Love and Sleep (2 page)

It fell to Pierce to light the matches that set fire to the heap, which is why he thought of himself as the one who set the forest on fire, though all of them were present—Hildy, Bird, and Warren. Hildy, a year older than Pierce, was the one who first went for water.

Most Saturdays the pile burned uneventfully. Pierce's uncle Sam, after a lifetime of shaving cream in tubes, had begun to buy cream in aerosol cans, and when one or two of these were to be burned, the children buried them at the bottom of the pyre, and after Pierce had got the fire going well, they all retired to the old garage (Warren would have already run laughing to hide there) and from the chinks between its weather-shrunk boards, they watched till the cans one by one imploded. When they had all been fired (sending showers of sparks and burning detritus a good distance sometimes) then it was safe to come out again.

It wasn't one of these, though, that started the fire. That morning was dry and windy, a premonitory burnt and ashy smell was in the air, and the brush and weeds were high all around: there was milkweed and yarrow and goldenrod, mullein and pigweed. At the edge of the open patch was a dry creek and a line of brushy poplars that Kentuckians called bummagillies; beyond them, the hillside and the forest. The wind blew that way.

Was it a page of
Collier's
or a
Look
that the fire was leafing through (blackening the pages as it touched and turned them one by one), or a sheet from an
Our Sunday Visitor
, or the dusty wax paper that lined a box of Kix? It was a big burning ash of something that arose not suddenly but gracefully from the fire as Pierce poked the burning mass with a rake. He tried to snare it as it rose, but it got away from him, and, black wings undulating, set out across the field as the transfixed children watched. Not far off it struck tall weeds and settled, dispersing. That's that. No it's not: one tall weed had caught, and was burning down its length like a fuse toward the ground.

What you had to do then was to rush to the spot and stamp out the starting fire, sneakering it wholly out, then back to work. But on this Saturday the runaway had already started a fire, black ground salted with white ash, before they could reach the spot and begin their stamping. Pierce, Bird, and Hildy chased along one arc of its progress, stamp stamp stamp, until Warren called out, and they turned to see that behind them it had bitten a big circle of meadow, tall weeds were igniting at their bases and firing like torches: and they knew it was not going to go out. That was when Hildy set off toward home for water.

Even as he felt the knowledge thrust on him that something terrible and irreversible had happened, Pierce was able to apprehend the interesting logic of fire, a logic he could have imagined in advance but hadn't: how it worked in a perfect circle from where it began, outward in all directions as it found new fuel at its edges and left the consumed places behind. He could see how the circle would just grow larger as long as fuel was found. Fire burned once, and left behind the place where it had burned, and went on; and there was no reason for it ever to stop.

Bird had run home now following Hildy, and Warren crying following Bird. The soles of Pierce's sneakers were hot, hotter than when he stood long in an asphalt roadway in the summer sun: too hot. He set out after the others.

Hildy was already on her way back with a small bucket in one hand and a watering can in the other when Pierce reached the yard of the house. Off-balance and hurrying, she was spilling most of what she carried. The sight of her fierce face, her urgent willingness, and the thrashing hose she had left running behind her where she had filled her futile buckets, paralyzed Pierce. He understood that the emergency had reached that point when grownups must be alerted. He stood trying to think whether his uncle Sam was in the house, or rather he waited while vivid imaginings of his uncle in the house, not in the house, in the house, came and went within him. He hadn't made up his mind when his mother put her head out the door and called to him. Pierce what's the matter. And Pierce's fire was instantly in others’ hands.

"It's probably nothing, isn't it?” she said; she tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it carefully. And went with Pierce out to the top of the yard, from where the field beyond could be seen. Bird and Warren came up after her.

"Oh hell,” she said.

A long time afterward, Pierce asked his cousin Bird if she thought they had really set a forest on fire, or whether only a few acres of brush had burned.

"I think it was big,” she said. “Sure it was. It must have burned a hundred acres at least. I know it burned all the way up over Yokun's place, because it burned up his fence, and he wanted Daddy to buy him a new fence. But his was an old broken-down rail fence that he never fixed anyway, and he wanted a new fence with like nice posts and bobwire! And it burned all the way to the river. I remember them saying there was no way to stop it, but that it would stop anyway when it got to the river. I guess it did.

