IT WENT ON for what seemed like hours, the shouts of the men outside, the gunfire, the scrambling inside, the footsteps and shouts of Pa and Calvin upstairs.
“Come on out, Ranel,” the voices kept demanding. “Come on out. We want you. We’re sick and tired of your comin’ into West Virginia and makin’ us hide away from our homes and womenfolk. We aim to make you pay for Wall dyin’ in prison. We want this over, now!”
Adelaide cried. She clung to me in the kitchen, where we hunkered low by the old cast-iron stove, and cried and trembled like a baby. “They aim to kill us, Fanny.”
I held on to her. “They won’t. Pa and Calvin won’t let ’em.”
“If only we had more men.”
“I should get my coat on and run for Floyd,” I said. I was sure I could sneak out. But every time I made a move to leave her, Adelaide clung to me. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me!”
So I stayed. To hear bullets thudding into the house walls. To hear the shouts and cusses and threats from the men outside, the braying and barking of our dogs, Adelaide’s wailing, Calvin’s voice upstairs, every once in a while Pa’s. To shiver in my nightdress next to Adelaide, even though we were beside the stove.
“Maybe we should go upstairs with Ma and Alifair,” Adelaide said.
I thought that a good idea. But just as we were pondering it, the light in the kitchen changed. A yellow glow cast on the walls from outside. Adelaide raised her head to see and gasped. “They’ve got pine-knot torches.”
“We’re a-goin’ to set the house afire, Ranel,” came a shout, “lessin’ you come out now!”
The only answer was a volley of shot from the upstairs windows. Each time the guns fired I jumped. The sound was so sickening. It echoed in the cold air.
Next thing we heard was a terrible scream. “I been hit! I been hit!” we heard from outside.
“That’s it, Ranel!” And with that, another kitchen window smashed on the front wall, and a flaming bunch of faggots made crackling brightness where no brightness should be, in the middle of the kitchen floor. At once the bundle of twigs flared orange, eating, devouring. Then came another, and another, and another followed, making a circle of flame and smoke that filled my eyes and brain, destroying the herbs hanging from the rafters, Ma’s calico curtains, making new curtains of thick, sour smoke.
I had to get us out. “Come on,” I said, “upstairs, Adelaide.” I had to drag her. We bumped into Calvin and Pa, scrambling down. “The kitchen’s on fire.” I choked out the words.
“Alifair, c’mon down here and get to the buckets,” Calvin yelled. We kept buckets of water in the house just in case of fire. Maybe three. At the most four. The flames in the kitchen were growing, hissing, growling like some live beast. I stood there, staring, thinking, Now we won’t have the Brunswick stew to eat anymore, and it was so good. Then somebody pushed me aside.
“Alifair!” I heard Calvin yell again. Then I saw Alifair go right through the smoke, grab up the buckets, and start throwing the water on the flames. The puncheon floor was warm, smoldering, under my bare feet. Flames lapped at the beamed ceding, feeding on everything in sight. The heat was near suffocating.
Calvin and Pa were firing out the kitchen windows. Pa’s shirt was smoldering in back. Alifair threw some water on it. “We need more water, Calvin,” she yelled. “It’s all give out.”
I saw Calvin turn from the window, waving his arms like some haint in the smoke. One arm held Trixie.
“We gotta have more, Calvin,” Alifair said, “or we’ll be burned out. We’ll be forced out, and they’ll kill us all!”
“Can you sneak out to the well and get some?” They were standing not three feet from each other, but yelling through the smoke, because Pa was firing out and the men outside were firing in. Alifair already had her coat on over her nightgown. Smoke and flames were coming up through the floorboards now.
“By God,” Calvin yelled. “They’ve put more torches under the house!”
“I’m goin’ out now,” Alifair said. She grabbed up a bucket.
“They’ll shoot you,” Pa yelled. I thought he hadn’t been listening, but he had.
