Controlled Burns
It was common practice to wait until rain before lighting scrap wood on fire. Raymond Ruthers had been doing it for 72 years, and hadn’t sparked up the countryside yet. His new neighbor Todd was from Indianapolis, so he didn’t have that sort of common sense in the blood. Todd had bought the farmhouse next door for the architecture, not the land. So Raymond told Todd about the rain trick, and Todd was appreciative. Those first couple burns of his were full of construction debris–Todd was putting in a darkroom of some sort, which he never asked Raymond to see and so Raymond never asked about. Whenever Raymond’s knee said it was going to rain, he would walk over to Todd’s house and tell him now was a good time for a burn, and Todd would always round up a huge pile of dead branches and detritus. Then Todd would disappear, drive off to who knows where. Raymond would go to sleep, and wake up in the middle of the night with Todd’s intense fire lighting up his bedroom. There were chemicals in there, photography stuff maybe, burning blue and green. Raymond couldn’t get within 30 feet of those burns–it was upwards of a thousand degrees. Raymond wasn’t going to tattle on his neighbor; he had some spilled solvents in his barn he wouldn’t want anyone poking round, either. When Raymond’s knee told of the next fire, he asked if he could throw in the bones of a deer he had recently butchered. Todd was fine with it, so the bones went in the wood pile. Again, it was lit in the middle of the night. The next morning, Raymond sifted through the smoldering ash, to find some remains. He couldn’t find a single trace from 30 pounds of bone. This was a very good way to dispose of a carcass. Raymond felt a ripple of fear running up his backbone. Todd knew this, too, and only drove to town when Raymond said it was safe to have a burn.