Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Five Flannel Shirts

In the schoolhouse the five men dress her in their shirts, Emile holds her frostnipped feet, and at five in the morning she crosses the yard and tells the captain to lift her up.

The schoolhouse was one room with a woodstove, a long table and a chalkboard nobody had washed since the nineties.

By four in the morning every light in it was on, and five men were standing around me.

"Cold snap runs through the sixteenth," Captain Bouchard said.

"The crew sleeps here until it breaks, because the engine won't start cold unless somebody feeds it.

"The bunk room is yours that long.

"After that the Red Cross finds you a place."

"Fine," I said.

"Josephine Gosselin," I said. "Jo."

"Gilles," he said.

He pointed down the line with two fingers.

"Ansel Durkee, my lieutenant.

"Normand Boisvert, pump.

"Emile Fecteau, medic.

"Thibault Lavoie, who goes by Tibo, is twenty-four and will tell you so."

"I am," Tibo said.

He was the youngest, tall and curly-headed, with soot on his chin.

He kept looking at me and frowning, trying to place something.

Normand went to the donation bin by the door and came back with an armful of flannel.

He was six foot five, with a red-brown beard and hands the size of pie plates.

"They're ours," he said. "They're clean."

I put on his shirt, which came to my knees.

I rolled the sleeves four times, and Ansel watched me do it.

"That's the first time that shirt's looked good on anybody," he said.

His voice was dry and slow, the voice of a man who had never once hurried.

"Sit," Emile said.

He pulled a chair out from the table and knelt in front of it with a basin of warm water.

He was the lean one, the only man in the room under six feet tall, with dark hair and careful eyes.

"Let me see your feet."

I put them in his hands.

I was in my wet socks, and he peeled them off one at a time and held each foot between both palms.

His hands were long and dry and very gentle.

"Wiggle," he said.

I wiggled.

"Pink.

"That's good.

"It's frostnip, not frostbite."

He turned my left foot in his hands and ran his thumb up the arch.

I felt that all the way up my leg.

When he had finished he stood too fast and put a blanket over his arm, in front of his belt.

I saw what the blanket was for.

I told myself it was the cold, because cold makes people strange.

Normand set a mug on the counter by the stove, too high for me.

He lifted me onto the counter without a word, hands closing all the way around my waist, and went back to the oatmeal.

I sat there with my bare feet swinging, my face hot.

"What do you do, Jo?" Ansel asked.

"Records," I said. "For the county."

It was nearly true.

"You sound like somebody," Tibo said.

"Smoke," I said.

"Yeah," he said, and looked at his boots. "Sorry."

The oatmeal came with maple syrup out of a jar with no label.

I ate all of it, with five men watching me do it and pretending not to.

At five Ansel banked the stove and the others went off to the bunk room in twos.

The captain stood at the door with his coat on.

"I take the first watch in the bay," he said.

"Somebody has to hear if the engine heater trips."

"All right," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, and his voice came out lower.

"Nobody in this building will ask you for anything you don't want to give."

"I know," I said.

The reply I did not say was that I wanted to give it.

I had wanted to for fourteen months.

I lay on the cot in the teacher's room with Normand's shirt around my knees and listened to the stove tick.

The wall between me and the bunk room was one board thick.

I heard Tibo laughing at something, and Emile telling him to sleep.

I heard the captain's boots cross the frozen yard.

For fourteen months I had only ever been given their voices.

I wanted the rest of them.

I got up.

I pulled on Tibo's wool socks and Normand's boots, which were far too big, and crossed the yard in his shirt in twenty below.

I pushed open the small door in the big bay door.

The engine ticked in the dark with its heater on.

The captain stood beside it, with the light of the work lamp on his face.

He turned, and I walked up to him until I had to tip my head all the way back.

"Gilles," I said. "Lift me up."

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