Little Things
By
It was just before nine o'clock in the morning and I was sitting at the kitchen table making out a shopping list. We didn't need much -- eggs, milk, bread, peanut butter. The little things you go through so quickly when you're feeding two kids and a firefighter. The breakfast dishes were still piled in the sink and since it was trash day I needed to have the cans out at the curb by noon. There was a load of clothes in the washer and another in the dryer. I was planning to make chocolate chip cookies and the ingredients were on the counter, grouped around the bowl where the butter sat softening.
Roy was late. Not late enough to seriously worry me but late just the same. There was nothing unusual about that. Firemen can't leave a fire half put out because the end of their shift rolls around. Still, when the telephone rang, the hope that it was him was tinged with the thrill of fear that always accompanies that sound when he is not here.
"Hello?"
"He's fine, Joanne."
I took a quick breath, recognizing John Gage's voice over the phone line and realizing that he was using that specialized, fire department version of the word "fine" that translates as "he isn't dead and his injuries aren't life-threatening or life-altering." My heart lurched in my chest, but John, with his typical thoughtfulness, had told me first what I needed to know most, so I was able to find the courage to ask, "what happened?"
"He fell off a ladder at a fire. He's got a broken leg, a broken arm, some cuts and bruises and a couple cracked ribs. His skull series came back clear, so they're going to let him go home as soon as they get the broken bones cast. I'm telling you, Joanne. We're going to have to have a talk with that boy about high-diving without a swimming pool!"
I appreciated the levity even as I heard the fatigue and worry under it. I tried to think.
"Where are you? Are you at Rampart? I'll find someone to watch the kids and --"
"No, now, just hang on a second," Johnny said. "We've already got it all worked out. Cap and his wife are on their way to your place. They're giving Roy prescriptions for antibiotics and painkillers and Cap's going to bring those with him. His wife will look after the kids. You can stop by the drugstore and get the prescriptions filled and by the time you get here they should be ready to release him. We'll help you get him home. Okay?"
"Yes. I . . . ."
"Now they had to cut his clothes off in the ER, so he's gonna need something to wear home."
"All right. Johnny --"
"It'll need to be something loose to go over the casts."
"I understand. Johnny --"
"He wants a pair of shoes but I don't think you should bring them. He couldn't get but one on anyway and he'll only go getting ideas that he can walk. Now, do you need money for the drugstore? 'Cause we can help you with that."
"No, I'm fine. Johnny --"
"Okay then. Now you just don't worry about anything."
"Johnny!"
"What?"
"Thank you."
" . . . what for?"
By the time I put a change of clothes in a paper grocery sack Captain Stanley was at the door. It was, I knew, another example of the thoughtfulness that came as second nature to John Gage. He had timed his call so that I would know what was going on before Cap drove up, but also so that I wouldn't have to sit and worry while I waited for him.
Grace Stanley came in, gave me a hug and waved away my thank you. "You just go on with Hank now and take care of that sweet husband of yours," she said, shooing me out the door.
We stopped at the drugstore where Cap, as Johnny had, asked if I needed money. I reassured him that I didn't, we filled two prescriptions, picked up a rental wheelchair and went on to the emergency room at Rampart General.
Roy was in one of the treatment rooms, talking to Johnny and Chet Kelly while he waited for clothes so he could come home. The nurses had cleaned him up. His dark gold hair was still damp, his cheeks pink, and he smelled of hospital shampoo and disinfectant. Chet was wearing casual clothes, if paisley polyester can ever be called casual. Johnny was still in his wrinkled uniform, smelling of soot and sweat, so I knew he hadn't left the hospital since he brought Roy in. No surprise there.
I walked around the bed so I could snuggle against my husband's right side and give him a kiss. His left arm and right leg were in casts and a tight, pinched look to his eyes and mouth betrayed both fatigue and pain that he wouldn't admit to, but he was in good spirits. "Hi, beautiful," he said. "Wanna play doctor?"
"Looks like you've got a head start on that, Ace," I told him.
Several of the nurses had already signed his casts. I took the heavy black marker that was lying there, drew an arrow on his arm cast pointing to his heart and wrote "MINE" in big, bold letters.
Kelly snorted. "Wow. I can't wait to see what the arrow on his leg points to!"
