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Show Go Love/134 wearing on her wedding day, when I stood between her and O W. What's happened in here-inconceivable I stand in the room and it's hard to see. Outside is better. Doris lights a box match, puts fire to a cedar spring, walks it clockwise around her pine tree. Life begins and ends- the big things in life, those moments when earth air sings, haven't they all come clothed in fire? "Dumb tmck driver," O.W.'d said out of nowhere. Dumb tmck driver? Fire's no friend of O.W.'s. He tried to light one in a cinder block house we lived in one time This was a Saturday when I was ten, Jimmy four, maybe. Trace was not yet born. And it was this bright, cold Saturday, with loud glurps issuing from the barn where our one horse-a stumpsucker OW.'d named Happy Boy-was sucking stall rails. For some reason I'd asked Mama if we'd all live to the year 2000, thirty years off in the future then. She got this crooked smile on her face, like Lara does, brown eyes twinkling. "Why of course we will, honey. Of course we will." She looked off through the kitchen into the living room where O.W.'d carried in the lawnmower gas can and was giving the green wood a good soaking. "Why, why in the world would you ask that?" O W was straight sober. He tilted the gasoline can into the fireplace, soaking the wood. Then he carried it toward us and out through the kitchen door, came back in and took a box kitchen matches out of the silver drawer. He went about his business-we could've talked about anything, me and Mama. Happy Boy grunted in the barn-we'd all live to 2000. "Say Joey, why'd you ask that?" O W. struck the match. When it caught, a ball of orange fire whizzed over his shoulder |