Nineteen Firefighters in the Front Pews

The Neighbor Across the Road

Mike was asleep in his recliner by the time Katie and I got home. He had showered and put on clean flannel, and his boots were by the back door with the ice melting off them onto the rug.

I did not wake him. I stood at the kitchen window and looked across the road at Harold’s place.

It is a white farmhouse with green shutters. Harold farmed it until 2004 and rented the land to Mike’s dad after that. Marlene kept the flower beds along the porch, and when she was alive there were petunias in every one of them by Memorial Day.

Marlene died three winters ago. Since then the beds have been empty, and Harold eats supper at the Ellerton Cafe four nights a week, alone, at the same stool.

Every winter since Marlene died, Mike has snowblown Harold’s driveway. He does it before he does our own, at five in the morning, before milking. Harold has never once mentioned it, and Mike has never once expected him to.

Harold brings us sweet corn in August. He leaves it on our porch in a feed sack with no note. That is how it has been between our two houses for twenty years.

Mike woke up around two. He came into the kitchen in his socks and poured himself coffee that had been sitting since breakfast.

“How did Katie do?”

“She was wonderful,” I said. “She looked for you the whole time.”

He was quiet for a while. He drank the cold coffee like it was nothing.

“I should have gone home and changed,” he said.

“You would have missed her.”

“I missed her anyway.” He set the cup in the sink. “Jody, I want you to leave it.”

“Leave what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t go to Pastor Linda. Don’t make it a church council thing. He’s seventy years old and he’s alone over there.”

I could have argued with him. I did not. Mike is a man who believes that most trouble goes away if you do not feed it, and he is right more often than I give him credit for.

But I kept thinking about the people in the back pews. They had watched a man who had just spent four hours keeping a neighbor’s house from burning get sent away like a stray dog. Not one of them knew where he had been.

A complaint to the pastor would have been a complaint. People argue with complaints. They take sides, they say Harold means well, they say rules are rules, and by Easter it is a feud.

I did not want to tell anybody anything. I wanted them to see it.