Roy blushed and giggled. Johnny slapped Kelly on the back of the head and said, "sorry, Joanne. You'll have to forgive Chester, here. He's heard the word gentleman but he doesn't know what it means."
With Johnny and Chet helping, I got Roy dressed in loose shorts and a tank top. We kept his movement to a minimum, but still his face had gone chalk-white and his breathing was fast by the time we were done.
"Just hang in there, Pally," Johnny told him. "By the time we get you home it'll be late enough for you to take another pain killer."
"I'm fine," Roy lied predictably. Sometimes I think if his head fell off he'd stick it back on and claim he was fine.
Doctor Brackett and Doctor Early stopped in to see him again before he left. They told me basically the same thing Johnny had already told me over the phone: Roy had a broken leg, a broken arm, several cracked ribs and some bumps and bruises. Brackett had a sheet of written instructions he gave me, and I looked them over and tucked them into my purse.
"You want to keep an eye on this husband of yours, Joanne," Brackett said. "If he were a cat, he'd have used up at least two of his lives today.
"Thank God for snagged lines, eh?" Joe Early added. I had suspected there was more to this story than falling off a ladder, but I let it go knowing I would find out soon enough. I had gotten the most important information when I first picked up the phone and Johnny said, "he's fine".
Dixie McCall brought a wheelchair. This is not the sort of task a head nurse usually performs, but the paramedics are special to her and she confided in me once that, of all the paramedics working now, Roy and Johnny are her favorites. I can understand that. I have a weak spot for them myself. We got Roy out and into the back seat of Cap's car. I climbed in next to him. Johnny rode in the front and Chet followed in his own car.
When we got back to the house it was filled with firefighters and their wives and girlfriends. All of Roy's shift mates were there, and a number of men from other shifts and other departments. With a well-oiled precision that needed no planning, Johnny and Chet made a chair of their hands. Cap walked behind them, supporting Roy's back and head as they carried him in. Marco held the front door and when they got to the top of the stairs Mike Stoker had the bedroom door open and the covers turned down on the bed.
Roy, of course, protested the entire time that if they'd just put him down he was perfectly able to walk by himself. Rather than point out the obvious -- that he was delusional -- Chet simply grunted, "shut up, DeSoto. We're trying to impress your wife."
They set him gently on the bed. John pushed him back against the pillows and covered him almost in the same motion. Then he disappeared in the direction of the bathroom and came back with a Dixie cup full of water. Anticipating him, I dug out the bag with the pills. He took it from me and read the pill bottles.
"Okay, Joanne. It's --" he checked his watch. "It's ten o'clock now, or close enough. He gets one of the pink pills -- those are the antibiotics -- every four hours and one of the white pain pills every four to six hours as needed. For today I'd just go ahead and give him one every four hours. He can start trying to be macho after he's had a chance to rest and get some strength back."
"You know," Roy said, "You'd think I could be trusted with my own medicine. I AM a professional, after all. Junior."
"Oh, no. Not when you're the one wearing the plaster of Paris you're not. I've had that point made to me often enough."
Roy made a grumpy face, but swallowed the pills John gave him. Cap, who is always Cap, clapped his hands for attention and took charge.
"Okay, people. Let's get out of here and give Roy and Joanne some peace and quiet."
Mike and Marco slipped out the door, but each stopped first to give me a hug. I hugged them back, realizing that I was, at that moment, a proxy for my husband. Big, tough firemen can't hug other big, tough firemen. Not in a room full of firemen and in broad daylight, too -- no matter how worried about that other fireman they might have been.
When it was Chet's turn, of course, he had to be different. He turned and shot Roy an impish look, making sure that he was watching, then took me by the shoulders and planted a kiss right on my lips. It caught me by surprise and I took it with my mouth pressed shut and my eyes wide open.
"Kelly, you're a dead man," Roy threatened, his voice already sleepy.
Chet made a show of shivering in terror. "Oooh! I'm scared!" he taunted. "Ooga-booga!" Laughing madly he skipped away down the stairs and was gone.
"You twit!" Cap called after him. He turned to me and laid his hands on my shoulders. "Grace and I will take the kids for the afternoon. We'll feed them and bring them back this evening. That way you'll be free to look after your invalid here. Okay?"
