The fire chief and his deputy, elected by their peers, wear white coats in 1970, the other firemen black, the better to find a leader during conflagrations. As I stand that night across from the burning Western Auto, I watch two white-coated men atop the Spikins building abutting the blaze. They direct truck placements and hose streams, pointing broadly, a pas de deux in smoke. The chief is my father.

And as I watch him dance through embers shot by burst timbers, I wonder how much heat weakens mortar and whether, if the building collapses, he will feel long the flames. “Fire never kills people,” he had told me a few months earlier, when fourteen-year-old Billy Youngstrem died eight feet from his front door, having gone back in to save a dog, “the smoke always gets them first.” And somehow that reassured me. But now there is too much smoke and fire. He and Fred Behr, the deputy chief, shimmer white in white and yellow against the night.

When you’re fourteen and your father is forty, he cannot die. Maybe after a long cancer when he’s old and you’re old, too. But because you cannot imagine yourself at thirty and forty, you cannot imagine your father dying. Or at least in 1970 you cannot. Perhaps today’s eighth-graders, poised for a service world of downsizing, have learned to consume the present, too, opening space for a future that includes the deaths of fathers. But such spaces did not exist for kids born into the small-town fifties and sixties.

The fire chief and his deputy, elected by their peers, wear white coats in 1970, the other firemen black, the better to find a leader during conflagrations. As I stand that night across from the burning Western Auto, I watch two white-coated men atop the Spikins building abutting the blaze. They direct truck placements and hose streams, pointing broadly, a pas de deux in smoke. The chief is my father.

And as I watch him dance through embers shot by burst timbers, I wonder how much heat weakens mortar and whether, if the building collapses, he will feel long the flames. “Fire never kills people,” he had told me a few months earlier, when fourteen-year-old Billy Youngstrem died eight feet from his front door, having gone back in to save a dog, “the smoke always gets them first.” And somehow that reassured me. But now there is too much smoke and fire. He and Fred Behr, the deputy chief, shimmer white in white and yellow against the night.

When you’re fourteen and your father is forty, he cannot die. Maybe after a long cancer when he’s old and you’re old, too. But because you cannot imagine yourself at thirty and forty, you cannot imagine your father dying. Or at least in 1970 you cannot. Perhaps today’s eighth-graders, poised for a service world of downsizing, have learned to consume the present, too, opening space for a future that includes the deaths of fathers. But such spaces did not exist for kids born into the small-town fifties and sixties.

Here the Central Sabers played football Friday nights, and you could count on cars nosed against the end zones at the old junior high field by the late afternoon, their owners to return during the sophomore game at six. You could count on the bank closing at three-thirty and old men playing sheepshead at Hap Smith’s Shell station and manure spreaders shucking corn cobs sprinkled with pennies onto Ninth Street each Ridiculous Day. For big trips, downtown Davenport had department stores and shoe and stationery, Sears and the rest, and each Christmas Petersen’s set up motorized scenes in its store windows. Northpark Mall would not open until 1973.

It was all an aberration, of course, for even small-town America is movement and change. A coal seam plays out. The bridge is built ten miles upriver. The new interstate turns highway to market road. Farms blow away. Fathers get killed by freight trains. That was Willis Hesse. Dad was seven. It was Christmas Eve, and he waited at a family party for a father who would never get there. When they brought Dad home from the hospital, an uncle took him up to his parents’ bedroom to give him the double-barreled BB gun he’d wanted. And so Dad lost his father and Santa Claus the same night.

Fictive stabilities can never be seen from within their own time. Like Wittgenstein’s fly, we can’t see our bottles until something shatters them. And then we circle the shards, piecing them together in our minds, trying to see what we cannot know, the bottle’s shape before the blow.