"There were always fires in those days. You remember. The sun in the summer if it was dry was a lot of times hazy and red. Smoke from some fire, somewhere."

In the years of the postwar mining boom the prop-cutters sent out by the mine-owners cut over thousands of acres; paid by the piece, the cutters had pulled out what was easy and left the rest—cut tops and shattered detritus and good long logs as well, too hard to extract and left behind. The woods beyond Sam Oliphant's hillside were a weird wilderness of cull and old stumps, the hollers filled with tumbled logs like great dropped jackstraws, dryrotting to tinder, awaiting Pierce's match. Bird remembered—though Pierce didn't—how after the red sun set she and Hildy and Joe Boyd (Bird and Hildy's older brother, who hadn't been at the fire's birth) climbed out onto the roof through the window of the second-story closet—a window in a closet, Pierce had wondered when he was first shown this trick, but why—and sat in the ashy-tasting dark watching the slow crawl of their fire through the holler and over the mountain.

If it was a forest fire it didn't look like one; didn't look like the fire that devastated Bambi's home, and drove the frightened animals before it. It wasn't a space of living orange flame but a line, a dull-russet smoking frontier between the burned and the unburned: not different really from the fire in the grass where it had started.

"Your daddy's going to have to pay for that,” Joe Boyd said to Pierce, smug in the security of innocence, burning trash not being one of his chores.

"That's not fair,” Hildy said.

"It's true,” said Joe Boyd. “When a little kid does something, or something? The little kid can't pay, but his daddy is responsible. He has to pay."

Pierce said nothing, unable to imagine the cost Joe Boyd meant. A mountain, two mountains? They seemed to Pierce's mind either invaluable or valueless.

"It wasn't
his
fault,” Bird said, though often enough when Joe Boyd announced awful facts like that he turned out to be right; Bambi's mother (though Bird covered her ears not to hear him whisper it to her) had really died. “Besides, his father's in New York. And he's poor."

She didn't add that it wasn't Pierce alone who set the fire, but all of them: the Invisible College, working together, pledged to one another. And that being so, Joe Boyd was guilty of it too: for Joe Boyd was himself Permanent President of this Kentucky branch of the College, duly elected by the membership. Bird didn't say any of that, because saying it meant revealing to Joe Boyd the existence of the College and the secret of his Presidency: and that was the deepest of the many secrets the Invisible College was sworn to keep.

"Not my daddy,” Joe Boyd said, to be sure no mistake would be made about this. “
Your
daddy."

Pierce Moffett's wasn't the only fire burning that night in the mountains, nor the only one not put out. The Cumberlands had been burning for years, and there had never been anyone to put them out. Not only the trees that covered them: once the mountains themselves had used to burn, set afire by the dynamite used to loosen the seams of coal like teeth; the seams would ignite, and the mountain burned, smoking out of fissures, parching its earth. A hot bitter breath could be felt coming from the mine's driftmouth then, and on the mountain's back the stones under bare feet were warm as flesh.

Slate dumps built beside the coal-tipples used to burn too: fires starting deep down from the pressure of tons of rock on the coal fragments and dust, and issuing up through fault lines in the slate and shale, to spit and smoke in long creeping veins. Now and then the bosses would set teams of men to following these fire-lines and smothering them with ashes; the men worked a day or two days, climbing over the heap like attendant devils in a little hell, only putting fires out and not stirring them. It didn't work for long; the fire only crept elsewhere, and found other outlets. Some of the slate fires burned for years; some that were burning in 1936 when Sam Oliphant, newly Dr. Oliphant, first came to the Cumberlands were still burning when he brought his family back there after the war.

His was a family of doctors. When old Doc Oliphant had died, Sam's older brothers had taken over his practice, leaving Sam to find a practice of his own. Instead, and without giving it a lot of thought, Sam had answered an ad for Public Health doctors in Kentucky, was accepted gratefully, and set out South in his father's Olds, part of his share of a small estate. In this car he came to ride a wide circuit, like a traveling preacher; in a country of old Fords it earned him both respect and suspicion, until it had acquired a few dents and the dusty roads had permanently dulled its lacquer.