"Oh, Cap," I said. "You don't have to do that."
"We want to." As we were speaking he drew me out into the hallway and lowered his voice. "Roy means a lot to us. We very nearly lost him last night. Let us help out, okay?"
I could only close my eyes and nod gratefully. "Are you sure it won't be an imposition?"
"None at all. Actually, it's been too long since we had little ones around the house. It'll probably take the porta-power to pry them away from my wife tonight." He smiled kindly and squeezed my shoulders, then turned to go. I followed him downstairs and found that Grace already had the baby on one hip and a packed diaper bag over her shoulder. Cap scooped up Christopher and I kissed my children goodbye and saw them off.
The Stanleys were the last to go and the house was suddenly empty and silent except for the soft sound of John Gage's voice, coming from the bedroom. All the gathered firefighters had slipped away and I didn't even have a clear idea of who had been here.
Needing a moment to collect my thoughts I wandered into the kitchen. The first thing I saw was my shopping list, lying atop a folded grocery bag with each item neatly ticked off. The breakfast dishes were clean and put away. I opened the refrigerator and saw milk and eggs, a plate of sandwiches that had not been there before and a casserole dish that I recognized from the station house. I slid it out for a second. It was covered with aluminum foil and a small note taped to the top read "bake 350 degrees for thirty to forty minutes". On the counter, where I'd left the ingredients for cookies, a pan of chocolate-chip cookie bars sat cooling.
I stepped out onto the small, enclosed side porch and looked towards the street. Roy's sports car and Johnny's Land Rover were parked in the driveway. Behind them, the trash was at the curb, awaiting the garbage truck. Turning back to the kitchen I saw that the two loads of laundry I had started were finished and folded and waiting to be put away.
All the little things were done, lunch and dinner were taken care of and I didn't even know who to thank.
I can't say that I was surprised by it all. I'd seen it before, from both sides of the situation. I've gone with Roy, more times than I care to count, to help out at the home of a fallen brother firefighter. You wash the dishes and mind the kids and take care of all the little things so that their family will be free to take care of the invalid, or pace the waiting room, talk to the doctors or -- oh, God! -- plan the funeral.
Firefighters are a breed apart. They stand fast in the face of the deadliest element. They stride forward where others run away and daily put their own lives in peril for the benefit of strangers. It is not something that anyone can do. The job is a smithy where boots -- recruits -- are broken or forged into firemen. Those who are tempered by these flames share something no one, not even those of us who love them, can ever truly understand. The bonds between them are unfathomable and immeasurable; deeper than oceans, brighter than suns. But men such as these have no words to express such things. So when death reaches out and brushes his fingertips too closely to a beloved brother, firemen speak their love through the little things.
Weary footfalls on the stairs interrupted my reverie and I went back in to meet John Gage. Roy's partner and best friend was drooping with fatigue and I doubted his ability to make it home safely before he dropped. He scrubbed one lean hand over his face and gave me a tired but crooked smile.
"He's out like a light."
"Looks like he's not the only one."
"What, me? Aw, I'm --"
"Fine, I know." I rolled my eyes. "Why don't you stick around for awhile? You can grab a shower and take a nap on the couch. I'll find you something of Roy's to wear."
He hesitated. "I don't want to be in the way."
"You're never in the way. Besides, I might need some help getting his meds down him later." He let me snag an arm around his waist, pull him into the kitchen and push him down into a chair. I like John Gage. He's a good guy and we have a lot in common. We both love the same man, after all. "Also, some nice person left a big plate full of sandwiches that need to be eaten."
I set out the sandwiches, got out a couple of sodas and sat down across from him.
"And," I concluded, "I'm still waiting for you to tell me what really happened to my husband last night."
Johnny froze in the middle of a drink of pop and looked at me, moving only his eyes. Contriving to look innocent, he set the soda down, shoved half a sandwich in his mouth and talked around it.
"I already told you. He fell off a ladder at a fire."
"Yes, I know. And now that we've got the Roy-approved version out of the way -- what really happened to my husband last night?"
