The Pies On The Station Steps

The engine on my gravel

The next morning was a Monday. I was not even dressed. I had my robe on and I was standing at the sink with a cup of coffee and one empty pie tin in my hand, the last one I had rinsed from the night before.

And I heard an engine coming up my gravel road. A big one. You live out here long enough and you know the difference between a pickup and a grain truck and something bigger, by the sound alone.

This was something bigger.

I looked out the kitchen window and I saw the lights first, coming slow through the shelterbelt. Then the whole thing came into my yard, filling my driveway end to end.

The ladder truck. The big one from Station Nine, the one Walt used to brag they finally got the county to pay for.

And behind it and beside it, cars and pickups, a whole line of them coming up my road.

I set my coffee down. My heart was going. I thought for one terrible second that something had happened to someone, that this was how they came to tell you bad news out here.

I went out onto my own front porch in my robe with that empty tin still in my hand, and I stopped at the top of my own four steps.

There they were. The whole crew. Fifteen, maybe twenty of them, in their dress shirts, not their work clothes, the good navy shirts with the patches on the shoulder.

Out front stood the captain, a man named Dale Brennan, forty-some years old, holding his hat in both hands the way men do at a graveside.

Behind him the whole department stood in my yard in the morning light, quiet, every one of them looking up at me on my steps.

For twenty-six years I had stood over them, leaving a gift on their steps in the dark. And now they stood under me, in the light, and I understood that the thing I thought was a secret had not been a secret at all. Not entirely. Not for a long time.

I put my hand up over my mouth. I did not know what to say to them. I had never once planned what I would say, because I had spent twenty-six years making certain this moment would never come.

What the captain set in my hands

Captain Brennan came up my steps slow, with his hat still in his hands.

“Mrs. Ellen,” he said. “We are sorry to come on you like this. We figured if we called first you would find some reason to tell us no.”

He was right. I would have.

“We know it is you,” he said. “We have known for a little while now. And after this week, we could not let another Sunday go by without you knowing that we know.”

I asked him how. I could barely get the words out.

He told me it was Cody.

A couple of months back, Cody had been the one rinsing the Sunday tins, and he turned one over and saw the initials scratched in the bottom. A W and an E. And Cody had grown up looking at the memorial wall in that station, the one with the helmets of the men who had served and passed.

Walt’s helmet was on that wall. And under it, on a little brass plate, it said Walter and Ellen, because Walt had asked that if his helmet ever went up there, mine went up with it, since he always said the two of us ran every call together whether I was on the truck or not.