Christine Byl‘s first novel, Lookout, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It follows a working class family across four decades of heartbreak, struggle, fire, and hope. Claire Boyles, author of Site Fidelity, said “each character’s struggle to live authentically is as rich and clearly rendered as the Montana landscape that sustains them.”
The following excerpt is from the first chapter, “Start Small,” which is set in July 1986. Readers find The Kinzler family – parents Josiah and Margaret and their children Cody and Louisa – in their small homestead in Northwest Montana.
Cody turned and there was Clint. Thirteen and half-tall, always looming bigger than he was, Clint was part neighbor part cousin part wild, and Cody drew toward him one day, and shrugged away the next.
“Look what I got.” His smile a dare. A large box of matches came out of his pocket and lay in the palm of his hand, balanced to show.
“The wood kind. They don’t bend when you light ’em.” Clint struck one match against the box edge and let it burn. Cody stomped a foot as the flame got close to his fingers. He flicked it into the brush. She watched the arc, ready to spit on the ash, but the air extinguished any spark.
“The fires—” she said, then stopped. They’d heard for weeks about the Glacier Park burn, spreading to Forest Service land, how many acres. But the wind constantly shifted and this hour, the sky sat blue and harmless, no smoke in sight, the only scent faint as a far-off campfire.
Clint ignored her protest. “They light on stone.” Against a rock big enough to sit on, he struck another match. It hissed and flamed in a quick snap. Clint handed the box to Bobby, who lit two more and thrust the box at Cody’s chest. She pushed his arm back. Matches were a risky game, forbidden in any weather.
“Bobby, I know where a weasel lives, in our shed, where we can watch.” Her voice was bright as she could make it. She didn’t address Clint but he answered her without looking.
“What baby cares about a shit-fucker weasel.” Clint stood up on the balls of his feet and rocked back, grinning at the sky. He cursed enviably, as easy as talking. Bobby watched them with his hands by his sides. Cody lit the first match with stiff arms, blowing it out fast, the tip barely blackened. It was hard to breathe.
“Don’t waste them.” Clint snatched the box from her. “Use them all the way.”
Cody tore the box back and held it behind her. Clint could change the day like a switch flipped on, a bright zing. She hated to be bossed but it made her brave.
At home she was allowed to light matches to start a morning fire in the woodstove or touch the candlewicks to flame. Out here in the sun, the matches were dimmer, but the heat felt near.
They passed the box back and forth and the rest of the matches—fifty?—went quick as they lit sticks and grass seed-heads, letting them burn, then dropping them in the river where they hissed out and shot downstream. Clint mouthed the sound of dropped bombs and Cody’s insides went night quiet. She lit one purple match tip from another, the blended flame an instant brighter surge. Clint licked his fingers and put out a little torch between his pointer and his thumb, so Bobby did it, too. Show-offs.
The last match caught Cody’s sleeve. She watched the loose cotton threads curl and go ashy, mesmerized, and so she let it go too long. When she mashed the cuff against the dirt it left a blackened smudge at the wrist. Her favorite shirt, a blue summer-weight chambray like her father’s, with pearl snaps and red stitched pockets. Too hot for that, Cody, her mother said. But Josiah never wore short sleeves.
Cody smelled her cuff. It stunk. She imagined burnt skin instead of cloth and looked up to see Clint squinting. He could turn his baby face into a threat.
“Cody, you tell our dads, I’ll—” Clint motioned, his hands a blend of wring and punch. It looked ridiculous but scared Cody anyway. Clint was smart enough to hunt down his own trouble and turn it into someone else’s.
By dinner Cody had forgotten about the matches. After they’d cleaned up the kitchen she draped on the arm of her father’s chair and her hands combed his beard, tickling, when Josiah grabbed her wrist and pulled it toward him. Her burnt cuff sat black in his lap.
“What’s this?” Josiah’s voice was stern, and Cody’s giggle halted in her throat.
“Oh, Pop, that was—I did that . . .” She couldn’t think of words. “I . . . got dirty.”
“This is not dirt. Where did you get a burn?”
Cody tucked her bottom lip under her teeth. She backed off Josiah’s lap, but he wouldn’t let go of her hand. She stood before him with her arm out as if she were reined.
“Cody, where did you get matches?” Josiah leaned forward in his chair and held her by the shoulders.
“Was it from Clint? Answer me.” His face moved with the deliberate words. His voice was deep and angry as he ever got, and Cody knew better than to persist.
“BobbyWatsonhadmatches.” It came out fast. Her father never ran into Bobby’s parents. No one would know what she told.
“And you lit them?”
Cody nodded.
“What have I told you about matches?” he asked. His loud voice drew Louisa trolling by the open door to investigate this rare shout, but she didn’t enter the room.
“There are fires burning in the park, Cody. Twenty miles from us. What have I told you about matches!”
He’d said it so often, she knew the exact words.
“You only light a match to start a flame,” Cody whispered. Josiah took hold and led her upstairs to her room. He strode with his arm wrenched behind him, dragging her along. At the doorway, he pushed her forward.
“Sit,” he said, pointing to the beds.
