A Summer Fire

by HANK ODELL

Five summers ago, the hottest on record, a horse kicked over a lantern in the barn and lit a stack of dry wood. That fire climbed up the walls and into the rafters faster than you could count to five, and by the time the sun was falling down the empty sky, the fire was poking at the roof, waiting impatiently for the beams to disintegrate. We came back from town and saw the blaze shooting up into the darkness, like fingers reaching into an oven, and we ran to the barn. If we went to free the horses, we wouldn’t get but a foot inside before the fire took us. We had to stand outside and watch the blaze creep across the stables and listen to the horses scramble and scream like hogs at the slaughter.

The horses got so loud my mother could hear them from inside the house. The flames reached up into the sky and made the shadows around the homestead long and hollow. When I remember that summer now, I smell burning paint and burning hair, hear sounds like a squeezing scream, smoke-filled and desperate and kicking at the blackening wood.

The fire killed a dozen chickens—six roosters, six hens—and all the horses but one. My brother Paulie’s horse Oldgut was the only one who didn’t perish. The thing was twice the size as any other we had and stubborn as could be. The next afternoon, well after the fire had reached the earth and burned itself to nothing, we stepped into the ghostly black box where the barn used to be, scattered wooden planks sticking up in the air like apparitions. We found the mangled bodies of each horse: Friendly, who was middle-aged and for leisure riding; Flower, who was only a yearling; Genna, who was the secondary workhorse; and Oldgut, our primary workhorse.

Every one of them was dead except Oldgut, who was sprawled out and sputtering into the dirt. Its one visible eye was spinning around in the socket wildly, shooting and zipping across the sky as though following some invisible bird. Occasionally, it would heave its entire body and toss about in the ash. The horrible choking sound it made, as estimated by our father, was Oldgut’s lungs slowly and steadily filling with ash and collapsing in on themselves. We pictured Oldgut’s chest turning black with soot and saw the flecks that went shooting out of its nose and mouth every time it did that horrible full-body sputter. He didn’t say it, but we saw in his face that father wanted to get his .22 and put a bullet between Oldgut’s eyes.

Paulie wouldn’t have it — when father got up and walked to the shed, Paulie stood by the door and wouldn’t let him in. Father tried to reason with him. It was for the best, he told him. It was to lessen Oldgut’s pain. Oldgut heaved and heaved again. Every time it did, a cloud of soot blew up into the air and was caught by the wind, scattered towards the fields. It was only when my father promised Paulie to not shoot the poor beast that Paulie relented, slowly inching away as though, if he stepped too quickly, Oldgut would notice his surrender. That evening, we tried to eat dinner in silence. Nobody spoke because there was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been cursed into the earth and evaporated in the air like water in a fire. The only sounds we heard that night were the scraping of silver forks on porcelain and the scratching, clawing, pleading coughs of Oldgut in the yard.

It seemed to me that everyone knew what would happen next except Paulie. My father glowered at the table, and I could see the reflection of a bullet in his eye every time Oldgut’s heaving seeped through the kitchen window. That night, we put Paulie to bed, and my father and I sat in the living room downstairs and waited for him to fall asleep. After what must have been an hour, my father sent me upstairs to check on Paulie. I opened the door to his room and found the boy soundly asleep, his room filled with summer breeze from an open window. Even from up there, I couldn’t escape the sounds of Oldgut kicking about, flailing and coughing and dying. Then, I heard the screen door open downstairs and heard it be carefully placed back against its frame.

After the door closed, I counted up in my head from one. Twenty paces to the shed. I heard the shed door open. Three paces inside. I heard the rattle of cold steel against wood. Three paces outside. I heard the shed door delicately shut against its frame. Ten paces to the ruins of the barn. Oldgut heaved into the dirt and snorted up ash before spitting it out again. For half a second, its heaving paused, and the bony rattle of its stubborn lungs subsided. The farm was quiet.

Then, the jolting snaps of two rifle reports stunned the air and seemed to bounce through the hills like the crackling of some great fire. When I turned again, Paulie was sitting up in bed and listening to the night, same as I. His eyes wavered and shimmered in the low light, and his mouth trembled like the leaves of a quaking aspen. Together, we listened for the song of our farm, the same song that had been overbearing since the fire ripped through, the song of a horse refusing to die. The night was silent again, and far below, the soot lay still atop the dirt.

 

Hank Odell is a senior creative writer who has always been drawn to the deep swamps of the South and confrontations between humanity and its own desires, intentions, and regrets. His influences include Flannery O’Connor and Aleksandr Pushkin.