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.I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which 'our Southern blackbirds' had left.I found nothing.What I found instead was a clipping from the Call marked July 19th (go down nineteen, I thought), 1933.The headline read VETERAN GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER.According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe.At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself).The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay.Fred's wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke.A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well.The fires had come fast when the wind changed, the paper said 'like marching explosions.' They jumped the only firebreak the men had left in that direction and headed for the far end of the lake.At Halo Bay there were no men to take charge, and apparently no women able or willing to do so.They panicked instead, racing to load their cars with children and camp possessions, clogging the one road out with their vehicles.Eventually one of the old cars or trucks broke down and as the fires roared closer, running through woods that hadn't seen rain since late April, the women who'd waited found their way out blocked.The volunteer firefighters came to the rescue in time, but when Fred Dean got to his wife, one of a party of women trying to push a balky stalled Ford coupe out of the road, he made a terrible discovery.Billy lay on the floor in the back of the car, fast asleep, but Carla was missing.Hilda had gotten them both in, all right — they had been on the back seat, holding hands just as they always did.But at some point, after her brother had crawled onto the floor and dozed off and while Hilda was stuffing a few last items into the trunk, Carla must have remembered a toy or a doll and returned to the cottage to get it.While she was doing that, her mother had gotten into their old Desoto and driven away without rechecking the babies.Carla Dean was either still in the cottage at Halo Bay or making her way up the road on foot.Either way the fires would run her down.The road was too narrow to get a vehicle turned around and too blocked to get one of those pointed in the right direction through the crush.So Fred Dean, hero that he was, set off on the run toward the smoke-blackened horizon, where bright ribbons of orange had already begun to shine through.The wind-driven fire had crowned and raced to meet him like a lover.I knelt on the pallets, reading this by the glow of my lantern, and all at once the smell of fire and burning intensified.I coughed.and then the cough was choked off by the iron taste of water in my mouth and throat.Once again, this time kneeling in the storage area beneath my wife's studio, I felt as if I were drowning.Once again I leaned forward and retched up nothing but a little spit.I turned and saw the lake.The loons were screaming on its hazy surface, making their way toward me in a line, beating their wings against the water as they came.The blue of the sky had been blotted out.The air smelled of charcoal and gunpowder.Ash had begun to sift down from the sky.The eastern verge of Dark Score was in flames, and I could hear occasional muffled reports as hollow trees exploded.They sounded like depth charges.I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn't be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair.Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright blue ones.She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying.I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved.I saw she was aboutKyra's age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde.Her hair is the shade her brother's will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]