Cy Prosser kept this township’s fire service alive with an instrument nobody ever saw him use. This is what it cost to stand next to that for twenty-three years and file it under luck.
The bag has a staple across the top and my mother’s name on the label, and he hands it over with two fingers underneath it, the way you’d hand somebody a plate.
“That’s Junie’s ninety-day,” he says. “So she’s good through October.”
“October.”
“There’s one in there new from the county home. It’s a stool softener. It’s nothing.” He turns the bag so the sticker faces me. “With food, or it’ll gripe her.”
“All right.”
“Tell her I said hey.”
That is the entire transaction and it has been the entire transaction for four years. He is not cold to me. I want that on the record, because when I’ve told people about this they picture a door getting slammed, and there wasn’t one. He is pleasant. He is pleasant to me the same way he is pleasant to the propane man, and he has never once made a mistake with my mother’s medication, and he calls me Wade.
Cy Prosser and I went on the volunteer department together in 1998. He was twenty-nine, I was twenty-seven. He bought the drugstore out on the state route in 2003. We ran calls together for twenty-three years, we ate at the same table at the fish fry for twenty-three years, and in February of 2022 he stopped, and there was no argument, no phone call, no letter, and nothing said in the truck.
I sent him seven messages between then and August of 2024. They all say Delivered. The last one is from the twelfth of August, 2024, and it says Hey bud you around this weekend.
Here’s what I had to go on. He’s a pharmacist in a township of nineteen hundred people, which means he is the only one within twenty miles, which means my mother’s blood pressure and my own knee and the whole rest of it come through his hands every ninety days, and I stand there and he is pleasant. And there’s a thing I said at a fish fry in November of 2021 that is still moving around this township at its own speed, nearly five years later, and I am going to have to put it in here, because none of the rest makes sense without it and because I have never said it out loud in a room where somebody could answer me.
In March of 2023 I carried my mother’s blood pressure bottle back in there on a Saturday with the place full, and I held it up and asked him, at a volume, whether the count was right, because it looked light to me. It wasn’t light. I’d counted it in the truck on the way over. He took the bottle in the back and came out and laid nineteen tablets on the counter one at a time where the woman behind me could watch him do it, and said nineteen, and asked did I want him to call the county home about the delivery. Then he stapled the bag.
I sat in the lot afterward with my hands going. I have not told anybody that until right now.
My version, for four years, out loud, to anybody: he gave up on me without warning.
I had reasons for that version. Twenty-three years, and I never once saw the man angry. He didn’t sulk. He didn’t get into it with people at meetings, and this is a fire department, so people get into it. When Denver Slagle called him a name in the bay in 2012 over the pump panel, Cy waited him out and then asked him about his wife’s shoulder. He remembered your kid’s name and which sport. He’d have a thing in his truck for you — a hose fitting, a coupon for the tire place — that he’d got because of something you said six weeks ago and forgot saying. Being around him was the easiest thing in my week for two decades.
Thanksgiving of 2024, my daughter Shelby was home. She’s twenty-six, she does human resources for a hospital system up in Columbus, so she has a lot of vocabulary, and she had come down with a pie she had every intention of saying she made. I told the story the way I tell it, with the bag of pills and the tell her I said hey, and she put her fork down.
“Dad, that’s a door slam,” she said. “That’s a textbook INFJ door slam. I’d bet money on it.”
“On a what.”
“It’s a personality type. There’s sixteen of them. He’s the rarest one and they all do this exact thing.” She got her phone out. “I can show you in about a minute.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I’m not doing a horoscope about it.”
I want to be honest about that minute, because I’ve been back to it. It wasn’t that I thought it was nonsense, although I did think it was nonsense. It was that Shelby had just told me there was a category with a name on it that my whole thing fit inside, and if it fit inside a category then it wasn’t about me, and I needed it to be about me. A man who quits on you without warning has done something to you. A man in a category has just been himself.
