Nineteen Firefighters in the Front Pews

Harold Voss stepped into the sanctuary doorway at 10:28 on a Sunday morning in March and put one hand flat on the frame. My husband stopped on the top step. Mike still smelled like a barn that had been burning since before sunrise.

“Mike,” Harold said. “The Lord’s house is not a barn.”

I was right behind my husband with our daughter, Katie, who was twelve. I had three bulletins in my hand. I remember the paper going soft where my thumb pressed into it.

Mike looked down at himself as if he had not thought about it until that second. His jeans were black at the knees. His barn boots had ice and ash packed into the treads, and there was a gray line of soot in the creases of his neck.

He had washed his hands and face in the sink at the fire hall. He had not had time for anything else.

“I just came from the Kesslers’,” he said. “I wanted to sit with my family. Katie’s reading this morning.”

“I know where you came from,” Harold said. “The whole church can smell where you came from. Go home, and come back next week dressed decently.”

Behind us the Lindquists had come up the steps and were waiting in their good coats. In the back pews, heads had turned. Nobody said anything, because in Ellerton nobody ever says anything to Harold at the door.

Harold Voss had been head usher at Trinity Lutheran for thirty years. He had lived across County Road K from us for twenty. He wore the same gray suit every Sunday with a little white usher’s ribbon pinned to the lapel.

Mike nodded. That is the thing I want people to understand about my husband. He nodded the way he nods when the milk inspector tells him something he does not like but cannot argue with.

“He’s right, Jode,” he said to me quietly. “I smell like a hay mow.”

“Dad, no,” Katie said.

He put his big hand on top of her head the way he has since she was born. Then he touched my shoulder, turned around, and went back down the steps to the truck.

I watched him go. He walked slow because he was tired, not because he was hurt, though I believe he was both. He had been up since a quarter to five and on a hose line for four hours in eleven degrees.

I turned back to Harold. I had a hundred things in my mouth, and every one of them was something I would have had to repent of by Wednesday.

“Thank you for your years at this door, Harold,” I said.

He blinked at me. I think he was waiting for the other thing, the angry thing, and it did not come. He held out a bulletin to Katie, though I already had three, and she took it because she was raised to.

We went in and sat in our pew, fifth on the left, where the Schaefers have sat since before I married into the family. Katie’s hands were shaking when she went up to read the Old Testament lesson. It was her first time.

She read it beautifully. She kept looking at the back doors the whole time.