“It’s either that or they shoot us all,” Alifair told him. “Anyways, even they aren’t low-down enough to shoot a woman fetching water to save her house!” And then she was gone, through the smoke, out the back door, and into the yard.
“Alifair!” Adelaide screamed, and tried to follow her. “Don’t go, please!”
“Grab your sister,” Pa yelled, “and shut her up! Get outa this room and see to Ma.”
I took a-hold of Adelaide, who was screaming like a painter cat. I dragged her out of the kitchen. There was a sight of smoke in it now. I didn’t know how Pa and Calvin were able to breathe, excepting that they were firing out of open windows. Every once in a while one of the shots from outside the house would thud against the walls. The sounds were soft thuds but horrible. Under my bare feet I felt broken glass. I tripped over something wooden, near fell, and righted myself. The world seemed to be gone howling mad all around me.
Then of a sudden the fearsome noise outside stopped. A man’s voice yelled, “Halt there! Who goes? Ranel? Have ye come out? Stop firing, boys.”
And Alifair’s voice in return. “It’s me, Alifair. Is that you, Cap Hatfield?”
“It’s me.”
“Well, I come out for some water because my kitchen is burning. My kitchen, Cap Hatfield. And to me it’s sacred. In all this fracas, did we ever come and burn your kitchen?”
I couldn’t hear his reply. Adelaide was blubbering in my ear. “Hush!” I shook her.
“If you don’t go back inna house, Alifair, I’m a-goin’ to have to shoot you,” came the voice that had allowed he was Cap.
“You? Shoot me?” And Alifair laughed. “We went to school together, Cap. I know you’re big and bad now, but not big and bad enough to shoot a woman, are ye?”
Silence, except for the crackling of flames where the fire hadn’t yet been dampened. Terrible silence. Then a shot, ringing and certain in the cold. Then Alifair’s voice, strong no more, but begging. “Dear God. Sweet Jesus.” Growing weaker and weaker, then nothing.
Adelaide broke loose from me and made for the door. Calvin yelled, “Damned varmints! They shot Alifair!” Pa yelled and made for the door then, too, but Calvin held him back. “She’s on the ground, Pa. She ain’t movin’. She’s dead. Go out there, and you’re next. I need you in here, Pa. Or they’ll kill us all!”
“Hold on to your sister!” Pa shoved Adelaide at me. He looked like some demented god as he turned again to the window and recommenced firing. Then Adelaide broke from me and ran to the hall and stood screaming, “Ma, Ma! They shot Alifair!”
But Ma was already coming down the steps, her long hair around her shoulders, her boney hands groping the walls. “My Alifair? They shot her? Let me through!”
Nobody could stop her. When Pa tried, she seized up a piece of broken glass and threatened him with it. And with Isaiah. “And I stay at my post through all the watches of the night!” Then she went out into the night.
“Cover her,” Calvin told Pa.
I could see Ma leaning over Adelaide and glaring up at a masked somebody who stood over her. His eyes reflected the firelight, glowed like Yeller Thing. “Get back inside, old hag.”
Ma stood up and raised her fist. “I will encamp like David amongst you. I will encircle you with outposts and set up siege works against you. Prostrate you shall speak from the earth!”
I recollect thinking how right brave Ma was. And how I could never be.
Then the man raised his gun and swung it back, and I yelled, “No, no!” I lunged, and then it was Adelaide holding me back as the gun cut the cold night air and hit Ma, again and again.
Calvin charged out the door next into the yawning dark and raced to the corncrib, making it there somehow, then raised Trixie to take aim and was cut down by a ringing shot.
“No, no!” I was yelling it then, and Adelaide was holding me. Pa was bellowing for Adelaide to take me into the woods, to go out the back window. I stumbled along after Adelaide, followed her out the window like I was in a dream, feeling colder and stiller than Ma and Calvin and Alifair, colder and stiller than the freezing night air that filled up my lungs, then seeped forever into my heart.