I didn’t look it up for fifteen months.
INFJ Traits: A Hole You Dig to Learn the Lot
I put in septic systems. Before you put one in you dig a test pit, which is a hole about eight feet deep in a spot the health department picks, and then everybody stands around the hole and looks at the sides of it. You are reading color and texture and where the mottling starts, and off that hole you say what the whole lot is going to do with water for the next thirty years. You are not guessing. You are also not going to be able to explain it to the homeowner in a way that satisfies him, because what he wants is a number and what you have is a hole.
River-bottom clay is the worst ground there is for this. It’ll take water fine in April when everybody’s looking and then quit on you in the fall, and a field that’s failing doesn’t announce it. It surfaces. You get one stripe of grass forty feet long that’s greener than everything around it and stays green in August, and that’s it, that’s the whole announcement, and it’s been failing for four years by the time the grass tells you. I have looked at that stripe on eighty properties. The people who live there have looked at it every day and thought they had good grass.
The last day of October, 2019, we were coming back from a mutual aid call in the county truck and Cy said, out of nothing, “You can’t hold anything, Wade.”
I laughed. I lose stuff. I’ve lost two phones off the running board and a set of keys into a foundation pour. I said something about how a man who keeps his tools that clean doesn’t get to talk, and he let me have it, and we got a coffee at the Marathon.
Three years earlier he had gone to bat for Ledge Amspaugh in a way I have never seen him do for anybody. Ledge was twenty-three, he’d been in some trouble, and the roster committee didn’t want him. Cy didn’t argue it in the meeting. He just talked to Ronnie Boyce, and then to Ronnie’s brother-in-law, and then to Ledge’s mother at the IGA, and by the next meeting the thing was done and nobody could tell you who had changed their mind. I asked him afterward why he cared about that kid.
“He’ll be all right if he’s got somewhere to be on Tuesdays,” he said, and that was the whole answer, and Ledge was on that department five years and was one of the better interior guys we had.
INFJ Relationships and Compatibility: The Easy Part
Twenty-three years and I cannot give you one fight.
I’ve thought about whether that’s a nice thing to be able to say. In 2009 my outfit almost went under — I had two machines financed and the housing thing had taken every foundation job in three counties — and I was going to take a job driving for a paving outfit in Columbus, which would have meant selling the excavator and leaving Shelby with her mother four nights a week. Cy came out and sat on my tailgate for two hours and didn’t say don’t do it. He asked me a lot of small questions. Where the paving jobs were. What the drive was. Whether I’d still have the truck. And somewhere in the middle of the third hour I heard myself say I’d rather eat the loss on the small machine than do that to my kid, and he said, “Well, there you go,” and got in his car.
I got out of it. I kept the big machine and sold the mini and I’ve never been under like that since. For fifteen years I told that story as the time Cy Prosser talked me out of the paving job, and it took me until this year to notice that he never said one word about the paving job.
That is what this is like from underneath it, and it is very good, and I want to say the second half of it as plainly as I can. You are handled. Not badly — handled well, better than you could handle yourself, by somebody who has already worked out where you’re going to end up and is just walking with you toward it and making it comfortable. And it costs you nothing at the time and it is beautiful, and then one day the handling stops and you sit down and go back through twenty-three years and every single warm thing in there is now a question. Was that a friend on my tailgate, or was that a man doing a job on me that he’d already decided the outcome of. I do not know. I am not going to know.
Living inside this daily, married to it, is a different seat than the one I had, and whoever writes that will have been in rooms I never got into. It doesn’t come at everybody the same way, either.
Nadine Prosser told me at the levy fundraiser in 2023, when I was still trying to get somebody to explain it to me, “He doesn’t do it to be mean, Wade.” She was carrying a sheet pan. “He’s just done.”
INFJ vs INTJ: Two Ways to Be Early
Faye Kesterson is the county emergency services coordinator and she was our interim chief in 2023. She is forty-four and she came up through a city department and she is the second person I have ever met who could see the end of this township’s fire service from a long way off.
