“Well, there wasn’t anything else to do but go and fight the fire. I guess George and Joe must have turned around and gone back with McDevitt, because I didn’t see them anymore that night. I rushed up to the house for some burlap bags, and then Henry Marsh and I drove as near the fire as we could get. I could see Marsh’s men black against the flames thrashing at it. A fire in the pines down here isn’t the same as a forest fire anywhere else. The fire clings to the woody soil and the oily palmettos and once in a while it gets up into a tree. If there’s a dead branch or a rotten place the whole tree burns up then. The bark is made tough and heavy like scales, so that the fire can’t hurt it if the tree is sound, and even young pines, if there isn’t anything the matter with them, will burn only a little and not be killed. But where there’s an old tree with its insides dead and rotted the fire leaps at it and the whole tree bursts into flame like it was tinder and the light of it brightens everything all around. Before you know it the tree crashes down and throws burning branches and ends of fire clear across a road or a fire path, and a new patch of palmetto will crackle up and blaze as if it was covered with kerosene.
“Through the smoke we could see the ground covered with blazing stumps and little edges of fire and an outer ring of flames where the fire was running toward my pine. Then a big tree that was burning fell like a fiery flag, falling straight toward the finest stand of them between there and the house, and I just went crazy. What I’d been with snakes or with McDevitt wasn’t anything to that, I was so scared the pines would go. Henry Marsh said I snatched a wet burlap out of his hand and went at that burning tree single-handed, stamping and beating, with my skirts and my shoes in the flying embers, until he said it was a miracle I didn’t catch fire myself. But all I remember was the heat on my face and a kind of wildness in me to get that fire out, no matter what happened or what it cost.
“And then suddenly that tree was out and there wasn’t any more creeping ring of flame, but only black stumps and branches and the ground hot and smoking underfoot. The men had stopped the fire up on the other side next to Henry Marsh’s grove and there was only some palmettos still burning in the middle and the smoldering earth where the fire had crept down into the peat and would smolder that way for days until it burned itself out. They got me back to my house and fixed up my burned hands and legs and feet, and I slept that night as if I was dead.
“The next day I sent word up to George and Joe that they could come back and see me when they wanted to, but I never said anything about McDevitt. And although they come back sometimes, it wasn’t any use. I guess I knew it all along. Something had changed in them. McDevitt hung around Miami and I knew the boys saw him and were with him, although he never tried to come out here again himself. That night finished something for me. I knew I’d never dare to say his name to them again or ask them what they were doing. I never did. They got jobs in town, I guess, and when they come to see me I was glad to see them, but I never treated them like I’d used to, and they weren’t the same with me.
“They brought me money sometimes, and I wouldn’t take it and I wouldn’t ask them how they got it, although they seemed to have plenty and dressed real nice. But I guessed things. They got to act more and more like McDevitt, smile like he did and not move their heads when they’d look at things, but only their eyes, and talk smooth and shifty. But sometimes they’d come back, or one of them alone, all tired out, and stay for a while, and all that would slip off them and they’d be just like my boys again, laughing and joking. I’d go in nights when they were asleep and look at them, great long heavy boys, the black one and the red one, sprawled over the bed.”
The quick tropic twilight was driving the yellow light of the sun out of the clearing between the pine trees. The sky overhead was lifting and receding into a high thin dome of green quivering light into which the prickle of a star came suddenly.
Larry Gibbs did not dare to tum his head to look at her, stone-still in her chair. Her chair itself did not creak anymore. But when she spoke again, except for the stiffness of her lips, her voice was deliberate and clear and dry.
“So I never let them or McDevitt see that I had a weak place, never once. I never said anything to them or pleaded with them. I never let them see me cry. I didn’t cry. McDevitt went away finally, I guess. I guess maybe he got driven out of town. And the things that happened then — happened.”
There was a long silence. Her voice said at last, in a breathless murmur, “And they can tell McDevitt — I haven’t — cried — yet.”
There was a man coming up the roadway to the house. Larry turned and watched him come. He was glad he would not have to say anything now. The man was thin and aimless-looking, and as he came up to the steps Larry saw he fumbled with his hat and had red rims to his blue eyes.
“Evenin’, Mis’ McDevitt,” he said uncomfortably. “Mis’ Marsh wanted I should step over and see if you needed anything, or if you wouldn’t like to sleep to our house tonight.”
Larry stood up slowly and turned to look at her. She was rocking again, but her profile was white parchment stretched tight over the boldness of her mouth and chin and her eyes were like smudges deep within their sockets.
“You’re a right good neighbor, Henry Marsh,” she said. “Tell Lizzie I don’t want anything, thank you, and I wouldn’t be comfortable anywheres else but here. I want to be up early in the morning. There’s a man coming with some avocado seedlings. I thought I’d see how they’d do here. This young man is going back now. Maybe he’d give you a ride back as far as your house. I’m much obliged to you, I’m sure.”
Her chair creaked slowly as the two men went toward Larry’s car. Driving back along the dark road Larry spoke only occasionally to the thin man, who seemed much affected. He told himself it was ridiculous to be affected so much himself, and yet he could not forget her sitting there on that dark porch. He found he had dreaded, in leaving her, to see some evidence of the defeat and dissolution of what in her he had found splendid, that spirit which by repeated and hard-won victories had strengthened itself, had learned to do without all the ordinary happinesses. He saw now that he had had nothing to dread. She had maintained herself, like an old pine through many burnings, by the enduring soundness of its own wood. That, Larry saw, was his story, if he could put into English his feeling of so important and so abiding a thing.
Luck