The Pies On The Station Steps

The January we almost lost everything

It was 1999. Walt and I had been married nineteen years then, and we had made our life in that farmhouse, the two of us and no children the Lord saw fit to send.

We heated with a woodstove in those days. Walt was careful with it. He cleaned the chimney every fall himself, up on the roof with a brush on a rope, and I held the ladder and fussed at him to be careful.

But that winter was a hard one, and we had a cold snap that ran two weeks under zero, and we kept that stove going day and night.

I woke up that night because the smoke alarm in the hall was screaming and the bedroom was already full of a smell like a campfire gone wrong.

The wall behind the chimney had caught. The fire was up in the ceiling before we knew a thing, running in the old dry joists where we could not see it or reach it.

Walt got me out the front door in my nightgown with no shoes on. The snow was up over my ankles and I did not feel it.

And then he went back in.

I screamed his name. He went back in for the strongbox in the hall closet, the one with the deed and the insurance and the photographs, everything that said we had been here and this place was ours.

I stood in that snow and watched the front windows go orange and I thought I was watching my husband die.

The Delphi volunteers came up our gravel road in the dark with the lights going. Nine minutes from the time I called, which out here is a miracle on a frozen night.

They did not hesitate. Two of them went straight through that front door after Walt, and they brought him out, and they put the fire down before it took the whole house.

Walt lived. We lost the back half of the house and everything in the kitchen, but we kept the front rooms, and we kept each other, and he was still holding that strongbox when they carried him out coughing.

I remember a young fireman wrapping me in a wool blanket right off their own truck and sitting me in the warm cab so I would not lose my toes to the cold. I remember the hiss of the water hitting the hot wall and the steam going up white against the black sky.

I remember the elevator man down the road had seen the glow and called it in before I even got to the phone. That is how it is out here. Your neighbors see your trouble before you can tell them of it.

I have never in my life been so grateful and so frightened at the same time. I did not know the names of the men who went in after him. It was dark, and they had their masks and coats on, and then they were gone to the next call.

When the sun came up I stood in the snow in a stranger’s blanket and looked at the black hole where my kitchen had been, and all I could feel, under the shock of it, was that my husband was alive and warm and holding my hand. Everything a fire can take, it is still just things. They had left me the one thing that was not a thing.