“Good Christ,” I said. “Call town. I’m going over there.”
I ran downstairs and on outside and jumped into the pickup, spraying gravel out hard behind me entering the road. As I raced on toward the Goodnough place, I began to see bright flames through the second-story windows, where fire was already burning the old dry wallpaper in the empty bedrooms. Above the house there was yellow smoke rising in the updraft, and the whole place was lit up in that strange flicker of light so that the trees and the picket fence seemed to waltz on the brown grass. I braked the pickup beside the gate and ran up onto the back porch. Only of course the door was locked. Except I didn’t know that. They never lock their doors. What in Christ’s going on here? I ran off the porch around to the side to try that other door that opened onto the living room and found it locked too, solid and brick hard, one of those old-fashioned oak doors made before anyone heard of constructing doors with hollow cores. What in hell is this? So I was going to break the window, that south window in the living room, smash it in, and enter that way. And then I saw Edith.
Beyond the window Edith was sitting in the rocking chair. She was looking at me, sitting bolt upright and staring at me as if I had startled her, as if she thought I meant to cause her harm. I could see her eyes, her white face, and white hair. And then, while I stood there peering through the window, she did something that I will never forget, something that stopped me from kicking that window in and that—if you think about it—has altered everything else: she raised one hand from the arm of the rocking chair. That’s all she did. But do you understand what I’m saying? She lifted one pale blue-veined hand up from the rocking-chair arm, not to motion at me for help or even to show that I should hurry, but to warn me, to stop me. It was as if by that one open-faced hand, lifted so I could see it, that she was telling me to stay away. She didn’t want my help. She desired that I do . . . nothing.
And just then I understood that. I understood too, all at once, why the doors were locked when in eighty years they had no doubt never been locked before. It all came together for me as I stood there on that side porch watching her through the window. Gradually she relaxed back into the rocking chair; she lowered her hand and shut her eyes. Then I saw that Lyman was asleep on the bed just below me, his face turned toward the window, pale and speckled, and his bow tie dark against the white of his best shirt. So I stood there. I stood listening to my neighbors begin to cough while their living room filled with the smoke that was curling in past the closed stairway door and while the rooms over their heads burned on. And you can think what you will. Perhaps you would have been able to break that window and to drag those two people out into the yard, but I couldn’t. I didn’t. I had seen Edith Goodnough raise her hand. That’s all.
ONLY THEN, the fire department and the ambulance got there. With Bud Sealy, Holt County sheriff, in tow. Because the fire department and the ambulance and the sheriff all pride themselves on speed and dispatch. Besides, it is only a short seven-mile drive from town, and Mavis called them at my instruction almost as soon as we understood why the dog was howling. Call town, I said. And she did. So it was within fifteen minutes—no more than that—after Mavis made that hurried call from our house that the local boys in the red trucks arrived. Long before they raced into the yard I could hear the trucks out on the blacktop, the sirens in full alarm.
So I tried to keep them away. That’s true—I tried to prevent them from entering that burning house. Not that I blamed them; it was their job. But I fought them anyway on the porch in that flickering, waltzing light with the roar of burning timber above us, and they thought I was crazy when I hit Irv Jacobs as hard as I could in the face when he ran up onto the porch. He stumbled back off the steps.