1

The big blue book.

That’s where Ma looked for answers.

Thicker than the Bible, the medical manual had a glossary of every disease they made in those days. Ma taught herself how to treat sunburn and cuts and fevers and pregnancies.

After the eczema I inherited peeled the skin off the bottoms of my feet, Ma had me step into sandwich bags full of Vaseline. I squished through the house in plastic medicine slippers, and the pain was gone.

Ma’s big blue book was holy like the Bible.

But there would always be things no book, no matter how holy, could fix.

Things like hellfire.

 

2

Behind our house was nothing but prairie.

Boys played baseball in the prairie, and they played Army in the prairie and they set fire to the prairie.

Not my big brother Leo, though.

It was Tommy, who was older and bigger and liked to yank bands of tighty-whities.

The king of wedgies dropped match after match onto ants emerging from an anthill.

A wisp of smoke swirled into the air.

Dry prairie grass crackled. Ants curled and popped. Burning blades turned brown and shrunk and curled and disappeared in yellow flame. The ants turned to black dots.

Flames went left and flames went right and flames went forward and flames went backward and flames went in every direction at the same time.

Tommy’s feet and Stevie’s feet and Jimmy’s feet and all the feet in the world couldn’t stomp fast enough.

 

3

The prairie burned.

Smoke billowed above the open field and boys ran like hell.

People came out of their houses. My big brother Leo and his best buddy Eddie the Greek ran from Ma’s house and what they saw was a sea of fire.

They ran down the block yelling at every kid they saw to grab buckets and hoses and sprinklers and anything they could find.

Leo stomped the fire with his black Converse sneakers, and the fire line retreated, but there was so much more hellfire to go. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

Eddie the Greek threw down a metal garbage can lid on a patch of fire and stomped it with his foot. When he lifted the lid there was a circle of black grass. Soon the prairie looked like a checkerboard.

Leo stomped and stomped and stomped and his jean cuffs turned crisp.

He stomped and he stomped and he stomped and someone yelled.

“Your leg’s on fire!”

The fire crawled up his jeans and made a fist around the calf.

He dropped like they taught him in school.

And he rolled like they taught him in school.

Kids patted Leo’s leg with baseball mitts until his leg smoked and sizzled.

Leo looked at his leg and saw tattered jeans, red flesh, white fat, craggy black edges where his skin cracked.

The boys loaded Leo into Ma’s station wagon.

Leo held my hand. He squeezed my fingers so hard they turned to ghosts.

“Hold on, baby,” Ma said.

“We’re almost there,” Ma said.

Leo cried the whole way to the county hospital.

And when Ma ran out of things to say, she cried too.

 

4

A doctor took skin off Leo’s ass to save his leg.

“A third-degree burn,” the doctor said.

Skin melted like candle wax.

Leo spent a month in Ma’s bed.

Ma cooked Leo spaghetti.

Woke him for Bugs Bunny cartoons.

And when he fell asleep, she read the big blue book.

Nothing in the pages explained how she could take it all back.

All those flames, all that pain.

Where that hellfire touched Leo’s calf would forever be a hairless scar the size of a fried egg the color of chicken skin.

 

5

Blades of grass sprouted through the ash.