Chapter Five

There's not a lot I can tell you about my cousin Kevin that you haven't probably already read in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He died in a fire about three years ago. The paper said that he was married, the father of three, a graduate of Cuyahoga Community College. It said that he was helping rescue some kids from a burning house, and that he was a hero, and that he will be very much missed by his brothers at the firehouse, his wife and family, and his large extended family, which included two sisters, two brothers, his mother, several nieces and nephews and a number of cousins who are also firefighters. It said that he was the son of Owen Kilbane, a retired firefighter. It mentioned that he was a member of the Pipe and Drum Corps and also that he was an amateur ham radio operator. They didn't miss too much. (If you know the Plain Drooler, this in itself is an unusual thing.)

But I want to tell you the things about Kevin that the Plain Dealer may have missed. It's early in the morning, we just got back in from a job a lot like the one that took Kevin, and none of us are hurt. The two cadets, Cullen and Marshall, are coughing a little, but that is because the dumb shits went in without masks, just exactly as they were told not to, which is the sole thing you can always count on a cadet to do, is the one thing you tell him or her not to do.

Anyway, none of us are hurt, I'm feeling grateful and still pretty wired from the fire, and I'm still trying to get this whole Grace thing out of my mind, so I figured I'd focus on something a little sobering.

Kevin was my cousin through my mother's brother, my Uncle Owen. Ma's side of the family is the lighter, blue eyed and freckled Irish. My dad's side is what they call Black Irish, which means that they have dark hair and dark or blue eyes. People say that's because the Spanish invaded the western coast of Ireland. I don't know if that's true but it might also account for the fact that every Black Irish person I know has a hot temper and a taste for spicy food. Well, maybe not every one. At least I do. Anyway, this is about Kev and not me, so I'll try to stick to my last here.

Kevin was tall, with thick dark blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles. He looked like the old Arrow shirt ads, my folks used to say. Girls adored Kevin on sight, the lucky bastard, because he was that perfect blend of handsome and innocent that chicks always go for. He had a little boy grin and a big, deep laugh. It would have been easy to envy him if he didn't have such a natural, self-deprecating way about him. As my mother used to say, Kevin's biggest attraction was that nobody had ever told him he was handsome, or if they did, he hadn't believed them.

Kevin was three years older than I am and I used to follow him around a fair bit when we were kids. He knew how to play bagpipes from an early age. Uncle Owen taught him, and he took lessons at the West Side Irish American Club too, and he was a natural, very good at it. At least, as good as anyone can ever make bagpipes sound, which isn't too good according to many people, although I've always liked the sound. When we were teenagers, he took a lot of flak from our other cousins. Everyone knew that if you wanted to get laid, you learned to play the guitar, and of course there were lots of jokes directed at Kevin. It was a pretty rich vein and we mined it well, so that by the time we were in the last years of high school, Kevin's piping was kept under wraps, like a secret vice.

One morning before school, Ma had sent me over with a dress pattern that she had borrowed from Aunt Mamie, Kevin's mother, and I caught Kevin out in the back yard practicing. He was playing an air I recognized from St. Patrick's Day parties and from the old 78 rpm records Dad and the uncles liked to listen to. The tune was called "The Minstrel Boy", and Kevin was doing it fair justice.

I entered the yard by the garden gate off the alley. I nodded to Kevin, who kept on playing. I'm glad I didn't say anything smart that morning. It must have been, as the old ones say, the grace of God, because it was not like me to let such an opportunity pass without a wiseass remark of some sort. We viewed it as practically an obligation in our family, a familial duty to keep each other humble, particularly the boys. But there was something about the sun on Aunt Mamie's scarlet roses in the garden that morning, and the wistful sadness of the air, and Kevin's earnest concentration....

See, this is why I hope to Christ nobody in the firehouse ever gets ahold of my laptop. If they were to read this, I would never hear the end of it. I would be accused of everything from being gay to thinking I'm William Butler Yeats, and since I don't see either as a shameful option, I would be forced to defend myself, and...well, these guys can be real shitheads when they smell blood. Firemen gossip like crones at a wake, and they love to play practical jokes, and if they know they are getting under your skin, they are more than delighted to take what started as a small, accidental joke and turn it into a running gag that goes on for years, being handed down in firehouse lore. "Remember the time we caught Sully writing that girly-girl novel, and we...." Yeah, yeah. So I keep this under pretty tight wraps here. If anyone asks, I tell 'em I'm writing love letters to my married girlfriend. I don't have a married girlfriend, but these guys are always quite ready to believe the wrong thing, especially if it involves banging some broad who's off-limits, and so I'm fairly safe for now.

