He spoke as though something in his own head was breaking.
The kids were crying, and Mr. Haddy still dancing in his striped shorts.
"No!" Father cried. He started to rush forward.
Then the explosion came. It filled the clearing with light that scorched my face. It brought color to every leaf, not green but reddish gold, and it gathered the nearby buildings — the cold store, the incubator, the root cellar — shocking them with pale floury flame and then pushing them over like paper. It lifted Fat Boy from the ground, broke it, and dropped it, shoving its planks apart like petals, as the fireball of flaming gas shot upward like a launched balloon.
Father had turned away from the blast. One side of his face was fiery, the other black. He had one red eye. It was fixed on me, and it was so bright it looked as if it would burst with blood. His mouth was open. He may have been screaming, but the other noise was greater.
The boom was over, yet the power of it still made the trees sway as they did before a storm, tossing their boughs. Birds woke, and mewed. The planks that had broken from the walls had caught fire, and fire clung to the pipes that shot jets of blue flame like a gas burner, and inside there was a griddle-fat sizzle and a choking stink of shit-house ammonia that pinched my nose and stung my eyes.
Father dashed toward the flames, then put his hands over his face and ran back to us. His mouth was black, and now I could hear him.
"Follow me!"
He went rigid. He did not move a muscle.
"Follow me!" he yelled.
Mother and the children snatched at him and hugged him and pleaded. I thought they would tip him over. "Dad!" they shouted, and "Allie!" They were weeping and trying to make him move, and we were all gagging on the ammonia fumes.
Mr. Haddy moaned. "We all gung die."
"We'll get out of this poison," Father said, but still he did not move. I wondered if he was injured. His face was streaked and dirty. "There's more hydrogen in the tanks, the ammonia's going to flood us. Cover your faces!"
Across the clearing, lighting what was left of Jeronimo, Fat Boy burned. I had not realized that such a bright fire could be so quiet. The houses flamed like baskets, but it was the birds that made most of the noise. The clearing itself, its fringes and trees, caught, too. The fire spread fast. It was not the flames or the light, but the sewer stink of ammonia that made this seem like the end of the world. Another gas tank blew, and caused a tremendous wind of heat and poison.
With terrible croaks, Father rubbed his eyes and pleaded with us to follow him. But he did not move. When I saw him this way, and his red eyes, I began to cry.
I said, "I know a place—"
As I started away, they followed, and soon they were right behind me, pushing me along the cool path.
All this took less than five minutes: I was still counting.
And then there were various shocks in the dark, the way doors slam in a house on windy summer nights.
III. BREWER'S LAGOON
21
ALL THAT NIGHT, Fat Boy's fire showed over the treetops like a bright hat. Even the pissy snap of hot ammonia gas reached us here. The flames brought Jeronimo close. Rising sparks put the stars out and replaced them with flaming straws, and the climbing smoke clouded the sky.
I sat in our dark camp, the Acre, tortured by mosquitoes. I could not find the black berries we used for keeping bugs off in the daytime. The Jeronimo smoke was no help here in driving them away — and it seemed unlucky to build a fire so near to the one that had destroyed our home. It was still chewing, in the violent and greedy way flames feed on dry wood, and spitting the trees into the sky as ashes. The kids had crawled into a lean-to, where they hid and slept. Mr. Haddy's whimpering about his boat had become lazy snores. He had turned drunk and silly on sleep. Father had found a corner of the camp and put his head down. He slept like the others. He had not spoken a word.
"Get some sleep, Charlie," Mother said. She yawned. Soon she was asleep, and only I was left awake.
Sitting among these purring people, I discovered how long Father's nights were. He was usually the one who watched the night pass. There were rattles in the darkness, and the clash of dropping branches, and the brief gallop of falling trees. There were bat squeals and, because of the fire, some birds still mewing and others beeping like clarinets. These sounds — the birds' most of all — did not belong in the jungle. They were too harsh, they nagged and rasped in all the soft, black surrounding trees.
Disorder here was this noise, loudest at night, and the worst of it cracking out in the darkest places. Some of it was like spurts from a broken hose pipe. I listened to the jungle being torn apart. These hidden creatures, and even some trees, had voices. They sounded their loud wakeful fear throughout the night, stirred by the fire that was stirring the whole sky. I was blind and the world was falling down like the dew around me. There seemed no remedy for it, to plug it or calm it or make it sleep. It all roared at me. Hope left me then, and wide-awake I began to worry. This was not solitude but rather a nightmare of damage an iron wheel that drove on and on monotonous noise in the timeless dark, scattering feathers and claws.
But Father was wise to these crowding sounds. Nights like this, which worried me, had filled his head with schemes. So when dawn came, I knew him better and feared him more than I had at the stunning ruin of Jeronimo.
"Let him sleep," Mother said. I was amazed that he was still at it: I had never seen him sleep so soundly.
He lay on his side, in a hedgehog posture, with his arms over his face and his knees drawn up — a bundle of grumbling snores. Flies had settled on his shirt, and they scratched undisturbed on the wrinkles and seemed to play, he was so still. No one spoke, no one wanted to hear what he would say when he woke up.
It was day now. I felt sick and small under the quivering trees.
In the dry-season dawn, the leaves seemed to die as the sun hit them. The dew dried on the grass, and the blades withered and were lighted like gold thread under the rips of foil on the boughs. Freed of the dampness and dark, the dust on the ground penetrated the air with a yellow smell of decay that was sweet this first hour of daylight. The rising sun heated each live thing it struck, and stiffened it and gilded it with death. There were lovely brittle coins on the shining trees, and whole bushes of crisp gold flakes. As soon as the sun was sieved through the topmost branches, everything in the Acre was bright and dead around the black pool.
We waited, hardly breathing, for Father to wake. I dozed and watched the spiders near the pool, the way they plucked their webs like zithers to trap and tangle a struggling fly before they rushed the insect and wrapped it like a mummy. They hung the parcels of neatly bandaged flies in a high corner of the web, the way Indians here stored peppers and corn.
"Poor Dad," Clover whispered.
Mr. Haddy said, "His spearmint almost kill us."
"We're all right now," Mother said. "Charlie saved us."
"This isn't Charlie's camp. It's the Acre. It belongs to all of us," Jerry said. "The Maywit kids helped make those lean-tos. And Crummo gets all the credit!"
"You were blubbering last night," I said. "You were scared!"
"I wasn't!"
Mr. Haddy said, "But I were skeered! I was praying. I see death back there. That were wuss than a preacher's hell. Ruther have hurricanes and twisters than them fires. I see devils. I see Duppies dancing. I were so skeered I were glad to die."
Clover said, "What happened to those men, Ma?"
"They're gone."
"And if they ain't gone, we got trouble for true," Mr. Haddy said, and he repeated, "For too-roo!"