FIRES by Nancy Lord
Just outside the cabin where I’m staying in the Texas Hill Country, I’ve built a fire in the raised fire pit. I lean back in a metal chair pulled up close, sip a glass of cold wine, and watch the December light empty from the sky.
For nearly a month my only visitors at the cabin have been two dogs from a neighboring ranch. The first time I encountered them, they were circling and barking wildly at a puffed-up porcupine. When I called them they left off their attack and came running, much to my surprise. I had to reward them with crackers. Now when they come by they keep hoping for more crackers, but I give them only pats on the head and kind words. The older one, stout and arthritic, wears a lop-sided grin. The frisky yellow one has grown a lump on his nose, and I worry about an embedded quill and whether his people give him the attention he needs. I don’t know which ranch they’re from and don’t make any effort to find out. “Good boys, good doggies,” I tell them.
Beside a pond and creek at the far end of a ranch’s caliche road, I’m a long way from human neighbors. For days, the only voices from outside my head have come from a radio – preachers admonishing, country singers rhyming cruel and fool, a hunter claiming that God wants us to get our bag limits of ducks and sandhill cranes.
This night I watch the last light fading behind limestone cliffs, the first stars brightening, and I recall my mother saying, after she and my father had reluctantly moved to a retirement home, that she was comforted to find the same familiar moon in the sky. My mother and father, four years dead now, have been much with me, appearing in dreams and associative thought, some of that memory pulse that fills in for conversation with the living. I look for the quartered Texas moon: absent for now, rolled under the waves of surrounding hills.
The Texas days have been warm and sunny, the nights swiftly cooling. I sit with my feet on the pit’s rim, luxuriating in the heat, the dance of flames, the elemental sounds of consuming fire and flowing water. The fire flares and retreats as bark falls away; as logs collapse to coals, to embers, to ash. Sparks float up and blink out. There’s no wind, and the smoke rises evenly, softly, its good smoke smell further sweetening the night.
I’m thinking about how primal this is – the comfort of sitting beside burning wood, the genetic basis tying us back to those who first gathered around heat and food. Memories of past campfires light up my mind: skating parties when I was young, beach fires with hotdogs and marshmallows on green alder sticks and salmon fillets sizzling their oil, a winter camping trip with fire melting down through feet of snow. Wet wool steaming, smoke in our eyes, and always someone saying, “smoke follows beauty.” Always stories, talk circling, deep silences filled with deep thought, knee-to-knee companionship.
Like the dry oak leaf at the fire’s edge, catching and flaring: a new memory ignites. My long-haired friend Mark is telling us, “The Indian says, white man builds big fire, stays far away. Indian builds little fire, stays close and warm.” The us is another friend and me, and three or four boys we’d taken camping near our Massachusetts college, forty years ago.
The boys were from a youth detention center where several of us volunteered to lead camping trips. Our charges on these weekends – boys and girls both – had committed various juvenile offenses, some of which would be considered crimes if the perpetrators had been adults and others of which were known as being “in need of supervision” or “ungovernable.” We weren’t let in on much information about the children individually, although we divined clues from their behaviors. We heard their references to “uncles” who beat them, mothers who drank, weapons they’d stolen or hidden or thrown into ditches. They boasted of toughness and knowing how to wire vehicle ignition starts. We knew not to react.
That evening the boys, as restless and rowdy as any their adolescent ages might be, were heaping wood onto the fire and brandishing lighted sticks. But they responded to Mark’s gentle admonishment – or they tired of thrashing trees and roughhousing – and soon we all sat Indian-like by a warming fire. The pine needles were soft beneath us, and moonlight shone through the trees. We could barely hear the traffic thrumming the highway behind us.
We told stories, I’m sure. I like to think that the three of us, older and with broader lives, modeled a way of being in the world. We certainly found our own comfort among the trees, in darkness, talking through ideas that came from our studies of Thoreau and Emerson, folklore, animal behavior, photography. We’d been to places beyond Massachusetts; we assumed the kindness of strangers; we thought beyond the needs and desires of a particular day to the beckonings of our futures. We were sure in our belief that time in the woods was better than time in what was essentially a jail, and that proximity to nature and our own clean-living might help combat the chaos of lives that could so easily end in forms of self-immolation.
One who went camping with us a time or two was a fifteen-year-old named Debby. She and her brother, a year older, were good-natured kids who gathered wood, cleaned pots, got along. They were more cheerful than the others, perhaps more cheerful than their circumstances called for.
I picture Debbie, by the fire, carefully tearing an oak leaf from its veins until it’s beautifully skeletal – just the thick and thinner filigree of veins holding the shape.
These many years later I don’t recall how or why it happened, but that fall Debby came to live with me in my dorm room. Why the State of Massachusetts thought it was a good idea to release children who were, at a minimum, “in need of supervision” to the care of college students, I have no idea. I do recall knowing that the Massachusetts welfare system was in fiscal collapse, with a general lack of resources for the needy and the mentally ill. I don’t believe that any actual adults at the college knew at the time that several of us, still teen-agers ourselves, were acting in locus parentis, and I don’t recall any paperwork about who was responsible for what or that there was any financial assistance. There seemed to be food for any hungry person in the loosely controlled dining hall. There seemed to be no provision for school; perhaps we thought that living on campus would be a sort of education. There had been no real school at the detention center, either – just a single classroom and a “teacher” who had other duties.
As the night darkens, the only light in my world comes from fire and stars, below and above. I think about a walk I’d taken on a dusty ranch road, and the hills shorn of cedar trees. The thirsty cedars – really junipers – are hated by ranchers, who rip them out in hopes of restoring the grasslands that thrived before cattle and fire suppression came to the Hill Country. The piles of cleared trees looked to me like tinderous hazards awaiting an ill-timed match or a lightning strike. I imagine fire racing through grass and slash to those pyres of dry wood. I imagine enormous hillsides blazing.
Debby had a long face and long dark hair that flew across her face when she ran. She might have been underdeveloped for her age, on the scrawny side. The boys had not seemed to pay much attention to her.
As far as I knew – and I knew only what she told me – Debby was not a juvenile delinquent, not confined to the detention center for even minor bad behavior. She and her brother were wards of the state, and the state apparently had nowhere else to keep them. The state, at least in theory, was providing their needed supervision.
She came to live with me, sleeping on the floor of my dorm room. She seemed happy enough, absent even the usual teen-age drama, able to manage her daily living. I was pleased to be offering, if not exactly a home, at least a refuge.
A weekend came, and she asked me to take her to see her family. I’m not sure if I knew before that that she had family other than her brother or if I gave any thought to the wisdom of an unannounced visit. I borrowed a friend’s VW beetle and drove her to a rural Massachusetts town, a modest home with a swingset in the yard. Little girls – three half-sisters – rushed to greet her, and for the first time I watched Debby’s long face light up with genuine happiness. The herd of them tore though the house and then out onto the lawn, where Debby galloped with the rest, tossing her head and pulling up on imaginary reins.
Debby’s mother looked as ordinary as anybody’s mother might. I recognized something of Debby around her guarded eyes and in the set of her shoulders, which seemed not quite aligned with her arms. She invited me to sit in the kitchen smelling of toast, where she offered me a glass of water. I took in the formica table, the refrigerator magneted with artwork and school notices, clean dishes in a plastic rack. Nothing about the place seemed injurious.
was, perhaps, glowing in my own happiness at seeing Debby happy. I was, perhaps, wondering why Debby wasn’t living at home, or when she would return.
Her mother frowned and said, sternly, “Do not bring her here again.”
What?
I must have looked startled, uncomprehending.
“I have a new life now,” her mother said. “I have a new husband and other children to care for. I gave Debby to the state.”
All these years, and I can still hear her steady, uncompromising voice. New husband. New children. I’m sure she said these exact words: “I gave Debby to the state.”
I burst into tears. Then, embarrassed at my childishness, I looked down at the table and covered my face with my hands. It was beyond my imagining, a mother who would give away her child whose only fault, it seemed, was to have been inconveniently fathered. Did people do that, ridding themselves of children as though they were last year’s out-of-fashion clothes? Gave her to the state? As though the government had requested a half-grown girl, or had any place to keep her. As though families were only temporary lodgings, beds and food, to be equally replaced by some other bed, some other food. As though adults had no emotional connection to the children they bore and raised, no responsibility to finish the job they’d started. All these thoughts burned through me in an instant. I was crying for Debby, and for my ignorance of the world’s injustice and cruelty. I cried because I was an over-privileged child whose devoted parents had sent her to an expensive college, and because I assumed that was my due.
Debby’s mother reached over and patted my arm. “Don’t cry,” she said, not unkindly. “That’s the way it is.”