We were losing people. Everybody could count — we ran a hundred and forty calls in 2019 with nineteen names on the roster and eleven of those nineteen were over fifty. But counting isn’t the thing. The thing is that in 2019 Faye Kesterson and Cy Prosser had both already arrived, separately, at the same finish: that inside five years this station gets absorbed by Chandlersville or it closes, and the difference between those two is the insurance rating on every house in the township.
Faye built a document. That is what she does. She built a ten-year staffing and cost model, she got the rating bureau’s letter in writing, she put the levy language together with the county prosecutor, and she stood up in the Grange hall in September of 2023 in front of ninety people and took an hour of it, including from a man who accused her of wanting a building named after her. She did not adjust her voice one time. The thing she built worked, and it worked without her, and it is still working — she has been gone from that chair for two years and the model is still what the trustees budget off.
Cy never said a word at the Grange hall.
What Cy did, starting in 2021, was that four men who were going to quit did not quit. Ronnie Boyce was going to quit because the merger talk made him think he’d be a nobody at forty-one. Denver Slagle’s boy was going to quit because he thought his dad had been pushed out. I could name the other two. Cy got to each one of them somewhere that wasn’t a meeting — a driveway, the back of the store, a hospital parking lot — and I could not tell you to this day what he said to any of them, and neither can they, particularly. They just stayed. And the reason the levy passed with two hundred and nine votes is that we could still put a crew on an engine in November of 2023, and the reason we could is those four men.
Here is what I’ve got about the two of them now. They start at the same place. Both of them get to the end of a thing years before there’s anything to show, and neither one of them can walk you through the steps, because it doesn’t come to them as steps. Where they split is what it comes out through. Faye’s comes out as apparatus — a model, a letter, a table, something impersonal that survives whether or not anybody likes her, and that a stranger can pick up in ten years and use. Cy’s comes out onto the room. His whole instrument is people in their particular states: who is about to fold, who decides for whom, which man has to be asked in a driveway and which one has to be asked where two other guys can see it.
Swap them and we lose the station twice. Faye could not have kept those four men, because she has no map of who matters to whom, and she’d have told them the true thing in a meeting and lost the room by Christmas. And Cy could not have built one page of that model. His method only works if nobody sees it working, which means it doesn’t go past the men he can personally get to, and it leaves nothing behind. When Cy Prosser is done there is no document. There is just a township where things went all right and nobody knows why.
Faye does other people’s taxes at her kitchen table from January to April, sixty dollars a return, forty-some of them a year. She doesn’t need the money. She told me once she likes forms because a form is a place where a person has to be finished.
I said something to her about Cy that spring — that he was worth three of anybody at holding this place together.
“He is,” she said. “And if he gets hit by a truck we find out on a Tuesday and there’s nothing on paper.”
INFJ Under Stress: The Third Time He Counted the Same Shelf
February to April of 2021, Cy Prosser gave out four thousand and some doses of vaccine out of a store with two full-time employees.
He had a freezer he was checking twice a day and a call-back list on paper because the state’s system kept dropping people, and he had the entire county phoning a drugstore that has one line. His tech quit in March. Nadine was doing appointment calls at their kitchen table at ten at night.
What I saw, the two times I was in there, is that he had stopped being the man who is easy in a room. He was polite and he was about four feet behind his own face. He counted a shelf of the flu stock while I was standing there talking to him, and then he counted it again, and I made a joke, and then when I came back on Saturday for my mother’s refill he was counting that same shelf.
I asked Nadine about it at the mailbox. She had a flat of marigolds on the ground beside her, which she puts in the same two beds every spring and which the deer take every June.
“He’s up at three,” she said. “He’s not upset. He’s going. He reorganized the whole back room Sunday and I don’t think there was anything wrong with the back room.”
