The Dog
Bryce was nine when the grass fire caught him in March.
It was a Tuesday. The fourteenth. Burning season in the Flint Hills of Kansas, when every rancher in three counties sets fire to his pasture to burn off the old grass and the cedar trees, so the new bluestem comes up green and sweet for the cattle. You can see the smoke from fifty miles away. At night the hills glow orange like somebody spilled coals across them.
Everybody out here grows up with it. Nobody’s afraid of it. That’s the trouble.
The Hensley place, south of us, was burning that afternoon. A controlled burn. Or it was supposed to be.
The wind shifted around three-thirty. It came out of the southwest at thirty miles an hour, gusting forty, and that fire jumped the firebreak on the north side of Hensley’s pasture like it was nothing. It came across the county road and into the strip of tall grass between the road and our house.
I was at work. I’m the head cook at Elk Bend Elementary. I was scrubbing the steam table when the fire whistle went off on top of the town water tower.
Josh was at work too. At the feedlot east of town.
Bryce was home. With his sixteen-year-old cousin, Kaylee, babysitting. And our dog.
Kaylee told me the rest later. Sitting on a bench in the hallway of the burn unit at three in the morning, crying so hard she could barely breathe.
She saw the smoke coming over the hill. She grabbed Bryce by the arm and ran him out to her car. She did everything right. She got him buckled in the back seat. She was starting the engine.
And Bryce looked out the window and saw Biscuit.
Biscuit is a yellow lab mix. Seven years old. We got her from the shelter in Emporia the year Bryce was two. She sleeps at the foot of his bed. She walks him to the school bus every morning and is waiting at the end of the driveway every afternoon.
She was standing in the backyard, by the fence. Barking at the smoke. Not moving. The way dogs do when they’re scared and don’t know which way to run.
The fire was coming across the pasture behind her. Maybe a hundred yards away. Moving fast.
Bryce unbuckled his seat belt. He opened the car door. Kaylee screamed his name.
He ran back for the dog.
He got to her. He got his arms around her. He was trying to drag her toward the car, and she was fighting him, the way scared dogs do, and the wind gusted.
The fire came through the tall grass along our back fence in about four seconds.
Kaylee said it sounded like a train. She said the smoke came down so thick she couldn’t see the house, couldn’t see the yard, couldn’t see anything. She was screaming Bryce’s name. She was calling 911 with her hands shaking so hard she dropped her phone twice.
Two of our volunteer firemen carried him out of the smoke.
Dale Prather and Mike Danner. They were on the brush truck, the first one out of the Elk Bend station. They’d been fighting the Hensley fire for an hour already when the call came about a child at our place.
They came across the pasture in the brush truck with the pump going. They found Bryce face down in the grass by the back fence. He was lying on top of Biscuit. Covering her with his own body.
Dale picked him up. Mike grabbed the dog. They ran.
Burns on both arms and across his chest.
Second degree, mostly. Some third, on his left forearm, where he’d had it wrapped around Biscuit’s neck. The fire had gone right through his sweatshirt.
Biscuit had singed fur and a burned paw. That was all. He’d covered her that well.
The ambulance from Cottonwood took him to the hospital in Emporia. Emporia took one look and put him on a helicopter to Wichita.
I got to Emporia twenty minutes after the helicopter left. I stood in the parking lot of Newman Regional in my school cafeteria apron and watched it get smaller and smaller in the sky, heading south.
Chapter Two: Eleven Days
Eleven days in the burn unit in Wichita.
The burn center at the big hospital on St. Francis Street. Sixth floor. The nurses there are the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life and also the toughest. They have to be. Burn care hurts. Every single day, they have to take off the bandages and clean the wounds and scrub away the dead skin, and the kids scream, and the nurses keep going.
Bryce screamed the first three days. Then he stopped screaming and just cried. Then, by the end of the first week, he didn’t even cry. He just held my hand and squeezed it so hard my fingers went numb.
He had skin grafts on the fifth day. On his left forearm, where the burns were deepest. They took skin from his thigh and laid it over the burns like patches on a quilt.
