The Chili Supper at the Fire Hall

Nola at the Line

Nola Branch had been working in the kitchen, cutting pies, all evening. Near the end of the line she took off her apron and got in line herself with a foam bowl, the way the cook always does when everybody else has been served.

She came up to the table, and she smiled at my aunt.

“Nadine, honey,” she said. “I have been meaning to ask you something all night.”

The hall was not loud to begin with, but it got quieter then. It was the quiet that comes when the person asking is the one everybody in town trusts.

Nadine set the ladle down in the roaster.

“I keep the books for the auxiliary,” Nola said gently. “Thirty years now. So I always like to know where a dollar went. It helps me tell the men what their work was for.”

She held her bowl a little higher.

“Fourteen thousand dollars is a lot of love from one county,” Nola said. “What did it go to?”

I did not move. I did not look at my aunt. I looked at the stack of foam bowls in my hands and I counted them, I remember, twelve bowls, and I waited.

Nadine did not answer.

She looked at Nola. She looked out at the folding tables, at Earl Lacey with his cap on his knee, at Kim, at Mr. Collins with a piece of pecan pie, at the family from the next county. She looked at the red engine sitting in the open bay.

Then she looked at me, and her eyes were full.

“Excuse me,” Nadine said quietly.

She laid the ladle across the rim of the roaster, straight and neat, the way she leaves everything. She went to the coat rack and got her coat. She walked out the side door into the parking lot without saying goodbye to anybody.

She left before the pie.

Nola looked at me across the table. She did not look surprised.

“I’m sorry, Missy,” she said softly. “I wasn’t trying to embarrass her.”

“I know you weren’t,” I said. And then I picked up the ladle and filled Nola’s bowl myself.

The Drawing

The supper went on. That is the thing about a supper in a small town: something can happen at the serving line that everybody saw, and then people still need their pie and their coffee, and the children still need to run around the fire truck.

Nobody said a word to me about Nadine. Not one person.

Near the end of the night, Wade came out of the kitchen with the piece of paper from his back pocket. He walked straight across the room to Bill Branch, who was standing by the coffee urn in his department jacket.

Wade held out the paper. He did not say anything.

Bill unfolded it. It was a drawing, in crayon, of the big red engine. It had the ladder on top, and the hose, and the lights done in yellow, with lines coming off of them so you could tell they were flashing.

Next to the truck there was a little house with orange in the windows. And standing in front of the house there were four stick people, two big and two small, and all four of them were smiling.

At the bottom, in Josie’s neat handwriting, because Wade had asked her to write it for him, it said: Thank you for coming fast.

Bill Branch is a big man, sixty-five years old, with a gray mustache and hands like Clint’s. He looked at that drawing for a long time. Then he got down on one knee on the concrete floor so he was eye to eye with my son.

“You know how many fires I’ve been to, buddy?” Bill said.

Wade shook his head.

“More than I can count,” Bill said. “And you know how many times somebody drew me a picture after?”

Wade shook his head again.

“This is the first time,” Bill said. His voice did something on the last word. “I’m going to hang this up right on the wall in there, where all the men can see it. Is that all right with you?”

Wade nodded. Then he put his arms around Bill Branch’s neck, and the fire chief of our county knelt there on the floor of his own fire hall with a six-year-old hanging on him, and did not get up for a while.

Nola came and stood next to me. She did not say anything. She just put her arm through mine, and we watched.

It is still on the wall in there, if you ever go. It is in a frame now. Somebody bought a frame.