Joe’s voice cut through the wind and fire. Faye heard him say, “Dad!” and she heard fear.
He was behind her, somewhere between where she stood and the house. Still holding a wet towel, on the off-chance that it was the secret weapon that would save everybody and everything, she ran for Joe’s voice.
She found him bending over a pile of broken wood. The biggest cistern on Joyeuse Island had stood since 1857, at least, but it wasn’t standing anymore. Faye knew that Joe’s father and his ax must lie somewhere beneath the wreckage.
Joe lifted a timber heavy enough to bow his back. He shoved it aside and reached a hand down into the pile. He had found his father.
Faye, who had never known a father before now, rushed to help Joe pull the debris off Sly. She could see him pushing up against the boards piled on top of him. Was the fire lighting Sly’s face as it peeked through the wreckage or was the moon finally starting to rise?
“I’m fine, Son,” he said, lifting a beam that lay across his legs and handing it to Joe. “Daughter, I’m fine.”
When Joe had set that beam aside and turned back to finish uncovering his father, he found a big arm extending out of the debris, an ax in its hand. “You got four other cisterns, Son. You know what to do. I can get myself out of this mess.”
Joe started to help his father anyway, but Faye stayed his arm. “I can do this,” she said. “I can help him. Take the ax and go.”
She draped her wet towel around her husband’s shoulders, knowing that he would shed it when he needed to swing the ax, but maybe that little bit of wetness would help him. Maybe a damp shirt would hold up better against the sparks that were starting to fly.
Red light reflected on her husband’s face as he ran to the first of the four cisterns that stood near the house’s four corners. The ax swung and swung again. In just a few blows, Joe brought the smaller cistern down, leaping free of the water that first shot out of its side and then gushed across the ground. He dodged the falling frame of the cistern, too, and ran for the second one.
The water was helping, at least a little. In two broad swathes of the woods surrounding her home, the flames on the ground were quenched. Faye could see that Sly and Joe had chosen their points of attack so that the water wouldn’t spew straight out into the woods. It had flowed laterally, parallel to the nearest wall of the house. They were doing their best to make a watery buffer that circled the house.
Faye gave Sly a hand as he lifted himself out of the rubble of the cistern. “We need to find Gerry. If the three of us get out there with shovels and some towels, we may be able to finish digging that firebreak. Let’s go.”
A cracking, splitting sound told them that Joe had finished wrecking the second cistern. As Faye ran for the last place she’d seen Gerry, she realized that she could see better, a lot better, but that there was still no moon. She needed to face the fact that the fire was bringing all the light. It was closing in, and they would soon need to run for the shore and let the Gulf of Mexico protect them as all of Joyeuse Island went up in flames.
But not yet. Faye wasn’t ready to run yet.
They found Gerry and showed him where the water from the cisterns had opened up big holes in the encroaching fire. Starting from those openings, they worked with shovel and wet towels to complete the ring of protection around Faye’s house. Around her home.
Faye wasn’t stupid. She could look deeper into the woods and see that flames were working their way toward them through the tree canopy. They couldn’t fight a fire that was twenty feet above their heads. Failing to run from a fire like that could kill them all, but Faye wasn’t running yet.
She slung her towel so hard at a chunk of burning bark that she knocked it right off the tree. It lay there on the ground, still burning, so she had to flap her towel at it again. This wasted time she didn’t have. She swatted the burning bark until it went black, like charcoal, then she moved on to the next burning thing.
The sound of an ax splitting wood told her that Joe had reached the third cistern. That left two more. When the cisterns were gone, there would be nothing left to fight the fire but four people, a shovel, and a bucket of wet towels. If something hadn’t changed by then, it would be time to run.
Faye started trying to make her peace with the loss. Joe and Sly and Gerry shouldn’t risk their lives for her house. It was a symbol of her hard work in preserving it and it was a symbol of all the people who had lived in it before her, all the way back to Cally and beyond, but it was just a symbol, just an object.
