The Fire Boots My Uncle Kept

“Bryce doesn’t know?” I asked.

“He thought the department bought them,” Ward said. “He found out Thursday night. I told him myself. He didn’t speak to me all of Friday.”

Bryce came to our house that same evening.

I opened the door and he was standing on the porch in jeans and a work shirt, holding a shoebox under one arm. He looked about twelve.

“Is Tessa here?” he said. “I need to talk to her. And you, I guess, Jolene. And maybe Uncle Emmett.”

He came in and stood in the living room and would not sit down. He set the shoebox on the coffee table.

Inside it were those black boots, cleaned and polished up better than I think he ever kept anything in his life.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear, Tess, I didn’t know. Dad said the department found the money. I’d never have put them on. I can’t believe I wore them to the pancake feed.”

“They wouldn’t fit me anyway,” Tessa said. “You’re a ten and a half.”

“Eleven,” Bryce said. And then, for some reason, they both started laughing, and it was the first time those two had laughed together since they were kids catching frogs in Dad’s stock tank.

Bryce did not take the boots back with him. He left the box on the table and said he would figure out the money.

Two Fridays later Dad got an envelope in the mail with three hundred dollars in it, in Bryce’s handwriting, from his elevator paycheck.

Tessa had left Ward’s envelope on Dad’s oilcloth, so in the end Dad got his three hundred dollars back twice. He tried to give one of them back to Ward and Ward would not take it.

He tried to give the other one to Bryce and Bryce would not take it either.

He finally put both of them in the coffee can over the refrigerator and said that it was the department fund now, and anybody in this family who needed boots could come and get it.

Our township board meets the second Monday night of the month in the community building, at a folding table under the flag.

Usually there are eight or ten people there, mostly to complain about the gravel.

That July there were about forty.

Word had gotten around about the Olsen fire, the way it does in a town our size, and people wanted to know why the department east of us had to save a barn on our own road.

Ward stood up when it was his turn to give the fire report. He read off his calls for the month, the way he always does.

Then he folded the paper and put it in his pocket and kept standing.

“I’ve got something else to say,” he said. “On the fourteenth of June we had a mutual-aid fire at Bud Olsen’s. We had three men available. Next township had four, and one of them was my great-niece, Tessa Fisk.”

He looked down at the table. “She tried to join this department in March. I told her it wasn’t for girls. I was wrong to do that, and I took something of hers I had no right to take. I’ve made that right with her and her family. Now I’m making it right out loud.”

The room got very quiet. Bud Olsen, in the second row, nodded his head slowly, like he was agreeing with something nobody had said yet.