There was a great crash and the bedroom breathed out, coughed its foul hot air at us as the roof behind the door collapsed. Now the sparks were swirling bright in the black, driven by new air. Even through the bitter soot I could smell the burning of flesh, the men’s or perhaps my own, and could no longer tell my pain from theirs. I was wreathed in choking darkness now, not smoke in air but tiny gasps of air in solid smoke.

Yes, it was proper to risk my living body for his dead one. This was no decent cremation.

I forced myself to go to where the bedroom door was still breathing sparks. There, by the doorway, I found the bare foot, clutched at the shin and knew it to be my father’s. I crawled the length of the body and had him by the armpits. It was no more than three feet to the doorway but it felt impossible. The body seemed many times heavier now, but I had air and I was not done. I screwed the charred rug in my fist and hauled at it until I was moving, and him with me. An inch, a foot, a yard and nothing to go by but sound. I clenched my teeth against the burning. Now I was him, I was my father.

Raised up on one knee, I felt the skin tear away from my forearms again as I worked him along the floor. The end of the rug, the lip of the doorway, a threshold board. One more heave and the air changed, both hotter and colder but offering breath at least. I could see nothing, and I did not see that the bedroom had ceased to exist, was now a pile of charcoaled wreckage three feet below. We fell through an instant of clear air and landed in the ashes and embers.

The heat was worse here, a furnace scattered on the earth, and a swirl of ash seared my lungs while the coals hissed at my legs.

A shout, a clatter of timbers being thrown aside, and the grip of strong arms once again. They disentangled my body from my father’s and carried him away. I was borne aloft and saw blackness and red furnaces, the starry sky and the pale glow of the sandy ground between tussocks.

~

I shook them off the moment they placed me down. It was Maynard and Slack, both eager to be gone anyway. Four men were missing, thought to be still inside; Charles Peterson, the invalid, was among them. Too slow, poor man.