Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Carry
Jo dials 911 from the snow, Captain Gilles Bouchard lifts her off the ground, and she names the schoolhouse bunkhouse and takes the cab.
I dialed 911 from the yard of my own burning house, and the voice that answered was one I had trained.
"Orleans 911, what is the address of your emergency?"
I gave her the number on Pettengill Road the way I give it at work, flat and slow.
I heard her stop typing.
"Jo?" she said.
"Send Four," I said. "Chimney fire in the wall, second floor going. One person out, nobody inside."
My voice came out as a rasp.
The smoke had taken most of it on the stairs.
"Jo, are you hurt?"
"Send Four," I said again, and she did.
I stood in the snow in my socks and my parka, with my phone in one hand.
It was twenty-two below zero.
Everything else I owned was upstairs in the fire.
I heard her key the tones for Tewksbury Corners through the phone, and then her calm voice going out over the whole county.
I had taught her that voice.
A little while later Engine 4 came up the road with its lights turning the snow red.
I knew the men on it.
I knew every one of them by his voice, from fourteen months of three o'clock in the morning.
I had never seen one of their faces.
I work nights at the county dispatch center.
The fire crews don't know my name.
They call me Midnight, and I am not supposed to tell them different.
The first man down from the cab was the biggest I had ever seen.
He crossed the yard fast, with a helmet on and a beard gone white with frost.
"Ma'am, is anyone inside?"
It was Captain Bouchard, the low patient bass that had said "Merry Christmas, Control" to me on the radio last Christmas Eve.
"No," I said.
"Pets?" he said.
"No."
"Are you hurt?"
"No," I said again.
He looked down at my feet.
"Where are your boots?"
"Upstairs."
He did not say anything else.
He just bent and picked me up.
One arm went under my knees and one across my back, and my feet left the snow.
I am four foot eleven.
My head fit under his chin, and his coat smelled of cold smoke and cedar.
"Easy," he said. "I've got you."
I should have told him to put me down.
I put my face against his collar instead.
Behind him four more men were pulling hose off the engine, and none of them was slow.
A pickup came up the road too fast and stopped crooked in the drift.
My landlord got out in his good wool coat.
He looked at the upstairs windows and not at me.
"I told you not to run that stove past ten," he said.
"You told me it was fine," I said.
"You ran it too hot.
"That's thirty-eight hundred dollars for the structure, and your deposit is gone."
The captain's arm did not move.
"The flue behind that stove was never lined," I said.
"I took a picture of the cracked thimble in November."
"A picture."
He laughed.
"You have until Sunday to get whatever's left off my lot.
"You have until the first of the month to pay me, or I take the truck."
The captain turned me a little, so that his shoulder was between the two of us.
"Sir," he said, very quietly. "Step back from the tape."
The landlord stepped back.
The captain carried me to the truck and held me against the warm side of the cab while the others worked.
"The Red Cross has a room at the Gateway in Newport," he said.
"Twenty-five minutes.
"I can have someone drive you."
"No," I said.
"Where, then?"
I knew exactly where.
"The schoolhouse," I said.
"You open it below zero.
"It's in the county cold-weather plan."
He studied me.
"That's for the crew, ma'am."
"Does the plan say it's only for the crew?" I asked.
"No," he said.
"Then I'll take it."
Something moved in his face.
It was not a smile yet.
"Nobody drives you anywhere you don't want to go," he said.
I put my arms up.
He took me under them, and his hands went all the way around my ribs.
He lifted me into the cab of Engine 4 in one move, and my feet never touched the step.
Down in the yard the landlord was still there, with his arms folded.
He grinned at me through the glass.
I put the window down.
"Five men and one cot," he said. "That ought to keep you warm till Sunday."
The captain went still beside the door.
In the jump seat behind me, the youngest of them stopped coiling a strap and stared.
I looked at my landlord.
"I'll think it over," I said, and rolled the window up myself.
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