The sky already had a red tint long before sunset. Curtis sped down the dirt road from the north fields of his family farm. Plumes of dust followed the Ford pickup’s tires dissipating into the rose glow as the dust spinned back to earth.

“Canada burning? California burning? Colorado burning? Are Washington State and Oregon on fire again? Will the fires ever stop?” Curtis mumbled to himself. 

Year after year the fires burned longer, with more destruction, more deaths. The fires that wouldn’t stop, with no plans to stop them had turned nature into a terrorist. When President Trump began his second term he redirected funds from climate control to oil exploration. He blamed the weather on El Nino. Like he handled the Covid epidemic. “It wasn’t his fault. It’s only the flu that will soon disappear. Blame the Chinese.” He has the same kind of excuses again. “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t start the fires.” Now he was blaming the fires on Ukraine and the Democrats.

During the fourth year of his term, President Biden had initiated a ten year plan to build water reservoirs that would be filled with desalinated water from coastal desalination plants, an addition to his infrastructure bill. World droughts were already here. His plan was to surround urban areas, and small towns with water reservoirs that stood high on steel legs with enough water immediately on site to quell any fire in hours instead of months. The number of reservoirs depended on the perimeter of the town.

Reservoirs would be filled with enough desalted water to keep communities safe from fires. Once urban areas had built enough reservoirs around their perimeters, plans would begin to build a grid of water reservoirs around national parks, wineries and forested areas. 

For the first time since the fires began, a President had the foresight to find a way to control wildfires. Water reservoirs are filled and readily available to quench any fire before it spreads. Reservoirs built along a grid pattern across the Western States would prepare us to end the uncontrolled catastrophe of loss of people and properties caused by wildfires. Preparedness for the future meant that we needed an immediate and unlimited supply of freshwater.

Freshwater will become the number one commodity throughout the World. Surround the population with water enough to saturate the foliage and protect the people and their property inside the grid. 

A delightful highlight of his plan was that when a fire was burning close to a reservoir, a shower curtain of water would start to fall from around its perimeter. Flowing down 10 ft. to the ground, the water wall would continue to fall around the perimeter of the tank and would create a continuous water shower curtain and a safe haven under the reservoir’s belly during a fire. This curtain of water would provide a safe place for humans and animals to gather and be safe until the fire was put out. Animals trying to escape flames, would instinctively run towards the sound of water falling. Humans trapped by the fire would know that if they could get to a reservoir and stand underneath, surrounded by a water wall, they would be safe. It was a perfect, beautiful plan that included an emergency source of water to be tapped for thirsty crops during a drought. And, the future looked certain that drought would be a continuous problem as the Earth heats up. 

It was a perfect, beautiful plan of hope to contain and manage wildfires in the United States that Trump abandoned a month into his second Presidency.

Curtis’ phone vibrated on the passenger seat where he had tossed it as he had packed up the truck to leave for the night. He pulled the truck to the shoulder of the road to read the message. It was a reminder text. It was from Moses Carlton, the new minister of the Bethel Baptist Trinity Church.

An emergency meeting will be held in the community room in the basement of the Bethel Baptist Trinity Church tonight starting at 7:30 p.m. All church members are requested to attend. 

Pastor Carlton had texted every church member with an announcement text, and again, with a reminder. Something was up.

Curtis looked at his watch and mumbled to himself. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” He was late.

Now Curtis had told himself that he could swear when he was alone, not ever really loud. Just a whisper under his breath when he was frustrated. Certainly, never in front of any adults, and especially, never in front of any adults who were church members. And, never, ever, in front of his father. Especially not in front of his father.

Curtis sat in the driver’s seat of his Dad’s pickup. His cell phone vibrated again. He picked up his phone to read the text. Glancing past the phone, he noticed that the creases in his hands were still tattooed with the day’s dirt. His lifeline ran like a dark stream across his palms. He turned his hand over and looked with despair at his nail beds. Even scrubbing with a brush and Lava soap, his hands still remained stained and appeared much older than his 16 years. 

