They were, God keep us and save us, reviews. Good ones, if you didn’t mind being called full of dusky good-nature.

I shuffled through them quickly, looking for anything about the circumstances under which “our Southern blackbirds” had left. I found nothing. What I found instead was a clipping from the Call marked July 19th (go down nineteen, I thought), 1933. The headline read WTERA GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER. According to the story, Fred Dean had been fighting the wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind had suddenly changed, menacing the north end of the lake, which had previously been considered safe. At that time a great many local people had kept fishing and hunting camps up there (this much I knew myself). The community had had a general store and an actual name, Halo Bay. Fred’s wife, Hilda, was there with the Dean twins, William and Carla, age three, while her husband was off eating smoke. A good many other wives and kids were in Halo Bay, as well.

The fires had come fast when the wind changed, the paper said’like marching explosions.” They }jumped the only firebreak the men had left in that direction and headed for the far end of the lake. At Halo Bay there were no men to take charge, and apparently no women able or willing to do so. They panicked instead, racing to load their cars with children and camp possessions, clogging the one road out with their vehicles.

Eventually one of the old cars or trucks broke down and as the fires roared closer, running through woods that hadn’t seen rain since late April, the women who’d waited found their way out blocked.

The volunteer firefighters came to the rescue in time, but when Fred Dean got to his wife, one of a party of women trying to push a balky stalled Ford coupe out of the road, he made a terrible discovery. Billy lay on the floor in the back of the car, fast asleep, but Carla was missing. Hilda had gotten them both in, all right—they had been on the back seat, holding hands just as they always did. But at some point, after her brother had crawled onto the floor and dozed off and while Hilda was stuffing a few last items into the trunk, Carla must have remembered a toy or a doll and returned to the cottage to get it. While she was doing that, her mother had gotten into their old Desoto and driven away without rechecking the babies. Carla Dean was either still in the cottage at Halo Bay or making her way up the road on foot. Either way the fires would run her down.

The road was too narrow to get a vehicle turned around and too blocked to get one of those pointed in the right direction through the crush. So Fred Dean, hero that he was, set off on the run toward the smoke-blackened horizon, where bright ribbons of orange had already begun to shine through. The wind-driven fire had crowned and raced to meet him like a lover.

I knelt on the pallets, reading this by the glow of my lantern, and all at once the smell of fire and burning intensified. I coughed… and then the cough was choked off by the iron taste of water in my mouth and throat. Once again, this time kneeling in the storage area beneath my wife’s studio, I felt as if I were drowning. Once again I leaned forward and retched up nothing but a little spit.

I turned and saw the lake. The loons were screaming on its hazy surface, making their way toward me in a line, beating their wings against the water as they came. The blue of the sky had been blotted out. The air smelled of charcoal and gunpowder. Ash had begun to sift down from the sky. The eastern verge of Dark Score was in flames, and I could hear occasional muffled reports as hollow trees exploded. They sounded like depth charges.

I looked down, wanting to break free of this vision, knowing that in another moment or two it wouldn’t be anything so distant as a vision but as real as the trip Kyra and I had made to the Fryeburg Fair. Instead of a plastic owl with gold-ringed eyes, I was looking at a child with bright blue ones. She was sitting on a picnic table, holding out her chubby arms and crying. I saw her as clearly as I saw my own face in the mirror each morning when I shaved. I saw she was about Kyra’s age but much plumper, and her hair is black instead of blonde. Her hair is the shade her brother’s will remain until it finally begins to go gray in the impossibly distant summer of 1998, a year she will never see unless someone gets her out of this hell. She wears a white dress and red knee-stockings and she holds her arms out to me, calling Daddy, Daddy. I start toward her and then there is a blast of organized heat that tears me apart for a moment—I am the ghost here, I realize, and Fred Dean has just run right through me. Daddy, she cries, but to him, not me. Daddy!

and she hugs him, unmindful of the soot smearing her white silk dress and her chubby face as he kisses her and more soot begins to fall and the loons beat their way in toward shore, seeming to weep in shrill lamentation. Daddy the fire is coming! she cries as he scoops her into his arms. I know, be brave, he says. We’re gonna be all right, sugarplum, but you have to be brave. The fire isn’t just coming,’ it has come. The entire east end of Halo Bay is inflames and now they’re moving this way, eating one by one the little cabins where the men like to lay up drunk in hunting season and ice-fishing season. Behind A1 Leroux’s, the washing Marguerite hung out that morning is in flames, pants and dresses and underwear burning on lines which are themselves strings of fire. Leaves and bark shower down,’ a burning ember touches Carla’s neck and she shrieks with pain. Fred slaps it away as he carries her down the slope of land to the water. Don’t do it! I scream. I know all this is beyond my power to change, but I scream at him anyway, try to change it anyway. Fight it! For Christ’s sake, fight it! Daddy, who is that man?

