The Pies On The Station Steps

The faces that changed

A volunteer department is a living thing. The people in it change the way the trees out my window change, slow enough that you do not see it day to day and then all at once you look up and a whole generation is gone.

The gray-mustache man I first handed a pie to, his name was Earl, and I know now he passed in his sleep back around 2011. I read it in the Delphi paper and I cried at my own kitchen table for a man I had met exactly once.

Young ones came on. Farm boys mostly, and a few of the girls now too, which Walt would have liked. They trained on Thursday nights and you could see the bay lights on late when I drove by.

None of them ever knew the pies had been coming since before some of them were born. To a nineteen-year-old just pinning on his badge, the Sunday pies were simply a thing that happened at Station Nine, like the flag going up, a fact of the place older than he was.

I found that I loved that. I had become a small invisible tradition. A thing handed down. The old-timers would tell the new ones, “Sundays there is pie, do not ask where it comes from, just say thank you to the empty step.”

I heard that once, standing at the hardware counter in town, two of the young ones laughing about it, not knowing the pie lady was three feet away buying a box of nails.

I about floated out of that store.

I never corrected anybody. I never let it slip. Walt knew, of course, and after Walt it was only me and the Lord who knew, and the Lord is good at keeping a secret.

Walt

I have to tell you about Walt, because the firehouse and Walt are all the same story to me.

After that fire, something changed in him. A man does not get carried out of his own burning house by strangers and stay the same.

When he got his wind back, he went down to the station and he signed on as a volunteer himself. He was forty-four years old and he said he had a debt that did not fit in a pie tin.

He gave them seventeen years. He ran calls in the middle of supper and in the middle of the night. He drove the tanker. He taught the young ones how to back a truck into a tight bay without taking the mirror off.

He wore the coat and the helmet and the whole county knew him as one of the Delphi men. He never once told them about the pies. He kept my secret the way I kept his coffee hot.

He had a call he never talked much about, a bad wreck on the highway with a family in the car, and he came home gray in the face and sat at our table a long time before he could speak. I put a slice of the Sunday pie in front of him, one I had held back, and he looked at it and said, “You know, Ellen, there is always pie at the station after the worst ones. I never told them it was mine sitting right there.” And he laughed, finally, a tired laugh. “I have thanked you a hundred times at that station and never once knew I was thanking my own wife.”