No volcanoes here, maybe, but plenty of carbon and flame, plenty of fire worship. Dawn-risers, field burners, Dan’s people, his valley. They burned their fields from low to high, whole families in long pants and steel-toed boots, up and across, up and across, rubbing their eyes from neighbors’ smoke. The valley was wide and dry. The Mormora Mountains east, black cliffs without foothills, mile-high curtains for keeping out witnesses. Keeping out the sun, too, till long after daybreak.

“Fucking’s the crux,” he said. “Fucking’s the beginning. Fucking’s the end.”

“Amen.”

“I do love saying it.”

“Say it all you need to.”

From the oak, all the valley spooled out. Fields burned across its rises and falls. The inheritors of the plain—just specks from here, skittering at the ends of plumes—carried hoes, rakes, and gas cans from their barns to their lowest fences. Ginny and Dan didn’t need to see it close. Far off was fine. Their neighbors uncoiled the hose, paid it out across hard pack, turned spigots on full. The water sputtered then flowed before the weed burners were lit. Last year’s grass was dry and matted. Burned fast and hot with the smallest puff of breeze. The first hills, each year, are a quarter burned before the sun tops the Saint’s Head. Neighbors wave shovels and rakes across creeks to neighbors who wave shovels and rakes. For a hundred years now they’ve marched up and across the fields herding fires. Up and across toward the knobs of knobby hills. For a hundred more they will stamp the flames with their boots on top, then walk down again and start another, till the valley smolders black. Kids will always jump the fire lines. Parents will forever scold—such tedious work—and hot as hell even in morning. These people will drink from hoses and creeks as smoke rises between hills, mixing with sticky spring shoots and new buds, dung on skin, gritty teeth gritty. Tongues and lips will spit as a plane flies over. The plane is counting fires all over the region, this flight from Elkins to Romeo. The commissioner’s report is due Monday, saying, “Burning two weeks near St. Cecilia, mostly small livestock operations, sheep, cattle, and a few equestrian. Two hundred to two thousand acres is average. It will soon be too hot, dry, and foolish for burning. Heat lightning will soon decide ignition: spike down after midnight, skimming west to east over hills and hills, farms and ranches, forking down from time to time to touch off neglected fields, a barn roof dried for decades, an unfortunate home, then exit, the innocent culprit, twenty thousand feet above the highest ridges, off across the Reservations.”

“Except that no goddamned commissioner talks like that,” she said.