own.
'Mom-EEEEEEEEEEEE!'
Her mind was stuck on hold, but her hands and body acted without any direction from her gibbering mind. As she reached the utility room and grabbed the extinguisher beside the door, Ryan was already emptying his own extinguisher on the blaze eating into the wallboard behind the dryer. Jill wailed in terror, plastered against the back wall of the utility room, clutching her stuffed bunny.
That's right, the bunny was still in the dryer. My God, she could have been electrocuted!
Toni joined her son, playing the chemicals from the extinguisher on the blaze, amazed that her hands and his were so steady. Doubly amazed that he had such enormous presence of mind for a ten-year-old. If he had just been a little taller, he could have reached over the dryer as she was doing and sprayed down behind it; from the looks of things, he'd actually tried, then given up, keeping his spray on the areas he could reach. But he had given her the extra few seconds she needed, confining the fire to the area in back of the dryer, keeping it from spreading any further until she could really put it out.
The last of the flames died. The plug, still in the wall socket, spat a spark; she dropped her now empty extinguisher, wrapped a rubber glove around the cord, and yanked, pulling it free of the wall.
Then she fell to her knees, gathered both her precious babies in her arms, and the three of them laughed and cried in fear and relief.
Then she called the fire department, told them what had happened, and had them send a truck over to make certain that the fire hadn't somehow gotten in between the walls. It made for quite a bit of excitement in the normally quiet neighborhood; Rod Junior came streaking in on his bike after the truck, and was nearly beside himself when he realized it was coming to his house. The first thing he wanted to know was if his room was all right. And predictably, by the time the truck left, Rod Junior had usurped Ryan's place in the tale of how the fire had been extinguished, at least where his peers were concerned.
It was only after the firemen had checked and found the house safe, only after they had made certain that it was the dryer plug and not the outlet that had shorted out, and only after she had called and left a message with Rod's service about the 'accident,' that she had time to think. And remember.
She had pulled the plug out of the wall this morning, just before she started sorting laundry. Rod never went into the utility room, and the kids couldn't possibly have reached it to plug it back in.
She had pulled the plug out of the wall. She had made absolutely certain to do so, in case one of the kids might go swimming at the neighbor's and throw a wet bathing suit into the dryer before she got a chance to stop them.
So who had plugged it back in?
Jennifer loved driving in the early morning at this time of the year. Mornings in June were just warm enough to be comfortable, and not so hot that you needed the air conditioner. In July-in July you would; the temperature often didn't drop below eighty, and sometimes stayed in the nineties until two or three in the morning.
But in June-the air was full of flower scent and bird song. Scissor-tailed flycatchers were performing wild acrobatic maneuvers in pursuit of bugs, and mockingbirds informed the rest of the universe that they knew every bird's song there was. Cows grazed placidly, knee-deep in ridiculously green grass, with adorable calves frisking alongside.
In June, the entire state looked like a travel brochure, or scenes from Green Grow the Lilacs. Not from the musical Oklahoma! that came from the play, though; the musical had been filmed by people who knew nothing about Oklahoma, and had perpetuated the myth of Oklahoma, Land of Flat and Treeless.
Where did they think all the wood came from to build all those wooden farmhouses, anyway? Hollywood. I'm surprised they didn 't film Lawrence of Arabia in the middle of the Serengeti Plain.
It was going to be such a nice day that she had packed a lunch; half a dozen apples and some cheese.
Not only was this part of Oklahoma anything but flat and treeless, once Jennifer got outside the city limits of Tulsa, the landscape looked a lot more like Brown County in Indiana than anything in Oklahoma!, the movie. Long, rolling hills; high, sandstone ridges topped with blackjack oaks; redtail hawks soaring above the highway, looking for road-kill. ... She tuned her radio to something she could sing along with, and resolutely enjoyed the drive, because she was probably not going to enjoy the march across country to get to the burial ground.
