The scrub had fewer inhabitants than for fifty years. The stretch in front of the Lantry clearing that had been low-growing, with far vistas, was dense and dark with growth. Its pines, grey-trunked and scrawny, crowded close together. The entire region was again almost a virgin wilderness. Yet the law had come into the scrub and lay over it like a dark cloud.
Several years ago the government had taken over the greater bulk of it, unowned, uninhabited. Thousands of acres at its heart were now a game refuge, where no one might hunt or trap. Fire towers had been established here and there. There had been panic among the few inhabitants. Old man Paine, whose clearing lay in the new reservation, had died recently in a burst of frustration.
"I've killed me hun'erds o' deer in my time," he had told Lant sorrowfully, "and with my age upon me, the law says I got no right to take me a leetle piece o' venison to fill my pore ol' guts."
Even the piney-woods side of the river had felt uneasy, living so close to an unwelcome neighbour. They had pictured federal spies behind every clump of palmettos. They craved venison in August as they had never craved it before. There were still immense areas that might be hunted during the open season. But it had seemed at first, with one section shut off by invisible lines, as though there were no other section worth hunting. The deer had come to be called "gov'mint cows" and "gov'mint yearlin's."
It had become apparent, as the years passed quietly, that the government was as remote as ever. There were no lurking spies, no agents, no tangible evidence of the federal hawk circling in a clouded sky. There was nothing in the scrub, except game, that anyone wanted. The Southern spruce, or sand pine, was valueless, even to the government. The varmints came obligingly to the swamps to be trapped as before. The deer still came to the river to drink. If a man hunted carelessly on into what a small sign designated as a National Forest, there was no living creature to know.
The fire towers had proved harmless. Each held a lonely fellow who lived at the top and kept a watch for forest fires. The man in the Salt Springs tower was from Georgia. He invited Lant up to the top to look out over the rolling scrub and see his maps and implements. The government, he said, wanted only to keep away the devastating fires and to give the game a place for breeding. He played an old flute that had belonged to his grandfather in the War of the States. One night, down the narrow sandy Salt Springs road, Lant heard him high up above the trees, tootling eerily on his flute. The notes had dropped sweetly over the scrub, like the cries of a lost soul riding the sky.
Now in a dry November the heart of the scrub was burning. Since morning the smell of smoke had grown stronger. Lant was running a charge at his outfit. His nose twitched like a rabbit's. He uncapped the cooker and put out the fire in the brick furnace before he had run off the usual amount of low-wine. He added hot buck to the two new settings of mash. He had two demi-johns of whiskey and one of low-wine. He drove the corks in firmly and buried them in the soft black muck of the creek bed. He hurried to the house and joined his mother on the front stoop. They shaded their eyes against the round ball of sun, red and sick behind the greyness that was smoke in the east.
"The hell of it is," he said, "the gov'mint'll be here direckly."
Piety nodded. It was reasonable, she agreed, that the federal government would send men to put out fire on its own property. The danger was manifold. The wind was from the north-east. If it turned into the east, worse, into the south-east, the fire itself would sweep towards the river across the scrub and would lick up the Lantry clearing, broom sage, fences, shingled house and all. Yet it was men, not fire, he dreaded. There would be not only strange federal men swarming in the scrub, but sheriffs and their deputies, game wardens and the like. He minded a game warden the least. He could fool a warden any time. Bill Mersey had never bothered him.
"Jest the same, them boogers is all mixed up together," he said to Piety. "I got no question Bill carries what he sees to the Prohis, and the Prohis does the same for Bill."
He pictured the fire sweeping towards the river, and the fire and Bill Mersey and the high sheriff and the Prohis smoking out his still like a rabbit warren. Bill Mersey was Ardis' cousin. He had forgotten her all day. Ardis Mersey. She had lived in a town and gone to school and had come back to the piney-woods where her father had fallen heir to her grandfather's prosperous lands. It was incredible that she had been away and out of his mind all these years simply because he had not known her.
He had intended to row across the river after he ran his charge to tell her that the scrub was on fire and he could not take her that night to Abner Lantry's cane-grinding. In September he had let a setting of mash go flat because he had promised to go with her to a peanut-boiling.
He said to Piety, "My girl's like to think mighty hard of me, but I reckon I better git goin' acrost the scrub to see what that fire's a-doin'."
"You've been mighty faithful for about four months. She hadn't orter take it hard." She looked at him, still shading her eyes. "You call her your girl to her face?"
