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.
Rodney Weller is forty-four. Six years older than Josh. He runs the John Deere parts counter at the implement dealer in Cottonwood. He’s been a volunteer fireman in Elk Bend for twenty-two years and the department treasurer for nine.
He’s a careful man. Quiet. Keeps his books in a ledger in a three-ring binder, in pencil, because pencil you can erase. He’s never been married. He lives alone in our father-in-law’s old house on the edge of town.
He looked at the porch boards. He didn’t look at me.
“Cass,” he said.
“Rodney.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Healing,” I said. “Slowly. He’s got PT twice a week in Emporia.”
He nodded. He kept turning his cap around in his hands.
“The board moved the supper money to the truck fund, Cass,” he said.
I didn’t understand at first.
“What?”
“The chili supper money. The three thousand, one hundred.” He swallowed. “The board voted Tuesday night. To put it in the truck fund.”
I stared at him.
“It was for Bryce,” I said. “It said so on the can. Somebody drew a picture of a dog.”
“I know it did.”
“Then how…”
“The brush truck failed its pump test,” Rodney said. He was talking fast now, like he’d practiced it. “In February. The annual service test. The pump won’t hold pressure. It’s a 1998 Ford with the original pump, and it’s worn out.”
“I don’t…”
“The state fire marshal’s office does inspections,” he said. “And the ISO does ratings. For insurance. If our brush truck can’t pass the pump test, they could downgrade the department’s rating. And if they do that, every homeowner’s insurance premium in Elk Bend goes up. Everybody’s. Hundreds of dollars a year.”
He finally looked up at me.
“A new pump is eleven thousand dollars,” he said. “We had seven thousand, nine hundred in the truck fund. The supper money gets us to eleven.”
I stood there on my own porch and couldn’t breathe.
“Bryce has insurance,” Rodney said. Quietly. “The truck doesn’t.”
He said it like he believed it. Like it was simple. Like it was the only way the math could come out.
I thought about Dale and Mike, coming across that pasture in that brush truck. With the pump going. That old, worn-out pump that couldn’t hold pressure.
I thought about Bryce face down in the grass.
“Was it legal?” I asked finally. My voice sounded strange. “To move it?”
Rodney looked at his cap.
“The money was given to the department,” he said. “Not to you directly. It went into the department account. Under the bylaws, the board can allocate department funds. So yes. It was legal.” He took a breath. “I checked. I called the county attorney.”
“You called the county attorney,” I said. “Before you came here.”
He didn’t answer.
I didn’t scream. I want that on the record. Bryce was inside on the couch. The window was open. I wasn’t going to let him hear me scream at his uncle.
“Get off my porch, Rodney,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he put his cap back on. He walked back to his white Ford with the fire department decal.
He stopped at the truck door. He turned around.
“I’m sorry, Cass,” he said.
Then he got in and drove away.
Chapter Four: Out of Pocket
The money was given to the department. Not to us.
That’s what it came down to. I looked it up myself, at my kitchen table that night, on my laptop. I read the department bylaws, which are posted on the county website. I read the Kansas statutes on volunteer fire departments.
Rodney was right. The board had the authority. Moving the money was his legal call.
Cruel, maybe. Not a crime.
Our insurance has a seven-thousand-dollar out-of-pocket limit.
That’s the family maximum. Through the feedlot’s group plan. After you hit seven thousand dollars in deductibles and copays, they pay a hundred percent for the rest of the year.
We hit it in four days.
Four days. The helicopter alone was thirty-one thousand dollars. Our share of it was the deductible, and the deductible was half our out-of-pocket. Then the ER in Emporia. Then the burn unit. Then the surgery.
By the end of the fourth day in Wichita, we owed seven thousand dollars. To the hospital. On payment plans that would take us four years.
And the insurance didn’t cover everything after that, either. Not really.
Bryce’s compression garments. Custom-made sleeves and a vest, fitted to his body, that he has to wear twenty-three hours a day for a year so the scars don’t thicken. They have to be replaced every three months because he’s growing. Four hundred and twenty dollars a set. Insurance covered two sets a year. He needs four.
The silicone gel sheets for his scars. Not covered.
