The following Saturday, the town held an open house at the fire station. Families, firefighters, and local officials filled the bay as I walked through the big overhead doors, and there was a man in a state uniform standing by Engine 2 with a clipboard, and my grandson was standing next to him looking like a boy who has just found out something about his own grandfather.
The fire marshal’s office had come out to certify the pump.
Here is a thing about a volunteer department that nobody explains to a nineteen-year-old with the keys. That engine has to pass an annual pump service test, and the department has to hold current training hours per member, and the truck check sheets have to exist on paper, and when the ISO man comes through he does not care how brave anybody is. He counts sheets.
Twenty-one years I arrived before every training session. Everybody thought that was about the coffee.
It was about the clipboard in the cab. Every truck, every session, every apparatus check, initialed and dated in my hand, and filed in the green cabinet in the back office where the wasps get in. Pump pressures. Hose test dates. The date each man’s Firefighter I hours were logged and the date I mailed them to Helena. Twenty-one years of it, and my initials are the small ones in the corner because I was never the officer, I was just the fellow who showed up first.
My grandson had the keys for three weeks and the cabinet may as well have been in another county. He did not know it was there. Nobody had told him, and that is not his failing, it is mine, because I never once said out loud what I was doing.
The state man went through it in an hour and told the boy that this was the best-documented volunteer department he had seen east of Billings, and that the county’s insurance rating rested on those sheets, and then he asked who WFH was, because those were the initials on twenty-one years of corners.
The boy said, that is my grandpa, he makes the coffee.
And the state man laughed and said, son, that is not what these are.
In the bottom of that cabinet is a manila envelope from my father, who ran this station before me and had the same wooden peg. He left it there in 1998 with my name on the front.
Wendell — a fire department is thirty people who mean well and one man who writes it down. Being the second one is not a lesser job. It is the one that keeps the trucks legal so the thirty can be brave.
My grandson found me at the coffee urn afterward. He is a good kid and he did it in front of people, which cost him something.
He asked me to show him the cabinet. We spent four Saturdays on it, and now he initials the corners, and he arrives before I do, which was the point of the whole thing.
My jacket is back on the peg. I still make the coffee. Somebody has to, and it turns out it was never the smallest thing I did in that building.