He shook his head.
"I'm feered I'll scare her. I got to sort o' slip up on her."
"Don't you be too sure about that." She laughed. "I've noticed it ain't hard to slip up on a girl if she's of a notion to be slipped up on."
He said, "She'd be off like a dove if I was to put my hand on her."
"Well, you'd orter know."
They stared into the murky east. Their eyes smarted. They heard voices across the clearing. Cleve and Kezzy and two Wilson men were coming through the rear gate. Kezzy's youngster was old enough to walk a little, but she carried him in her arms. The woman and three men pushed hurriedly through the sand. The men carried axes and spades.
Lant called, "You got news about the fire? I was jest about to git on the mule and go look for it."
One of the Wilsons said, "We got news, all right. South o' Lake Delancey the hull Big Scrub's a-burnin'. The fire warden to the Salt Springs tower jest now sent a boy ridin' hell-bent into Eureka for hep. Ever'body's called out to he'p fight."
Lant said, "Cleve, you know where-all the harness is at. You go git it while I ketch the mule."
On his way across the yard he tolled his grandfather's farm bell to call in Zeke.
Kezzy said, "Aunt Py-tee, let's you and me load some jugs o' water in the wagon and what bread and meat you got cooked."
The men loaded axes and hoes and shovels. The women would go along and drive the wagon back again. By the time they were ready Zeke had arrived. He climbed in and they rattled down the road. A few miles to the south they turned left and took the Salt Springs road through the heart of the scrub. It was inches deep in shifting sand. The smoke grew more acrid. Cleve and the Wilsons talked excitedly. Piety and Lant and Zeke and Kezzy were silent, with drawn faces. The wind was still out of the north-east.
Cleve said, "You don't figger on fire in November."
But the summer had been dry, frost had come early, and the scrub was like tinder. The floor was carpeted with parched brown pine needles. Dead palmetto fronds were like oil-soaked paper. Old lighter'd knots and fallen pine limbs made a network of inflammability. Cars and wagons and men riding mules and horses were on the road, some going towards the fire; other cars and wagons had dropped their men and were going back for more. Lant turned the mule off the single-track road when he met a car, for wheels spun helplessly out of the deep ruts. To another wagon he gave half of the road. Hands lifted in passing but there was no friendly hailing. Faces were grave. Men who were not concerned, even for the endangered game, were coming away startled from that sea of flame.
The billowing smoke had been visible for the past five miles. Within a mile the fire was plain, leaping like red-tongued dogs after juicy bones of palmetto and oak and pine. The roar, overlaid with a sharp crackling, filled their ears above the thump of mule-hooves in the sand. Lant tied the mule in the scrub off the road and they walked in. Kezzy went with them. Piety sat in the wagon and held the baby. It was strange to have them go away and leave her. A brief time ago she would have been in it with the men.
Government fire-lines had been ploughed a few years before, but grass and weeds had grown over them and had dried in the drought. The fire had taken the first set of ditches like a runaway horse. Men were working far to the south, widening and clearing the fire-lines as yet unreached. Ahead, an open area lay in the path of the flames. Men were back-firing here, and beating out the fire of their own making with green palmetto fronds and pine saplings.
Newcomers joined Lant and Cleve and Zeke and the two Wilsons and they set to work as a unit, without orders. The fire-warden could be seen on a slight rise, directing the line of fight. Fire was familiar to men of the piney-woods and they needed scant instructions. The Florida woods burned every spring.
"Thanks to them turpentine men," Kezzy said, "burnin' out the brush so they kin git to their boxes, and not keerin' what happens to the rest o' the woods."
Zeke said, "Yes, and the cattle men has been as bad."
Kezzy said, "Well, I cain't see a mess like this un and not git into it."
She borrowed Lant's light axe and cut a sapling for herself. She worked beyond the Wilsons, beating out the fresh flames as they fired. The wind freshened and within an hour it was plain that most of the front would have to be abandoned. Across one corner a burned-over patch turned the fire, but the great body of it rolled in. The sound, so close, was terrifying. The green leaves of oak and myrtle and gallberry and palmetto exploded like fire-crackers. The floor of the scrub burned with a snake-like sizzling. The dry pine-tops burst into flame with a roar. Balls of fire leaped twenty feet at a jump.
Zeke shouted, "I never heerd no storm come thu the pines with sich a noise."
