The Coffee Can at the Station Door

What it was and wasn’t

The supper was put on by the firefighters association. The checks were made out to the association.

The flyer had Bryce’s school picture on it, but it never said the money would be given to us. Everybody understood it was for us. Nobody wrote it down.

So when Rodney and Darlene met as the board, with Earl gone to a fire in the next county, and moved the supper money into the apparatus fund, it was theirs to do.

Josh’s cousin is a deputy, and he told Josh so in about one sentence.

It was cruel. But it was not a crime. And you don’t sue your husband’s brother over a chili supper in a town of nine hundred people, not if you want to keep living in it.

And the truck was real. The brush truck is a one-ton pickup with a skid unit on the back, a tank and a pump and a hose reel.

It is the first thing that rolls out every time the grass catches. It was the truck that came up our road.

Every year the department runs its trucks through a pump test, and that March the brush truck’s pump would not hold pressure.

A new pump and plumbing would run more than eleven thousand dollars. The truck fund had about six.

Rodney told the board that if the town’s fire rating slipped the next time it was reviewed, every homeowner in Cottonwood Falls would pay for it in their insurance.

People can argue about how much and how soon, but the bones of it are true.

And he believed Bryce was covered. He heard the word insurance and thought it meant what it says on the card.

He had never had a hospital bill bigger than a few hundred dollars. I know that now. I did not know it on my porch.

Josh

Josh came home that night and I told him while he was still taking his boots off by the back door. He listened to the whole thing without moving. Then he put one boot back on.

“Where are you going?”

“To town.”

“Josh. Sit down. Please.”

He looked at me, with one boot on and one boot off, and something went out of his shoulders.

He sat down on the bench by the door and put his face in his hands, and he stayed like that for a while.

“He raised me,” he said, finally. “When Mom was sick. He was seventeen and he packed my lunches. He came to every one of my wrestling meets. He’s the one who taught me how to change a tire, Cass. On the side of the road. In the snow.”

“I know.”

“I want to knock his teeth out.”

“I know that, too.”

He did not go to town. He did not call his brother.

He did not speak to Rodney for eight days, not at the co-op, not at church, not when Rodney’s wife brought over a pan of enchiladas and left it on the porch without knocking.

On the ninth day, we were in the truck coming back from a dressing check in Wichita, with Bryce asleep in the back seat, and Josh said, out of nowhere, “He’s not a thief, you know.”

“I know he’s not.”

“He’s scared of that truck. He’s been scared of it since the Hymer fire two years ago, when the pump on the old tanker quit halfway through. Dale nearly got cut off on that hill. Rodney was the one on the radio.”

He was quiet for a mile. “He thinks if that truck fails again, somebody dies, and it’s on him.”

“He might be right.”

“He might be.” Josh kept his eyes on the road. “That doesn’t make it his money to move.”