The Coat on the Firehouse Hook

I am Rexford Pell. I am sixty-eight years old. I live in Oak Verge, Kansas, population eight hundred and some, and I have cooked the Sunday breakfast at the volunteer firehouse for six years.

For four of those years I poured a cup of coffee for a man who did not come. I am going to tell you why, and what I learned on a pancake Sunday from a nine-year-old girl in a purple coat. But I have to tell it in order, or you will think better of me than I have earned.

We are a fire family. My father, Lucius Pell, was chief for twenty-two years. In the fall of 1963 he went into the Farmers Co-op elevator when it was already burning at the headleg and pulled out a boy who had been sweeping the gallery.

He had a saying. When I was twelve, a kid in my class went through the ice on Prewitt’s pond and I stood on the bank with the rest of them.

My father heard about it at the feed store. He told me in the cab of his truck, “A Pell does not stand on the bank while a man goes under.”

I had done nothing wrong. A bigger boy had already gone out on his belly with a fence rail. My father said it anyway, so that I would carry it, and I did, for fifty-six years, like a stone in a boot I had stopped feeling.

Idella and I married young and had one child, and Colt got all of it, all the attention and all the standards. I rode that boy harder than my father ever rode me.

When he was nine he broke his wrist off the hayloft ladder and carried it around for two days so I would not notice. I called that toughness.

It did not cross my mind that a boy who hides a broken wrist has already learned what his father is like when something goes wrong.

At twenty-four he put on turnout gear, and the department put his name on the back of his coat in reflective letters, the same letters that had been on mine and my father’s.

I shook his hand, formally, like I was closing on a combine. Then I went out behind the firehouse and stood with my hands on my knees for five minutes. I never told him that either.

Two years later my heart gave out on the stairs of the grain bin. Three stents, and a young doctor with cold hands who told me she never wanted to see me in a burning building again.

I could drive the engine and run the pump panel. I could not go in. My father’s son, benched like a boy with a bad ankle.

The tones went at ten past two on a Sunday morning, the last one in October. Structure fire, Tuckett place, Section Road 9, barn fully involved.

Doyle Tuckett was seventy-four years old and I had known him all my life. He had a heifer due to calve, which is why his barn light was on at two in the morning.

The fire marshal figured later that a heat lamp over the calving pen got into the hay.