Fire

            Deep inside my head, I heard ringing. At first the noise was abrupt and frightful. “I’m dreaming,” I thought. Closing my eyes tighter against the ringing’s urgency, I nudged deeper under the covers and awaited someone to make it stop. But it wouldn’t stop. As consciousness bubbled up to the surface, I realized the telephone was ringing in the middle of the night, and all around me in the room in which I slept was black as pitch. Fear made me shudder, and I awoke into what would soon become the new reality for my town, my family and me.

Like most teens, I had no trouble sleeping. In fact, if allowed to do so I could sleep most of the day.  The reason I slept so much, I reasoned, was because I was catching up on much needed rest after my frenetic elementary school years. Until age 12 or so, I was in constant motion, sunup to sundown, one of those kids that really can get on your nerves because I would not be still anytime, anywhere. The fact is documented in an old 8 mm film shot at Al and Clara Mae’s house when I was around 8 years old.  Film cameras unlike the Kodak Brownie model I received one Christmas were oddities in East Texas in the early 1960s. Some adults would glance with suspicion at the whirring picture machine, no doubt a throw back to superstitions passed down through the generations about the bad luck that follows catching one’s spirit in reflection.  

My Uncle Johnnie was cameraman, and as he panned the great room, there sat the adults motionless as if paralyzed by the camera’s light attachment. My girl cousins sat on the couch in their starched Sunday dresses as meek as Disney mice. And then there is me bouncing up and down, pigtails flying, until someone out of the camera’s eye obviously gives me a “look,” and I guiltily slow down the bouncing and eventually stop. I think I caught up on my sleep in my teen years from all this jumping around.

            I mention this change in sleep habits because around 4:30 in the morning of Friday, February 24, 1967, I took a long time to answer a ringing telephone extension beside my bed. I was 14 years old, and most of my waking hours were spent daydreaming about boys and twirling in the living room to Beatles music on the large credenza-type “hi-fi” stereo my oldest sister won at the furniture store in a Philco contest.  

            So as I struggled to sleepy consciousness from a day of music and daydreaming, I answered the phone unwarily, too immature and innocent to dread the oddity of it.

            “Hullo?” I mumbled.

            “Carolyn, Carolyn. Wake up. This is Mary. Are you awake?”

“Yes, I’m awake,” I said, searching the room to find some light somewhere to assure me I wasn’t blind.

“Tell Jasper the Lufkin and Livingston fire departments are on the way,” said the caller, and she hung up.

            I sat up on the side the bed and let this information process within my juvenile mind. Mary had to be my cousin Buzzy’s wife, Mary. Fire departments meant a fire somewhere. Two fire departments in addition to the volunteer fire-fighting force in town must mean a big fire. It’s not our house, I reasoned, because I don’t see any fire around me. Puzzled by this seemingly conflicting information, I pulled back the curtain on the window that faced south toward the street in front of the house. I didn’t see any fire.

            So I got up to find my dad, Jasper, and pass along the caller’s message. I crept toward the other end of the darkened house. I passed through our den, which was covered with windows on the backside that opened onto a screened back porch. That’s when I saw it. An unworldly yellow glow so bright I could clearly see the yard - grass, an odd toy ball and a tricycle with its wheels awkwardly askew. A more experienced person would have known at that point that a fire bright enough to light up a backyard like sunrise was a huge fire. But that fact didn’t register with me. I continued through the den to my parent’s bedroom. I softly tapped on the door and opened it. No one was in the room.

            Shaken from my drowsiness, the fact that my parents were not in the house was a very scary realization. I walked back to the den through the screened-in porch at the back of the house, into the yard and looked west toward the source of the light. Unbelievably, the entire landscape was not just bright, but aflame. Through a stand of timber and beyond several houses, I saw the actual flames some quarter mile away that were higher than seemed real and were causing the incredible light in the yard around me. The high school was on fire. In that moment, I felt the physical response to fear that would come to me a number of times in my lifetime. It’s a blow-to-the-gut panic that drains my mind of anything but the primordial instinct to run.

            I don’t know how I got there, but I found myself sitting in a car looking at the burning building from the parking lot in front of the high school. By this time, the flames had consumed every morsel of wood and paper, and what remained of the building had crumbled to the ground where a pile of red-hot embers flickered in the February darkness. I remember the clear frigid night like yesterday. There was the emersion affect of the smoke, its smell invading the closed car. Hoses snaked from fire trucks toward a pile of rubble, limp now, their work futile against the inferno. People of all ages huddled in groups, wrapped in quilts, blankets, bedspreads - whatever they could grab as they rushed to the scene. Above, the stars flickered in an ocean of darkness just as they had for millennia as if nothing had changed. From inside the car, the brutal truth of the loss slowly became clear and permanent as I realized what the loss of the school meant, especially to Jasper who was the superintendent of schools.

            No cause of the blaze was ever determined. The red brick high school building was 27 years old in 1967.  Its inside was paneled and floored throughout with some of the most unblemished yellow pine planks that you can imagine.  Even the furniture in some of the classrooms, in the library, the home economics rooms, the administrative offices, and the hard stationary seats in the auditorium were wood. All of this wood was clear varnished to a fare-thee-well, all conspiring to create a spectacular and fast-burning fire. Separate buildings on campus survived: a gymnasium, a band hall and an agricultural education building.

            The most logical explanation given was a faulty natural gas heater. In the auditorium, two huge gas heaters hung from the ceiling on both sides of the stage. Some of the first to arrive on the scene seemed to think the fire started on that south side of the building in the auditorium with its heaters.

            When first light came, we learned of the heroic attempts by our beloved maintenance chief who attempted over and over to enter the flaming building and retrieve student records from the main office. All evidence of school history not recorded at the county superintendent’s office since its formal beginning as a free school in 1892 was gone. Every test score, shot record, teacher note to file was lost.  Every trophy and memorial item placed with pride in the trophy case was melted into an unrecognizable heap or charred into ash. No evidence of wood remained.  Only the red brick and the twisted iron beams lay above the smoldering mess. One bronze plaque that memorialized the opening of the school survived the inferno. School personnel would spend months trying to replace records that were lost.

A photo appeared in the newspaper that summed up our loss.  It is a photo of the back of my dad in a light-weight jacket standing on bricks amid the smoldering rubble, hands deep into his pants pockets, shoulders stooped against the biting cold. It seems at that moment he bore the full weight of all those generations whose schoolhouse past had burned to the ground in front of him. 

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore