Part 1
Every Christmas for eleven years, old Gideon Platt carried two buckets of water into the schoolhouse, and every Christmas the district laughed at him.
It was December 1883, in Jewell County, Kansas, at the Spring Valley school, and the Christmas program was the biggest night of the year. Every family for six miles packed into the little frame schoolhouse. The children recited. The older girls sang. And at the end, when it was dark outside and the stove glowed red, the teacher lit the candles on the tree, and every child came up to take a present off the branches.
Gideon was seventy-one. He was a bachelor, with a quarter section on Buffalo Creek and a temper the district had learned to steer around. He had no children. Nobody had ever seen him laugh. He came to the Christmas program anyway, every year, uninvited, and stood at the back by the door with his hat on, and at his feet stood two wooden buckets full to the brim with well water, and on top of one of them, folded square, a wet gunny sack.
"Gideon's fire brigade," people called it.
Nobody knew why he did it. He had come to Kansas from Ohio in 1872 and never said one word about his people. Once, at the program in '76, a little girl had asked him what the buckets were for. He had looked down at her for a while, and said only, "For in case," and gone out into the snow.
This year the new teacher was Miss Carrie Dunn, nineteen, from Topeka, and she did not know about the buckets.
She found them when she came in early on the afternoon of the twenty-second to trim the tree. Somebody had left them inside the door, and she nearly fell over one.
"What on earth?" she said.
"Gideon Platt's," said Delbert Crane, who was the chairman of the school board and had come to help her nail the tree to the floor. He laughed. "He'll be by tonight to stand guard over them. Pay him no mind."
"Guard over what?"
"Over the tree. Against fire." Crane shook his head. "He's done it since '72. Never so much as a singed twig, in eleven years. The man's cracked, Miss Dunn. Harmless. But cracked."
Carrie looked at the tree.
It was a big red cedar, cut off the Buffalo Creek bluffs three weeks before and stood in the corner of the schoolroom ever since, beside the stove. Every time somebody walked past it, a little shower of brown needles pattered down onto the floor.
She did not think anything of it. She was busy with the paper chains.
That night, Gideon came at seven o'clock, as he always did.
He came in at the back, stamping snow off his boots, and the whole schoolhouse turned and looked at him, and a ripple of laughter went across it. Somebody said, "Here's the fire brigade." Somebody else said, "Mind you don't spill, Gideon."
He did not answer. He set his buckets down by the door. Then he walked to the back of the room, to the window behind the woodbox, and propped the sash open an inch with a stick of kindling, though the night was bitter. Nobody paid any attention. He came back and stood behind his buckets with his arms folded.
Delbert Crane walked back to him, grinning.
"Gideon," he said, loud enough for the front rows to hear, "Miss Dunn's new. She'd like to know if you mean to drown us all this year."
Gideon looked at him from under his hat.
"That tree's been standing by the stove three weeks," he said. "It's dry as a corn husk."
"It's a cedar, Gideon. It's green."
"Outside it's green." Gideon looked at the brown needles on the floor. "Inside, it's kindling."
Crane laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and went back to his seat. Carrie Dunn, at the front, pretended not to have heard. She felt a little sorry for the old man and a little embarrassed by him, and she wished he would take his buckets home.
The program went beautifully.
The little ones said their pieces without forgetting more than half. The Crane twins played a duet on the melodeon, more or less together. Eight-year-old Mattie Crane, Delbert's youngest, recited the whole of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in a white dress with a wide pink satin sash, and did not miss a line, and the room applauded until the windows rattled.
Then Carrie Dunn took a long taper from the stove and went to the tree.
There were twenty-four candles on it, in little tin holders clipped to the branches. She lit them one by one, reaching up on tiptoe, and the room went soft and gold and everyone said "Oh," the way people always do.
At the back, by the door, Gideon Platt unfolded his arms.
"Now the presents," Carrie said. "Come up one at a time, when I call your name."
The children came up in a crowd, the little ones at the front. Mattie Crane was first, in her white dress and pink sash, reaching up for a paper cornucopia of candy that hung on a low branch, close to a candle.
She tugged at it. The branch dipped.
The candle on the branch above tipped sideways in its tin holder, and the flame touched the dry cedar.
For one second nothing happened. Then, with a sound like a sheet being torn, the whole side of the tree went up in yellow fire.