what I remembered first was the belt. Luke, I would think. You wild
dog. I wonder, do you still wear twine?
Now, at age twenty-nine, I sit down to write, to reconstruct the
incident from the echoes and shouts of a tired memory. I scratch it out.
When I get to the end, I pause. There’s an inconsistency, a ghost in this
story.
I read it. I read it again. And there it is.
Who put out the fire?
A long-dormant voice says, Dad did.
But Luke was alone when I found him. If Dad had been with Luke on
the mountain, he would have brought him to the house, would have
treated the burn. Dad was away on a job somewhere, that’s why Luke
had had to get himself down the mountain. Why his leg had been
treated by a ten-year-old. Why it had ended up in a garbage can.
I decide to ask Richard. He’s older than I, and has a sharper
memory. Besides, last I heard, Luke no longer has a telephone.
I call. The first thing Richard remembers is the twine, which, true to
his nature, he refers to as a “baling implement.” Next he remembers
the spilled gasoline. I ask how Luke managed to put out the fire and get
himself down the mountain, given that he was in shock when I found
him. Dad was with him, Richard says flatly.
Right.
Then why wasn’t Dad at the house?
Richard says, Because Luke had run through the weeds and set the
mountain afire. You remember that summer. Dry, scorching. You can’t
go starting forest fires in farm country during a dry summer. So Dad
put Luke in the truck and told him to drive to the house, to Mother.
Only Mother was gone.
Right.
I think it over for a few days, then sit back down to write. Dad is
there in the beginning—Dad with his funny jokes about socialists and
dogs and the roof that keeps liberals from drowning. Then Dad and
Luke go back up the mountain, Mother drives away and I turn the tap
to fill the kitchen sink. Again. For the third time it feels like.
On the mountain something is happening. I can only imagine it but I