Nineteen Firefighters in the Front Pews

Mike was first. He had a smudge of soot on the side of his neck that he had not noticed. His coat smelled like every fire he had ever been to, which is the smell that never comes out of turnout gear no matter how many times you wash it.

He did not look at anyone. He looked straight up at the cross over the altar and walked.

As he passed our pew he looked down at me, just once. I will never forget his face. It was not angry, and it was not proud. It was a man trying very hard not to cry in front of the whole town.

They filled the front three pews. In a Lutheran church, the front three pews are always empty. Pastor Linda has joked about it for years. That morning they were full, every inch, of men and one woman in turnout gear with their helmets on their knees.

I turned around in my seat to look at the door. I could not help it.

Harold was standing there holding it. He had held it for all of them. He had not said one word.

The last one through was Duane.

The Chief at the Door

Duane did not go in. He stopped on the threshold, in front of Harold, and took his helmet out from under his arm and held it in both hands.

The church was so quiet I could hear the furnace kick on in the basement.

“Harold,” Duane said. He said it low, but sound carries in that building. “Do you remember March of 1991?”

Harold did not answer at first. His hand was still on the brass handle of the door.

“I remember,” he said.

“I was twenty-six years old,” Duane said. “Your kitchen was full of smoke. Marlene was on the floor by the stove, and you were out in the barn and didn’t know.”

Some of the older people in the back nodded. They remembered. I did not; I was ten years old and living two counties over in 1991.

“I went in and carried her out,” Duane said. “I wasn’t wearing a suit, Harold. I was wearing this.” He touched the front of his coat. “She didn’t mind what I had on. Neither did you.”

Harold’s face did something I had never seen it do. It came apart, just a little, around the mouth.

“No,” Harold said. “No, I didn’t.”

“These are the same people who would come for you tonight,” Duane said, “if your house caught. Every one of them. Mike Schaefer would be the first one in your door. He lives closest.”

Then Duane did a kind thing. He did not wait to see what Harold would do. He nodded once, as if the conversation were finished, and walked up the aisle and sat down at the end of the front pew next to my husband.

Harold stood at the door by himself.

I watched him. The whole church watched him. He looked down at his gray suit coat for a long moment, at the little white ribbon on the lapel.

Then he took the coat off.

He folded it over his arm, very neatly, the way an old man folds a good coat. He hung it on the brass hook inside the usher’s closet beside the door. And he came up the center aisle in his white shirtsleeves and his suspenders, past every pew, past me.

He did not stop until he reached the front. Mike slid over without being asked. Harold sat down in the front pew of Trinity Lutheran Church between my husband and a nineteen-year-old in bunker pants, and he folded his hands in his lap.

Katie grabbed my arm so hard she left marks.