That fire was still going strong when I passed Mormon Key and tacked into the river. At the Bend, the trees was just a-shimmering in that heat, and the hawks and buzzards comin in from as far away as cane smoke can be seen to feed on small varmints killed or flushed from cover. What was burning was our thirty-acre field. This year we was too broke to hire outside labor for the harvest season, so there was only the Boss and me and Rob, and maybe Tant if we were lucky. The Boss must of gone crazy—that’s the way I figured. He was firing a cane field we could never harvest. Tying up, I seen no sign of Rob, let alone Tant. All I seen was Mister Watson on the half run in his field setting fires like he’d heard a shout from Hell; he was drifting over the black ground in a ring of fire like a giant windswirled cinder. Had his shotgun in his other hand, and that made no sense neither, cause he hadn’t lit fires on three sides the way we done when we wanted a shot at any critters that might run before the flames.
