The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

I was sitting in my pickup with the engine running when I saw it, and for a second I did not understand what I was looking at.

It was a bright spring morning, the first Saturday warm enough to leave the window down.

The big bay door of our volunteer fire station was rolled all the way up, the way it always is on truck-check Saturdays.

The red pumper sat on the concrete floor just inside the door, washed and shining for truck check.

Sunlight came in long across the floor and caught the chrome on the bumper.

My uncle Ward stood beside the pumper in a navy T-shirt and jeans.

He is fifty-eight, with a gray mustache he has worn since before I was born, and he was holding a pair of brand-new black fire boots.

He held them out to his son, Bryce.

Bryce is twenty, short brown hair, a gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and he reached out and took hold of those boots like they had always been his.

A few steps away stood my daughter.

Tessa was nineteen that spring, with a long red-brown braid down her back and the green canvas work jacket she wears to the co-op. Her hands were in her pockets.

She was just watching them. She was calm.

She did not move and she did not say a thing, and that is how I knew something was wrong, because my girl has never been calm about anything she cared about.

Ward said something to Bryce and clapped him on the shoulder.

Bryce sat down on the pumper’s running board and started pulling off his old pair, the ones with the split along the side that he had been taping since Christmas.

Tessa turned around and walked out of the bay toward me. She opened the passenger door, climbed in, buckled her seat belt, and folded her hands in her lap.

“Can we go, Mom,” she said. It was not a question.

I put it in reverse. I did not say anything until we were past the elevator and out on the blacktop, and then I said, “Those were new boots.”

“Yep,” she said.

“Where did Bryce get new boots, Tess?”

She looked out her window at the ditch for about a quarter mile.

Then she said it the way you would read off a grocery list, flat and in order, so she would not have to feel any of it.

“Uncle Ward says the department isn’t for girls. He says he’s sorry he let me sign the paper. He says he’s keeping Grandpa’s money for the department, because it was given to the department, and the department needed boots.”

I drove another mile before I could trust my own voice.

Two weeks before, my dad, Emmett Fisk, had called Tessa over to his kitchen table. Dad is seventy-eight.

He farmed wheat and milo on the same quarter section for fifty years and he still keeps his cash in a coffee can above the refrigerator.

He took down the can, licked his thumb, and counted out fifteen twenty-dollar bills onto the oilcloth.

He did it slowly, the way he does everything now, and he squared up the stack with both hands when he was done.

“Structural boots,” he told her. “Not the cheap ones. If you’re going into a burning building, you go in with good feet under you. Your great-grandpa lost two toes to a bad pair of boots.”

Tessa laughed and said, “Grandpa, he lost them in a combine.”