The surgeon was a tall woman named Dr. Okafor, with gray braids and reading glasses on a chain. She sat with me in the family lounge afterward and drew me a picture on a napkin of how the graft would take.
“He’s going to heal,” she said. “He’s going to have scars. He’s going to need compression garments for a year, maybe two. Physical therapy, so the skin doesn’t tighten up and limit his movement. But he’s going to heal.”
I put my face in my hands.
“He ran back for his dog,” I said. “He’s nine years old and he ran back into a fire for his dog.”
Dr. Okafor was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve been doing this twenty-two years,” she said. “Most of the kids I see got burned doing something stupid. Fireworks. Gasoline. Climbing a power pole.” She put her hand on my arm. “Your son got burned doing something brave. That doesn’t hurt any less. But it’s different.”
Josh drove back and forth every night so he wouldn’t lose his job at the feedlot.
Two hours each way. Elk Bend to Wichita. He’d work his shift at the feedlot from five in the morning until three in the afternoon, feeding eight thousand head of cattle, and then drive straight to Wichita in his work clothes. He’d sit with Bryce from five until eleven. Then he’d drive home and sleep for four hours and do it all over again.
The feedlot only gave him two days off. They’d already lost three hands that winter and couldn’t spare him.
“If I miss more, they’ll replace me,” he said. “And then we lose the insurance.”
So he drove. Every night. Eleven nights. Almost five thousand miles.
I stayed in Wichita. I slept in the chair next to Bryce’s bed. The school gave me two weeks of emergency leave. Mrs. Abernathy, the principal, drove down on the third day with a bag of my clothes and a cooler full of food the lunch ladies had sent.
I took one look at that cooler and cried. Turkey sandwiches. Chicken salad. Chocolate chip cookies. Three of them had written notes on paper napkins. We love you, Cass. Hang in there. Bryce is a hero.
Back home in Elk Bend, the town held a chili supper.
I didn’t know about it until it was over. Josh told me on the phone the next night, standing in the hospital parking garage.
The fire department organized it. In the station bay, where they park the trucks. They pulled the trucks out onto the apron and set up folding tables inside. The Methodist ladies made chili. The Baptist ladies made cornbread. The American Legion donated pie.
There was a coffee can at the door. A big red Folgers can with a piece of paper taped on the front. FOR BRYCE WELLER. Somebody’s daughter had drawn a picture of a fire truck and a dog on it with markers.
Three thousand, one hundred dollars. In one night.
Elk Bend has six hundred and forty people. Most of them ranchers or feedlot hands or school employees or retired. Three thousand, one hundred dollars is a lot of money in Elk Bend.
“Rodney counted it,” Josh said on the phone. “He’s the treasurer. He said he’d put it in the department account and write us a check.”
“Rodney?” I said.
“He was there all night,” Josh said. “He took the door.”
Rodney is Josh’s older brother.
We came home on the twelfth day. Bryce rode in the back seat with his arms wrapped in white gauze, propped up on pillows. Biscuit was waiting at the end of the driveway, the way she always did, with a bandage on her front paw.
She saw the car and went crazy. Barking and wagging and running in circles. Bryce was crying before we even stopped.
“Can I hold her?” he asked. “Mom, please. Can I?”
The nurse had said no pressure on the grafts. I didn’t care. I got Bryce out of the car and sat him on the porch steps, and Josh brought Biscuit over, and she put her head in Bryce’s lap and lay there, perfectly still, for an hour.
She didn’t jump on him once. She knew.
Chapter Three: The Porch
Two weeks later, Rodney stood on my porch with his cap in his hands.
It was a Thursday afternoon. I was home with Bryce. He was in the living room on the couch, watching cartoons, with his arms propped on pillows. Biscuit was lying on the floor beside him.
I heard Rodney’s pickup in the driveway. A white Ford with a Elk Bend Volunteer Fire Department decal on the back window. I went out on the porch.
He got out. He didn’t come up the steps. He stood at the bottom of them, in his feed store cap and his canvas coat, and took his cap off and held it in both hands. 