It Won't Mind the Fire

SENSITIVE CONTENT - WAR RELATED TRAUMA AND DEATH

Part 1 – Captain Charles Miller

They moved at dawn because that’s when an army moves best: when the light is clean, the air is cold, and men are quiet. No time for talking. No time for second thoughts. The road was soft from the night’s rain and the men cursed their boots, but they marched anyway, shoulders bowed, rifles at rest. The fields to their left were thick with tall, dying corn, dry enough to go up with a single torch. Captain Charles Miller rode ahead, coat unbuttoned, hat pulled low against the glare.

He didn’t like riding. It made him feel separate. But his knee had turned bad many months and many miles ago, and the surgeon said if he marched on it much longer, it would go stiff and stay that way. So he rode, and the men said nothing.

They were headed for a plantation called Wexley Hollow. Intelligence said it had two wells, thirty hogs, six barrels of cornmeal, and a family that had refused to evacuate. That was enough to earn a visit. The orders were clear. Deny the enemy subsistence. Break the back of the rebellion.

He’d long stopped asking if it was right. Only if it worked. You don’t always need a bullet to do the job. Just take their food, take their roof, take their firewood. That was the part no one liked to say out loud. But it ended wars faster than sermons or treaties. It was pressure, applied until something broke.

The trees thinned as they neared the estate. No pickets. No sentries. No cannon. Just a large white house with wide porches and empty rocking chairs, and outbuildings spread like ribs from a spine. Slaves had once worked here. Now the fields were half-harvested and abandoned. Maybe the Confederates had called them to the fight. Maybe they’d scattered before the army got within a day’s ride.

One of his lieutenants, Farris, came up beside him. “Sir? Want us to spoil the wells?”

Miller shook his head. “No. We’re not poisoning the South. Just starving it.”

Farris pointed at the barn. “Dry roof. Should catch easy.”

Miller didn’t bother looking. “We’ll take the stores. Burn the rest.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The men moved out, disciplined. No whoops. No laughter. The new recruits had learned by now not to cheer when the flames came. The veteran soldiers worked quickly, collecting flour, salt, dried meat. A sergeant broke open the smokehouse with a prybar and gave the all-clear.

A woman watched them from the porch. Not yet forty, but the war had aged her face faster than the seasons could. Her graying hair was pulled back tight, like it was the only thing she could still control. A boy stood beside her, maybe eight, wearing shoes with broken laces, dust-caked and too small. They didn’t speak.

Miller approached the house slowly. He stopped short of the steps, removed his hat.

“You’ve been given time to leave,” he said. “We’ve no quarrel with civilians. But the buildings go. All of them.”

The woman stared at him like he was already a ghost. “This land’s older than your war.”

Miller wasn’t in the mood to argue. “Then it won’t mind the fire.”

She didn’t answer. The boy looked like he might run forward, or maybe cry, but he did neither. Just stood there, shaking with rage, or cold, or both.

Miller turned away before she could say anything else. He didn’t like watching them beg, and he liked it even less when they didn’t.

By midday, the barn was cinders. The smokehouse went next. The wind shifted, and ash drifted across the yard like snow. One of the younger privates tossed a broken toy onto the pile — a wooden horse with one wheel missing. It caught quick. Flames climbed its painted legs.

Farris came back again. “The woman and boy still haven’t left.”

Miller nodded. “Let them be.”

He moved past the hog pens. Empty. Someone had already taken the animals. Confederates, most likely. Or deserters. Or the family, slaughtering what they could before the army came. He saw the boy’s eyes again. They were still. Children were supposed to cry. But this one just burned cold.

Miller stopped at the edge of the field. The corn rustled in the wind like it was whispering something. He pulled a match from his coat, lit it on his saddle stirrup, and dropped it.

The stalks took fire fast.

Miller didn’t watch them burn. He turned his horse and started back toward the road.

The smoke rose behind him, thick and furious. Like something old had broken loose. He didn’t look back. He never did.

*****

Part 2 – The Boy

I don’t remember when they came. Just that they were there when I opened the door.

The sky was still waking up, and the yard smelled like dirt and old wood. I thought maybe it was going to rain, but it didn’t. It was quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Just the kind before something bad.

There were a lot of them. All dressed the same. Guns on their backs. Faces like they were heading somewhere worse than this.

Mama told me to stand still. So I did. My shoes didn’t fit right that day. They pinched at the heel, but I didn’t move.

The man in front didn’t yell or wave his arms. He wasn’t big, but everyone looked at him before they did anything. His coat was darker than the others, and his face didn't move. It was like nothing behind it was still alive.

They talked, him and Mama. I couldn’t hear much. Her hands stayed clasped like she was holding something she didn’t want to drop.

They took things. Then they lit the barn. Then the field.

It didn’t roar. It ate. You could feel it chewing the air, like it wanted your breath too.

I wanted to run and tell Papa, but Papa was gone. He left with his horse, his saber, and a carbine when I was six. Said he had to head for Tennessee, where the real fighting was. I think he really believed he was doing the right thing.

After they left, I went behind the smokehouse to be sick. It wasn’t even a choice. My stomach turned inside out and I dropped to my knees in the dirt. The ground was warm from the fire still smoldering. I tried not to cry, but it was like my body didn’t know the difference.

It smelled like ash and meat and something worse. That’s when I started to understand. Not just that they were gone, but that they could come back. That they could do it again somewhere else. That nobody could stop them.

My hands shook. I wiped them on my shirt, then sat there for a long time, trying to breathe without tasting smoke.

Later I walked back to the yard. The barn was gone. The field looked like the sun had been buried in it, and the burn left a scar. I found where the ashes had buried my toys. The ones I left near the porch, where Papa said they’d trip someone one day. I tried to dig one out, a carved horse with a chipped leg, but it crumbled in my hand. Fell apart like dry bread.

I didn’t cry then. Not because I was brave. Just because there was nothing left in me.

We left that afternoon, walking toward Uncle Silas’s place three miles west. Slept under a hickory tree that night with smoke still in our clothes.

Uncle Silas’s place was smaller. No one bothered to burn it. Not since he went off to war and his girls took the wagon north.

We let ourselves into the house. It was cold and quiet, but the walls still stood and the wind stayed out. Mama sat at the kitchen table that night without saying anything. She looked like she was waiting for someone to say it was over.

That winter was long. The cold got into the house, then into her. She stopped talking sometime in January. I buried her before spring, in the back field, where the ground was soft and no one would step on her.

I told myself I’d find the man in the dark coat one day. Make him look at what he did.

But I never saw him again.

I still think about his face. How he didn’t look angry. How he didn’t look anything at all.

And how that made it worse.