Anyway, Kevin was a good piper, and he also wanted to follow my Uncle Owen into firefighting. It came almost as second nature to him. Some guys have to go off and "find themselves", have to go to college and work a desk job and maybe go in the Army or work as unemployed artists or whatever the hell it is they think they're going to do, and then one day it hits them that there's a greater purpose and they go into The Job, either firefighting or police work, twin heads of the Irish Catholic Career Hydra. The other option in this town is to be a pipefitter or ironworker. You're Irish, you're male, you're a cop, a firefighter or a journeyman pipefitter or ironworker. None of this bullshit about being a stockbroker or an English teacher or any of that other shit they tried pushing you into in college, if you were lucky enough to go to college and sit on your ass for four years and think about things, getting pussy beaucoup and free beer and prepared meals and reading all night and taking little multiple choice quizzes...... No, sir. You are going to work hard and if it was good enough for your father/brother/Uncle So-and-So....

Anyway. Some guys come into it the roundabout way, like I did after getting an English degree from Northwestern University and driving Ma and Dad nuts for three years while I lived at home and bummed through a succession of jobs. Other guys, like Kevin, are born to it. They seem to know almost from childhood that they want to go into The Job, and they do so with a preternatural concentration.

Kevin took the Civil Service test and got on as a probie straight out of high school. Back in those days, the mid-seventies, you could do that. It's very unusual today. First off, most people want to go to college. Almost nobody starts work straight out of high school these days. Secondly, the Job wants you to have some training through the community college, either emergency medical technician, criminal justice, or both. Now you can even do a special safety technology course that's tailored for firefighting.

In those days, though, you didn't have to do that. Suit up, show up, pass the Civil Service test and report for work. Kevin was unusual in that he wanted to do more, to learn more. He didn't just want to be a firefighter, he wanted to be the best firefighter possible. He enrolled in night school and did a course in emegency medicine. He could have been an EMT, which in those days paid better, but he wanted to fight fires. He wanted to be on the front lines. It was the way he lived his life.

The fire that took Kevin was pretty ordinary. I say that because when you've been on this job for a lot of years, you see a lot, and although there is nothing ordinary about a burning building to most sane people, when you have been doing what we do for awhile, you learn to recognize that it's always dangerous but it's not often exciting. Yeah, there is a rush about going into a burning building -- the old saw goes, firemen are nuts because we run into a building that any sane person would run out of -- but there are fires and then there are fires. As with any job, there are defining moments and triumphs and narrow escapes and brilliant moments, and then there is the old same shit, different day ennui that haunts most of our day to day gigs.

Whether you are a firefighter or a computer programmer or a housewife packing school lunches, some days it seems so much the same that you couldn't really say what day it was when this or that happened; they all run together. This was that kind of a day except for one thing: we lost Kevin. It just goes to prove that we never know, any of us, what a seemingly routine day can have in store. There are no guarantees in this life except that one day, something is going to kill you. It may be as benign as old age or as dramatic as a gunshot, but one day, you are gonna go. In our line of work, you'd think we'd bear this in mind, but you can get used to anything if you deal with it often enough. Get too comfortable and it cankill you, whether you're a firefighter inside a building whose roof's about to collapse or a CPA speeding along the freeway at 85 mph. Mindfulness is an important thing. I'm more aware of this as I get older.

There are a very few, up in their comfortable offices in City Hall, who will say that Kevin was not mindful on that day. They, the self-crowned efficiency experts, are generally regarded with contempt. Those who knew Kevin at all know what he was, what he stood for, and that he was the kind of firefighter you would always want on a job with you. He didn't take stupid chances, he wasn't a fool who thought he was bulletproof, and he didn't forget for a minute the reason we do our job: fires take lives.

