The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

There was one other woman in the class that spring, a nurse from up near the Nebraska line named Pam.

She was fifty-one and had joined her department after her husband passed, because she said she had to do something with her Saturdays or lose her mind.

Most Saturdays I stayed. I sat in the pickup in the gravel lot with a library book and the radio on low, and when they were outside on the drill ground, I watched.

Week four they put them in full gear with air packs and had them carry a charged hose line up the stairs of the training tower.

Four stories, with an instructor yelling the whole time.

From the lot I could see the tower stairs through the open side.

I watched her go up with a line of men in front of her and behind her, and I watched her stop halfway, bent over, with her hands on her knees.

I gripped the steering wheel so hard my hands hurt. I told myself I would not get out of the truck.

I told myself that if I got out of the truck I would ruin something for her that I could never fix.

She stood back up. She picked up the hose.

She went the rest of the way to the top, and when she came down the instructor said something to her and she nodded and went right back to the bottom to do it again.

Week seven was ladders.

Week eight was search and rescue in the burn building, crawling through the dark with a mask blacked out, feeling for a dummy that weighed as much as a grown man.

Tessa and Pam were partners for that one.

They came out of that building forty minutes later dragging the dummy between them, and the instructor stood there and clapped, just two slow claps, and I found out later he never clapped for anybody.

The boots held up.

By week eight they were black with soot and scuffed white at the toe, and Tessa cleaned them every Saturday night on newspaper on the back step with a rag and saddle soap.

“They earned it now,” she said, when I asked her about the scuffs.

The ninth Saturday, my cell phone rang in the gravel lot while I was reading. It was a number I did not know, and I almost did not answer.

“Is this Jolene Fisk? This is Dale Hanson. I’m chief over at the next township, the department east of you. I think we met once at a funeral.”

“I got your daughter’s name off the instructor at county,” he said. “He says she’s the best in that class at the stuff that matters. Doesn’t quit. Listens. He says she’s not signed with anybody.”

“She’s not,” I said.

“Here’s my problem, Mrs. Fisk. I’ve got eighteen people on my roster. I’ve got plenty of farmers and plenty of nights. What I’ve got is nobody on a weekday afternoon. Everybody’s in the field or at a job forty miles off.”

“Your girl works at the co-op in town?” he asked. “I need to know straight. Will they let her go on calls?”

I already knew the answer, because I had asked the co-op manager myself back in February.

He had said absolutely, the co-op had always let its people go on fire calls, as long as somebody was left to run the scale.

“They will,” I said.