That’s the part of this type nobody puts in the descriptions. The descriptions have all the depth and the insight in them. They don’t have a fifty-two-year-old man at three in the morning with a scanner gun doing inventory nobody asked for, because the one thing he cannot do is be in a bad hour and let it be an hour. It has to be handled, and if there’s nothing left to handle in the future he’ll go handle the shelf.
One thing said plain, since I watched it and did nothing. A bad stretch that ends was a bad stretch. If it doesn’t end — if the sleep never comes back, if the counting stops being about the store — then a friend with a coffee is not the answer to it and neither is a page like this one. That is a doctor’s, or a licensed counselor’s. I’d rather be blunt about it than keep the tone of this nice.
It lifted. By June he was out at the station on Wednesdays again, and he’d got a new tech, and he made a joke about the freezer that I still think about because it was the only time I ever heard him complain about anything.
INFJ Strengths and Weaknesses: No Proof Ever Went Out
I want to put the strength down fairly first, because I am about to be the villain of my own story and I don’t want anybody thinking I’ve stacked it.
Ledge Amspaugh got four years on that department because one man looked at a twenty-three-year-old with a record and saw the whole thing four years out: what would happen to that kid specifically if he had somewhere to be on Tuesdays, and what would happen to him specifically if he didn’t. Nobody else in that room saw anything but a problem. And Cy didn’t win the argument. He went around and moved five people in three weeks so that there wasn’t an argument. If you have ever wondered what this type is actually for, it’s that: the correct answer, arrived at years early, delivered by rearranging a room so quietly that afterward everybody believes it was their own idea.
Now the other side, and it is the same equipment.
He never dug you a hole to look in. Twenty-three years and I never once got shown the sides of it. He arrived at a finish about a person and then the finish just sat there, closed, and the person went on being treated beautifully. There was no proceeding. Nobody got a letter. You cannot answer a verdict that was never read to you, and I would have taken that meeting.
The fish fry was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 2021.
I’d had three, which for me is not a lot but is not none. Ronnie Boyce and Dale Hupp were at the end of the table by the fryer, and the subject was Ledge Amspaugh, who was up for the driving job at the quarry, and Dale said something about how the quarry ought to look at what they’re getting.
And I said: “Well. You’d think somebody’d check what he’s picking up at Prosser’s.”
I knew what I was doing. I’d like to be able to say it came out. It did not come out. I said it to two men, one of whom cannot hold water, at a table with forty people at it, because Dale Hupp had been talking down to me about the tanker all fall and because I wanted, for one second, to be the man at that table who knew something. I don’t know one actual fact about Ledge Amspaugh’s prescriptions and I never did. What I had was a thing Cy said in 2016 about Tuesdays, and a look he gave the kid once in the bay, and I took those two nothings and I made a sentence out of them and I set it down where it would walk.
It got to the quarry inside of three weeks. Ledge lost the job in January. He was gone out of the township by May and I hear he’s in Zanesville.
That is the only genuinely mean thing I have ever done to another person and I did it at a fish fry for no reason at all. There is no version of the next part where I’m owed anything.
Cy stopped in February. I found out on the twenty-second, when I went by the station and the coffee was already made and everybody was standing around and it turned out there’d been a thing at Ronnie’s the night before that nobody had called me about.
INFJ Behavior: One Hundred and Seventy-Four Calls
The last week of February, 2026, I was up at the station arguing about air packs.
We had a grant list to turn in and I said we’d bought four bottles in 2022 and Faye said three, and rather than argue she sat down at the county laptop and started pulling reports, and once she was in there she was in there. She pulled the purchase log. Then she pulled the run reports, because the fourth bottle had gone out on a call and she wanted the date.
I was standing behind her chair drinking a Pepsi.
“There it is. Barn on Bloomfield, oh-four of ’22.” She scrolled. “Huh.”
“What.”
“You and Prosser.” She was still scrolling. “Hundred and seventy-four calls you’re both on since November of ’19. You’re not on the same piece of apparatus on any of them.”
