Smoke and water, the burning of old wood. I’ve kept this night to myself so far. It’s as if just because the sky was smeared with a red-gold paste, I remember that scene more clearly than most events of my youth. A barn was on fire. Do you remember? Were you there? It was just a half mile from my cabin, on a hill overlooking the bay. I have told stories that made you the mute and muddy hero of that night, pumping water from the volunteer fire truck long after hope for the barn. I can see you, happy because you had something important to do, stricken light washing across your body. But I have lied in worse ways, I suppose. When is a story a lie? When it forgets to leave something human and difficult at its core.
I had never seen anything burn uncontained before, and at that moment I felt time slide sideways, as if I were allowed to feel other, older moments within this moment combusting in front of me. Every time I’ve described this night before, I’ve had to invent something more dramatic to try to convey the experience: efforts to save the barn, love among the firemen, a trapped cow—god help me. It was just a leaning barn used for winter hay, but the scene didn’t need embellishing. The truth is, the sight of that barn on fire thrilled me through every last neuron: the tremendous spitting roar, the orange light rippling across our faces, making us look like fanatics. The air around our circled bodies was thick with smoke and the smell of fear. Something missing had returned for just a moment—the threat of death.
I like to remember that night as if you were there, as if you understood me. But, honestly, I don’t remember seeing you. I don’t even remember how old I was or how I happened to be there to see it burning.
I must have looked around me, though. The faces in the small crowd must be my own memory and not a movie scene. They were beatific, orange, raised to the highest tongue of flame, as if it were a sign of the beginning of the end. Their backs were turned black with night. It was as if our lives in time-lapse photography were playing at high speed in front of us, as if our own skins were rippling with heat, as if the sun had actually set into the field and was reducing itself to ashes. In our pulse points we felt the tap of our meltable hearts. There is nothing more thrilling than looking at your own demise and finding it beautiful. Weren’t you there? Wasn’t it a gorgeous night?