It was time to let her home go.
A percussive noise near the house told her that Joe was slinging the ax at the last cistern, unleashing its water to fight the fire that would never stop coming. She gestured to Gerry and Sly that it was time to leave. They drew back from the fire’s edge, into the front yard of Joyeuse’s big house.
Faye knew every square inch of it. She had patched the tabby walls of its basement. She had run wiring and ductwork to bring it up to twenty-first-century standards of comfort. She had painted its walls, restored its murals, hung vintage wallpaper to replace the antique paper destroyed by the hurricane. She and Joe, working together, had rebuilt the spiral staircase and both exterior staircases. They had made a new cupola to replace the one that had blown away. They had installed up-to-date roofing.
Long ago, and this memory threatened to take her to her knees, her grandmother had taken a teenaged Faye up on that roof and taught her to patch the ancient tin that had covered it in those days.
She was losing it. She hadn’t been sure she could walk away and let the fire come, but it was just a house. She had survived the loss of her baby daughter. She would survive this.
She heard Joe’s ax strike again. Collected rainwater rushed out of the last cistern with such power that she could hear it, even over the roar of a fire that had nearly come. He had done everything in his power to save their home, and she loved him for it, but the fight was done. She went to him, held out her hand, and said, “It’s time to go to the water.”
Joe’s face was wet, and it wasn’t cistern water shining on his cheeks. “Faye, I tried.”
“I know you did. We all did. Let’s go.”
The fire had crept way too close to the path to the beach. They should have fled long ago. Gerry handed wet towels all around. They wrapped their heads and upper bodies in them. When a burning branch crashed to the ground ten feet away from the entrance to the path, they ran. By the time they had pushed down the path far enough to feel branches brush their arms on either side, the opening behind them was alight.
As they ran, more branches fell all around them, and some of them dropped coals onto the path ahead. Faye had only enough of her wits about her to think, “I’m barefoot,” as she ran across them.
Joe had an arm curled around her back. He wasn’t pushing her and he wasn’t carrying her, but she saw that he was prepared to do either. If she staggered, he would throw her over his shoulder, but that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to leave her home for the last time under her own power.
The beach and its sand looked so soft and so cool. Her feet wanted her to get there, where the sand would soothe them and they could rest. They took her there but the dry grains of sand did no good at all. They did nothing but stick to her burned and bleeding feet.
Emma and Michael were waiting in the water. Her son was already wailing, but when he saw Faye and Joe, he held out both arms and shrieked.
They went to him. Their family was all together, almost. When Amande got home, everything would be right. Even if she came home to a family that was camping out on an island that had been burned black, everything would be right. Or close enough to right.
She heard another crack, much louder, as if Joe, Gerry, Sly, and Emma had all sunk axes into a wooden tank of water while Faye waited inside. Sly’s ax had been left behind and no one but the dead Delia was left on the island to wield it, so she had to be hearing something else
Faye and all the others stood in the water, like penitents waiting for baptism, and looked ashore to see what was making all that noise.
A flash of light broke open the black sky. Less than a second passed before they heard another loud crack. Faye looked up and saw a great cloud gathering itself overhead. She saw pinpricks of stars on the sliver of sky just above the water to the south. Those stars hadn’t been there a moment before. They had been covered by the cloud that had rolled off the water and spread itself over Joyeuse Island. Among those stars was a brightness that grayed the black night. The gray light looked like hope.
Sure enough, the clouds pulled further away from the horizon, revealing a moon that had been shining behind them for quite some time. Those clouds rushed in front of a strong wind that piled them up over Faye’s head. Thunder pealed again, signaling the clouds to release the rain.
And it fell.
Water fell on them like a blessing. The water rinsed the smoke from Faye’s hair. It ran off Joe’s face in black streams of soot. It pattered on Michael’s cheeks and Emma’s curls and Sly’s broad shoulders and Gerry’s upturned face. It washed them all clean.