Carla asks, and points at me as the green-shingled roof of the Dean place catches fire. Fred glances toward where she is pointing, and in his face I see a spasm of guilt. He knows what he’s doing, that’s the terrible thing—4way down deep he knows exactly what he is doing here at Halo Bay where The Street ends. He knows and he’s ajaid that someone will witness his work. But he sees nothing. Or does he? There is a momenta doubtful widening of the eyes as if he does spy something—a dancing helix of air, perhaps. Or does heidel me? Is that it? Does he jel a momentary cold draft in all this heat? One that jeh like protest ing hands, hands that would restrain if they only had substance? Then he looks away,’ then he is wading into the water beside the Deans’ stub of a dock. Fred! I scream. For God’s sake, man, look at her! Do you think your wife put her in a white silk dress by accident? Is that anyone’s idea of a play-dress? Daddy, why are we going in the water? she asks. To get away from the fire, sugarplum. Daddy, I can’t swim! You won’t have to, he replies, and what a chill l]gel at that/Because it’s no lie—she won’t have to swim, not now, not ever. And at least Fred’s way will be more merciful than Normal Auster’s when Normal’s turn comes—more merciful than the squalling handpump, the gallons of eezing water. Her white dress floats around her like a lily. Her red stockings shimmer m the water. She hugs his neck tightly and now they are among the fleeing loons,’ the loons spank the water with their powerful wings, churning up curds of jam and staring at the man and the girl with their distraught red eyes. The air is heavy with smoke and the sky is gone. I stagger after them, wading—I can Jel the cold of the water, although I don’t splash and leave no wake. The eastern and northern edges of the lake are both on fire now there is a burning crescent around us as Fred Dean wades deeper with his daughter, carrying her as if to some baptismal rite. And still he tells himself he is trying to save her, only to save her, just as all her lij Hilda will tell herself that the child just wandered back to the cottage to look fir a toy, that she was not left behind on purpose, left in her white dress and red stockings to be JSUND by her father, who once did something unspeakable. This is the past, this is the Land of Ago, and here the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even unto the seventh generation, which is not yet. He takes her deeper and she begins to scream. Her screams mingle with the screams of the loons until he stops the sound with a kiss upon her terrified mouth. “Love you, Daddy loves his sugarplum,” he says, and then lowers her. It is to be a full-immersion baptism, then, except there is no shorebank choir singing “Shall V Gather at the River” and no one shouting Hallelujah! and he is not letting her come back up. She struggles furiously in the white bloom of her sacrificial dress, and after a moment he cannot bear to watch her,’ he looks across the lake instead, to the west where the fire hasn’t yet touched (and never will), to the west where skies are still blue. Ash sifts around him like black rain and the tears b I UI–IEN IXLPQKA pour out of his eyes and as she struggles furiously beneath his hands, trying to free herself)qom his drowning grip, he tells himself It was an accident, just a terrible accident, I took her out in the lake because it was the only place I could take her, the only place left, and she panicked, she started to struggle, she was all wet and all slippery and I lost my good hold on her and then I lost any hold on her and then-I]rget I’m a ghost. I scream “Kia/ Hold on, Ki!” and dive. I reach her, I see her terrified face, her bulging blue eyes, her rosebud of a mouth which is trailing a silver line of bubbles toward the surface where Fred stands in water up to his neck, holding her down while he tells himself over and over that he was trying to save her, it was the only way, he was trying to save her, it was the only way. I reach for her, again and again I reach r her, my child, my daughter, my Kia (they are all Kia, the boys as well as the girls, all my daughter), and each time my arms go through her. Worse—oh, far worse—is that now she is reaching)$r me, her dappled arms floating out, begging Jr rescue. Her groping hands melt through mine. I cannot touch, because now I am the ghost. I am the ghost and as her struggles weaken I realize that I can’t I can’t oh I couldn’t breathe—I was drowning. I doubled over, opened my mouth, and this time a great spew of lake-water came out, soaking the plastic owl which lay on the pallet by my knees. I hugged the jo’s NOTIONS box to my chest, not wanting the contents to get wet, and the movement triggered another retch. This time cold water poured from my nose as well as my mouth. I dragged in a deep breath, then coughed it out. “This has got to end,” I said, but of course this was the end, one way or the other.