“Earl? I believe Earl’s deserted his post. Maybe you seen the kitchen chair by the farm gate when you drove up? No? Well, he carried a chair down there after I come back from town this morning and ever since he’s been sitting there, waiting on you. Didn’t take my word that you wouldn’t be here until after supper. Just sat there with the sun beating down on him – damnedest thing. I coaxed but he wouldn’t come into the house to take a meal. Was afraid he’d miss you, I guess. It’s the only day he hasn’t done any work since he’s been here. And then, after all that waiting, he spots your lights on the approach and up he gets and makes off that way,” Dover had said, indicating direction with the lantern, the light flaring yellow-white on his face as he lifted his arm, “towards his wheat.”
Alec had not been able to disguise his surprise. “He’s been sitting out all day? Down by the gate?”
“Down by the gate since eleven o’clock this morning. As I say, I tried to get him in but he wouldn’t budge.”
“And what did he have to say for himself?”
“What does he ever have to say for himself? Nothing, that’s what. He didn’t bother about me more than he would a fly.”
“Maybe,” Alec had speculated uneasily, “maybe he took off for the field and we’re supposed to follow. Maybe he wants to show off the crop. Notwithstanding…”
“Notwithstanding it’s dark,” Mr. Stutz had said, completing his thought for him.
So the three of them had set off to find Earl, Dover lighting the way with his lamp, Mr. Stutz and Alec on either side of him shouting Earl! to the darkness and giving anxious pause for an answer. None came. Each interval of waiting was silent except for the sound of breathing, the dry whisper of dusty grass brushing boots and pants cuffs, the burble of the whisky bottle shaken in Alec’s coat pocket. Each time they shouted his name and received no reply their pace quickened.
“When I first seen it, I had no idea what it was,” said Mr. Stutz, shifting on his chair. “No clue at all.”
“You took hold of me by the shoulder and pointed,” recalled Alec. “You asked, ‘What’s that there?’ ”
“And you said, ‘Fireflies.’ ”
“That’s what I took it for. It’s what it resembled to me, sparking on and off like that.”
“I knew it couldn’t be fireflies. Not so late in summer. Not so big and bright at a distance.”
“I didn’t think of the time of the year. It looked like fireflies to me. Flickering, blinking like that.”
“I suppose the breeze was blowing them out. He was in the open, on higher ground, and there you always catch a breeze.”
“And with us calling out, he knew we were near. He could hear us coming.”
“Sure he could. And see us, too, when we came to the fence and Dover held the lamp up over his head to cast a beam far as possible.”
“He’d have made us out, all three crowded underneath the lantern. Would have seen our faces, too. He wasn’t more than a hundred yards off.”
“A hundred yards off,” echoed the old man, “striking matches in a bone-dry crop.”
The small patch of brightness had taken hold so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that neither mind nor eye could comprehend it. For an instant the three of them had only been able to recognize a glow of agitation, something shuddering and vibrating like a swarm of bees in the black distance.
Mr. Stutz put the name to it. “Fire,” he said.
All three men strained forward at the word, the top wire of the fence squealing and bending as they leaned upon it tensely. A wind had fluttered up behind their bowed backs and ran past them out into the field and night. It was like the long drawing of a sick, fretful breath. Alec heard the dark mass of grain rattle and shiver and sensed the heads of the wheat dipping and plunging before it, the wave rippling out to break upon the fire. It rooted him to the spot.
And when that wave dashed itself against the flames, the fire popped explosively, like a flare on a night battlefield, and there stood Earl waist-deep in the wheat, awash in a hot yellow, shaking light, smoke rising from the grain surrounding him like morning mist steaming up from a marsh.
“I never seen anything catch so fast in my life,” said Mr. Stutz. “I wonder that the heat of it didn’t make him run for it.”
“I wonder,” said Monkman.
Because Earl did not run, even though the heat caused him to flinch, to turn away his face toward the three men hanging on the fence. The boy might have been blind or deaf. He gave no sign he saw them there, beckoning desperately, or heard the two of them shouting Run! while the third gripped the strand of wire and stared. Earl did not move, except to draw up his shoulders against the searing heat which pounded his back and caused him to wobble as he stood his ground. Plunged to his hips in the crop, shrinking into himself, he had looked very small to Mr. Stutz and Dover, smaller still to his father. Perhaps the great flapping curtain of greasy smoke which had gone roaring up into the sky at his back had made him seem more so – a poor, lost actor without lines to speak, made to occupy and hold a stage with nothing but his face, his hands, his eloquent silence.
In scarcely a minute the curtain had risen to such a height as to overwhelm him, a drapery of grey and white smoke flecked red and orange with bits of burning awns and chaff. The three men’s eyes followed it as it climbed into the night sky, swaying and billowing, blowing and sinking, its hem ragged, licked with fire. Their eyes were still on it when they felt the air tug about them as the blaze made of itself a firestorm, a whirlwind. The sudden convulsion ripped the curtain to rags and sparks, a violent updraught flung a spray of sparks higher and higher until they showered down about Earl and spattered the crop with more dark red poppies of fire.
Like his son, Monkman did not move. Did not move when the wire sagged and shrieked under his hands as Mr. Stutz flung himself over it. Did not move as in a fiery, smoky dream he watched Stutz run heavily forward, lurching as he panted through the wheat and over the hidden stones which twisted his ankles and wrung his knees, beating on to where Earl waited, face tight and gleaming, ringed by a dozen new patches of fire whose edges were running together and offering up a thin blue haze.
“I never lifted a hand to help, did I?” said Alec to Stutz. “It wasn’t me that went into the fire. It was you.”
“I told you before,” said Mr. Stutz, “it was shock. Thinking he was going to burn put you in shock.”
“He saw me stand at the fence,” the old man muttered. “That’s what he took away with him, me at the fence.”
“He didn’t take anything away with him,” Mr. Stutz assured him. “Don’t forget I was there. The boy had nothing in his mind. He had nothing whatsoever in his mind.”
“It’s not then I’m speaking of,” said Monkman.
12
September was a fine month. The sun shone day after day but the air remained cool and sweet as pure well water. Alec swore he could taste the air on his tongue where it succeeded in improving the flavour of everything, even tobacco and coffee. Mornings he sat perched on his front step, a mug of coffee set steaming between his feet while he smoked the first cigarette of the day, squinting up at the sky and across the yard at the goldenrod. The goldenrod flowered bold as brass all about the garden shed but this year Alec didn’t take a scythe to it. Vera had nicely requested him to spare it. “If it makes you happy to look at,” was all he had said and refrained from pointing out to her that goldenrod was a weed. It did make Vera happy, too, when she saw the plants standing erect in the autumn sunshine like golden sceptres and reflected that it was she who had saved them. She also reflected that now the days were no longer so hot she might prepare creamed chicken and dumplings for her father, a favourite dish he had been hinting for all summer like a wheedling, spoiled child. It was a sign of a temporary truce.