flat, seeing, like lightning, the flames racing across our cinder-dry fields, over our house, through our young orchard, across the crisped grass of Desolation Valley, leaving nothing but a smudge on the sky and hundreds of miles of scorched earth. It had happened other places in dry years.
I skidded to a stop in the edge of the flames, and, for lack of anything else I could do, I started stamping the small licking tongues of flame and kicking dirt over them.
“Barney!” I heard Father’s shout. “Here’s a shovel!”
I knuckled the smoke tears out of my eyes and stumbled to meet him as he ran toward me. “Keep it from going up the hill!” And he sped for the weed-grown edge of the alfalfa field.
Minutes later I plopped sand over the last smoking clump of grass and whacked it down with the back of my shovel. We were lucky. The fire area was pretty well contained between the rise of the hill and the foot of the field. I felt soot smudge across my face as I backhanded the sweat from my forehead. Father was out of my sight around the hill. Hefting the shovel, I started around to see if he needed my help. There was another plume of smoke! Alerted, I dropped the point of my shovel. Then I let it clatter to the ground as I fell to my knees.
A blackened hand reached up out of a charred bundle! Fingers spread convulsively, then clenched! And the bundle rolled jerkily.
“Father!” I yelled. “Father!” And grabbed for the smoldering blackness. I stripped away handsful of the scorching stuff and, by the time Father got there, my hands were scorching, too.
“Careful! Careful!” Father cautioned. “Here, let me.” I moved back, nursing my blistered fingers. Father fumbled with the bundle and suddenly it ripped from one end to the other and he pulled out, like an ear of earn from its shuck, the twisting body of a person!
“He’s badly burned,” said Father. “Face and hands. Help me lift him.” I helped Father get the body into his arms. He staggered and straightened. “Go tell your mother to brew up all the tea we have in the house- strong!”
I raced for the house, calling to Mama as soon as I saw her anxious face, “Father’s all right! I’m all right! But we found someone burned! Father says to brew up all our tea-strong!”
Mama disappeared into the cabin and I heard the clatter of stove lids. I hurried back to Father and hovered anxiously as he laid his burden down on the little front porch, Carefully we peeled off the burned clothes until finally we had the body stripped down and put into an old nightshirt of Father’s. The fire hadn’t got to his legs nor to his body, but his left shoulder was charred-and his face! And arms! A tight cap thing that crumpled to flakes in our hands had saved most of his hair.
Father’s mouth tightened. “His eyes,” he said. “His eyes.”
“Is he dead?” I whispered. Then I had my answer as one blackened hand lifted and wavered. I took it carefully in mine, my blisters drawing as I closed my fingers. The blackened head rolled and the mouth opened soundlessly and closed again, the face twisting with pain.
We worked over the boy-maybe some older than I-all afternoon. I brought silty half bucket after half bucket of water from the dipping place and strained it through muslin to get the silt out. We washed the boy until we located all his burns and flooded the places with strong cold tea and put tea packs across the worst ones. Mama worked along with us until the burden of the baby made her breathless and she had to stop.
She had given Merry a piece of bread and put her out in the little porch-side pen when we brought the boy in. Merry was crying now, her face dabbled with dirt, her bread rubbed in the sand. Mama gathered her up with an effort and smiled wearily at me over her head, “I’d better let her cry a little more, than her face will be wet enough for me to wash it clean!”
I guess I got enough tea on my hands working with the boy that my own burns weren’t too bad. Blisters had formed and broken, but I only needed my right thumb and forefinger bandaged with strips from an old petticoat of Mama’s. We left Mama with the boy, now clean and quiet on my cot, his face hidden under the wet packs, and went slowly down the path I had run so many times through the afternoon. We took our buckets on past the dipping place where a palm-sized puddle was all that was left of the water and retraced our steps to where the fire had been.
“A meteor?” I asked, looking across the ashy ground. “I always thought they came only at night.”
“You haven’t thought the matter over or you’d realize that night and day has nothing to do with meteors,” said Father. “Is meteor the correct term?”
“How funny that that fellow happened to be at the exact place at the exact time the piece of the meteor hit here,” I said, putting Father’s question away for future reference.
“‘Odd’ is a better word,” Father corrected. “Where did the boy come from?”
I let my eyes sweep the whole wide horizon before us. No one on foot and alone could ever have made it from any where! Where had he come from? Up out of the ground? Down out of the sky?
“I guess he rode in on the meteor,” I said, and grinned at the idea. Father blinked at me, but didn’t return my smile.
“There’s what set the fire,” he said. We plopped through feathery ashes toward a black lump of something.
“Maybe we could send it to a museum,” I suggested as we neared it. “Most meteors burn up before they hit the ground.”
Father pushed the chunk with his foot. Flame flared briefly from under it as it rocked, and a clump of grass charred, the tips of the blades twisting and curling as they shriveled.
“Still hot,” said Father, hunkering down on his heels beside it. He thumped it with a piece of rock. It clanged. “Metal!” His eyebrows raised. “Hollow!”
Carefully we probed with sticks from the hillside and thumped with rocks to keep our hands from the heat. We sat back and looked at each other. I felt a stir of something like fear inside me.
“It’s-it’s been made!” I said. “It’s a long metal pipe or something! And I’ll bet he was inside it! But how could he have been? How could he get so high in the sky as to come down like that? And if this little thing has been made, what was the big thing it came from?”
“I’ll go get water,” said Father, getting up and lifting the buckets. “Don’t burn yourself any more.”