From a slight elevation to the south-west where they had retreated, the conflagration could be seen as a sweeping flood. It rolled in billows, the flaming surf of an infernal sea. Other groups joined them, waiting a moment to see which lines would hold, and where they must go at it again. Here and there the advance of the fire cast itself helplessly where there was no fresh fuel. Watching, they saw it leap, because of a slight shift of wind, or for no apparent reason at all, across an entire small area, or skirt around an island of slash or long-leaf pine.
Kezzy worked with the men until late in the afternoon. They were blackened with smoke and charcoal. Their eyes shone inflamed in dirty faces. They realized that Cleve had been missing for two or three hours. They walked in a body to the wagon for drinking water and to inquire after him. Beyond the wagon, under a myrtle bush, they saw the man, asleep. The Wilsons nodded to each other, their eyes narrowing.
Lant said to Zeke, "Go rout him out."
Eph Wilson said, "Hell, leave him go on in with the wagon, or go on sleepin'. He's no he'p, noways."
Kezzy turned scarlet under her dirt. Eph gulped.
"Excuse me, Kezzy. No offense."
"No offense," she agreed lightly. She added quickly, "He were 'coon huntin' all last night."
Eph said politely, "That so?"
Piety unwrapped the food she had brought. They turned from the wagon, wiping their mouths.
Lant said, "Kezzy, you quit now and go home with Ma."
She frowned.
"You'll starve your damn young un if you don't take keer of him."
Piety said anxiously, "'Tain't right, Kezzy. You'll give him the colic, and you so hot and sweatin'."
Kezzy took the sleepy body from Piety. She laid her face against the silky head. A streak of black came off on the child's cheek.
"Gittin' you smuttied—Folkses'll think I had you puttin' out the fire." She said reluctantly, "I'll go on in. We'll come back if you don't git in soon."
Lant said, "If we cain't lick this soon, we jest as good to clare out and let her rip."
Zeke and the Wilsons started away.
Lant said, "Kezzy, you do somethin' for me? When you go home this evenin', git word to Ardis why I ain't comin'."
"She'll know," she said easily. "Bill Mersey was comin' over."
"She jest might not hear."
"Lant, I wasn't figgerin' on goin' home. I'll likely be drivin' the wagon back here after night-fall. You don't need to fret about Ardis not knowin'."
"All right."
He turned away, wiping the grime from his face. His back was dejected. She understood that he wanted the small yellow-headed girl to know—not that he would not come—but that he was sick at heart because he could not. She walked after him and pulled his sleeve.
"I'll row acrost soon's I git your Ma to the house and tell Ardis you're sorry," she said, and hurried to the wagon again.
He looked back in a moment. She was leaning over the snoring man under the myrtle bush. He heard her say desperately, "Cleve, for God's sake—" He felt guilty. Kezzy, with her breasts stretched hard and tight for her child, rowing across the river, smutty-faced and weary and damp with sweat, to take his casual word to the pale, bird-like girl who was afraid of him—He plunged into the thick of the fire-fighting. The warden was setting dynamite and it gave promise of checking the advance.
The fire continued through the night. Zeke Lantry's harridan, frightened, joined Piety and Kezzy and helped them cook food and make gallons of coffee. They put the coffee in Lant's demi-johns and wrapped the jugs in thick blankets of Spanish moss to keep them hot. Setting out towards the Salt Springs road a little before midnight, they could see the whole eastern sky ablaze. Miles away, a cloudy roar came to their ears, as though bull alligators battled and bellowed in the distance.
Fresh men arrived in the morning from farther settlements. The first day's fighters crawled away from the front of the fire, far advanced and inexorable, and fell on the pine-needled earth for an hour's rest. Towards noon the wind shifted and the sky clouded. In the early afternoon a light shower sprinkled its way across the burning scrub. At four o'clock rain fell in sheets. The red tongues flickered high against it. Steam began to rise in clouds and join the descending greyness.
Men laughed and shouted and corn whiskey appeared. They sat on their heels and joked suddenly. Stumps smouldered and tall trunks smoked, but the fire was done for. The Big Burn lay black and desolate, as it was to lie for years, with skeletons of trees reared against a sky that would seem here always of hot and dirty steel. The unburned patches stood anomalous, as though they had known a secret and evil magic to turn the flames.