It was a house fire, in the early morning hours, over on the east side on Kinsman Road. There must have been fifteen people, most of them kids, living in the old two-story clapboard Colonial. Most of them were gathered on the lawn, a large woman huddled with three tiny kids, a crying baby slung over one of her ample hips; a shirtless teenage boy, a couple of young girls, an old woman wrapped in a blanket, and various school-age kids, shivering in the predawn cold and damp (it was a rainy early March morning, ugly and windy and the streets were snot-slick with fresh sleet). Two lines had already gone in; the fire had been contained to an area in back of the house but was now spreading to the second floor. The family had been using a kerosene heater that one of the kids had tipped over, and the place had gone up fairly quickly. We had thought everyone was outside, but the woman had started screaming after an initial head count that someone named Raphael was on the second floor. Raphael, it turned out, was a four-year-old boy, and he had gone back inside to save his dog.

I'm not going to make this any longer than it has to be. You don't want to read it, and more importantly, I'm not sure I can tell it. The roof gave in, in a shower of sparks and debris, while Kevin was in there trying to find Raphael. When we finally got in, through all the black smoke and heat and spray from the hoses, and cut through the wall of the back bedroom, we found them.

Kevin had thrown his body over Raphael, who had thrown his body over the dog. All three were dead of smoke inhalation. The coroner says they didn't last long, but then the coroner wasn't trapped inside a burning house. All I know is that Kevin was a hero. Rescue was on the scene almost as it was happening, but there just wasn't time. It all happens so quickly in that situation.

Kevin's funeral was on a Monday. Ma and Dad sat in the front of St. Kieran's with Uncle Owen and Aunt Mamie. My brother Pat, the only priest in our family, said the funeral Mass.

It was raining like hell that day, and I don't remember everything Pat said, and I had to get up and say a few words, and Jeannette, Kevin's widow, said a few words before having to be helped back to her seat beside Uncle Owen. Kevin's kids were all in one pew, with my sister Theresa looking after them. Sean and Jimmy were seven and five, old enough to know what was going on, but Katie, the baby, who is named for my mother, was in Theresa's arms, smiling at all of us. There might be something more heartbreaking than that toothless little smile on that merciless March morning, but I hope I never see it.

The pipers, playing "Amazing Grace" as the coffin was borne from the church, had a notable absence. The clearest note among them was never to be heard again.

The cemetery was a pretty difficult scene, and there never seems to be good weather when someone is buried. I don't know why it works out that way, and maybe it's better, but all I know is that I have never been to a cemetery on a day tat was sunny and seventy. I'm sure there are such funerals -- I mean, they have funerals in California, right? or maybe they just scatter ashes off a cliff into the ocean; I don't know -- but I have never been to one.

We all repaired to the Flat Iron after the funeral breakfast, at least, the brothers from the firehouse and Uncle Owen. The wives and kids had gone to Jeannette's afterward. We all got pretty drunk that afternoon and evening, at least, the ones who didn't have to be at the house. That is another thing about our job. Fires don't take a break, and somebody always has to go back to the house. I made it home somehow, and next day I had to report for a shift, and we all made it through the next few weeks without too much ado. St. Patrick's Day was in there somewhere, and a bunch of us made it to the parade, and it was pretty tough seeing the Pipes and Drums go by without Kevin.

But I think the toughest thing, or at least the toughest thing so far, was cleaning out Kevin's locker at the house. His pipes were in there, and that was pretty awful, and there was of course his civvies and his shoes, and a couple of library books, and a tiny bottle of Irish Mist with the seal still on that Uncle Owen had brought back from Shannon's duty free shop when they all went Over the year before. There was an old black wooden Rosary and a bunch of issues of Mother Jones (Kevin always was a reader and used to get teased about being a wild-eyed radical). There were pictures of Jeannette and the kids taped to the inside, and an Indians sticker, and of course there were comments scrawled all over it in magic marker -- you aren't loved unless there are droll obscenities on your locker. But I think the thing that got me most was that there, at the bottom, was a small toy metal firetruck I recognized from when we were kids. It was a Tonka truck, one of the miniature kind, and it was chipped and banged up and one of the rails was broken off. But here Kevin had kept that with him all these years. A memento? An inspiration? A talisman?

You just never know.