gonna cost you.”
“Durn them boys,” said Daddy, shaking his head.
“Could’ve been a lot worse,” Peacock said. “If she’d fallen on her face, we’d have to make a whole new head. You can’t never get a new nose to look exactly right.”
As they continued to talk, I wandered around in the twilight to read the names of Crockers long gone. Old Mr. Ham Crocker had been eighty-eight. His sister Florence, laid to rest here around the turn of the century, “died a maid of 14 yrs., 3 mos., 24 days.” And there was Daddy’s great-uncle Yancy Knott “and also his beloved wife Lulalia Crocker Knott,” both dead of typhoid in 1902.
Gardenia bushes had been planted on either side of the gate and they were in full bloom. Their heavy sweet fragrance filled the air and hummingbird moths were busily working the fleshy white blossoms.
Lightning bugs drifted on the still June air. Mosquitoes, too, I realized, and slapped at one that was biting my arm.
Suddenly the quiet evening was interrupted by a pager on Rudy Peacock’s belt. He squinted at the tiny screen in the failing light, then strode across the cemetery to his truck, pulled out a cell phone and punched in some numbers.
“Where?” we heard him ask urgently. The next minute he was stepping up into the cab.
“Sorry, Mr. Kezzie, Miss Deb’rah, but I got to go. I’m on the volunteer fire department and we just got a call- out. Sounds pretty bad.”
“Where?” asked Daddy, his long legs covering the ground between them.
Already we could hear sirens on the other side of the woods.
“Starling’s Crossroads,” said Rudy Peacock as he swung himself into the seat and switched on the flashing red light suctioned to his dashboard. “The church yonder.”
6
“It must be Balm of Gilead,” I said as we sped through the lane behind Rudy Peacock. “Where that Mr. Freeman preaches.”
“Yep,” said Daddy.
Despite the warm evening, we had the pickup windows rolled tight to keep from breathing in the clouds of dust Peacock’s truck was kicking up. It was like driving through fog and Daddy kept his beams on low so he could see the way.
When we reached the blacktop, our windows came down and we heard sirens converging from all directions. We followed as Mr. Peacock made another quick turn onto a clay road with deep, sunbaked ruts that hadn’t been scraped since the last heavy rain. A car was ahead of him and another turned in behind us. The red clay made it even dustier than the lane we’d just come from, and at that speed we were jounced around so hard that we had to shout to hear each other. Between rising dust and falling darkness, it was hard to make out the old converted gas station until we were right on it and could see the front lit up in kaleidoscopic flashes from the red lights in a couple of volunteers’ pickup trucks.
Flames were already jetting through the back left corner of the roof and Daddy pulled in behind Peacock just as the West Colleton volunteer fire truck swung in next to the building itself.
Ignoring Daddy’s command to stay in the truck, I jumped out to see if I could help salvage anything from inside.
Like hundreds of small two-pump gas stations built in the 1940s, this one had the usual low-pitched A-line roof that extended out over a narrow pull-through to cover the gas pumps plus a smaller pump for kerosene, none of which was still here.
A fireman called out, “Reckon they’s still any gas in them old tanks?” and I hoped Daddy had heard and that he’d stand well back in case something set off the tanks that were probably still there beneath the ground.
Two barred windows flanked the center door, and I followed a burly volunteer in protective gear into the large open space once lined with shelves of canned goods, sugar, flour and cereal, with room for a counter to one side, a drink box at the front and a potbellied stove in the middle. A narrow door at the rear would have provided cross- ventilation in summer.
Now the single room held ten or twelve long wooden pews, an old-fashioned upright piano and a homemade wooden pulpit, and the cross-ventilation fed the flames blazing in the far left corner. I saw that one of the pews was ablaze on its own in the middle of the room, but what with the heavy pulpit Bible and grabbing up anything else I could lay my hands on, I was too busy to think just then what that might mean.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!” cried the man with the pulpit on his shoulders, but there were hymn books scattered along the pews—how could this impoverished congregation buy new ones? And fans. No air-conditioning here—I had to save the fans. Sparks showered down, stinging my bare arms.
Gasping for air, choking on smoke, I heaped hymnals and fans on top of the huge pulpit Bible and stumbled through the door just as rafters began to crash down behind me.
I was no sooner out into the fresh air than Daddy grabbed me roughly as if I were ten years old again and he meant to shake some sense into me.
“Don’t you never do nothing like that again as long as you live,” he raged as he brushed at the singed places where burning sparks had fallen onto my hair.
Between coughs to clear my lungs and trying to assure him that I wasn’t hurt, I almost didn’t see those ugly words spray-painted in dark green across the front of the white clapboard structure.
As soon as I did see them though, I knew that this was no accidental electrical fire. Those letters were too