Johnny swallowed his sandwich and laughed. "Ah, the Spanish Inquisition. I knew when you offered to feed me there was an ulterior motive somewhere." I simply sat and waited. Silence, I have discovered, can be a powerful thing. I knew he wanted to talk about it anyway, and I could almost pinpoint the moment when, in the privacy of his own mind, he capitulated.
He took a Polaroid snapshot from his pocket and leaned towards me conspiratorially. "Okay, Joanne, I'm going to show you something. But you're going to let Roy think you got this from Chet, okay?"
I grinned at him, making no promises, and reached for the picture, but he pulled it back.
"Wait, now. Just wait a minute. You have to let me set this up for you first.
"We got toned out just after seven this morning. House fire. See, this woman got up and made breakfast for her family, like always, but her husband's car wouldn't start and she needed her car to run errands and their teenage son missed his bus so she wound up having to drive them to work and to school. In all the hustle she forgot to turn off the gas flame under the coffee pot and by the time she got back the whole kitchen was on fire. It was an old wood-frame house and the place went up like tinder. By the time we got there the whole first floor was pretty much involved.
"Cap sent me and Roy up a ladder to the second floor. We were going to break the window to vent it and lay down a stream, to try to keep the fire contained downstairs. We were carrying an inch and a half and Roy was in the lead. He got up to the point where his head was level with the window. I was just below him, helping with the weight of the hose.
"The grass was pretty long and we didn't notice that there was one of those tie-out stakes in the middle of the yard. You know? The things you tie up a dog to? Well, the hose caught on it and it turns out it's a damn good thing that it did!" John paused to take another swig of soda. I'm certain that he stopped at that point on purpose.
"Okay," he finally continued, "picture this. Roy's on about the eighth rung of the ladder; he already has one foot on the next rung, ready to go on up. When the line snags he turns and looks down at me to ask what the problem is. Stooping a bit and looking down, his head is now just below the window ledge. Also, he hadn't, for once, bothered to tighten the chin strap on his helmet and it's hanging loose across his chin."
John stopped again, his gaze faraway, and I felt as if I could see the scene through his eyes. At that moment an image of Roy was very clear in my mind, balanced on the ladder in his turnouts, his face framed by helmet and chin strap, a question in his blue eyes. "And then?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
John blinked. "What we didn't know, Joanne, was that we were outside the window to the teenage son's room. He's into all that end-of-the-world, survivalist crap. We may never know where he got the grenade."
I blinked as his words sunk in. "Oh, my God!"
"Roy did a neat half gainer off the ladder and landed on the ground. You already know that part. This is the part I wasn't supposed to tell you."
Finally he passed over the picture. I blinked down at it, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
"This looks like . . . but it can't be."
"Yup. It's Roy's helmet. And, yes, it's embedded in a tree. A tree that was a good fifteen feet away, no less."
I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. "If . . . ." I couldn't finish the thought, but John finished it for me. I had no doubt he'd been thinking of ifs all day.
"If the line hadn't snagged. If he'd been up another rung. If he hadn't turned around. If he hadn't looked down. If his helmet strap had been on tight. If any one of those things had happened, Jo, we'd be planning a funeral right now."
I simply sat, staring at the picture in shock. Johnny covered my hand with his and left me to silence as he polished off his sandwich and soda. Then he pulled his shirt away, sniffed his underarm and grimaced. "Yeesh! I stink!"
Laughing, the gloom dispelled, I found him a change of clothes and a clean towel and left him to his own devices while I went back up to the bedroom to check on my husband.
Roy was sleeping peacefully, dark-gold lashes making pale semi-circles against his pink cheeks while a soft breeze came in the window and played with the lock of hair across his forehead. I twined my fingers with his, closed my eyes and loved him with all my heart.
If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never understand how I came to be blessed with a man like Roy. He is kind and gentle, brave and wise. Everything that is good in my life is there because of him, from the material things like the house we live in to the much more precious possessions, like the two small children who have their father's eyes. I wish, sometimes, that I could explain to this quiet and unassuming man that he is my world. But though I search through passages from Shakespeare and Browning, though I seek the wisdom of poets and prophets and great men of old, all I learn is that there are no words for something so vast.
So here I sit, in a quiet room, watching the rise and fall of his chest. I circle my fingers around his wrist and count each tiny, precious heartbeat. And I thank God, thank God again, for the little things.
The end.
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