The farther north of Tulsa she got, the more rugged the country became, and the fewer the inhabited farmhouses. A lot of farmers had given up in the last ten or twenty years; had sold out to bigger ranchers, or just let the land go to the bank. This kind of land was no good for anything but cattle, really; full of stones, hard to clear, hard to plow, and utterly unforgiving in the years without much rain. Selfishly, she was pleased. The cattle could graze under the blackjacks without disturbing the general balance of nature too much; the land was going back to the kind of territory her people had known and roamed. There seemed to be more redtails this spring than ever before; she saw them perched every mile or so, on top of telephone poles, or in the tops of snags, the old, dead blackjacks that simply hadn't fallen down yet.
This was not 'farmland' as people in the north or east, or even south, were used to thinking of farming land. Even during the Dust Bowl, this part of Oklahoma had not been affected much, because it had not been cleared much. This was almost all grazing land, wild and hilly, overgrown with poison ivy, sumac, tangles of wild blackberry vines, and wild plum thickets with thorns as long as a thumb. The blackjack oak reigned supreme here; a tree that was as tough and hard to kill as the Osage that used to call this land their home. Blackjacks seldom grew tall enough to attract lightning, except on the sandstone ridges; their thick, rutted bark resisted penetration, and the tannin in their leaves and bark discouraged insects. Their allies were the woodpeckers, red-bellied and downy, who probed their bark for boring insects persistent enough to stomach a bellyful of bitter tannin. In return, they sheltered birds of all kinds all through the winter, with leaves that turned brown but didn't fall until they were pushed off in the spring by new growth, and branches that bent down toward the ground in a prickly snarled tangle that left protected, predator-free spaces around the trunks.
It was hard to penetrate country like this, on foot. Jennifer wished she knew someone out here with a horse- unfortunately, the owner of the property didn't have one. If groves of blackjacks didn't block your way, in the open spaces between the groves, huge thickets of wild plum made it impossible to pass, and where they didn't grow, vines of honeysuckle waited to trip you, and wild blackberry bushes were perfectly prepared to act like tangles of barbed wire.
It looked lovely from the car, but Jennifer was not looking forward to forcing her way in to where the burial ground lay. In all probability, if it had been raided, the farmer on whose land it lay would not know. Out here, people often didn't bother checking over rough parts of their wooded pasturage on foot, unless there was an animal missing. And even then-well, ranchers and farmers weren't dumb; they quickly adopted every technological aid they could afford and get their hands on, and these days there were plenty of folks who checked over their herds from treetop level, in ultralight aircraft. You could even do some limited herding with an ultralight, she'd been told. The cattle didn't much like their noisy two-stroke engines, and would often move away from a circling farmer.
/'// ask at the house, she thought with resignation, as she approached the tiny village of Rose (population less than one hundred), hut he'll probably just tell me I'd better check for myself.
Tom Ware was home, and getting ready to clean out his henhouse and spray for mites when she pulled into his driveway. And he said exactly what she thought he'd say.
'Shoot, haven't been anywhere near that section since deer season,' he replied, his eyes crinkling up with worry. He pushed his hat back with his thumb, and squinted in the direction of the burial ground, grimacing. 'I didn't put any cows out there this year; figured I'd let the ground rest for a year. Shoot, the Ancestors aren't gonna like it if someone's been gettin' in there.'
Ware was Osage, although his family had long since adopted Christianity. But even though he didn't follow the Old Ways, he respected them, and respected Jennifer and Mooncrow. Part of the reason he'd bought the ridge when it came up for sale years ago was to protect the old burial ground. While Jennifer shrugged, and made an answering grimace, he seemed to be making up his mind about something. 'Look,' he said, finally, 'it's not easy gettin' back in there. I just broke a ridin' mule last fall for deer huntin'. '
You want to saddle her up and use her, I reckon she could use the exercise.'
Well, that was going to make her job a hundred times easier!
'Thanks, Tom, I would really appreciate that,' she said gratefully. 'Just tell me where the tack is, I'm not so green I can't round her up and saddle her myself.'
Tom's eyes crinkled up again, but this time with amusement. 'I dunno about that, Miz Talldeer,' he said,