“That’s the way it falls.”
“It’s not the way it falls, Wade, I run these. He does the assignment sheet.” She went back up the screen with two fingers. “Look. Here’s you on 91, he takes command. Here’s you on 91, he takes the tanker. Here’s you on the tanker, he takes 91. Every one.” She turned around in the chair. “November nineteenth of ’19 is where it starts. Before that you’re together on about half.”
The furnace kicked on. Somebody was running a saw out in the bay.
“Print me that,” I said.
“It’s forty pages.”
“Print me that.”
I sat in the truck in the station lot with forty pages on the passenger seat until the dome light timed out, and then I drove home the long way, out Bloomfield, past the barn.
What Is the INFJ Personality Type: The Letters I Wouldn’t Look Up
Fifteen months after my daughter said it at the table, I sat down at eleven o’clock at night and typed in four letters. In the one national headcount anybody has ever run, this is the smallest box on the board — about one and a half adults in a hundred, one point three among men.
I fought it the whole way down the page, out loud, in my kitchen.
Introverted. He talked to two hundred people a day. But I have never once in twenty-eight years seen that man walk into the station and go find somebody, and he left every single Christmas party by eight fifteen, and I had stored both of those under Cy’s just like that.
Intuitive. This is the one I was ready to fight and it’s the one that ended the argument. Not spooky. It means the thing he does with a person, which is the thing I do with the side of a hole: you take in a pile of small specifics — how a man says his wife’s name, what he does with his hands when the roster comes up — and what comes back is not a list of the specifics. It’s the finish. It arrives whole and it arrives years early and it will not break down into steps for you, so you cannot show it to anybody, so you either act on it privately or you don’t act.
Feeling. I had this one filed as soft. Kind is a different word. This is about what goes on the scale when he decides, and what goes on the scale is the blast radius: who is inside it, and in what order it reaches them.
Judging. A question left open is weight he carries until it’s settled. Settled, it turns into furniture.
The letters are the front of it. Behind them the framework stacks four habits, ranked, best-equipped down to worst. The ranking is what makes one of these a different animal from the next. In this one the finish comes first and the room comes second, and the two of them together account for a man knowing in 2016 what a twenty-three-year-old needed and then getting five people to hand it to him without ever once making a case.
So: the trip back from the mutual aid call on the last day of October, 2019, was not a joke about my keys. And nineteen days later he changed the assignment sheet.
How many of these there are, since it matters here: fewer than any of the other fifteen. The one sample anybody built to mirror the country, instead of mirroring whoever showed up to be tested, puts it around one and a half in a hundred, and thinner in men than in women. Any other percentage you run across deserves a squint, because most of those tables are built out of people who sat the questionnaire because a company or a school handed it to them, and a sample like that describes the hallway it was collected in. One and a half in a hundred works out to maybe two dozen of them in a township this size, which means most people meet one, get nowhere, and call him hard to figure out.
Where the whole thing stands, one line, since you came here for a type and not for a fight about the instrument: the measurements underneath hold up better than the sorting does — the dials are real enough, and the last step, where a human being lands in one of sixteen boxes, is a filing decision the numbers have never fully paid for. You can use it anyway if you know which half you’re standing on. And every line of this describes an average of strangers. Read it about yourself and the place where it quits describing you is the only part of the page with your name on it.
In September of 2023 we buried Denver Slagle, who had forty years on the department. Cy came in late and sat in the row behind me. During the second hymn he put his hand on my shoulder and left it there for the whole hymn, and then he took it off, and he did not come to the meal.
INFJ Cognitive Functions: Where the Reasons Are Kept
The second habit is the room, and it is the one that made twenty-three years so easy that I never got a single thing out of them. For the record the framework files these as introverted intuition first, then extraverted feeling, introverted thinking, and extraverted sensing — the order matters more than the labels do.
