Eight minutes was faster than she had ever done it. Her hands were not steady by the end of it, and she did not care. The pump worked. She went back to the well and finished filling the bucket and carried it to the barrel team at a near run.
The fire crossed the Hendricks property line at approximately eleven in the morning. She knew it happened not because she could see it from the field. It was too thick along the western approach for clear sight lines, but because she heard it. Fire in dead standing corn makes a particular sound when it moves through quickly, a sustained loud crackle that rises into something almost like continuous thunder. She had heard it once before years ago and the sound was not something you forgot.
The men working the break heard it, too. She watched them look at each other and then look at her. "Keep working," she said. They kept working.
The first sparks reached her property at the fence line 20 minutes later, not the fire itself, but the advanced material. Burning fragments lifted by the heat column and carried on the westerly wind ahead of the main line. Most landed on the cleared break and went out in the disturbed soil. Two or three landed in the outer fringe of the remaining squash section, which was still green enough to resist ignition, and one landed in the corn beyond the second row, caught briefly, and was beaten out by Tom Hendricks's son with a wet sack before it established itself. The main fire line reached the Bell property fence two claims west of hers and she could see it from the western break now, orange at the base with black smoke above, moving through Hiram's dead cornfield at a speed that was frankly terrifying to observe.
Hiram was watching it consume his own crop and there was nothing in his face that she could name specifically because she was looking at a man watching his year burn. And that expression does not need specific naming. "Hiram," she said. He turned.
"I need you on the break line, not at the fence." He came. The break line was as wide as they had managed to make it, about 10 ft of cleared disrupted wetted earth running the length of her western boundary. The squash had been pulled from the outer two rows, leaving 40 ft of exposed field beyond the interior planting. The barrel stations were positioned at intervals along it, each with a dipper and a designated person.
Silas was at the north end of the line. Evie was at the south. The fire hit the cleared strip between the Bell property and hers, and she watched it slow the way she had hoped it would slow, not stop, but stutter. Dead corn burned fast, and the fuel load dropped when it crossed the cleared strip, and for a moment she thought the widened break might hold it entirely.