Gas to Emporia for physical therapy, twice a week. Sixty miles round trip.
Gas to Wichita for follow-ups with Dr. Okafor. Two hundred and forty miles round trip.
Josh’s lost hours at the feedlot. The two days they gave him off were unpaid.
My two weeks of leave from the school. Unpaid.
I added it up at the kitchen table on a legal pad. I’m a school cook. I’m good at numbers. I order food for two hundred and forty kids on a federal budget of three dollars and seventy-six cents per child per day. I know how to stretch a dollar.
Over the next year, beyond our insurance, Bryce’s care was going to cost us about six thousand, four hundred dollars.
Three thousand, one hundred would have been half.
Josh didn’t speak to his brother for a week.
He didn’t speak to anybody much. He went to work. He came home. He sat with Bryce on the couch and watched cartoons. He took Biscuit for walks down the county road at night, alone.
When Rodney called, Josh let it go to voicemail. Rodney called four times. Josh deleted all four messages without listening to them.
Then, on the eighth night, Josh came in from walking the dog and sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
I was paying bills. The hospital. The pharmacy. The compression garment company in Kansas City.
He watched me for a while.
“He’s not a thief, Cass,” he said.
I didn’t look up.
“I know he’s not,” I said.
“He’s scared of that truck,” Josh said.
I set down my pen.
“Scared of it?”
Josh looked at the window. At the dark pasture behind our house. At the black, burned strip of grass along the back fence where the fire came through. It was starting to green up now. New grass coming up through the ash.
“You know about Dad,” he said.
“I know he died in a grass fire,” I said. “In 2011. Before we got married.”
“Rodney was on the truck,” Josh said.
He told me the rest that night. At our kitchen table. I’d been married to him for eleven years and I’d never heard it.
April 2011. The big fire in the Hensley pasture. The same pasture. A wildfire that got away from somebody’s burn pile and took out four thousand acres before they stopped it.
Josh’s father, Harlan Weller, was fire chief then. He was sixty-one. He’d been on the department for thirty-five years.
Rodney was thirty, running the pump on the old brush truck. The same truck. That 1998 Ford.
Harlan was out ahead of the truck with a hose line, on foot, fighting the fire head. The wind shifted. The fire turned. Harlan called for more water.
And the pump quit.
“Lost pressure,” Josh said. “Just died. Rodney said it made this sound, like a cough, and the hose went limp in Dad’s hands. And the fire came over him.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
“Rodney spent thirty seconds trying to get it restarted,” Josh said. “Thirty seconds. Then he jumped off the truck and ran out to Dad. He pulled him out with his bare hands.” Josh’s voice cracked. “Dad died two days later. In the same burn unit in Wichita. Sixth floor.”
He looked down at the table.
“The pump got rebuilt after that,” he said. “Patched up. It’s been running on patches for thirteen years. And every year, Rodney’s begged the county commission for money for a new one. Every year, they say no.”
“And then Dale and Mike went out in it,” Josh said quietly. “To get Bryce. With that same pump. And it held. This time it held.”
He looked at me.
“Rodney’s been in that station every night since,” Josh said. “Since March. Sitting in the bay with that truck. Doug Kemper saw his light on at two in the morning.”
I sat at my kitchen table with the bills spread out in front of me and didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Josh,” I said finally. “I’m not going to call the newspaper. I’m not going to post anything on Facebook. I’m not going to say a word about your brother to anybody.”
“Okay.”
“But I’m not going to sit here either,” I said.
Chapter Five: The Locker
I didn’t call anybody.
I didn’t post anything.
I’m a school cook.
I make chili for two hundred and forty kids every other Thursday. It’s on the menu. It’s the most popular lunch we serve. The kids line up for it. The teachers line up for it. Mrs. Abernathy comes down from her office for it.
My chili recipe is my grandmother’s. Ground beef and onions and kidney beans and tomatoes, and a spice blend she never wrote down that I learned by standing on a step stool in her kitchen when I was six. I make it in a forty-gallon steam kettle. I know exactly how much meat feeds how many people.
On a Monday morning in April, I called the locker.