It faces out, and what it tracks is condition. Where a man is standing this minute. What would take twenty pounds off him. What a room needs so that it does not come apart. That habit is why nobody ever fought with Cy Prosser: he was already three moves into keeping the fight from starting. And it is why a man can be finished with you privately in November of 2019 and still be pleasant across a counter in 2026, because the pleasantness was never a report on how he felt about you. It was a report on what the room needed, and the room is the store, and the store needs a bag handed over with a staple in it.
Under that there’s a third habit, and it’s the one I understand worst because it happens with the door shut. It works alone, in terms, without ever arguing. It takes the finish and files it, and once it is filed that is simply how things are. Nothing gets reopened, because nothing was ever opened.
Which brings me to the tailgate again, and to 2015, which I have had to move to a different shelf in my head this year.
There was a stretch that summer where I’d been running my mouth about Ronnie Boyce’s wife and it had got back around, and Cy came out to the shop and sat on the tailgate and asked me a lot of small questions. Where I’d heard it. Who I’d said it to. Whether I’d want it said about Shelby. Same as the paving job, same tailgate, same nothing-face. And at the end of it he said, “You’d want to get a handle on that, bud,” and I said I know, I know, and we went and got a coffee.
That was a hearing. That was the whole proceeding, sides of the hole and all, and I sat in it for two hours and thought we were visiting.
And the fourth habit, the one he is worst outfitted for, the one that has to handle whatever is physically in front of him this minute, that’s the shelf at three in the morning, and that’s why the thing at the end went the way it went. A man with the whole future modeled and no instrument for the present does not get to do a good ending. He doesn’t have a scene in him. He just goes quiet and hands you the bag.
INFJ Careers: What the Counter Is For
A counter is the perfect job for this. Two hundred people a day, ninety seconds each, no relationship required and every one of them read on the way past — who is scared, who isn’t going to take it, whose daughter is the one really picking up the prescription. He was the best-informed man in the township and he never told anybody anything.
The word the town uses for him is good with people. That is what a workplace does with it: the best instrument in the building gets written up as a nice manner, and nobody has ever put a nice manner on a pay scale. Nobody ever paid Cy Prosser one dollar for the four men who didn’t quit.
What a workplace decides this is, and what thirty years of that decision does to a person’s earnings, belongs to somebody who has sat on the hiring side of a desk, and I never have. And two people can carry the identical thing and have a room receive it two different ways, which is somebody else’s assignment and not mine.
INFJ Personal Growth: What I Have to Go On
Everything written about growth for this type comes down to a bulleted page telling him to say what he needs. Show me the man who read that page and did it.
What I actually saw was one thing, and it is smaller than a page and worth more. In 2015 that man had already reached a finish about me and he drove out to my shop anyway and spent two hours giving me a chance to be somebody else, and he never once told me that was what was happening. So he has it. It was never a skill he was missing. What it runs on is a tailgate, a thing still small enough to walk back, and two hours he was under no obligation to spend.
I got one. I used it up saying I know, I know and going for coffee.
Faye Kesterson turned the chief’s job down in 2024 and took a pay cut to stay county, and I still think she engineered that whole merger to get her name on this building, and I have said so at the fire board, and I’ll say it here.
Ledge Amspaugh is in Zanesville. I have his number. I have had it for four years.
He’ll come around. I know how that reads after everything above. I think it anyway. He’s got twenty-three years in this with me and a man doesn’t just set that down.
The eleventh of July we had a car in the ditch on the state route with the driver still in it and both of us caught the call. Cy took command because he’s safety officer and that’s the sheet. He came up the bank with the clipboard and stopped in front of me for about a second and a half.
“Wade. D side. Take the line and stand there and don’t let anybody past you.”
“Got it.”
I took the line and I went around the back of it and I stood on the D side for fifty minutes while they cut the door, and nobody came past me. On the report I’m under Engine 91 and he’s under Command, which is where the two of us have been since the nineteenth of November, 2019.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.