I stir my fire, add another log, listen to the night’s cicadas. Something plunks in the pond – fish jumping or a turtle tumbling from a log. A rustling and grunting from near the cliffs I take for a foraging wild pig. I reconstruct in my mind the surroundings I can’t see. The pond’s spillway, and the shallows where the resident egret stalks and spears. At shore’s edge, the bare cypress surrounded by dropped needle-leaves, its line of rounded knees. The lavender bushes that, by day, flicker with red and yellow butterflies. The live oaks hung with fungus balls like ornaments. This place, so recently unimagined, now holds me close.
I didn’t say anything to Debby on the drive home – nothing about what her mother had said, nothing about future visits – and I didn’t ask about her family. She hovered over an ugly plastic troll the little girls had given her, braiding and unbraiding its scraggly gray hair. I had the sense that the visit had satisfied something for her and she hadn’t been sorry to leave.
Back at school, the two of us got on well enough. I didn’t think it my business to ask questions, and Debby did not confide. I don’t recall what rules we had, if any, or what Debby did while I was in class or otherwise occupied as a college student. She was friends with another, younger girl from the detention center, and the two of them were often together.
Debby was passionate about animals. She talked me into visiting a nearby animal shelter, and then she talked me into letting her rescue a puppy that nobody loved. How could I say no? The puppy – a brown, droopy-eared mutt whose name I can’t recall – came to live with us in my dorm room. Debby devoted herself to it in a way I found both touching and encouraging. Everyone should love and be loved, right?
As I add more wood to my fire, an acorn from the overhanging oak smacks the cabin roof and rolls down its metal sheeting. In the beginning these hammer-hits had woken me at night, but – like everything a person learns to live with – they gradually softened to background. This time, I visualize the nut – its sharp point, its smooth wooden side, its cap, its spin from the roof to the ground where, tomorrow, deer will feed. What chance has it to become a new oak tree?
Far off, coyotes are wailing.
The whole thing ended badly. Debby’s friend stole money from unlocked student rooms. I don’t remember what else fell apart, only that everything did. I’d begun to understand that Debby was more troubled, or troubled in more complex ways, than I had suspected, and that she wasn’t always truthful.
The college administrators wanted to know, Who are these children? Why are they here? Debby and the rest went back to the detention center.
I cried on a friend’s shoulder, shaken. What had happened? Why had I failed? Why had Debby not seemed to care about packing up her few belongings and leaving, as cheerful or as resigned to false cheerfulness as ever, with her dog pulling on the end of the parachute cord I’d given her from my camping supplies?
It’s blackest night now, every bit of light drained from the western sky, the stars like a zillion pinpricks in a very thin cloth. There are patterns there, figures to learn to see, but I’ve never been good with finding them, or even telling the brighter planets from the stars. I know only the Big Dipper and the North Star. In winter, at home in Alaska, the Big Dipper is perfectly framed by the skylight over my bed.
I get up and walk around the side of the cabin for a better view of the north. I can’t find my Big Dipper. There are stars everywhere, cascades of them, the sky everywhere milky, unfamiliar.
A few weeks later, Debby called me from a women’s commune that had taken her in. Her dog was sick. Would I take them to the vet’s?
The commune women, when I arrived, seemed unconcerned, uninvolved. They seemed to have no more relationship to Debby or her problems than random, thrown-together housemates. The dog, with thick and copious snot running from its nose, was dull-eyed and lethargic.
When the vet was done examining and treating Debby’s dog, he called me into his office and gave me a disgusted look, then an angry lecture. No dog should have to suffer from distemper. Everyone knew puppies needed shots. I was a terrible person, irresponsible and cruel.
My last memory of Debby is of her cradling that sick dog in a blanket as we drove back to the commune. We must have talked again, later, because I seem to know that the dog got well.
It’s possible that I only want to think that everyone got well, was loved, lived happily after.
One star is moving. I think, falling star, make a wish. But it’s moving far too slowly, so I think airplane, then satellite. But then it stops and starts, turns abruptly at a right angle. It fades and disappears.
Perhaps it was nothing: a reflection in my glasses, an errant spark, the wine.
I make a wish, just in case.
Nancy Lord is the author of the nonfiction books Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North (Counterpoint, 2012), Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale (Counterpoint Press, 2004), Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast (Counterpoint Press, 1999), and Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore (Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1997). She is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.