Curtis had rushed from the field where he and his father had been bailing hay to store in the barn to feed three dozen Angus and longhorn beef cattle this winter. Extreme heat had destroyed half of the crops this past summer. Hay was important to supplement the cattle feed for the winter. His Dad had already parked the tractor in the shed for the night. Curtis had to rush to make the 7:30 p.m. meeting on time. He showered and dressed in dark blue jeans, a gray t-shirt under his new Varsity jacket.

“Curtis, do you want a sandwich? Do you have time for some supper?”

“Sorry, Dad. No, but don’t you want to come to the meeting tonight? Didn’t you get the Pastor’s text?”

“Curtis, I am tired. Please give my apologies to Pastor Moses, but my body needs to sit and be still. I want to catch the news on TV and go to bed. I’m in for the night.” 

Now if his mother was alive, the table would be set and the smell of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy and biscuits, and sweet corn with butter melting down the kernels would be waiting. There would always be homemade pie or cake for dessert. But his Mom had passed, almost eight months ago. Curtis and his Dad had visited the new headstone placed above her grave just last Sunday after church service.

John Frederick Mason wore a stone face through the cancer. Never once did he allow his wife to see his fear. Two surgeries. Then the two courses of chemotherapy which took what joy she had left in life, away from his wife’s face. A resigned acceptance that it was God’s plan for her life to end grew as the cancer continued to spread. That’s how it was explained to him by well-meaning friends at church. God needed her in heaven.

She died in her sleep at home in her and John’s bed. John was grateful that he was next to her when she smiled at him and said, “Good night, Love.” one last time. He was grateful that he couldn’t sleep, that he was conscious through the night. He wrapped his arms around her thin body and held her against his chest and listened to her breath. He hoped that he could remember how peaceful she appeared during the night. He kissed her face when she closed her eyes. He held her body, spooned, close to him and he kissed her shoulders In the dark. He was still holding her in the morning, already knowing she had left her body. He had felt her soul letting go just before the first light. His wife was gone. Then alone, he wept.

Curtis didn’t know about that intimacy of tears. After the funeral and the casseroles were eaten and the pans were returned to the neighbors, Curtis spent more time at home with his father, helping him in the fields and caring for livestock in the barns.

After his mother’s death, the daily chores gave a familiar rhythm to their lives: Chores in the early morning and again, soon after dark. Parts of every day at the beginning and the end of each day were the same. The farm required such commitment which provided in themselves the order that both Curtis and his Dad needed: the comforting necessity of doing the chores. His father had told him once that chores were our daily privilege to tend to our little piece of the earth, entrusted to us for a time. Guardian farmers, he once said. Curtis often remembered his words from that day. He, like his father and grandfather, would become a guardian farmer.

Curtis was convinced that for his Mom to die in her sleep in her own bed, with his Dad beside her, was the best way for her to leave for Heaven. The thought soothed him when he thought about the last few weeks of her life. She was in real pain. “To die in your dreams and there remain eternal…” Part of a poem Curtis thought he remembered. Maybe it was a hymn he had heard in church.

“She was so good.” Curtis said over again to himself. He was sure she must be in Heaven. Everlasting love…Those were words of a hymn the choir sang at her funeral. Everlasting love was what she was. He missed his mother. Every day.

The phone vibrated again. Jiggling across the seat, Curtis grabbed it before it vibrated off the cushion. It was Christian, his best friend. He needed a ride from work to the meeting.

Curtis and Christian had met at the Varsity football tryouts. Football was the only extra curricular activity in high school that Curtis had ever joined. He had promised his mother to try out for the high school football team last summer. She insisted that he spend some time with other boys his age. 

Even before his mother’s death, Curtis spent all of his free time following and learning farming from his Dad. The only son in a family history of farmers, his responsibilities on the farm grew as his skill levels excelled. He had no fear of driving the monster combine, or the tractor the size of a Mack truck that had a hood and heater for the long cold hours of winter in Texas. There never was a discussion that Curtis would, of course, choose anything but to be a farmer. The thought never was thought in the Mason household. He inherited his life with the pressure of three generations of Frederick Masons on his shoulders.

