Bones by Andrew Caroll
"In the Middle Ages, when men believed in the physical existence of Hell, the sight of fire must have meant something different than what it does today.nevertheless their idea of Hell owed a lot to the sight of fire consuming and the ashes remaining-as well as to their experience of the pain of burns."   -John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1973   I always remember those times we had on Bonfire Night. Rather, I remember both the night and all of the preparations that went on during the day leading up to it. The McEntee boys, who lived at the top of the hill, would be out gathering materials for the fire since early morning. They would bring our attention to some deadwood they had found somewhere in the nearby wood; we would drag them in ones or twos to the site until a considerable pile had amounted. The bonfire was always built on the empty site on the other side of the road from their house. The McEntee boys took special pride in doing the majority of the work, as well as controlling the construction of the fire.   The pile of wood would be placed in the middle of the site, away from three separate triplets of electricity wires that ran high above; we had once been warned by Terry Keane, a neighbour, that it was dangerous to light a fire directly under power-lines. It would be finished just before lunchtime; such was our fervour and excitement in building the fire that we would have the job finished before the morning was out. As well as the wood, dried, dead beach leaves and a few rubber tyres that Terry would contribute would be added to the structure. The leaves, I was once told, helped to make smoke, though I was forever puzzled as to why anyone would want to cause such an effect. I remember, on at least one occasion, Garry, one of the McEntee boys, coming back from the wood with a red, two-person saw slung around his torso, dragging green-leaf-covered branches behind him. The sight stirred a mixture of feelings in me; one of admiration for the older boy, and a sense of abhorrence at the fact that someone one could cut down and burn live tree-limbs as he did.   We would filter away to our respective homes for lunch about one, once the bonfire was built. Each of us, however, would return to the structure at points during the day, alone or in twos, to stand in its shadow and stare at the incredible sight of it. The unlit fire possessed a potency that held young eyes captivated by its mysteries; it seemed to sing to us of its incendiary potential. It sang of other powers also, older ones that whispered their tune from within us.   We lit the fire just after nightfall. Terry would come up to the site with a few more tyres and a can of kerosene, as well as some rolled up newspapers for starting the blaze. He was the resident Gárda, and it naturally fell to him to light the fire and to supervise a potentially dangerous event. The blaze would spread quickly to all areas of the pile, the sounds of sparking and crackling becoming more intense as the conflagration advanced, stirring excitement in us as we stood around it. We stared transfixed into its enigmatic movements, though it destroyed as part of its consumption those fresh leaf-covered branches, jagged at one end from the two-man saw. The sight spoke to me of things that were to come, inevitabilities that all childhoods have to yield to eventually. As we progressed through those waning halcyon episodes of youth, a saw of opposition would, at every stroke, bring us incrementally, each year, to a point when our connection to Grace would be completely severed, as I became the older boy, and beyond.