alive and whole, came home.
Kevin Keegan was a probationary firefighter with three months' experience under his belt when the bell at Engine 168 rang on September 11. His shift was over; he didn't need to be there. But Keegan could often be found in the firehouse after his shift was over. Or before it began. Or on off-duty days. He liked the place: the kidding around, the stories, even the food.
“Kevin grew up here,” Owen McCardle told the
“We made him like the prince of the firehouse,” confirmed Peter Connell, recently promoted to captain and given the command of Engine 168. 168's former commander, Bill Small, is one of the men this company lost. “Kevin was two when his father died. We sort of adopted him. No kid should have to grow up without a father.” Captain Connell looked back through the open firehouse door to the apparatus floor. Engine 168, damaged in the maelstrom that was September 11, has been repaired and repainted. The captain said, “I guess there are going to be a lot of kids to adopt now.”
When the call came in to Engine 168 on September 11, off-duty firefighter Kevin Keegan asked Captain Small for permission to ride along. By then the extraordinary nature of the event was clear, though not yet its true and terrible extent. With the other members of the company, Keegan rode the engine into a cataclysm for which no level of experience could have prepared anyone.
“They had the bridge open for emergency vehicles, but it was slow going.” In an interview last week, Keegan sat with a visitor at a picnic table on the rolling grounds of the Burke Rehabilitation Center in White Plains. “By the time we got there, the second plane had hit. The fires were burning pretty bad.”
Keegan is a cheerful red-haired, freckled young man. But when he speaks of the events of that day, he turns his gaze away. He peers across the distant hills like a man hoping for the first glimpse of travelers returning home.
“Everything was chaos,” Keegan said. “Girders crashing down, glass breaking. People on fire falling from the sky. It was unbelievable.” Here in the green serenity of the hospital grounds, it did seem almost unbelievable that such horrors had ever been real.
“They sent us to the north tower,” Keegan went on. “We were massing to go in—there was a chief there, I don't know which chief, but my captain reported to him. And there were, I think, four other companies. And we were getting set when part of the building just came twisting out of the sky. Someone shouted, and some guys ran, but some guys didn't have a chance to run.”
Keegan was seriously injured by the falling debris, receiving a concussion and second-degree burns; but it's clear he knows how much luckier he is than many of the men with whom he stood.
“I lay there with something heavy on top of me. I knew I was being burned, but I couldn't move. I thought, I'm going to die. But, okay, at least I'm on the Job, I'll die as a firefighter. That was okay, you know?”
Whether or not that would have been okay is a judgment the visitor is glad he does not have to make.
“Then I heard Uncle Jimmy calling me.”
Uncle Jimmy, of course, is Capt. James McCaffery, who stepped in and helped raise young Kevin Keegan after the death of his father. “There was smoke and dust everywhere, you couldn't see anything, but Uncle Jimmy told me to go left. He said it was my coat that was pinned, not me, and to take it off and stay low and head toward daylight on the left.
“So I did. I peeled out of the coat, and I could move. It was slow going, but Uncle Jimmy kept saying just a little further, he was right there waiting. I could see the daylight he meant. I got there, to a kind of hole, and saw guys up there, yelling and digging. I called to Uncle Jimmy. I figured that's where he was, that I'd made it to the right place. A couple of guys yelled back. One guy jumped down into the hole. A guy I didn't know.” Keegan shook his head, clearing out memories of smoke and dust, fire and darkness. “I asked where Uncle Jimmy was, but he just kept telling me I was okay, and they got me out.
“That's the last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital the next day. Some of the guys were there sitting in the room, the guys I rode with. They told me about Dave”—firefighter David Schwartz, the second member of Engine 168 to die that day—“and Capt. Small. I asked about Uncle Jimmy. They told me about him, too.
“The thing is”—Keegan turned his clear green eyes back to his visitor, giving up his search of the horizon for absent friends—“I reconstructed it. Over and over, in my head. Uncle Jimmy was already up in the tower when we got to the location. Thirty, forty flights up. That's where he was when it fell—on forty-four. He was nowhere near where I was. Nowhere near.”
Today in Pleasant Hills a breeze ruffled the bunting above the doors of Engine 168, and the carved salamanders, legendary lizards that cannot be destroyed by fire, seemed to wink. And Probationary Firefighter Kevin Keegan walked, slowly, on crutches, but unaided, back into the firehouse where he grew up.
“Jimmy saved him.” Keegan's mother, Sally, has no doubt in her mind about that. “Jimmy's been taking care of us all our lives. Since we were all kids. Kevin's dad . . .” Sally Keegan smiled. It was a day for smiling. “You had to know Markie. My husband was the sweetest man who ever lived. But he got into trouble all the time. Jimmy was always getting him out. One of the worst things for Jimmy, I think, was when he couldn't help Markie that one last time. But he's been doing things for Kevin and me ever since. And look what he did for us now.”
You don't have to believe in ghostly voices to see the ways in which Captain McCaffery is still taking care of his friend's son. Kevin Keegan's FDNY health insurance paid for his stay at Burke. Jimmy McCaffery's FDNY life insurance named Keegan as beneficiary and has paid for the extras: the private room, the private nurse, the hours of physical therapy demanded by a young man eager to push himself, anxious to get back on the Job.
But even before that, years before, Jimmy McCaffery always did what he could.
Mark Keegan, Kevin Keegan's father, died in prison, according to Marian Gallagher, director of the More Art, New York! Foundation and Kevin Keegan's godmother. “Markie killed a man in self-defense. He was never charged in the killing. But his gun was unlicensed, and he went to prison for that. It was a short sentence, but he got into a fight there and was killed.” Marian Gallagher's face saddened. “We were all so young. . . .”
After Mark Keegan died in prison, Jimmy McCaffery looked after Keegan's young family. “Uncle Jimmy said we should sue the State,” Kevin Keegan tells the visitor. He leans on his crutches, the center of the happy chaos echoing down Main Street. “Mom and Aunt Marian thought he was nuts. Even Uncle Phil did.” Keegan grins. He