Football opened an opportunity for Curtis to become a part of a team and possibly, make some friends, something hours alone on the tractor, just didn’t create. His mother was right. Curtis came to thrive in football practice. Football practice gave him a break from memories of missing his mother for a couple hours after school before he came home to chores and the near empty house. Curtis was over six feet tall, with upper body strength and defined muscles under the soft face and skin inherited from a Scandinavian grandmother. 

The Coach knew that Curtis had a stutter when he was called upon in class. He stuttered when he was nervous, or anxious, or questioned. Kids in the hall made fun of him. Recording him in class, they posted his voice on the school’s social page. Coach also knew that Curtis had lost his mother to cancer less than a year ago. 

Curtis wasn’t fast enough to be a receiver, but he had good defensive reflexes. He was fast enough and strong enough to block. His even temperament never flinched as he took hard hits from his now, fellow team members that day in tryouts. Yet Curtis never tried to hurt an opponent. Coach picked Curtis as part of his defensive team within the first half-hour of tryouts.

Christian was a transfer student whose family, the Carltons, moved to Mount Pleasant, Texas, last Spring. His father was hired by the Bethel Baptist Trinity Church as their replacement of their previous minister who had died from Covid about the same time as Curtis’ mother had passed.

Bethel Baptist Trinity was a small church on the outskirts of Mt. Pleasant, Texas. The population of Mt. Pleasant was 16,047 in the US 2000 census, When Pastor Moses accepted the church’s offer for their new minister, church records listed 24 families as church members. Many had moved on when the church closed first for Covid, then for six months after the minister passed. Most of the church families were farmers or small business owners that eked out a living, but not much more. Moses was offered the pastor position with the parish, a three bedroom 1975 ranch house behind the church provided for his family to live in, as his only pay. Moses must work a part-time job to subsidize his family. He soon got a job at Ace Hardware. His wife, Helen, found work as a substitute teacher at the local middle school. Their son, Christian, was a junior in high school, but he also worked part-time jobs, saving for tuition for higher education, probably at a seminary some day after his high school graduation.

The minister’s duties included caring for the grounds, mowing the lawn, clearing the parking lot of sagebrush and debris before services, making small repairs on the buildings wherever he could. A storm had recently torn off part of the roof of the chapel. A huge plastic tarp covered one portion of the church building. There were no extra funds to repair it.

Christian’s family was church mouse poor, literally patching together incomes to cover a family’s day-by-day needs and responsibilities. Yet, not one of the Carltons complained. In fact, the family drew members back to the church by their positive, simple joy in daily life. Soon Bethel Baptist Trinity had two Sunday services, a prayer meeting in the chapel on Wednesdays, and once a month a fun event–a church picnic or a church hayride for the youth on Friday, or Saturday, careful not to schedule a youth event on game day, during football season.

Christian had never played football on a team. His father had been in the Army before he attended seminary, and the Carlton family moved from post to post, stationed both in Germany and South Korea, and Army bases in Georgia and Texas until Moses got accepted into seminary and retired from the service.

Mt. Pleasant High School combined three middle schools in the general area to provide enough students to qualify for AA league, the local competition school size of their high school football teams. The winning team of each District would compete in the Texas State Finals for the Texas High Schools Football Championship.

Christian was almost as tall as Curtis, but he was thinner, more bone than muscle. At first, the Coach hesitated to allow Christian to try out at all. That was, until he saw Christian throw the football.

Coach told one of the school reporters.

“This kid can throw the football while side-stepping a guard like I’ve never seen before at this level of play.” The Coach confessed to the student reporter. “I predict that the Mt. Pleasant Bulldogs will be in the State Finals this season. This year we have a team to be proud of.” He gestured across the practice field as the team was doing their final laps.

Mt. Pleasant High School football hadn’t made it to District Finals in twelve years. Hopes were high during the pre-season. Rumors about the new football team spread through breakfast by the morning diners at Denny’s, and repeated again by the town regulars at the local tavern, Arthur’s, evenings after work. The town was ready for a winning football season. Opening season’s first game was a week away.