Part 2
Somebody screamed. Then everybody did.
The fire ran up the dry cedar faster than Carrie Dunn would have believed fire could run. Paper chains caught and fell in burning loops. A cornucopia of candy flared like a torch. The heat hit her face like an open oven door, and the room behind her rose up in one roar of benches and voices and feet.
And Mattie Crane, eight years old, stood frozen in front of it with her hand still reaching up, and a burning loop of paper chain dropped onto the pink satin sash at her waist.
The sash caught.
Carrie could not move. She would remember that afterward, all her life. She stood with the taper in her hand and could not move.
Gideon Platt could.
He came down the center of the schoolroom through the crowd like a bull through a fence, with a bucket in each hand and the wet gunny sack over his shoulder. People flew out of his way. He did not stop for any of them.
He dropped one bucket. He swung the gunny sack off his shoulder and threw it around Mattie Crane like a cloak, sash and dress and all, and pulled her hard against his chest and smothered her in it, and turned his own back to the fire.
"Out," he roared at Carrie. "Get them out. The back window's propped. I propped it."
Carrie found she could move after all.
"Out," she cried, and her voice came back to her, high and clear as a school bell. "Everyone out. Little ones first. To the back window."
The schoolroom came to life. Men grabbed children and passed them hand to hand, out the door and over the sill of the back window into the snow. Mothers snatched babies. Someone dragged the melodeon. Carrie stood at the window lifting the small ones over one after another and counting them aloud, and she did not stop counting until she reached the end of her list.
Behind her, Gideon set Mattie Crane down, sobbing and smoking but whole, in the gunny sack, and picked up the second bucket and threw the whole of it into the heart of the fire.
The tree hissed and roared. Steam boiled up to the ceiling. He threw the first bucket after it. Then he tore the burning branches down with his bare hands and beat them out on the floor with his coat.
When it was over, the cedar was a black skeleton nailed to the floor. The paper chains were ash. The ceiling over the corner was scorched in a long black tongue, and the whole schoolroom stank of smoke and wet wool.
Nobody was hurt. Not one child.
Mattie Crane's white dress was black at the waist and her pink sash was a charred rag, but under the wet gunny sack her skin was not even reddened. She stood out in the snow in her father's arms, in the light from the schoolhouse door, and did not stop crying until her mother came.
Gideon Platt's hands were blistered across both palms. He did not seem to notice. He stood by the door with his coat smoking, breathing hard.
Delbert Crane came to him across the trampled snow with Mattie still in his arms.
His face was white. He looked at the old man's hands, and at the empty buckets lying on their sides in the doorway, and at his little girl wrapped in Gideon's gunny sack.
"Gideon," he said finally. His voice cracked. "Why? Eleven years. Why the buckets?"
Gideon looked up at the stars.
"Christmas of 1841," he said. "Stark County, Ohio. My father put candles on a tree for the first time, because the German neighbors did it. I was twenty-nine. My little sister Sarah was seven." He stopped. "Nobody had a bucket. Nobody thought of it."
The yard had gone quiet around him. Thirty people in the snow, listening.
"I couldn't get to her," Gideon said. "I've carried water to every Christmas tree I've come near since. It isn't much. But it's what I could think to do."
Delbert Crane looked down at his daughter. Then, without a word, he put her into Gideon Platt's arms.
The old man stood there holding her, awkwardly, the way a man holds something he has never held before, with his ruined hands spread careful under her back. Mattie looked up at him, still hiccuping. Then she put her head on his shoulder.
They finished the program outside.
There was nowhere else to go. The schoolhouse was full of smoke. So the whole district stood together in the snow under the stars, with the lanterns from the wagons, and Carrie Dunn handed out the presents that had not burned from a bushel basket, and the children sang "Silent Night" in the cold, and the sound of it went up and out across the dark white prairie.
Gideon stood at the back, as he always did. But someone had brought him a chair from the wagons. And someone else had wrapped his hands in clean handkerchiefs, and someone had given him a cup of coffee, and he held it in both bandaged hands and drank it slowly.
Before the wagons left, Miss Dunn went to him with her list in her hand. She did not know what to say, so she said the truth.
"I thought you were cracked," she said. "I'm sorry."
"So did I, some years," said Gideon.
Next Christmas, Delbert Crane carried the buckets in himself. There were four of them.