The Coat on the Firehouse Hook

I said, “Colt Pell is the best fireman who ever wore a coat in this house. That includes me, and it includes my father. I am saying it where he can’t hear it, because I do not get to make him stand here and take it.”

I said, “Dallas, I want a commendation in the department record with his name on it, and I want what I said written next to it, in my words. I am not asking for anything back. I am asking that this house tell the truth about him.”

Then I walked the board to the kitchen door, and I did not hang it back up. I leaned it against the wall of the dry storage room, face to the plaster, where it will stay.

That was my father’s voice, and my own, for fifty-six years. It cost me more to carry out of that dining room than the helmet ever weighed on my counter.

Dallas said, behind me, “It goes in the record, Rex. Every word.”

The room did not applaud. It was not that kind of room. People sat back down quietly, and a church lady I have known forty years brought me a cup of coffee, black, and put it in my hand without saying anything.

Doralee came up to me before they left. She said, “Is that the coffee you made for him?”

I said, “That’s mine, honey. His is on the table.”

She had a very small hand. She put it flat on my sleeve for about a second and took it away, and that was all I got from her, and all I needed.

I did not drive to Hays. On Monday morning I took the coat off the hook, where it had hung since the Sunday it was left, and I carried it to the dry cleaner on Main Street.

Mrs. Haskett at the counter did not ask what it was, and I did not tell her. She held it up and said, “This has been in a closed room a long time.” I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Tuesday I wrapped it in brown paper and put it in a box with the helmet, the one that had sat on my counter all that first day and in the cupboard under the percolator ever since. I wrote a letter on the back of a feed-store receipt pad, because I did not have any good paper in the house.

I will not put the whole letter here.

It was six sentences. I said what I had said and what I had seen and what I had decided. I wrote down what the girl had said, that it was a good coat. I said that I did not ask him to write back, and that if he never did, I would go on knowing it was his to decide.

I wrote that the coat belonged to him and the name on it was his, and that I had carried it for four years without the right. I signed it Dad. I had not signed anything that way in four years.

I mailed the box at the post office window, with two stamps for the weight. It was ninety miles of Kansas highway, and I stood there in the lobby after the clerk took it and could not think of one thing to do with my hands.