Time Well Spent as a Ghost

Chapter 4

A fear like nothing she'd ever known suddenly numbed her brain as she ran towards the men. Bruce thought she was running into the fire and caught her by the waist as her arms flailed. Sylvia was trying to call to the others to climb the loft and look for Ben. The only one who seemed to hear her was her father. He looked at her with his hand cupping his ear, and she shouted as the fire roared. He looked up at the blazing loft, but then turned toward the milking pens where the boys were freeing up the livestock. For the rest of her days, Sylvia wondered whether he had understood her or not.

"C'mon," Bruce yelled.

He grabbed her hand and they ran past what was left of the hen house. The back doors of the barn were open too, and the air flowed in from both directions feeding the flames that were quickly climbing towards the roof. From the front of the barn it had looked as if the entire loft was engulfed in flames, but this side wasn't. Bruce pushed Sylvia backward as he looked for a ladder. He jumped up getting a foothold on the window frame and pulled himself onto the loft.

Sylvia could hear him calling Benjamin's name, but it sounded so far away. And as she stood back and looked around her it was as if the roaring of the fire wasn't a noise at all but a wordless expression of rage and destruction that Sylvia could feel in the core of her chest. Burned roof tiles began to fill the air with sparks of miniature fires that landed and caught hold on the wood floor. Through the front door, Sylvia could see the frightened cattle being herded away from the barn, and she hoped her brothers were out from under the beams that were beginning to buckle as the fire chewed through.

Sylvia yelled for Bruce but she couldn't see him anywhere. She stood back, trying to see further up into the loft, and then she caught sight of him. He was walking toward her, carrying what looked like a burning pile of empty feed sacks in his arms. He was cradling the mass of flames close to his chest, and his face had such a look of pain that for a minute Sylvia didn't understand what he was doing. Her mind screamed for him to drop the bundle before he got hurt and keep looking for their son. Then she realized what was happening. He fell to his knees near the edge of the loft and lowered his head to Benjamin's body as his own clothing started to burn. Sylvia screamed in horror but there was no time to react as the floor of the loft gave way and her husband and son fell through, down into the equipment room.