Cars and wagons and horses and mules were all moving towards the river again. Cleve and Kezzy and the Wilsons had gone home in Abner Lantry's automobile. Piety waited on a side trail with the wagon. Lant and Zeke were among the last men to leave. Lant was light-hearted. He had seen almost no strangers; certainly no federal men. Turning down the dim side road he saw a small figure running past the pines. The blood beat against the top of his head.
He called, "Ardis!"
She was white with terror. She ran to him and sobbed breathlessly against his arm. He stroked her sleeve gently. Zeke shuffled his feet uncertainly a moment and hurried ahead of them.
Lant soothed her, "Easy, honey. Was you losted? What you doin' out here, anyway?"
She caught her breath and laughed a little.
"I came with Father and Cousin Bill, just to see. I saw some girls I knew, in a car down the road. When I came back, I couldn't find anyone."
"Why, honey," he said, "I seed Bill and your daddy drive by a half-hour ago. They must of figgered you'd gone on."
He pulled a handful of moss from a pine and wiped her eyes. She quieted.
"You'll take me home," she said.
Piety clambered down stiffly from the wagon to meet the girl.
"Zeke jest figgered you was Ardis," she said cordially. "You come set on the wagon-seat between Lant and me and keep warm."
Dusk fell before six o'clock and the scrub road was dark and winding. The wagon rattled and the mule jogged steadily and Zeke whistled behind them, hanging his feet over the tail-boards.
Piety said, "Wa'n't your Pa Thomas Mersey? Lant, I tol' you Ardis' Pa were the one I knowed. I went to school with Tom when I was a gal young un. The leetle I went, Tom Mersey were in the school when I was."
Ardis said, "We were all away a long time."
"That's what Lant said. You glad to be back?"
"Father's glad. I like it better now."
Lant felt her arm warm against him. He wanted to shout down the length of the shadowy road. The fire was out, the scrub would not burn to the river's edge, there had been no agents of the law on an inch of his land. There was no more danger, from fire or from folk, and Ardis sat next to him on the wagon-seat. He began to sing loudly in his high nasal minor. He sang "Comin' Round the Mountain" and Zeke hummed with him. Ardis laughed.
She said, "I like that. I forget it's dark when you're singing."
Where the road branched two ways, one towards Eureka, the other towards the Lantry clearing, he stopped the mule.
"Miss Ardis," he said, "hit's a two-hour job to git you home tonight. This way, or from my place acrost the river. If your daddy figgers you're with a passel o' gals, won't he figger you're stayin' the night with 'em?"
"I guess he will."
"You been promisin' to go fishin' with me one time. How 'bout you spendin' the night with Ma and me and we'll go fishin' in the mornin' and I'll git you home 'fore your daddy finds out which side o' the river you're visitin'."
Piety urged her. "You come spend the night now, Ardis. Lant's been wantin' you to visit the worst way."
She said after a moment, "All right."
At the house Lant walked aimlessly about, following Ardis from the front room to the kitchen and back again. The strangeness of her presence there was overwhelming.
Piety said, "Don't you try to he'p me. I'll fix us a bite o' supper. You jest set by the fire."
She sat in Piety's rocker and held the yellow cat. Lant brought out his box of alligator teeth. He showed her how they replenished themselves, new ones forming constantly, the new teeth nested inside the old.
"Alligators has lots o' use for teeth," he told her earnestly, "and the Lord takes keer o' the sons o' bitches."
He brought out hides and rattlesnake skins. She touched them gingerly. It delighted him to see her finger dart at them and away again. He left her and went to the kitchen for a bottle of wine. He leaned over Piety at the cook-stove.
He whispered in her ear, "Ma, ain't my girl sweet?"
She said loyally, "She's jest mighty sweet." She looked at him. "She won't think you're sweet, and the smut not even washed off you."
He said, "Great God!" and made for the wash basin.
It was after ten o'clock when they finished supper and Piety made up the small bed in the front room. She put a new sheet on the bottom and a clean quilt for cover. She brought out a clean flannel nightgown of her own and held it up.
"You one o' the few runty enough to git into this," she said.
Lant went into his room so that the women could undress by the fire. After his mother's door had closed and the creaking of the bed in the front room stopped, he opened his door a crack.
He whispered, "Good-night, Ardis."
Her voice came small and delicious from her bed.
"Good-night, Lant."
Then it was morning. Ardis and Piety were up ahead of him, and the smell of coffee and bacon drifted across the breezeway. Piety was at the side of the bed, bringing him clean clothes.