I’ve got to get out of here.
I climb down the ladder and scoop Houdini up under my arm, carry the poor sick dog uncomplaining, struggle him up to the loft and lay him down. I kick out one of the small windows easily, one fake karate-chop kick with the strong side of my body. Before I can think about it too much I toss the dog out the window, and he barks as he falls end over end, his body catching as I had planned it on the bank of shrubs below. He scrabbles on the uneven surface of the hedgerow, tumbles forward and lands with a whomp in a patch of mud. Looks up at me, confused.
I toss a salute down to the dog, light another match from the matchbook, and set the hay on fire.
*
It happens a lot faster than I thought it would, old dry hay and wooden timbers, much faster than I in my rashness and desperation had really contemplated. One small fire touching off new small fires in all directions, small fires growing together and becoming large, dancing up, reaching for the rafters. I retreat, stumble backward, miss the ladder and roll down from the loft onto the hard dirt floor, landing flat, flipping over and moving as fast as I can away from the growing fire up there, my black shoes pulling through the barn-floor mud.
Immediately I regret my plan. I crouch in a corner staring up in horror, watching the burning embers float over the edge of the loft, float and then rain. The fire is literally raining down, sending sparks and small twirling pieces of hay over the edges of the loft. The black and gray of the midnight barn has erupted in red, and after all this was a mistake—better to starve and die in the barn than burn. I race to the door and pound on it hard, the heavy wooden beams thudding against my fist, while the floor of the barn turns to fire all around me, new gouts of flame, now it’s like hell’s floor, patches of burning ground on all sides.
The heat is crowding in, splinters tumbling down from the roof, the roof beginning to crack above me. If it’s going to work, if anyone is going to see it, they’ll see it now—it will get no brighter, I don’t see how. It’s a furnace in here, I’m here in a furnace. In the last instant, I grab like a maniac at the handle of the barn door, pulling, knowing it’s useless but pulling, and the pain on my hands is instant and intense and scalding, and I hear this weird distant screaming—a screech, a call, a cry. Is it me? Is that me screaming? I think that it is, I think I’m screaming.
3.
There is no strange swim back up from unconsciousness this time, no sneaky dreams of Nico. I’m just awake, looking from left to right in a small warm room. I’m on a bed. The room is beige, off-white. A wooden door. The bed has a quilt on it, lovely and plain.
The first thing I do is cough. Taste smoke and ash in my throat. I cough again, louder, violently, my body buckling upward, cough so hard and so loud that my stomach starts to ache. When I have recovered, managed to take three normal slow breaths, I realize that I am still dressed, T-shirt and shoes and long pants. Fully dressed under the covers like a little kid whose parents carried him, sleeping, in from the car.
I cough one more time, look around for a glass of water and find a pitcher and a cup. I pour myself a cup and drink it, then pour the rest and drink that, too. It’s a bedroom. Wooden bed frame and wooden nightstand and four undecorated walls. Plain white muslin curtains, pulled back from the single plain window and tied with twine. I can taste smoke inside my lungs, I feel heavy with it, like there was a fire inside my mouth and esophagus that was doused with thick wet foam. There is also a new nasty pain on the palms of my hands—I look down and see that both hands are thickly bandaged, mummy hands. Beneath the bandages, they burn and sting. I groan, try to roll my body slightly, one way and then the other, shift out of the discomfort. It feels like I should probably be dead by now.
When my grandfather said “Dig a hole” he was in hospice, at the very, very end, the absolute last thing he said before he died, the last event of his life. I was sitting beside him waiting, as we had been waiting for months, more or less. Grandfather’s breaths rolling in and out on rusty wheels, in and out, each one emerging with more difficulty than the last. His eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, his cheeks hollowed out, body twitching. Neither one of us were churchgoers, but I felt that as the responsible adult I needed to ask: did he want me to get someone? “Someone?” he said, even though he knew what I meant, but I pressed on, fulfilling my obligations, trying to get everything down according to procedure. “Someone,” I said. “A priest. To do last rites.” He laughed, with effort, a low, gasping chuckle. “Henry,” he said. “Dig a hole.”