“Country Fire,” first published in The New Yorker (October 1, 1938), is an event-driven short story that seems to prefigure Gill’s later interest in architecture and preservation as well as his personal reckoning with a New York/Connecticut divide. While there are many people in the story, the only character that is developed is the community of this Connecticut country town, in amalgamation. If there is an antagonist other than the fire, it is the New Yorkers and the architect lurking in the outskirts of the town’s consciousness.
Country Fire
by Brendan Gill
By the time the first townspeople reached the farm, five minutes after the siren in the town hall had begun its keening, the smallest of the four barns was a yellow kettle of flames. It was still possible to see in the midst of the fire the outline of a burning truck. It was surmised that the old Ford, on being driven into the barn, had backfired, kindling its load of hay. Now, with a roar, the fire was beginning to spread.
More and more volunteer firemen kept arriving. The chief of the department was said to be shopping in Lakeville, and old Dr. Harley, who was eighty-nine, had not yet reported; the rest of the men were happily sizing up the ground and looking for water. The pumper, which had been taking part in a parade in Canaan, arrived with flags and bunting and driven by a Pilgrim Father. Beside him, filling the valley with the clangor of the bell, sat a painted Indian.
The nearest water lay high on the hill behind the barns. The pumper started through a plowed field and could not make the grade. Francis Nolan, the plumber, took over the wheel. He was a black-haired Irishman, and he looked, as he sent the shining red-and-chromium chariot against the slope, like a god in armor, but the pumper remained unheroically mired. Francis swore. His curses echoed across the fields and among the trees. The firemen tugged and thrust against the wheels until the pumper began to rock; then slowly it slid back and down the hill.
Dick O’Brien, the grocer, still in his apron, with a pencil over his ear and a yellow pad in his pocket, began to pay out the hose. It would have to be carried up the hill by hand. In the meantime, as the crowd gathered, the smallest barn burned to its skeleton. Between the last of the flames and the charred timbers, the blue September sky opened in squares. Everyone was waiting for the gas in the truck to explode; the explosion, when it finally came, made very little sound, no more than a tree, heavy with leaves, crashing in a woods. Then the timbers fell, wall by wall, laying themselves out precisely across the scorched ground.
The owner of the farm, a man with one arm, did not seem concerned. He stood under a nearby tree, pointing out with seeming good humor to everyone who passed how clumsily the volunteers lifted the heavy hose. He held in his single hand a big silver watch, timing the destruction of the barns. The house was two hundred yards away, out of the direction of the wind, but, for double assurance, two farm hands were dousing the roof with water handed up to them in tin milking pails.
Another barn caught fire. The flames were so high and strong that they swallowed the barn, with its stored-up hay, in one immense burst of fire, making bright loops of light through the loft, orange and yellow and white. One minute the roof was solid black shingle; the next, it began to curl, and candles of fire were shining under it; then it was one wide, coppery blaze. The heat reached out to shred the leaves on branches twenty yards away. A rabbit darted from under the burning floor, his white tail bobbing. He wheeled, panting, at the feet of the crowd and stared at the burning barn, and then, as if he suddenly realized that home was where he wanted most to be, plunged back into the smoke.
Everyone in town had heard the siren or had caught sight of the smoke lifting above the hills. Mrs. Abley, an elderly paralytic, had been driven over in her Cadillac to occupy a place in the front rank. The volunteers had to circle her car with the hose to reach the barns. A dozen young girls, in halters and shorts and dark glasses in spite of late September, paraded before incurious boys. One mother had brought her baby, wrapped in blankets. Dr. Hill, the distinguished surgeon from New York, went about picking up the late apples from under the trees in the orchard.
The volunteers finally reached the little pond at the top of the hill. They straightened the hose into easy curves, set it free of kinks, and attached the wide nozzle. Twenty minutes had passed since the siren began. All three remaining barns were by now smothered in smoke. Mr. Degnan, the butcher, his apron spotted with hamburger, his straw cuffs at his elbows, brushed back the hair that no longer grew on his bald scalp and directed two of the youngest volunteers to carry the hose first to the third barn and then to the fourth. There was now no hope of saving the second, which was shaking in readiness to fall.
“It’s coming!” The words, shouted from the top of the hill, fell in the clear air through the upland meadows, through the clover, through the orchard, and along the green plateau. And then the water, as it poured down, began to quicken the hose. The white case turned and quivered under the firemen’s hands, and, finally, with a spurting kick, the foam shot forth into the blaze. There was a hiss, a black cloud that dirtied the sun, and the flames fell back.
Ladders of every size and kind were brought forward. The volunteers mixed in confusion with the crowd and the ladders were set up, lifted away, and set up again. Boys picked up rocks and tossed them against the windows of the biggest barn so that the firemen could send the water into the loft and against the roof, but the draft made by the broken panes served only to feed the fire.
This biggest barn was the pride of the town. It had been built in 1888, and the date was worked into the slate roof and carved into one of the stones of the immense granite foundation. It bore geometric designs in the shingles of the side walls. It also had a cupola with stained-glass windows and a gilt cow weathervane. It held quarters for the farm hands as well as a loft for hay, stables for horses, and a wide basement for the cows. The horses and the cows had been let out into the fields, the horses galloping off, snorting, into the orchard, the cows staring back reproachfully, without alarm. The firemen soaked the walls of the barn till the steam rose and glittered in the sun.
The third of the barns suddenly collapsed, the south wall falling outward over Tom O’Connell, the garageman. The square of timbers dropped about him, boxing the ground at his feet; he leaped out over the blackened grass without a word, without turning his head.
The crowd was beginning to get bored. The worst of the blaze seemed over and apparently the big barn was certain to be saved. The younger boys crawled up on the pumper, asking questions of Francis Nolan and hammering at the silver bell, and the girls in their halters began to shiver as the wind strengthened. Mrs. Abley was driven away. The mother carried her sleeping baby home to its crib. The owner of the farm stood alone, saying nothing, simply waiting.
As the firemen worked on and as the flames continued to fall back, rumors swept through the crowd. Mrs. Clennan, the real-estate dealer, was supposed to have said that she had only last week sold the farm to a couple from New York. That explained the calmness of the one-armed man. This couple was planning to move an old house from Winsted to a site by the pond at the top of the hill. According to Mrs. Clennan, the couple wouldn’t have minded losing the present house, because it was such a fright—early twentieth century and in very bad taste; but their architect, who had been up to see the farm only yesterday, had fallen in love with the barns. He would be heartbroken. He had planned to make of them the most charming, the most delightful Early American group. Another rumor had it that the architect had intended to tear down the barns the very first thing, and now the couple from New York would be able to collect insurance on what they had wanted to get rid of. In these matters, the truth was always a long time in coming out.
The crowd drifted away; it was suppertime. At seven o’clock only the firemen were left, still stubbornly washing down the walls with water, stamping out the little tongues of flame that were constantly spreading across the grass. At eight o’clock they wound up their hose. The job was done. They were not hungry—the fire had taken their appetites away. They talked for a minute or two about the fire, and then Francis Nolan climbed into the driver’s seat. The pumper churned, choked, and sputtered. Here in this meadow in the dark, with the ruins smoking behind them and their beds lying ten minutes ahead of them, they were out of gas. They walked in silence to the road to stop the first approaching car.