Nineteen Firefighters in the Front Pews

The Next Sunday

On Sunday morning Katie and I went to church without him. We got there at 10:15. The parking lot was full of the same Buicks and pickups as always, and the sun was out for the first time in two weeks.

Harold was at the door in his gray suit with his ribbon on the lapel. He nodded to me.

“Morning, Jody.”

“Good morning, Harold.”

He held out bulletins. I took two. He looked past me toward the lot, the way he always did, counting cars.

We sat in our pew, fifth on the left. Mrs. Erdmann was at the organ playing the prelude. Pastor Linda was up front talking with the acolyte, a Henning boy with his robe on crooked.

At 10:22 I heard the trucks.

They did not come with lights or sirens. They just came, one pickup after another, turning off Main Street into the lot. A few of them had the little blue light on the dash, unlit. They parked along the back fence, wherever there was room, and the engine doors opened.

Through the window by our pew I watched them get out.

Nineteen of them. Tan turnout coats with the yellow and silver reflective stripes across the back and around the sleeves. Bunker pants. Heavy black boots. Every one of them carrying his helmet under his arm the way they carry them at a funeral.

Ted Pankratz, who runs the feed mill. The two Lindquist boys. Rachel Henning, the only woman on the department, who is a nurse at the hospital in Chilton. The nineteen-year-old, Josh, whose mother cuts my hair. Duane.

And at the front of the line, because Duane had put him there, my husband.

People in the back pews had started turning around. Then the middle pews. Mrs. Erdmann looked up from the organ and lost her place and stopped playing in the middle of the prelude.

I could not see the door from our pew. I did not need to. I heard their boots on the steps.

Then I heard them on the wood floor of the narthex, and then they were coming up the center aisle, two by two where the aisle allowed, single file where it narrowed by the baptismal font.