Elk Bend Meat Locker, on Main Street. Owned by the Kraus family since 1946. It’s where every rancher in the county gets their beef processed.
Hank Kraus answered.
“Hank,” I said. “It’s Cass Weller. I need sixty pounds of hamburger.”
There was a pause.
“Sixty pounds?” he said.
“Sixty.”
“That’s a lot of chili, Cass.”
“I’m feeding a lot of people,” I said.
Another pause. A longer one.
“I heard about the money,” Hank said quietly. “From the first supper.”
“I’m not talking about that, Hank,” I said. “I’m just ordering hamburger.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I’ll have it ready Friday,” he said finally. “No charge.”
“Hank, no…”
“Cass,” he said. “Bryce sat in my shop every Saturday last summer while you did the grocery shopping. Helped me wrap steaks. Kid wrapped a better steak than my own son.” He cleared his throat. “Sixty pounds. No charge. Don’t argue with me.”
Then I asked Earl.
Earl Haskins is the fire chief. He took over after Harlan Weller died in 2011. He’s sixty-eight now, a retired rancher, with a white mustache and a navy blue department jacket he wears everywhere, even to church.
I found him at the station on Tuesday evening. He was in the bay, working on the brush truck. The old 1998 Ford, red and dented, with ELK BEND VFD in gold letters on the side. He had the pump housing open and was looking at it with a flashlight.
He heard me come in. He straightened up. He wiped his hands on a red rag.
“Cass,” he said.
“Earl.”
“I want to ask you for the bay,” I said. “One more Saturday.”
He looked at me.
“For what?”
“A chili supper,” I said. “Another one. I’ll cook. I already ordered the meat.”
He didn’t say anything. He looked at me a long time. His eyes went to the brush truck. To the pump housing. Then back to me.
“For Bryce,” he said.
“For Bryce.”
I thought he was going to say no. I thought he was going to say it would cause a fuss. That it would look bad for the department. That Rodney was the treasurer, and the board had voted, and it would split the town.
He folded his red rag. He put it in his back pocket.
“You can,” he said.
I let out a breath.
“And I’ll take the door myself,” Earl said.
Chapter Six: Saturday
We set it for the last Saturday in April.
I didn’t advertise it. I didn’t make flyers. I didn’t post on the Elk Bend Community page on Facebook.
I told the lunch ladies at school. They told their husbands. Their husbands told the men at the co-op. The men at the co-op told their wives. The wives told the Methodist women and the Baptist women and the Catholic Altar Society.
By Wednesday, everybody in Elk Bend knew.
The church ladies brought cinnamon rolls.
Seven pans from the Methodists. Five from the Baptists. Four from the Altar Society. Big ones, the size of your hand, with white icing dripping down the sides. They brought them Saturday morning in the back of their cars and stacked them on a folding table by the door.
The Legion brought pie. Again.
The Hensleys brought ice tea. Three big orange water coolers full of it.
Old Mrs. Hensley drove it over herself. She’s eighty-one. It was her pasture fire that came across the road. She stood in the station bay holding a sleeve of paper cups and cried so hard her son had to come take the cups from her.
I cooked all day Friday in the school kitchen. Mrs. Abernathy gave me a key. Sixty pounds of hamburger, browned in batches on the big flat-top grill. Forty pounds of onions. Twenty-four number ten cans of kidney beans and twenty-four of tomatoes. My grandmother’s spices.
I filled the forty-gallon steam kettle. Then I filled the big roasters. Then I filled every slow cooker I could borrow from the lunch ladies.
Josh helped. He carried the cans and stirred the kettle and didn’t say much. Around nine o’clock Friday night, he stopped stirring and looked at me across the steam.
“Does Rodney know?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t tell him.”
Bryce wanted a job.
He’d been home three weeks. He was going stir-crazy on the couch. He wasn’t supposed to go back to school until May, because of the infection risk.
“I want to help, Mom,” he said Saturday morning. “Please. I can do something.”
I called his nurse in Wichita. A man named Terrence, who’d taken care of Bryce on nights in the burn unit and given him his personal cell number.
“Can he help at a supper?” I asked. “Serving food?”
