Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: Muster
The Firemen's Muster filled the Orleans County fairgrounds on the second Saturday of July.
Eleven companies stood about in their dress shirts, and a brass band played the same four songs all afternoon.
The water-barrel fight was the last contest before dark.
Two hose teams of six stood on either side of a steel cable strung between poles.
A beer barrel hung on a pulley in the middle.
Each team aimed a hose at the barrel and tried to drive it over the other side's line.
Station 4 had never made the final in nine years.
"You're the nozzle," Gilles told me, in the staging pen.
"The nozzle?"
"The low one.
"The man on the nozzle takes the whole kick of the stream and gets knocked flat.
"You're the only one who weighs less than the hose."
"That's a compliment?"
"It's a tactic," said Ansel, dry.
"Hold the bale on your hip and aim for the barrel's belly.
"Normand will back you."
They lined up behind me on the hose.
Normand stood at the base with his arms locked around my waist.
Gilles, Emile, Ansel and Tibo stood behind him in a row, a wall of wet canvas and big men.
The whistle blew.
Water thundered through the line.
Normand took my weight and my kick at once, and I leaned back into his chest and held the nozzle on the barrel's belly.
The barrel shuddered.
Across the cable the other team, a company from Derby with a twenty-year streak, hit it from the opposite side.
It hung in the middle.
I could not hear anything.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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