Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, took out a folded envelope soft at the creases from being carried a long time, and set it on the table beside his cap.
He didn’t raise his voice. Walter has never once raised his voice in fifty-one years of marriage, which anybody who knows him will tell you is worse.
He said: Chief, before I stop volunteering, there’s a piece of paperwork I ought to hand over. I’ve been meaning to for a while and I kept forgetting.
Then he slid the envelope down the table.
Inside was the Ohio title for a 1968 Ward LaFrance pumper. Serial number, mileage, all of it. And on the owner’s line, in a county clerk’s typing from the spring of 1999, was my husband’s name and our home address.
That truck is the one in every parade. It’s the one in the photograph on the station wall. It is the truck two generations of that department learned to pull hose off of.
In 1998 the county surplus-auctioned it because the department couldn’t come up with the money and the trustees voted to let it go. Walter drove to Zanesville with a cashier’s check for nine thousand four hundred dollars, which was our roof fund and my mother’s small inheritance, and he bought it, and he brought it home, and then he told the trustees they could keep running it as long as they liked. He rebuilt the brakes himself. He put a transmission in it in 2011 and paid for it out of the shop account he ran with the same hands he was polishing helmets with.
Twenty-six years, and he never told a soul but me. Two chiefs knew. Both of them are buried out at Mount Zion now, which is exactly how a thing like that gets forgotten.
Tucked in with the title was a piece of station stationery, folded small, written in 1999 in Chief Ed Pruitt’s block hand.
Walt — I can’t put this in the minutes because you asked me not to. So I’m putting it here where somebody will find it someday. This department is still a department because of you. Don’t let anybody make you small about it. — Ed
The new chief read that standing up, and then he sat back down, and he did not look at anybody for a good while.
Here is the part I love my husband for. He didn’t take the truck. He signed the title over to the department right there at the head table, borrowed a pen off the auctioneer, had two men witness it, and pushed it across.
The chief tried to apologize three separate times that night. Walter told him the same thing every time: son, you had no way of knowing, and now you do.
They put a brass plate on the bell in the fall. It doesn’t say much. Just his name, and the years, and RANG BY W. E. HARDESTY.
He rang it again on the Fourth. Thirty-two now.