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Peace in the Valley

By Kelly Irvin

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Chapter 1
West Kootenai, Montana
A cotton nightgown and a wispy lock of pale blonde baby hair wouldn’t take up much room in the box. Nora Beachy’s hand hovered over the only keepsakes that remained to mark the birth of her sister who passed away a few hours after her birth. The wildfire racing through Montana’s Kootenai National Forest this Friday before Labor Day weekend might destroy everything in its path—including the home Nora had lived in her whole life. It couldn’t, however, take the memory of humming a lullaby to that tiny, strangely silent bundle of sweetness for a few brief moments before returning her to Mother.
Wiping at her face with her sleeve, Nora took a long breath. Her dry throat ached and her lungs burned. The stench of acrid smoke hung in the air. She coughed and gagged. The fire must be getting closer. Moving faster, she laid the nightgown aside and tucked the lock of hair back in its yellowed envelope. She tried to hum her favorite English hymn, “How Great Thou Art.” Music usually calmed her. Not today. The biscuits and apple butter she’d eaten for breakfast sloshed in the coffee she’d drank to force them down.
“What are you doing?”
Nora whirled. “You scared me.”
Mother stood in the doorway to the bedroom she shared with Father.
“You’re supposed to be packing the kitchen.”
“We can buy more sponges, clothes soap, and towels.” Nora picked up the faded green-and-blue patchwork quilt Grandma Rachel had made as a wedding gift for Mother and Father. She brushed it against her cheek. It smelled like the cedar chest. “Some things can’t be replaced.”
“Cleaning supplies cost money.” Mother crossed the room and took the quilt. She glanced down at the cotton nightgown yellowed with time and tears. “We only have so much room in the wagons and the buggy. Go finish packing the kitchen.”
Grandma Rachel’s tinkling laughter in the middle of one of her stories about Grandpa’s youthful shenanigans sounded in Nora’s ears even though Grandma had been gone five years. A picture bobbed in her mind’s eye of the way Grandma worried her lower lip as she threaded the needle for another crib quilt for one of the great-grandchildren. “Jah, Mudder. I just—”
“Don’t be crying over material things. It’s not as if we can take them with us when we pass from this life.” Mother’s wan smile took the edge from her words. Behind silver wire-rimmed glasses, her blue eyes were bright and teary. “Gott will provide everything we truly need.”
Nora lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders. Her faith was strong. God could use the fire for her good and the good of every person in its path. That didn’t mean she had to like the way lightning had started a fire in the forest, tinderbox dry after a long, hot summer. That firehad consumed stands of magnificent ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and the homes of the wildlife who lived on fourteen thousand acres of forest north of Lake Koocanusa in a mere twenty-four hours. “I’m not crying. The smoke is burning my eyes.”
It’s not my place to ask, I know, but I was just wondering what is Your plan, Gott?
God’s mighty eyebrows surely bumped the highest star in the sky at the temerity of her question.
Don’t mind me, Gott.
“It’s hard to think we might not have anything to come home to, but people make homes, not furniture.” Mother gently tucked the keepsakes into the box and handed it to Nora. “We’ll make room on the wagon for these and for your groossdaadi’s Bible.”
Her dishwater-chapped fingers grazed Nora’s hand. “You have a soft heart, Dochder. Never change.”
Mother could read her mind. Comforted by the thought, Nora trotted into the front room where she added the Bible, along with Father’s German-English one, to the box. As an afterthought she snatched the box of checkers that kept her brothers busy on many icy winter nights. In the kitchen she added the lighter box to one filled with canned goods from the cellar. She glanced around the room. Canning pickles, baking bread, making gingerbread men and popcorn balls for Christmas. The smell of bacon, elk sausage, and pancakes on a snow-blanketed winter morning. Those were the memories that made a house a home.
A fire couldn’t take those memories.
But it could take future ones. For two years she and Levi Raber had been saving their money to buy a small plot of land near his parents’ property. Then they could get married. Two years of scrimping and saving her checks from the Kootenai General Store. Two years of stolen kisses, sweet hugs, and a growing hunger for more.
If the fire took the house . . . No, she wouldn’t think about that.
Straining under the weight of the boxes, she tramped down the hall and out the front door into a frantic beehive of activity as her father and five brothers set up sprinklers and soaked the house, wood shop, and barn in hopes of staving off fire damage.
