Home Fires by Margaret Maron Page A

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 similar to the ones sprayed across the Crocker family cemetery. And while I still didn’t think A.K. had written either set, I could only pray that he’d spent the evening repenting in his room tonight and that he hadn’t stepped foot out of the house since he got home from court—that he hadn’t been out with any racist friends.

    “Back! Get back!” shouted the young man who’d rescued the pulpit. He was sweating profusely inside his heavy fire suit, but his eyes flashed with excitement as he ordered us further away. The interior was now such a fiery furnace that even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego couldn’t have rescued anything else from its depths.
    The rear of the building suddenly sagged and the rusty tin roof crashed in with sharp creaks and bangs. Geysers of sparks shot up twenty feet or more into the night sky, and the old dry wood beneath the tin burned like heart pine light-wood. Rafters pulled loose from their nails and sheets of tin buckled in the heat as more oxygen fed the flames. Clearly there was no saving any of the building and now the firemen turned their efforts to confining the fire to the structure itself as they drenched the scorched trees and bushes around the edges to keep them from catching.
    There was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn to the ground.
    More cars and trucks had pulled in, several of the arrivals members of this small congregation. Tears trickled down the face of a gray-haired black woman as she filmed the blaze with her video camera, but there were angry mutterings from others of the men and women standing apart from us whites.

7
    Some things have to be believed to be seen.
    —Park Methodist Church
    The fire was still smoldering when we left and the fire truck was packing up its gear, but people continued to arrive as word spread through the black community. One of the deacons took the big pulpit Bible from me and he thanked me for rescuing it. His wife smoothed the white lace runner. “My grandmother crocheted this when I was a little girl. Thank Jesus, you saved it.”
    Another member of the congregation smiled when she saw those stick-and-cardboard giveaway fans. “You don’t mean to say you walked through fire for these raggedy old things, do you?”
    “You just grab up whatever you see at a time like that,” I said, feeling as foolish as old Mrs. Crocker must have felt once the emergency was past and she realized she’d risked a neighbor’s life for a fifty-cent milk pitcher.
    “I hope you ain’t going to make a habit of that,” Daddy said gruffly as we walked back to the truck.
    “No, sir,” I said and squeezed his work-rough hand in mine.

    Neither of us had much to say as we drove home through the warm still night. The odor of smoke was on us both and every time I touched my hair where sparks had landed, a singed-feathers smell reached my nose. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the damage in a mirror.
    When we came to Old Forty-eight, Daddy turned in to a farm lane that led past Jap Stancil’s old house. It was dark and deserted, though there was a light on up at his daughter-in-law’s house where she still waited trial for shooting Mr. Jap’s son.
    A half-moon was up and the air was full of the summer sounds of frogs and cicadas and crickets. We crossed Possum Creek onto Knott land over a homemade bridge of logs and boards, then took a west-branching lane that led past a twenty-acre tobacco field. It must have been topped that afternoon, for the smell of green