Wild, wild and strange he found the mountain country to be, his circuit of towns and coal camps with their simple utilitarian names, Cut Shin Creek, Stinking Creek, Black Mountain, Big Sandy River—names having been given only to places that needed them, and not out of any ambition of permanence or glory, no classical evocations, no biblical names either, no Bethel, Goshen, Beulah: maybe because the founders were unlearned even in the Bible, or maybe because however beautiful and vast their mountains were they had not believed this was God's country, nor ever mistaken it for the Promised Land. The people Dr. Oliphant preached to (how was it they didn't know how to build a proper privy, or how to put food safely by?) filled him with stories that his Westchester relatives would find hard to swallow; Sam refined them and polished them over the years, and his children refined them further in their own retellings. Sam on his first tour, examining a girl of fourteen, who's feeling peaked. His consternation: the girl's clearly pregnant.

Child, did you know you're going to have a baby?

Wide eyes astonished: Ain't so!

Well it is. Do you know how it happened? How you get a baby?

A solemn nod, reckon I do.

Well, what happened? You can tell me. Were you raped?

Oh doctor (a sigh of cheerful resignation), it's been nothn but rape rape rape all summer long.

His people, their lives harsh and poignant as their fiddle laments; his dawn journeys along pea-vine roads that skirted deep glens and crossed crackling brooks (hollers and cricks, he would learn to say); the morning smoke of hidden rivers rising through the timberlands, drifting with the soft curl of smoke from cabin chimneys; even the smell of his Olds and its upholstery, the taste of his Camels and his coffee, all of it came soon to be colored for Sam with love. Love would be the reason he remembered it so fondly, and why, when a widower with no reason to remain, he lived there till he died.

Opal Boyd was a schoolteacher, a child of the Western farmlands of the state and like Sam a recruit of the decade's hopes for progress. She wore her ash-blond hair in two long braids wound on her head in a pale tiara; she wore cotton shirtwaist dresses with woven belts, which she bought on a yearly trip to Louisville or Chicago. In her rented room in the house of the county clerk there was a tennis racket in a wooden press. Hopeful and useless and brave in that valley, the tennis racket too was touched for Sam with love.

When Opal married Sam and conceived a child, she began to see the ravaged mountains differently. They went North to have the baby, they went to the great World's Fair in New York and saw the future, they decided not to go back. But the established practice on Long Island that Sam bought into with all of his and Opal's savings proved to be not very large or very lucrative, and by the time he returned to it after four years of war, he found that it had in effect disestablished itself, divided among two doctors who had elected to remain at their necessary work rather than enlist as Sam had done. In the same medical journal where he had once found the ad wanting Public Health doctors in Kentucky, Sam saw that a small Catholic mission hospital in the town of Bondieu, Breshy County (a town he could not remember ever having passed through), was offering a good salary for a chief physician, more by quite a bit than he ever seemed likely to make among the potato farmers and oystermen; and some ten years after he and Opal Boyd had left the Cumberlands they came back, with four children, not to stay forever but only long enough to build a little capital for starting over elsewhere.

"I suppose it was a sudden decision, and I suppose it wasn't a very smart one,” he wrote to his daughter Hildy a long time after, in the last months of his life. Hildy was the child he could talk to most easily, but even she was surprised when she began getting letters from him, and she started laying plans to get home quickly. “I'm sorry that I never made much money, or accumulated much of an estate to leave you and the others. Doctors now are assumed to be well off, and I guess I should be ashamed I'm not; but you know in the years when I went to medical school we really
didn't
expect to make a lot of money. Most of us did in the end—things changed in medicine—but we didn't expect it, like the med students now do. So I don't feel so much like a failure that I didn't. Only I
am
sorry for this damned impulsiveness I've always had, that I never thought through the big decisions. I think maybe I've passed that on, with the no money that goes with it. Any talent for good sense you'll have to thank your mother for."