Joshua Lott for The New York Times  Jerry Payne, Arizonaâs deputy state forester, at a fence cordoning off the area where 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite wilderness firefighting crew, died in the line of duty.  YARNELL, Ariz. â The flames that killed 19 members of an elite firefighting squad moved capriciously through this old gold-mining village, scorching structures indiscriminately, as if playing a drunken game of hopscotch. They spared everything on one side of Route 89, which doubles as Main Street here, but proved cruel on the other, sometimes destroying entire blocks, sometimes burning a single house and nothing else.  By last week, the Yarnell Family Diner, a local institution, had reopened, but the villageâs sole grocery store had not. Donated furniture packed a warehouse in the city of Prescott, to the north, and the old high school gym in Wickenburg, to the south; the people who needed it had no home to take it to. Church groups distributed cases of drinking water from the side of the road. Molten or cracked by the fireâs intensity, water pipes awaited repairs.  Standing by the blackened basin where the firefighters died on June 30 â trapped between a rushing fire and a rocky mountain they could not climb â Darrell Willis, the chief of the wildland division at the Prescott Fire Department, which employed the men, said they had been there to keep the village from burning, to stop the flames using saws, pickaxes and sheer physical strength.  âGod had a different plan for this crew,â he lamented.  Peter Andersen, 61, believes that God had a plan for him, too, which is about the only way he has found to explain why his house was spared the destruction that befell all the other structures around it.  âThe Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,â Mr. Andersen said.  Pat Sim, 65, who lives nearby, has seen her spirits go âup and down, up and down,â buoyed by the joy and battered by the guilt of finding her home intact.  The people of Yarnell have been picking up the pieces since the fire that burned the forest that surrounds their town surrendered to the teams that battled it on the ground and from above, too late to save the firemen.  There has been time devoted to rebuilding, for those determined to do it, and time devoted to relieving their hearts â in meals at the diner, in the churches that anchor this close-knit community and in the modest memorial that sprouted on a knoll off Route 89, where some people have wandered to, just to let themselves cry.  Karen Patterson, 34, said that sometimes she feels anger. Once the winds turned and the flames changed direction, charging toward Yarnell like a galloping cavalry, she began to think about her grandmother, whose entire life had been spent here, and the memories packed in the house that she owned but for which she had no insurance.  On her way out after the evacuation order that, like the raging fireâs sudden turn, caught many people by surprise, Ms. Patterson stopped on Route 89 by the Shrine of St. Joseph and prayed for mercy.  âThis fire,â she said, âit cost 19 lives, peopleâs homes, their pets, everything they owned. Couldnât it have been put out the same day it started burning?â  A late-afternoon lightning storm punctuated the skies here on June 28, and several residents called 911 to report smoke coming from the mountains. At 7:19 p.m., according to dispatch logs, the fire was deemed âinactiveâ and ânot much of a threat.â The first crews, made up of inmates trained to fight wildfires, were ordered to report to neighboring Peeples Valley the next morning at 5.  âNot taking action tonight,â reads one of the transcripts of the dayâs conversation, provided by the Arizona State Forestry Division.  At 4:55 p.m. on June 29, the log says, âNeed to order HT,â short for Hotshots team, a group of wilderness firefighters who work under punishing conditions, deep into the forest â frontline soldiers in the battle against flames.  The fallen firefighters, from a crew called the Granite Mountain Hotshots, were called in at 9:01 p.m., through an e-mail to the crewâs supervisor, Eric Marsh. At 43, Mr. Marsh was the oldest of the crew and one of its founders, so passionate about his job that he started a wildfire training academy out of his living room. (It has since moved to a building in Prescott, hosting classes for firefighters from the United States and abroad.)
In Yarnell, Ariz., where 19 firefighters died and where homes destroyed by fire sit next to those mysteriously spared, residents struggle to ascribe meaning to what happened.