The Pies On The Station Steps

That was Walt. He could find the quiet joke in the heaviest day. He gave that department the best of himself for seventeen years, and he asked for nothing back, and the only badge he ever truly wanted was to know he had paid the debt for that January night. I do not think a debt like that ever really gets paid. I think you just keep paying on it because paying on it is a kind of love.

The thing is, nobody at the station ever put the two together. Walt was a volunteer. The pies came anonymous on Sundays. Walt never let on they came from his own kitchen, and I think he liked that nobody knew, same as I did.

His lungs finally gave out. The doctors said the damage from that old fire never fully healed, that he had been running on a little less air for years and never complained of it.

He died at home, eleven years ago now, in our bed, in the spring, with the windows open and the apple trees in bloom.

I thought I would stop the pies then. For about three weeks I did stop. I could not get out of bed before the sun, let alone bake.

And then one Saturday night I found myself standing at the counter at eleven o’clock with flour on my hands and no memory of deciding to do it. My hands had decided for me.

Baking those pies was the one thing that still tied me to Walt and to the thing we had done together all those years. So I kept on. Alone, but not really alone, because every pie had his hands in it too.

The night they lost one of their own

This spring the Delphi department lost a man.

His name was Cody. He was twenty-six years old, the same number as my years of Sundays, which I have not stopped thinking about.

He was a farm kid who had grown up three roads over from me. He had a wife and a little girl not yet two. He had been on the department four years and the older men said he was the best natural firefighter they had seen come up in a long time.

It was a grain bin out on the Petersen place. There was a man trapped in it and Cody went in after him. He got that man out. And the bin took Cody.

Anybody who grew up out here knows what a grain bin can do. The grain moves like water once it starts, and it pulls a man down faster than you can get a rope to him. The man Cody saved was a hired hand, a father of three, and he is alive today and will tell you to his last breath who put him there.