By noon, they had drained somewhere between thirty and forty cars. Luke
had collected the fuel in five-gallon buckets, which he began to haul across
the yard to Dad’s flatbed. On one pass he stumbled, drenching his jeans in a
gallon of gas. The summer sun dried the denim in a matter of minutes. He
finished hauling the buckets, then went home for lunch.
I remember that lunch with unsettling clarity. I remember the clammy
smell of beef-and-potato casserole, and the jingle of ice cubes tumbling into
tall glasses, which sweated in the summer heat. I remember Mother telling
me I was on dish duty, because she was leaving for Utah after lunch to
consult for another midwife on a complicated pregnancy. She said she might
not make it home for dinner but there was hamburger in the freezer.
I remember laughing the whole hour. Dad lay on the kitchen floor cracking
jokes about an ordinance that had recently passed in our little farming village.
A stray dog had bitten a boy and everyone was up in arms. The mayor had
decided to limit dog ownership to two dogs per family, even though the
attacking dog hadn’t belonged to anybody at all.
“These genius socialists,” Dad said. “They’d drown staring up at the rain if
you didn’t build a roof over them.” I laughed so hard at that my stomach
ached.
Luke had forgotten all about the gasoline by the time he and Dad walked
back up the mountain and readied the cutting torch, but when he jammed the
torch into his hip and struck flint to steel, flames burst from the tiny spark
and engulfed his leg.
The part we would remember, would tell and retell so many times it
became family folklore, was that Luke was unable to get out of his gasoline-
soaked jeans. That morning, like every morning, he had hitched up his
trousers with a yard of baling twine, which is smooth and slippery, and needs
a horseman’s knot to stay in place. His footwear didn’t help, either: bulbous
steel-toed boots so tattered that for weeks he’d been duct-taping them on each
morning, then cutting them off each night with his pocketknife. Luke might
have severed the twine and hacked through the boots in a matter of seconds,
but he went mad with panic and took off, dashing like a marked buck,
spreading fire through the sagebrush and wheat grass, which were baked and
brittle from the parched summer.
I’d stacked the dirty dishes and was filling the kitchen sink when I heard it—
a shrill, strangled cry that began in one key and ended in another. There was