The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

“You did good, kid,” Ward said. His voice was rough from the smoke. “You did real good. That shed’s standing because of you.”

“It’s standing because of Dale,” Tessa said. “And because of your pump. I just held the nozzle where he told me.”

Ward shook his head. “I’ve been holding nozzles forty years. I know what I saw.”

He let go of her hand.

He stood there a second longer like he was going to say something else, and then he turned around and went back to his engine to start rolling hose.

He came to Dad’s house that Sunday. Not to dinner.

He came at three in the afternoon, by himself, and knocked on the back door like a salesman instead of walking in like he had for fifty years.

Dad called me and told me to come over and bring Tessa.

When we got there, Ward was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee he had not touched, and Dad was sitting across from him.

Ward stood up when Tessa came in.

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out an envelope, and I saw that it was a new one, a plain white one, and he set it on the oilcloth in front of her.

“There’s three hundred dollars in there,” he said. “That’s your grandpa’s money. I should have given it back to you the day I took it. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

Tessa did not pick it up. “Why’d you take it, Uncle Ward?”

He sat back down. He looked at his coffee for a long time. Dad did not say a word.

Dad just waited, the way he must have waited for Ward a thousand times when Ward was a boy at that same table.

“Bryce was going to quit,” Ward said. “Back in February. His boots split, and he said he wasn’t going in a fire in taped-up boots, and he was right. I didn’t have it in the budget. The township gives me what they give me, and it went to air pack bottles.”

He rubbed his face. “Do you know how old my department is, Tess? Not counting Bryce, the youngest man I’ve got is fifty-four. I’ve got two men in their seventies. Every year I bury somebody or somebody’s knees give out.”

“So you took my boots and gave them to Bryce,” Tessa said. “Because he’s a boy.”

“Because he’s my boy,” Ward said. “And because I was scared to death that if he quit, the whole thing would go with him. That’s the first part of it.”

He was quiet for a while. “The second part’s worse. Your great-grandma told me when I was a kid that women don’t go in. It’s the men who go in, and the women wait. I watched her wait. I never in my life questioned it.”

“Mother waited,” Dad said quietly, “because she had six kids at home and nobody else to watch them. Not because she couldn’t have held a hose.”

Ward nodded without looking up. “I know it. I know it now. I watched you on that line Thursday, Tess, with that roof coming down, and you didn’t back up one step more than you had to. I’ve had men I had to drag back to that pump.”

He finally looked at her. “I was wrong. I was wrong about you, and I was wrong to take what wasn’t mine, and I was wrong to let my boy wear it without telling him where it came from.”