Chapter 10

Missouri is a raging furnace during the heat of summer. The humidity is constantly rising until, like the pressure cooker that Gramma T uses to make canned goods, we almost needed to scream. The summer that Jake, Eddie and I spent looking for that cave was no different.

Jake spent every day coming through hills through the hills looking for the cave. He dragged me along, “for protection.” Sometimes Eddie got to come. We saw a couple of good caves in the hills but I do not think we ever came close to seeing the real one, if there was such a thing.

Jake believed. He spent any time that we were not climbing around looking for it, asking Mr. Hilken about it. He pestered that old man till I was sure that he was going to regret ever saying anything about it to us in the first place.

However, the old man seemed to enjoy watching us play, and he endured Jake’s questions with grace. He gave all the details that he could ‘recollect’ and then he would go on about his chores. He told us one day that Jake reminded him of our granddad.

“You look like him, boy! And he got things stuck in his head and he couldn’t get ‘em out. That’s good, though, better than being lazy.”

Though I could never be too certain, I think that last statement may have been aimed at me. It was obvious, to me anyway, that this was a complete waste of time. I would have rather spent my time learning to tackle stuff better. I knew I need to be faster and stronger.

I had begun to work with one of the farm hands just a couple of days a week. Gramma T told me that if I didn’t want to stay, as she put it, a “skinny ‘lil runt” forever then good old fashioned farm work would “put meat on them bones.” The first time I went out with the guys they carried me back to the house exhausted. I fell asleep in the truck. Raising cows is a whole lot harder than they show on the T.V.

Eddie, of course, was no stranger to the work. He had been doing this kind of work his whole life. He laughed hard at me.

I really liked the hard work. Looking back, I also found some recognition that was desperately lacking in my life. The farm hands really like me, and the harder I worked, the more I was accepted by them. Eddie eventually had to admit that I was a good, hard worker. In the absence of my father, I really needed some male approval.

Jake was patient with me for about three weeks. He followed Mr. Hilken around most of those days, helping in any way that the old guy would let him but Jake’s curiosity could never be squelched for long. Of course, things never work out for me long anyway, so I rather knew that my contentment would not last long.

I awoke early one morning, to find Jake sitting on the edge of his bed looking at me intently. His arms were folded, and he wore a concerned look on his face. I had never seen this from him before so I said, “what?”

“Nothing.”

I could tell that he was lying. He was not good at lying, to me anyway. However, he look liked he didn’t really want to talk about whatever it was, so I let it go.

As I was getting dressed, he kept looking at me with that strange, concerned look on his face. I must confess that it was starting to creep me out a little. Jake was so deliberate in everything he did. I never knew him to ever do anything for “nothing.” Finally, I got fed up and said to him, “Knock it off ok! Either tell me what’s a matter or stop staring at me.”

Jake cocked his head to the side and the look on him face hardened. I was immediately sorry that I had spoke so sharply to him, but there was no taking it back now. He shrugged and said, “you gonna follow that ugly cowboy around today, or are you gonna help me?”

Instantly, I knew what he meant. He wanted to look for that damn cave. I had begun swearing that summer. Eddie had shown me how and I did it all the time. Mom would have beaten me if she had found out but I felt more like an adult when I used profanity.

Jake stood there expectantly, his foot tapping out a rhythm that said, “You better make the right choice Stephen.” His eyes were pleading with me, so I really had no choice but to give in.

“Those guys aren’t doing anything cool today anyway, so I was gonna ask you at breakfast if you had any idea where that old Indian cave was.”

His face brightened. “Yeah, Stephen, I think I know where it is. I saw a cave just above the water hole that I think is it. Mr. Hilken just shrugged when I asked him about it.”

We made our way down to the table as he talked. He was so excited, his face so animated that even if I lost a day of respect from the farm hands, I knew that I had more than made up for it in the eyes of my brother. Some things are more important anyway.

He chattered on for almost the entirety of breakfast. Gramma T had left us some biscuits, gravy and bacon on the table with a note that she and mom and gone to town and that they would be back later. This was good enough for us.

We ate with relish, Gramma T made the best biscuits anywhere, and her gravy was prize winning. Everyone in the whole town of Cadence said that it was the “best in the county.” Jake talked rapidly between bites, his full mouth jabbering away about the possibility of finding the cave. Eddie drifted in just as we had finished eating.

Several minutes later, we headed out of the yard with our lunches in a small backpack. Gramma T always kept plenty of things we could carry around and eat, plus lots of canned soda. She never drank anything but hot black coffee, or iced tea, herself, but she wanted us to have enough to drink during the summer.

We had crammed enough chips, biscuits and left-over roast beef into the bag to feed three armies of boys and set out. In spite of myself, I was almost as excited as Jake was. We raced out of the yard and soon we were in the thigh high grass of the pastureland.

The thing about Missouri is that there are woods everywhere. They surround the pastureland, and you can go nowhere without going through the woods. I was not surprised when we entered the woods and kept going. Jake just walked and walked, he did not seem to tire at all.

We walked for what seemed a lifetime when we finally reached the place where Jake thought he saw the cave. Normally the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains are not very rugged, yet as we stood at the foot of this one, I felt a shiver run up my spine. I could barely see the cave mouth above our heads. The climb looked dangerous. Not to mention, there was the fact that there might be something living in that big ol’ cave up there.

Jake looked up at the cave, a look of triumph on his young face. My stomach growled and I was reminded that we had been walking for quite some time. Eddie commented that he was hungry too.

Jake looked down at his own stomach and we didn’t say anything to each other, we just sat down right there and ate our lunch. It is always better to die with a full stomach anyway. They always give the condemned prisoners a last meal, right. This was the same thing here.

