Danny Delaney

Posted by Pat Carr in HandPrints Stories & Videos | 0 comments

© Pat Carr

I was already a movie buff by the time I was five. On Saturdays my family would drive the fifty miles over rocky, barely passable Wyoming roads from Grass Creek to Thermopolis to see whichever motion picture Hollywood had sent to the single theatre. So, even before I started first grade, I knew how the swashbuckling heroes were supposed to act. But it was during my first year of elementary school that I discovered what heroism really meant.

With so few children in Grass Creek, no girls my age lived in the Standard Oil Camp that my father ran, so I went searching for agates and arrowheads in the foothills with my brother Mike, Danny Delaney, and Jack and Murray Cameron. Danny always stayed beside me, and he was the one who helped me to climb over boulders, and to avoid the sagebrush, under which rattlesnakes coiled and rattled as we walked by. Jack and Murray were the sons of the clerk who worked directly under my father, so when we returned from our forays, my mother occasionally invited them to come into the house. But Danny’s father was a mere roustabout, and when my mother called Mike and me in, Danny had to wait on the front porch.

I can remember any number of times coming out to find him hunched on the rough porch boards, asleep with his head on the porch swing. My mother believed that two blue-eyed people wouldn’t have a brown-eyed child, so the fact that Danny’s mother and father both had blue eyes, and that his sparkling eyes were dark, dark brown didn’t help.

All Grass Creek children naturally went to the two-room schoolhouse, where we concentrated on our own grade’s lesson, with three other grades in the same room. We worked to keep our peanut-butter sandwiches from freezing on the way to school, and tried to stay bundled up through recess in the Wyoming winters.

The outdoor incinerator was lit one day a week, enabling the teachers to burn trash —Miss Lee for the younger kids, and plump Mr. Williams for the older ones. Then we could stand near the high iron sides, twelve inches above my head, and get some warmth. Since the snow melted in a border around the rusting incinerator cube, we could also keep our boots dry that one day a week. We’d all been cautioned—even the eighth graders—not to touch the pilot light lever at the end of its pipe. We’d been warned that even accidentally lighting the incinerator was enough to get any of us expelled—even Mike and me, though our father was the camp boss.

One afternoon, when Jimmy Gleason found a scrawny, orange-striped cat hiding beside the fence that separated the school yard from the buffalo grass along the creek, we were all stunned to see him fling the cat into the incinerator and make a dash for the pilot light. But Danny didn’t stand there dumbfounded, like the rest of us. He left my side and made straight for the iron receptacle. Raising himself over the rusty side, he grabbed the poor cat, just as Jimmy turned the lever of the pilot light. Blue-orange flames burst across the iron interior with a roar. Danny fell back, his forehead burned; his hair and eyebrows singed off. The cat frantic sprang clear and sped away.

Amid the shouting, plump Mr. Williams managed to bundle Danny into his car and drove off. Miss Lee stood trembling for a few minutes, then remembered to go back inside for her coat, mittens, and the keys to the bus to drive us all home.
The next time I saw Danny, his face was covered with black crankcase grease, so that only his dark brown eyes glittered through the thick slimy mask. He didn’t try to talk through the grease, but I knew he was smiling at me the way he always had.

Both Danny and Jimmy were absent from school for three weeks, and when they returned, no one dared mention the cat or the flames. Danny had no fire scars, and his hair and eyebrows had already started to grow back. He was as handsome as ever!

Not one of the acts of bravery shown at our small-town Thermopolis theatre made as lasting an impression in my life as that of Danny Delaney. The image of his swoop into the incinerator to save that cat is etched into my memory, and remains my standard for heroism to this day.

Cat photo by Sarah Jones