Tears rose in my eyes and I closed the door. For several minutes I could not speak a word. I stared at the floor, horrified at what I had done. The sound of my own breath going in and out filled the room. I closed my eyes and turned my face upward, so wrought with anguish at my own being, my many faults, that no prayer came to me at all.
And then I heard, “Haff. Haffa. Ahah! Mama, hap!” I opened my eyes to see my Dorothy, her face an open display of shock and disbelief. On a low stool, a candlestick had lost its taper. Dolly’s wee skirts and petticoats smoldered and exploded into tongues of orange flame. Her face at that moment registered only surprise.
I fell upon Dorothy, tearing the flaming cloth with my hands. I crushed her to me, pressing the fiery ash against my body, setting alight my apron, my house cap, and my skirt. Dorothy wailed now, terrified at the fire as well as what I was doing. I flung burning fabric away and crushed her at last against the floor with my own body, forming my arms against her tiny ones to smother every last bit of flame.
I felt more than saw my other children, my men, America, all standing, helpless, watching, chasing and stamping cinders of burning cloth. I stammered out, “Get—water.” I rolled off Dorothy and she let out a wail that came from her soul’s core. I stood her up and pulled again at layer after layer of burned petticoat and stockings, until, even as she wailed, half the poor mite was naked before us all, pink and scorched. Only then did I breathe. She had lost most of her hair back of her ears on the whole expanse of her head. The skin there was blistered and red. Her face, thankfully, untouched and whole. Her legs had blistered in rising whitish lumps, though her back seemed unscathed, for the fire had stopped at the sash of her pinafore. “Oh, baby,” I said. “My baby. Whatever possessed you to step over a burning candle?”
Dorothy cried. It would not have mattered if she could have explained her action. Children did things because they knew no fear, they had no judgment, and they cannot look forward in time, not even one minute. I bathed her backside with cool water cupped in my hands and she cried all the harder. Gulping air, at last she let me bind her sore legs with clean linen bandages. I held her in my arms and rocked our bodies together, singing “O Waly, Waly,” until by the second verse, she slept.
I shook my head and said, “I could not move fast enough.”
August said to me, “Ressie, you were like a wild animal. You saved her life.”
America said, “Now she is sleeping. Will you let me clean your wounds?”
My hands hurt mercilessly. I had blisters, too, though the tops of several of them had already opened and torn away; they tormented me most thinking that my babe felt such burning pain. As America dabbed at my hands and face with wet cloths, I felt every sting as if it were Dorothy’s. I asked, “Have I my hair?”
“Yes, in the back. Poor thing, the front is gone. Also your eyebrows and lashes. They will grow.”
“I have to go to town on Monday to appear before the magistrate.” I sighed. “I will look a madwoman even if I wear a new cap, pulled low. If I must, I will powder my face. All I care is that Dorothy is well.”
That night Dorothy glowed with fever as did I. In the morning, I bathed her with woolen pads soaked in cool water before the fire in my room. She cried as if I tortured her, revived enough to eat, cried more in distress, then slept again. August was away from the house early in the morning, but did not tell me where he was going. America and I tried to salvage what could be had of my clothing, for not a scrap would I waste. All of it would make something, even if it were a pot holder. I sat at length and studied the stool where the candle had been. I wanted not so much to place blame for the accident, but to prevent its occurring again. All I could figure out was that someone had moved the candlestick from its usual place on the mantel to get at the box on which it sat, and had not put it back.
I looked inside the box. Tobacco. Perhaps August had reached into it, and not thinking about the whimsical nature of children, had busied himself with a pipe, even lighting it with the candle, and set it by his feet on the stool. Dorothy had been used to playing upon the steps and jumping from the second one to the hearthstone. With the stool there, she may have thought it nothing new, or perhaps thought she could jump high enough to get over it. Had he been so careless as to endanger my child?
Just the day before, when she was playing at dancing, I had said to her, “Oh, my, how high you jump! Look at my Dolly fly up, as a wee jumping jack.” Perhaps she thought she really could fly. There was no end to the guilt I owned this day. If my precious Dolly should die from this, I thought, I shall throw myself into the sea.
*