I didn’t know what Jake was feeling, but I ate my lunch with no relish. I confess now that I was frightened of the idea of climbing that hill just to be eaten by whatever was inside that cave. I ate in silence, hoping to find a way to convince Jake that we should try it later.

I didn’t have to think anything up though. Jake’s gaze was toward a break in the tree line. I turned my head and tried to see what he was looking at. Black smoke was billowing up into the sky. The direction it was coming from was the exact way we had come. It had to be the house!

Jake was up and moving at once, and Eddie and I ran quickly behind him. We left our backpack lying there on the ground, our lunch still spread out on the ground. There was only one thought in our minds. The house is burning down!

A path that had taken us all morning to cover now, we now flew along toward the house. In my mind I went over my last steps at the house, I just knew that I had done something that had caused this. Had we left the stove on? No, it had never been on. I could think of nothing that I could have done that might have been the cause of whatever catastrophe was taking place right this very minute on the farm.

Jake, Eddie and I ran so fast that we hardly noticed the branches of the trees whipping our faces. I was slapped a thousand times in the face, and the brush beat my bare legs savagely as we ran as hard as we could toward the house. The wind rushed through my ears, and I could hear nothing through the noise of it.

The tears were in my eyes then, and I wiped at them as I continued. I could not stop, not even to breathe. Next to me, I heard Eddie and Jake crashing along beside me. Jake was saying something that I could not understand. Whatever it was, he was repeating it over and over again.

Ahead of us, the wooden fence that marked the edge of the pasture fields was rising like the devil’s obstacle. We leapt onto it, scrambled to the top, and fell over. Jake lay there for a second, still repeating his indiscernible mantra. He wheezed a bit and leapt to his feet. We dashed away toward the house.

A spray of trees lay between the main farmyard and us. We trucked around the small patch of trees, hoping for the best but fearing the worst. We could smell the smoke. It was an awful, putrid smell. The black plume rose to the heavens over the treetops.

As we crossed the farmyard, we saw right away that it was not the house that was on fire but the small pick-up truck that Mr. Hilken drove. It was crashed into the side of ancient tractor that, just days before, Jake and Mr. Hilken had been repairing. The driver side door of the little truck was open, and Mr. Hilken lay on the ground next to the truck.

He was face down and the fire was spreading to his left leg, which was still inside the truck. Jake screamed and grabbed a hold of Mr. Hilken’s shoulders. Exerting all the strength he could, Jake attempted to pull the old man away from the truck. He was too little, though, to very effective.

He looked at me with a command in his little eyes. I obeyed almost out of fear from that fierce look, more than out of any response to the danger the old man was in. I grabbed the old man’s outstretched hand and pulled with all my might. Eddie grabbed his jacket with both his big hands. Together we dragged him away from the burning wreck.

When we had gotten him safely away from the fire, I ran into the house and called the Cadence Fire Department. The dispatcher sounded like I had awakened him from a nap. He told me that the fire trucks would be there in shortly and to stay back from the fire. Right, I thought, stay away. A little late for that, man!

I heard a strange sound and I turned around in time to see the truck’s gas tank explode. The truck was a good way across the yard, so the fireball only lit the grass around it on fire. Even so, the dryness of the summer grass caused it to ignite brilliantly, and the fire was, I could tell, going to get out of control quickly.

It would take too long for the fire department to reach us I thought. I ran for the door, grabbing gramma T’s fire extinguisher as I went. I realized I had to try to contain the fire until the fire trucks could come put it out.

Jake was ahead me, of course. He already had used the water hose to put out the fire on Mr. Hilken’s pant’s leg. Now he was spraying the now blazing grass with the hose.

The wind, which had just come up, was pushing the fire toward the barn. I ran over to Jake and starting spraying the Fire extinguisher at the fire. Eddie had grabbed a bucket and was throwing water on the fire. We just had to keep the flames from reaching the house and the barn.

Tears were streaming down Jake’s face. The soot that the wind had blown on his, and my, face was running with the tears. It was pooling at his neck and dirtying the red t-shirt that he had on. The water hose was not enough, really, to battle to fire, but Jake just stood there spraying his little jet of water.

Somewhere in my ears, I barely heard the din of sound that a fire truck makes. The roaring engine, the screaming siren, and the bell ringing; all these sounds filled my ears and mingled with the roar of the advancing blaze and the shout of the townsmen as the rushed to unpack the fire hoses. One of the most amazing sights to behold is a small-town volunteer fire department at work. The men that make of the crew are usually not full-time firemen. They are the businessmen who make up the community.

They train several days a week and few of them ever, thankfully, get that much experience fighting a fire. In some cases, some of the men never get to see a fire. That is good news, because having a fire means that one of your neighbors has lost their homes, and sometimes their lives.

The Cadence volunteer fire department was headed by a man who had lived in St. Louis for two decades and had been a fire fighter there. Cadence had asked him to head the department and he had injected a huge amount of order to the previously chaotic department. Now they were a machine, not a well oiled one mind you, but a machine.

They had the fire out in just a few minutes. It was very dramatic to see the men in their dingy yellow fire coats with the shield over their face spraying the burning pick-up truck with some type of spray. It was like slow motion or a fog in my brain; the men running back and forth, and there, in the midst of them, Jake was standing, tears running down his face as the paramedic examined Mr. Hilken. He was dead.

The fog in my brain cleared a little when I saw my mom’s car pull into the driveway. The look of fear on her face was mirrored by my Gramma T. They both leapt from the car and ran over to where we were.

Jake and I buried our faces in my mom’s shoulders and I began to sob. It was too much for me. I could feel Jake’s little body, his face pressed into my mother’s other shoulder, shudder as sobs ripped across his body. Eddie was standing in the yard staring at the burned-out wreck of Mr. Hilken’s truck.