Smoke hung like fog in the air. The boys had donned respirators. They looked like strange aliens invading the farm with soaker hoses as weapons.
Another thought she wouldn’t share with her parents. They found her flights of fancy a bit too fanciful at times.
Father slid his respirator back and let it rest on his silver curls. His brown eyes were bloodshot and his lined face wet with dirty sweat. “Get your mudder. It’s time for you to leave for Rexford.”
The Dublins, owners of the store in Rexford, had offered them use of an RV on the other side of Lake Koocanusa. But first they had to travel nearly twenty miles from West Kootenai across the longest, highest span bridge in the state and north on Highway 37 to Rexford.
It would be a long drive with an overloaded wagon, two small boys, and a dog. They’d driven that road hundreds of times. Now the path seemed murky with smoke and uncertainty.
“Not without you and the boys.” The words were out before she could test them for impertinence. “I mean, shouldn’t we stick together?”
“We need to soak everything for as long as possible.” Father tugged the boxes from Nora. “Take the little ones and go.”
He turned and called to Solomon and Seth, nine and five years old respectively. After Amelia passed, God had blessed Mother and Father with five more boys, but Jeannie, now married and the mother of her own daughters, and Nora were their only girls.
Dust kicked up on the road. A truck or a car headed their way. Coming fast. Nora’s stomach clenched. Not more bad news?
A siren screamed, a foreign sound in this part of God’s country. Father whirled and headed toward the road. Nora followed. A filthy Lincoln County sheriff’s SUV roared into the driveway and halted within inches of the first wagon. Sheriff Emmett Brody left the engine running and hauled his bulky body from the truck the second it came to a full stop.
His usual hearty smile was missing. “You folks have to go now.” His chest heaving as if he’d been running in the thin air of high altitudes, he pointed at the mountains behind them. “It’s coming fast. We’re telling everyone to get out now.”
“You said we had four or five hours.” Father clutched the hose. The look on his face was foreign, as if rooted in his own despair but clinging to hope. “It hasn’t been two hours yet.”
“The wind picked up.” Emmett pulled a can of spray paint from the SUV’s front seat. “It’s moving faster than we figured it would, and it didn’t slow down in the meadows. Time to go.”
“What about the others? Is everyone else out?” Nora edged closer to the sheriff. “All the Plain families, I mean.”
Not that she didn’t care about the English families. They were good neighbors and good friends but coming right out and asking about Levi specifically would raise eyebrows—especially those thick bushy ones above her father’s eyes.
“She wants to know about Levi.” James, brother number one, elbowed her with a silly grin that came and went. Leave it to him to make light in the midst of an impending inferno. “Is her special friend safe?”
“Hush, Suh.” Father frowned. “This isn’t the time.”
“The other families are all on the road.” His fair skin ruddy with heat, Emmett removed his white cowboy hat and slicked down sparse carrot-orange hair with an impatient gesture. “You’re my last stop.”
Levi was on the road. To where? Some families would go to Rexford, others to Eureka, or even farther if they had family in Libby or St. Ignatius.
Libby. Her parents would never go there. Even though they had more family in the Eagle Valley Amish Ministries district than they did in Kootenai.
Mother tottered through the front door with two bulging suitcases. “What is it, Harley? What’s happened?”
“We have to go.” The words sounded stuck in Father’s throat.
“Is there anyone else in the house?” Emmett shook the can of spray paint. “Get everyone out.”
“We’re out. What are you doing with the paint?”
“That’s how we know who’s gone and who’s staying.”
“We can stay?” Father’s gaze went to the house. “I could stay and keep the water going.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” Emmett clapped Father on the shoulder. “I know everything in your gut is telling you to hang on. But you gotta go. Think of your kids. Do you want to leave them fatherless over a bunch of buildings that can be rebuilt? We have a few idiot folks who refused to leave, but they had to sign a form saying they stay at their own risk. No one will rescue them. Just take a good look and tell me it isn’t time to go.”
In unison they turned. Nora’s breath caught in her throat. Her hands came up to her face. A raging vortex of angry flames hurled themselves down the mountain, decimating everything in their path. They headed straight for Kootenai.
Straight for their home.
“Fraa, go. Suhs, in the buggy.” Father tucked Solomon onto the back of the wagon. Seth scrambled in next to him. Stinker, the no-good, lazy dog loved by all, planted himself between them.
Emmett spray painted a big fat zero on the sidewalk. “Godspeed.”

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