Odd Thing

The burned world gets stranger. The past few days have been leaf-out, the trees exploding in green. Even on Mackletree, where the damage is severe, but the fire was a ground fire, the poplars and oaks are leafing. There will be little evidence of this conflagration by fall, some blackened tree trucks. Sumac and blackberry will be thick, and a burn always makes for great grass. My favorite burn, and I saw it repeated several times, was Big Roy's bean-field burn every spring. It was about an acre, I think I might have told this story to you before, I thought about it the other night, if so, I'll try and tell it better. True story. His property, to the north, ended at a pine-tree stand, and there was a fence there. Kudzu had climbed the fence and into the trees and there was a wall of kudzu walls as solid as a house. He grew bush beans, rather than climbers, Pink-Eye Purple Hulls, a wonderful bean, a cow-pea probably, African, maybe a hybrid, as I remember, from Texas. So many beans in Mississippi, little Lady Peas that would make you close your eyes and swoon, small yellow Butter Beans that grew just two to the pod, Black Crowder peas that produced a liquid that was ambrosial. Every spring, probably March, Roy would wait for the perfect day, a light breeze blowing from the south, call us all, maybe a dozen, I'd be the only white guy. He and I would start early, grilling ribs and various other things. Early afternoon, we'd all start a fire on the south end of the field, then run around to the north side. Fire would fucking fly across the field, burning old bean stalks, dead grass and weeds. It would hit the wall of kudzu with a palpable sound, and die. We were there to stamp out any embers that survived. Like the Kentucky Derby, or any horse race, a long build-up and a party after, but the event itself is over quickly. Then we'd eat, I'd bring over cases of home-brew, and the stories would start. They mostly talked about coon hunting, it was a passion with them, they raised the best hounds I've ever seen, Blue-Tics, Red-Bones, and these were dogs with voices. I let them hunt my bottomland, where there were many coons, so I could listen to their dogs while rocking on the porch. I went with them once and that was too much; they grew fond of me and I loved them all like favorite uncles, they taught me things. Other fires, on the positive side, every year in Colorado, we had to burn the irrigation ditch, but that was easy, nothing else grew anywhere close, so all you did was walk along the edge of the fire and sort of nudge it along. I didn't feel like writing tonight, checked the blog-site and realized I'd written more postings than any other month, and decided to make the number even. Memory is such a strange thing, how it reforms itself with time. I'm longer sure, anymore, the edges blurr, fractals of something else overlap. What Barnhart said about Bach. I have to work on this. The way the edges become important. I'm still alive, fuck the edges man, I live to find a place in the middle. I'm neither agile enough nor quick enough to stop anything happening, I might be able to get out of the way, even that's a close call, probably I'd watch the falling whatever. Nothing interests me more than a dead end. I like where we're going with this. I might have another agenda, for instance, someone could be paying by the word that I was writing you, it's possible, would that change anything? If you knew I was lying, maybe there had never been a fire. Maybe the fire was a construct, a conceit. There never was a fire, he only imagined a threat, we pat him on the hand, you know, treat him gently, he's a sensitive fellow, one of those guys that weeps at weddings.