. Then the commander of fire operations was back.
“Take Tucker’s truck,” he said briskly. “Key’s in the ignition. It’s got a CB radio. Channel seven. I’ll relay from here.”
The next half-hour was the longest of Bonnie’s life and also the shortest.
She found Cooper at the south end of the fire break with Boone and dozen other men, mostly ranchers from across the valley, all of them soot-streaked and sweating. They’d scraped a section of bare earth thirty feet wide, but the fire was sliding south a bit, threatening to flank them.
“We need the grader down here!” Cooper shouted to her over the howl of the wind and roar of the fire.
Bonnie keyed the CB. “Gray. The south end’s getting flanked. Can you redirect the grader?”
His voice came back steady and clear. “Sending it now. Tell Cooper to pull his people back out of the way and let the grader do its things. I’m bringing the hose truck down there, now.”
She relayed the instructions. Cooper nodded briskly and started pulling people back. The grader appeared three minutes later, blade down, carving a brutal swath of bare dirt through the grass as it raced the fire south.
It took a couple of minutes, but the grader got a hundred yards or so south of the fire. It turned around and started back toward the clustered people, doubling the width of the scraped earth strip.
The fire approached the break.
Bonnie stood beside Gray’s truck and watched it come.
A wall of fire about twelve feet tall advanced through the grass with the implacable, rolling motion of a wave.
The heat hit her first, a physical force, like opening an oven door and hot air slamming into her face.
The sound intensified. The crackling roar she’d been hearing became a full, sustained bellow, the voice of an enormous and mindless and all-destroying monster.
The fire hit the road and bare earth.
And faltered.
Not stopped. Faltered. The gusting chinook winds picked up embers and flung them at the fire break. Most died on its bare dirt. But a few reached the grass on the other side. Small spot fires bloomed, yellow and orange flowers opening in the brown stubble.
Shouts went up along the line. People ran toward the spot fires with shovels and wet blankets. A rancher Bonnie didn’t know beat out a flame with his jacket.
Gray’s voice came over the CB: “South end, I’m almost there with water.”
The fire engine rolled into view down the dirt road, red and enormous, raising a plume of dust. Gray parked it where the spot fires were worst and had the hose unwound off the truck and running in under thirty seconds.
The spray from his hose hit the flames with a hiss that sent steam boiling into the air.
The spot fires died.
All along the road the same scene played out in variations.
The fire reached the break and found bare earth instead of fuel.
Embers flew. Spot fires started. People ran and shoveled and threw water and beat flames with whatever they had.
Harlan’s water tank handled the north end, directed by Willard in his lawn chair who was providing remarkably accurate information over his walkie-talkie.
Molly treated a man from town who burned his hand. She treated woman who twisted her ankle in a gopher hole. And Molly marched over to Walter Meeks, who’d inhaled too much smoke and was coughing badly but refusing to stop shoveling.
“Walter, sit down,” Molly ordered.
“I will not sit down. I’ve been fighting grass fires since ’78.”
“You’ve been breathing smoke for an hour. Sit down or I’ll have Cooper arrest you.”
“He can’t arrest me. He’s not a cop.”
“He’s deputized for emergency situations. Sit down, Walter.”
Walter sat down. But he didn’t stop providing opinions from his seated position.
And then she spotted Noah.
Her heart leaped into her throat. What is he doing out here? How did he get here? Where’s Cassidy? Where are my parents? The questions flashed through her head in a panicked heartbeat.
He was standing beside the ambulance when Bonnie drove back to the staging area for more water. He had his question notebook in one hand and a granola bar in the other and was watching the fire with an expression of pure, electrified fascination.
“Noah Andrew Watson. Where did you come from?” she demanded, striding toward him.
“Grandma’s car. We all came. Grandma and Grandpa and me and Cassidy.”
Bonnie looked wildly toward the line of parked vehicles and spotted her mother’s sedan. Her father was already heading for the fire break with a shovel. Her mother was handing out water bottles from a cooler in the trunk of her car.
“I want to help, too,” Noah declared.
“You’re seven.”
“I know a lot about fire. Gray taught me—.”
She didn’t have time to argue with him right now.
“Stay with Molly, do whatever she says without backtalk or questions, and stay out of everybody’s way.
Do not leave the ambulance under any circumstances.
If Molly or Tucker tells you to get into the ambulance, you get in it and stay in it. Understood?”
He nodded, wide-eyed. “Understood. Can I take notes?”
“Yes, you can take notes.”
As she turned away to look for the next crisis to deal with, he opened his notebook, sat on the ambulance’s rear bumper, and began writing with the industrious focus of a war correspondent.
Cassidy was not visible at the staging area, which meant she must still be in the car with Bonnie’s mother, which meant at least one of her children had demonstrated impulse control today.
And that was when Bonnie heard the sirens of the Apple Pie Creek Fire Department. Praise the Lord.
But even with the help of a dozen firefighters and two hose trucks from Apple Pie Creek, the fire burned for another two hours.
The fire break held. The fire spent itself against the bare earth and the water and the hundred-odd people who stood in its path and refused to give ground.
Spot fires flared and were beaten down. Flanking attempts to the north and south were stopped by the grader’s widened swath and Harlan’s water tank and Cooper’s bucket brigade.
Fire fighters from Apple Pie Creek jumped aboard the Cobbler Cove engine and ran the hose while Gray drove it up and down the line.
He took the south end, and the two Apple Pie Creek hose engines took the middle and north end of the fire line.
There was still mop-up work to do. Smoldering patches and hot spots to wet down, finding embers lodged against rocks and stuck in fence posts to extinguish.
But eventually, Gray and the Apple Pie Creek fire captain walked the entire length of the fire break to inspect what a hundred civilians with shovels and a borrowed road grader had accomplished and declare the fire out.
The fire captain said to Gray, “This is a professional-grade fire break. Who organized this?”
“It was a team effort,” Gray replied. He stood beside his engine, covered in soot, his face black, his voice hoarse from smoke and shouting. His eyes were red-rimmed. His hands shook, although Bonnie suspected that was adrenaline and not fatigue or fear.
She piped up. “Gray directed the whole operation.”
“You’ve got training,” the captain said to him. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m working on a fire science degree.”
“Finish it. Then come talk to me.”