“As long as he keeps his gauze clean,” Terrence said. “And he doesn’t touch anything hot. And he takes a break every hour. And he wears his compression sleeves under the gauze.”
“Okay.”
“And tell him I said hi,” Terrence said. “Tell him the dog kid from 614 says hi.”
So he passed out cornbread from a pan.
I set him up at the end of the serving line. On a stool, so he wouldn’t get tired. With a big sheet pan of cornbread cut into squares and a pair of tongs.
Both forearms wrapped white in fresh gauze. His blue compression sleeves showing at the wrists. A little fire department T-shirt Earl gave him, three sizes too big, that came down to his knees.
He held those tongs like they were the most important job in the world.
By suppertime, every folding table was full.
The station bay at Elk Bend VFD holds forty-eight people at folding tables if you squeeze. They’d brought in more tables from the Legion hall. And more chairs from the Methodist church. And people were still standing along the walls.
Ranchers in from the pasture burns, still smelling like smoke. Their faces streaked black, their jeans grimy. They came straight from the burns, because it was burning season and they couldn’t stop. They sat down at the tables in their work clothes, smelling like the thing that burned my son.
Teachers. All twenty-two of them from Elk Bend Elementary.
Kids from my lunch line. Dozens of them. Holding their bowls out, saying, Hi, Mrs. Weller, Hi, Mrs. Weller, like it was Thursday at school.
The brush truck was parked at the back of the bay. Its doors open. Its old pump housing still apart where Earl had been working on it.
Kids kept going over to look at it. A little girl named Hadley, maybe six, stood in front of it for a long time and then came back to the line.
“Is that the truck that saved Bryce?” she asked me.
I looked at the old red Ford. Dented and faded.
“Yes, honey,” I said. “That’s the one.”
Earl stood at the door.
He’d set up a folding chair and a card table. On the card table was the same red Folgers can from the first supper. Somebody had taped a new piece of paper on the front. Bryce had drawn it himself, that morning, with his gauze-wrapped hands holding the marker very carefully.
A fire truck. And a yellow dog.
And underneath, in big shaky nine-year-old letters: THANK YOU.
Earl didn’t sit down. He stood behind that card table for three hours in his navy blue department jacket, and he shook every hand that came through that door, and he looked every person in the eye.
Chapter Seven: Rodney Walks In
At ten after five, Rodney walked in.
I saw him first. I was at the steam kettle, ladling chili into bowls. I looked up and he was standing in the doorway of the station bay. In his canvas coat and his feed store cap.
He stopped just inside the door. By Earl’s card table.
The whole bay went quiet.
Not all at once. It started near the door. People at the tables closest to him stopped talking. Then the ones next to them. Then the next ones. It went across that station bay like a wave. Forks stopped. Spoons stopped. Conversations stopped in the middle of words.
Two hundred people in the Elk Bend fire station bay, and you could have heard a pin drop on the concrete.
Everybody knew. Of course they knew. It’s Elk Bend. Six hundred and forty people. Everybody knew where the first supper money went. Everybody knew who moved it.
Earl looked at him. Rodney looked at Earl.
Neither one of them said anything.
Rodney reached into his coat pocket. He took out an envelope. A plain white one, thick. He put it in the Folgers can on Earl’s card table.
Earl watched him do it. He didn’t say anything.
Then Rodney took off his cap. He hung it on a hook by the door, next to the department turnout coats.
He didn’t sit down.
He walked across that silent station bay. Past every table. Past the ranchers smelling like smoke, and the teachers, and the kids from my lunch line.
Nobody said a word. Nobody looked at him. Everybody looked at their chili.
He walked straight to the serving table where I was standing. He went around behind it.
He picked up the second ladle.
Nobody asked him to.
He didn’t ask me. He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t even look at me. He just picked up that ladle and took a bowl off the stack and filled it from the steam kettle and held it out to the next person in line.
The next person in line was Doug Kemper. A rancher from west of town. Sixty, with a sunburned neck and soot on his face from the burns.
Doug looked at the bowl in Rodney’s hand. He looked at Rodney.
He didn’t take it.
