The Night the Feed Store Burned

Jefferson City

The parole board hearing was held on Thursday morning in a plain beige conference room on the third floor of a state office building in Jefferson City. There was a long table at the front where three members of the board sat with folders open before them. There was a smaller table for Wade and his public defender, a young woman named Ashley Navarro who had been out of law school for two years and looked terrified. There were three rows of plastic chairs for anyone else who wanted to attend.

Usually, Denise Harlan told Nora in the hallway beforehand, nobody attended. Sometimes a mother. Occasionally a victim.

That morning, the three rows of plastic chairs were full, and people were standing along the back wall.

Nora had not organized it. She had only told a few people about the hearing. Pam Ridley. Rick Ostrander, the fire marshal’s investigator, who had driven over from his office across town on his own time. Travis Kell, who had come in uniform. But word had traveled the way it always did in Calder Ridge, through the café and the co-op and the church parking lot, and that morning, at seven o’clock, a small caravan of pickups had left town together and driven three hours north.

Wade’s sponsor, Earl, a seventy-year-old retired welder with thirty-one years sober, sat in the front row. Beside him sat the night clerk from the Gas-N-Go. Behind them sat two of the old men from the feed store porch, in their good shirts, holding their caps in their laps. Beside them sat the retired pharmacist from Linden.

And in the very front row, in a wheelchair, with a portable oxygen tank hissing softly beside him and a cane across his knees, sat Wendell Teague.

When the guard brought Wade in through the side door, he stopped dead in the doorway and stared at the room. He was in a white shirt and khakis that Ashley Navarro had bought him at the Walmart in Linden, the creases still sharp from the packaging. His hands were still bandaged. He looked out at the rows of faces from Calder Ridge, and Nora watched him find Wendell in the front row, and she watched his face simply fall apart.

Wendell lifted one hand off the arm of his wheelchair. Just a little. A small, steady wave.

Wade sat down at the table with Ashley Navarro and put his face in his bandaged hands.

The board chair, an older woman with silver hair named Dr. Patricia Moreland, called the hearing to order. Denise Harlan stood first and read the violation report in a flat, professional voice. On the night of January 9, the parolee had been outside his residence after his ten p.m. curfew. She paused. Then she set the report down.

“I’d like to add some context to that, if the board will allow,” she said.

Dr. Moreland nodded.

Denise told them. She was concise and factual, the way parole officers are trained to be. Eighteen months of perfect compliance. Every test clean. The nighttime walks, recommended by his sponsor, to manage cravings. Then the fire. The broken window. The burned hands. The 911 call. She asked that the recording be played, and it was, over a small speaker on the table, fifty-one seconds of coughing and roaring flame and a young man’s desperate voice. I got him out. He’s on the dock. Please hurry.

When it ended, nobody in the room moved.

Then Rick Ostrander stood and described what he had found in the ruins. The broken safety glass. The gray fleece on the wires. The scorched door handle. The forty feet. He said that in twenty-two years of investigating fires, he had seen a lot of people run away from burning buildings, and very few run toward them.

He had seen a lot of people run away from burning buildings, and very few run toward them.

Then Dr. Moreland looked out over the rows of plastic chairs.

“I understand,” she said, “that the man who was rescued is present and has asked to speak.”

Wendell Teague put both hands on the arms of his wheelchair. Nora started to stand up to help him, but he shook his head sharply. Slowly, with his jaw clenched and the oxygen tube pulling at his nose, the old man pushed himself up out of the wheelchair onto his own two feet, and leaned on his cane, and stood.