The Supper in the Old Fire Station

I stayed by the urn. I didn’t go over. It wasn’t my moment, and I’d had mine already, back when Dad put his hand on the fender.

Mabel leaned over and said, “Told you. Second grade.”

They ate side by side and didn’t say much. I watched Royce reach across once for the salt, and Dad pass it to him before he finished reaching, the way he used to pass us things at the supper table when we were boys.

After a while, Royce said something I couldn’t hear, and Dad nodded slowly. Later I learned Royce had asked him to come out to the new hall on Monday.

He wanted to talk to the department about making Dad an honorary life member, the first one in a hundred years who’d never pulled a hose.

“I’ll need a vote,” Royce said. “I’m doing it by the book.”

“You do that,” Dad said.

There were a few men from the banquet who drifted in after Royce, too, still in their dress uniforms.

Younger ones, mostly, in their thirties and forties, the ones who’d never known a truck Dad hadn’t touched. They filled plates and found chairs along the wall and sat with the old crews.

Near nine, when the last roaster was getting down to scraps, Cotton stood up from his chair and walked over to the pumper.

He didn’t say anything to anybody. He climbed up into the cab beside Elsie and said something to her, and she grinned and slid over.

Then Cotton looked across the bay at Dad and raised his eyebrows.

Dad understood before I did. He set down his fork. He said, “Is the choke out?”

“It’s out,” Cotton called.

“Give her two pumps first.”

Cotton gave her two pumps. The whole room went quiet again, but this time it was a different kind of quiet. Everybody knew what was coming. You could have heard a bolt drop.

Cotton turned the key and pressed the starter.

That old engine turned over once, twice, coughed, and caught. The sound filled the brick bay like thunder rolling in from the west, deep and uneven, and then it smoothed out and settled into a steady rumble you could feel through the floor and the folding chairs and your own chest.

Somebody had opened the big front doors, and the exhaust drifted out onto Main Street in the cool September dark.

Dad closed his eyes.

He sat at that folding table with his hands flat on either side of his two plates and his eyes closed and his head tipped a little to one side, listening.

The way you’d listen to a hymn you used to sing with someone who’s gone.

After a minute he opened his eyes and said, to nobody in particular, “Number six is lazy. Always has been.”

Royce laughed. I hadn’t heard my brother laugh with my father in so long that I’d forgotten it was the same laugh.

“I’ll look at it in the spring,” Royce said.

Dad turned and looked at him. “You?”

“You’ll have to show me,” Royce said. “I never learned.”

And my father, who had waited twenty years for one of his boys to pick up a wrench, put his hand on my brother’s arm in that dress uniform and said, “First Saturday in April. Bring a creeper.”

Cotton let the engine run another five minutes, so Elsie could pull the horn cord twice, which she did, and which every man in that room pretended to be startled by.