Josiah left the room and yanked the door shut past the warped doorjamb so it would be hard to open. Cody sat on Louisa’s bed weaving her fingers through the holes in the afghan, still for what felt like an hour. She touched the soft spots under her eyes, pressed until she saw black and green. Her skin felt sticky. She could hear Louisa in the bathroom talking on the phone, the cord stretched under the door from the hallway cubby, tight enough to trip on. It was boldly light out. The sun would not set for hours more and the after-supper birds were still silent, even the referee bird that always sang first. Then her father returned.
“Cody, come.” Josiah was calm. He took her hand back into his palm, a glove now instead of a leash, and walked her down the stairs, past her mother laying out bills in stacks on the wiped table.
“We’ll be half an hour,” said Josiah to Margaret, who looked up from her calculator and nodded. Cody dropped her eyes so as not to plead, ashamed of her badness. In the yard Josiah picked up a Pulaski leaning against the shed and kept Cody by the other hand. They walked away from the house, away from the river, toward the south corner of the property where an old logging road shambled into the woods. The late evening air hung low and still and Cody smelled the sugary scent of ponderosa bark, thickest after the day’s heat. Before she was old enough to know them by name, she called them Pancake Trees. Their smell reminded her of Saturday breakfasts when Josiah made thin crepes in the shape of her initials, drizzled with maple syrup from the glass bottle with the tiny handle, much too small for a finger. C.M.K.: Cody Madeleine Kinzler. Crispy where the edges bubbled against the buttered iron skillet.
The trees opened up into a small meadow. Josiah dropped her hand and moved so quickly ahead of her it was as if they’d arrived separately. Cody knew this clearing well; she played here, piling seed cones into heaps, hucking them at the giant pine at the edge of the clearing. Her father said it was a grandfather tree, old and tall with rough, thick bark that glowed orange as a robin’s chest. Her aim was good and she hit it squarely every other time. She’d had two real grandfathers, one she’d known and one she hadn’t.
Her father stopped and Cody spotted the dirt strips right off, four shallow trenches around him in the grass that formed a square as big as her bedroom, and inside the lines, low brush, grass, a few needled branches. Josiah’s matches came out of his pocket, wooden, the same blue and red brand as Clint’s, though his box was full when Clint’s was nearly empty. He looked at Cody and struck one match, then bent and lit a stalk of grass near the square’s edge.
“Stay there,” he said. Josiah crossed the plot and struck several more matches, planting them into brush. At the far corner of the plot, he picked up a blue cube water jug and walked the dirt perimeter back to her, leaking water onto the exposed soil trenches.
“Pop?”
By the time Josiah reached her, the patch flamed in front of them. Smoke rose. The individual fires grew hotter as they ate the dried white grass, the reddish needles, downed branches and mounds of cones. The small fires reached each other so their edges joined until, with a sudden burst of air like breath forced out tight lips, the center of the square surged into one flame, high as Cody’s waist. Josiah pushed her forward toward the dirt line, too close, and she backed away.
“Pop?” Cody said it again. Josiah stepped behind her and did not answer. The fire spread outward. She felt warmth on her face and legs. The air twisted and she realized that heat was something you could see. Cody looked back at her father. The fire advanced towards them and she heard the pop and hiss of seedpods and the squeak of sappy limbs drying fast. Cody cried out again, but her father made no motion and the fire burned so hot that her face felt tight and the liquid dried in her eyes: erased tears. Cody saw the ponderosa in the corner of the field and all she could think was that the fire would burn up the grandfather. She didn’t back away from the fire as it approached the line only a few feet in front of her. When it nearly reached her shoes, Josiah stepped forward and swung the jug, spraying the rest of the water out over the flames. The smoke turned in an instant from white to gray and the smell of doused ashes blanketed the plot. Cody put her face in her hands and cried.
When her father approached, Cody stiffened as if he were a stranger but as Josiah crouched low, her own knees folded. She sobbed with her face burrowed in his shirt. It smelled like chainsaw gas and the animals. Josiah squatted in the grass holding her against him and as her crying lessened, Cody peeked over his shoulder at the plot. Inside the dirt lines the grass was gone, the square flat and smoldering. A few tiny flames quivered but under her gaze they paused longer, then disappeared, as if the dirt were a swallowing mouth. No pinecone left. The muggy char hung thick but outside the dug lines, now dry, the world began again as green and live as usual. Josiah lifted her up in his arms. His hands joined under the pockets of her jeans and her legs swung, toes pointed downwards.
“Cody. Every fire starts small.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
Their chests moved together. Cody rested her face on her father’s shoulder and her feet dangled near his kneecaps. She’d be ten years old come fall, and in his arms, too large and awkward, she felt older. She was parched and tired and the corner of her mouth wetted his shirt. After a few minutes, he set her down. Her legs tingled as she straightened herself.
“Run home,” Josiah said. “I’ll be a few.”
He picked up the Pulaski and walked into the ashes with his back to her and kicked apart the piles of debris. With the adze end of the tool he turned up the dirt and dragged the last cinders with his feet.
Josiah half turned. “Go, Cody.” She ran.