The day we lost the barn

I was five years old. So was David. We both attended Mrs. Benford’s afternoon kindergarten. My mother was a nurse at Dr. Gulick’s office in town, three miles away. So, mornings my mother needed a sitter. She paid David’s mother, Mrs. Draper, to watch us both at our home on Batavia Road.

David and I pinched a box of matches in the kitchen when Mrs. Draper wasn’t looking. I can’t say it wasn’t my idea. I don’t recall for sure, but I would have known where to find the box.

We first tried burning a bit of the front lawn on the west side of the old two-story Georgian farmhouse. Still in shadow, the dew had yet to dwindle. The wet grass refused to yield.

This wasn’t much fun. We almost quit.

But my parents had a barn.  We used to have a barn then, a small barn. My dad kept a few sheep in the adjacent corral. In the barn, he kept hay.

David and I discovered that hay was an excellent combustible, and, from the perspectives of five-year-olds, the barn was far from the dining room where Mrs. Draper was doing some ironing. We had the perfect place to play with matches.

Children can be remarkably clever and incredibly stupid at the same time. We never wanted to burn down the barn. We loved the barn. It had a loft with all sorts of gadgets and devices.  On the workbench were not only an assortment of hand tools but also old electronic devices my oldest brother Richard had acquired at an Army surplus store in Vacaville. The loft was another great place to play but not with matches.

We started below in the corral. First, we lit one straw.  That’s all.  Just one. It burned beautifully. I think David held it and I lit the match, but it might have been the other way around. It was so impressive that we had to try it again.

Fire is fascinating. It may be the most fascinating thing humans have ever played with. We like it so much that we have invented bombs dedicated to setting stuff on fire. Napalm will alight anything it finds—homes, gardens, pigs, goats, people. You name it. I know because I saw the Vietnamese people burning. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley showed them to me a few years later on the NBC Nightly News.

Humans have even invented matches so powerful that, if they set them all off at once, the whole world would burn. Although we were only five years old then, we already knew something about atomic bombs. In kindergarten we had a drill to hide under our desks to protect ourselves from a nuclear holocaust.

We also saw exactly what an exploding atomic bomb looked like. They showed it on television many times. A great mushroom cloud incinerated a huge something-or-other. We never got to see what the something-or-other had been.

At about that age, I used to have a dream about waking up in a desolate landscape. Everybody was dead except my faithful dog Paddy, a wire-haired terrier. It was awful seeing such a mess. But the dream had its good points. The local candy store in town always survived somehow, so I had all the candy I could ever wish for. Paddy and I had to walk into town to get it, but even a dream may demand a little effort.

You can easily see why a young boy might become interested in learning about fire. By itself fire is captivating. Being in the news all the time, along with warnings about the Red Menace, the space race, and what have you, fire supercharged the imagination.

“Never0 play with matches!” I must have heard that a hundred times from my parents, older brothers, and Smokey the Bear. My dad even had a little magnetic cigarette extinguisher in the shape of Smokey’s head. He kept Smokey’s head on the dashboard of his 1949 Ford pickup. He would stub out his Camels just behind Smokey’s little cap.

It is not that Smokey’s admonition meant nothing to us. We took it to heart.  Really. But Smokey’s reverent and truthful warning had to compete against an agent that triggered something deep in the brain.

If Mrs. Draper had known what we were up to, she would have put a stop to it in a jiffy. But she had the ironing to do, and we were both pretty good kids. I think Mrs. Draper trusted me to keep her David out of trouble. After all, I was an altar boy, and the year before honored with the task of carrying the baby Jesus to his creche at the midnight mass in Saint Peter’s.

Whatever our reverence might have been, two straws were never going to satisfy two five-year-old boys. Fortunately, David and I only had a small box of little wooden matches. Give us something bigger and we might have blown up half the county.

I remember the box. Blue Diamond Matches. Red and Blue on the top and bottom. On the sides two strips of dark grey abrasive. Even a four-year-old could light a fire with a Blue Diamond Match. We had no problem.

We pulled together a little pile of dry hay just under the lean-to roof attached to the side of the barn by the corral. With a single match we lit the pile and watched gleefully as the flames consumed the chaff. What a triumph!

After that, we were satisfied. It burnt away, and then we stomped on the ashes to make sure the fire was out.

But there it was plain as day. The evidence of our misdemeanor was bound to be discovered later when Dad came home and fed the sheep. Something had to be done.

Well, there was plenty of hay all over. We did what criminals have always done. We hid our tracks. We covered up the ashes with fresh hay. It looked totally innocent to us.

As the barn had served us so well, we thought to make a morning of it. We went straight up into the loft to play with my brother’s gadgets and anything else of interest we could rummage.

But after ten minutes or so, we were bored and agreed it was time to go back to the house. Too late. The first steps of the stairs were ablaze, the heat rising up the stairwell intense.

I remembered a loose floorboard on the opposite side of the loft. We could lift it up and jump down onto a table below. I hoped it would be safe. It wasn’t. The entire barn below was burning. We were trapped.

In my mind came a vision. I was looking down from above like an angel. I saw my mother combing through the ashes and finding the skeletons of two little boys. I could not let that happen.

Unbeknownst to us, Mrs. Draper had noticed the burning barn and our absence. She had already called the fire department and my mother. My mother fled from the doctor’s office to save me. In her station wagon she raced out old Highway 40 and passed the fire trucks on the way. When motivated, she was really something.

But if David and I had waited for the arrival of the fire trucks and my mother, we would not have lived to tell the tale. The flames had already consumed the stairs and were creeping across the loft floor. The floor might collapse at any moment.

A screen window on the west end of the loft offered our only hope of escape. The rusty old screen gave way promptly as soon as I assaulted it with a hammer. But the jump down was terrifying. From the window ledge to the ground measured twelve feet if not more. For a five-year-old, that’s scary high. Worse, my dad had coils and coils of barbed wire stored immediately below the window. We would be jumping to our doom.

But we could not wait for someone to bring a ladder. I begged David to jump first. He took one look and refused. I knew that we both had to jump. I was afraid that, if I went first, he would not follow. We’ll probably get hurt jumping, I told him, but we’ll certainly die in the fire. I could be articulate for a five-year-old.

“You go first!” David taunted.

“Alright. But you have to promise that you’ll jump too.”

“I will if you do.”

I could see the barbed wire below. I calculated that if I vaulted horizontally hard enough, I might land on the other side of the wire. I launched, landed, and rolled. Not a scratch. I didn’t feel a thing. I was alive. I got up immediately and hollered “jump.”

As promised David jumped and landed in the same spot. He too got up unscathed.

Mrs. Draper ran up and hugged us both. We cried and cried. It was probably the best cry I ever had.

When my mother arrived, I continued the jag. I probably could have stopped crying by then, but I had enough presence of mind to remember that my father still believed in corporal punishment. So, I kept it up until after he arrived and I was certain his belt would remain on his trousers.

By that time, the firefighters were already dousing the flames, which had even jumped to the corner of the roof of my home.

I attended Mrs. Benford’s kindergarten that afternoon. David stayed home. My mother found a new sitter the next day. A nice Catholic woman with a round face and a cheerful demeanor.

From that day to this, I have taken great care to manage vigilantly any fire under my supervision. One mistake was enough to promote a life-time appreciation of fire’s power to propagate calamity.