Fire Season

Fire Season Lee Martin Maybe it was cholera, ague, typhoid, influenza. Or it could have been dropsy, nephritis, apoplexy, consumption. It might have been grief over the death of her daughter, Nancy. AU I know is that for some reason lost now, my great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Gaunce Martin, died in the autumn of 1866, and her husband those 33 years—John Martin, who had taken her to Ohio and on to Indiana and finaUy to IUinois—was suddenly without her. At the Brian Cemetery, on the day ofEUzabeth's burial, the hickory trees would have been yeUow; the nuts, their black husks spUtting, would have lain in the brown grass. I imagine John's boots, freshly blacked, shuffling through that grass, his steps weary and halting, as he makes his way down the hiU from the graveyard. His children are with him: William and Sarah, grown now, and the ones stiU at home—Henry, back from the war; George; Jackson; Robert; Louisa. Louisa pauses at the graveyard's gate and looks back toward the hickories. "Aren't the trees pretty?" she says, and John hears the grief hidden beneath her bright voice. Although he's not ordinarüy an affectionate man around his chüdren, he puts his arm around Louisa's shoulder—too roughly, he fears, because he knocks her straw hat, the one Sarah pinned to her hair, askew. Louisa stands there, the hat, tilted to the side, a siUy look on her face, and she says, "Oh, Pa." He straightens the hat for her, knowing that she's the one he feels most sorry for, the one who wiU miss her mother most. Prudence Louisa, named after Lizzie's sister, a name that now seems a mistake since Louisa is anything but prudent. She's irrational, indecisive. A mooncalf, Henry sometimes says. A twitterbug, chattering and gigghng and buzzing about like a honeybee crazy for clover. She's always relied on Lizzie to steady her even after she 2 Fourth Genre became a grown woman. "Mommy, what dress will I wear?" "Mommy, I can't tie my sash." "Oh, Mommy." John knows, this day as they leave the graveyard, that Louisa wiU never marry. He's sure that his other children wiU find their way in the world— have started to already—but Louisa, oh, his sweet, siUy Louisa, she wiU always be his baby girl, too simple, too useless to be someone's wife. "Yes, the trees are pretty, Lou," he says. "Now let's go on. Let's go home." "Home?" she says, a crestfaUen look on her face, and he knows she'll be completely lost without Lizzie. "Yes, home," he says. He herds her down the steps cut into the hiU, feeling in a way he never has, his duty toward his daughter. At bedtime, she comes to him in her sleeping gown, her hair undone, a wild bramble, a brush held in her hand. "Mommy always brushed my hair." She reaches out the brush to him. "Every night," she says. He's sitting in a rocker by the window, letting the night air rush in, warm enough here at Indian summer to please him. It carries the scent of wood smoke and leaf must and the sounds of cornstalks, their dry blades scraping together. Ifit were a normal night—ifLizzie were still alive—she wouldjoin him here, and they would sit awhile, thankful for the harvest—corn and tobacco and pumpkins—and for Henry come home to them from the war, for Sarah and her good husband, Alfred Ridgley and WiUiam, a grown man now, earning his own wage as James French's live-in hired man. John and EUzabeth would give thanks for aU they had survived: the cholera that had almost taken him before they could marry the birthings that she had managed , the journey they had made from Kentucky to Ohio and the drought that had driven them west, thirsting for rain. They had lost Nancy but still, compared to other famiUes who had buried child after child, they had been blessed. "Can't you manage your hair tonight?" John says. He knows that if he touches Louisa...