Biscuit is a yellow lab mix. Seven years old. We got her from the shelter in Emporia the year Bryce was two. She sleeps at the foot of his bed. She walks him to the school bus every morning and is waiting at the end of the driveway every afternoon.
She was standing in the backyard, by the fence. Barking at the smoke. Not moving. The way dogs do when they’re scared and don’t know which way to run.
The fire was coming across the pasture behind her. Maybe a hundred yards away. Moving fast.
Bryce unbuckled his seat belt. He opened the car door. Kaylee screamed his name.
He ran back for the dog.
He got to her. He got his arms around her. He was trying to drag her toward the car, and she was fighting him, the way scared dogs do, and the wind gusted.
The fire came through the tall grass along our back fence in about four seconds.
Kaylee said it sounded like a train. She said the smoke came down so thick she couldn’t see the house, couldn’t see the yard, couldn’t see anything. She was screaming Bryce’s name. She was calling 911 with her hands shaking so hard she dropped her phone twice.
Two of our volunteer firemen carried him out of the smoke.
Dale Prather and Mike Danner. They were on the brush truck, the first one out of the Elk Bend station. They’d been fighting the Hensley fire for an hour already when the call came about a child at our place.
They came across the pasture in the brush truck with the pump going. They found Bryce face down in the grass by the back fence. He was lying on top of Biscuit. Covering her with his own body.
Dale picked him up. Mike grabbed the dog. They ran.
Burns on both arms and across his chest.
Second degree, mostly. Some third, on his left forearm, where he’d had it wrapped around Biscuit’s neck. The fire had gone right through his sweatshirt.
Biscuit had singed fur and a burned paw. That was all. He’d covered her that well.
The ambulance from Cottonwood took him to the hospital in Emporia. Emporia took one look and put him on a helicopter to Wichita.
I got to Emporia twenty minutes after the helicopter left. I stood in the parking lot of Newman Regional in my school cafeteria apron and watched it get smaller and smaller in the sky, heading south.
Chapter Two: Eleven Days
Eleven days in the burn unit in Wichita.
The burn center at the big hospital on St. Francis Street. Sixth floor. The nurses there are the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life and also the toughest. They have to be. Burn care hurts. Every single day, they have to take off the bandages and clean the wounds and scrub away the dead skin, and the kids scream, and the nurses keep going.
Bryce screamed the first three days. Then he stopped screaming and just cried. Then, by the end of the first week, he didn’t even cry. He just held my hand and squeezed it so hard my fingers went numb.
He had skin grafts on the fifth day. On his left forearm, where the burns were deepest. They took skin from his thigh and laid it over the burns like patches on a quilt.
The surgeon was a tall woman named Dr. Okafor, with gray braids and reading glasses on a chain. She sat with me in the family lounge afterward and drew me a picture on a napkin of how the graft would take.
“He’s going to heal,” she said. “He’s going to have scars. He’s going to need compression garments for a year, maybe two. Physical therapy, so the skin doesn’t tighten up and limit his movement. But he’s going to heal.”
I put my face in my hands.
“He ran back for his dog,” I said. “He’s nine years old and he ran back into a fire for his dog.”
Dr. Okafor was quiet for a moment.
“I’ve been doing this twenty-two years,” she said. “Most of the kids I see got burned doing something stupid. Fireworks. Gasoline. Climbing a power pole.” She put her hand on my arm. “Your son got burned doing something brave. That doesn’t hurt any less. But it’s different.”
