WARWICK, Mass. — After the bodies had been carried from the debris and the hoses folded back onto the fire engines, volunteer Fire Lieutenant Bill Lyman would agonize over every minute, reliving as much as remembering.

What if he had put on his bunker gear before he got to the scene, not after? What if, right before the Warwick volunteer Fire Department arrived on Richmond Road, there had still been a way inside, before the flames closed in? What if the 911 call had come in just a little earlier?

Could they have saved them?

Another, more terrible question tore at him.

What if the childrenhad been screaming, just the way he had taught all the kids in town — “Help me, I’m in here!’’

But afterward, the firefighters agreed. There was nothing they could have done.

The call came in on March 4 at 12:43 a.m. First the high-pitched tone on their beepers that jolted them from sleep. Then the calm voice of the dispatcher.

“Attention Warwick fire personnel, Warwick fire personnel. Respond to 405 Richmond Road for a report of a wood stove on fire in the kitchen. All occupants are attempting to exit the residence.’’

Across this rural town on the New Hampshire border, volunteer firefighters streamed toward the fire, or to the station they had built for the town themselves, to get two engines and tanker. Occupants exiting, they thought. That was good.

As he drove, Captain Joe Paul figured that at worst, a few of the guys would have to haul the wood stove out the front door and dump it in the yard. Chief Ron Gates thought they might have to pull a line into the kitchen.

But Lyman also knew that dispatchers rarely had the whole story. The worst was always possible. A year ago, almost to the day, he had stood vigil over the bodies of two young girls who died in a house fire in the next town over, trapped in a closet.

“Get there,’’ he thought as he drove. “Get to work. Jump. Move.’’

None of them could have imagined what they would see — an inferno that engulfed the home, a father and his 10-year-old daughter running down the driveway as the flames licked the treetops behind them.

Small-town intimacy

In a town of about 750, the odds are good that when volunteer firefighters arrive at a home for a call, at least one of them knows the people living there. They might have hunted on their land, fixed their porch, or received a pie as thanks for an odd job.

It’s a small-town intimacy that only adds to their pride in their work, and abiding sense of responsibility. But it can also multiply the sorrows. Gates once arrived at the home of a dear friend on a medical call as the man was suffering a massive heart attack.

The March 4 blaze was only the third house fire the department had responded to in Warwick in six years. It claimed the lives of Lucinda Seago and four of her five children. Officials have said it started accidentally in the wood stove. The state fire marshal’s office is investigating whether there were smoke detectors or fire extinguishers in the home.

The firefighters who could not rescue the family have been burdened by loss, and left to reckon with the limits of their devotion. Gates, 53, considered quitting the force. But he and his firefighters can’t bring themselves to abandon their neighbors.

“You see these people every day, and you know that you’ve got to be there to respond,’’ said Joe Larson, a 23-year-old EMT who joined the junior firefighters when he was 15 after witnessing a Thanksgiving Day car accident that killed a teenager. “If I were to leave, it would be one less person to help.’’

The 13-person department is unpaid, save small stipends to cover expenses, with the exception of the chief, who makes $1,500 a year. They answer about 80 calls a year, most of them medical, along with car accidents and small fires in brush, sheds, or chicken coops.

The town has no fire hydrants, so firefighters draft water from lakes and ponds to fill former military five-ton tankers. They train Warwick’s band of junior firefighters, an energetic corps that has amassed a wall of trophies for winning muster competitions. Regular firefighters meet every Tuesday, and train together regularly.

Warwick’s is one of just 13 volunteer departments in Massachusetts, according to the fire marshal’s office. The firefighters count carpenters, mechanics, and plumbers among their members, but they view this work as their calling. They are always on duty.

“Most of us firefighters, I won’t say we want to be heroes, but we definitely want to save the day,’’ said Paul, 49, who made the news in 2013 when, while on vacation in Maine, he tracked down a missing skier after hundreds of other searchers had been unable to. He joined the Warwick department about 17 years ago, after watching firefighters put out a fire in his chimney.

For Lyman, joining the department has restored a life he thought was lost. In 1996, he’d been working in a psychiatric unit when a large patient went out of control and crushed his spine. For the next five years, as he fought to recover his health and mobility, he was depressed and angry, and at times contemplated suicide.

But after receiving a small settlement from the hospital, he put a down payment on a 21-acre property in Warwick. Not long after he moved there, in 2001, he was burning some brush when the flames got away from him. The Fire Department came and put it out, and he joined up.

Lyman, 52, has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder since the hospital injury. But on calls, his world distills to a single, clear mission — charging with perfect economy toward someone else’s emergency, with the tools to tackle it tucked inside his truck or fire engine.

“Life’s not there for happiness,’’ he said. “Happiness is OK. You get there every now and then. But then it goes away. What matters is when you’re really doing things to help people.’’

The Seago family

Sometime before 12:43 a.m. that bitterly cold Saturday morning, Scott Seago walked downstairs to the kitchen of his family’s home on Richmond Road. Debris near his wood stove was engulfed in flames, officials said later. He opened the front door to let the smoke out, Gates said.

The Seagos had bought the Victorian-style home in 2009, when Scott’s wife, Lucinda, was pregnant with their fifth child. The couple had met as college students in Boston, when he was attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology and she was at Wellesley College, according to their priest, the Rev. Sean O’Mannion. He spoke to the Globe with Scott Seago’s permission.

Seago was too grief-stricken to be interviewed, O’Mannion said.

Scott is quiet, O’Mannion said, with a dry sense of humor and a love for bluegrass music. Lucinda, whose family called her Cindy, was sweet and quick to laugh.

Their children — 15-year-old Nicholas, 12-year-old Martin, 10-year-old Vivian, 9-year-old Demetria, and 7-year-old Peter — were known for their intelligence and devotion to their Catholic church, Our Lady of Czestochowa in Turners Falls, friends of the family said.

Nicholas and Martin served as altar boys in a program O’Mannion had dubbed the Knights of the Temple, an allusion to Knights Templar, the 12th-century Christian military order. The boys proudly sported badges with the Templar emblem of two knights sharing a horse, symbolizing the knights’ vow of poverty. Nicholas had achieved the rank of knight; Martin was a squire.

The children could all recite Scripture, friends said. Vivian speaks with a wisdom beyond her years, and when O’Mannion quizzed Sunday school students, Demetria was always quick with answers.

“What are the three theological virtues?’’ he recalled asking her once. He started to supply them: “Faith, hope —’’ and she chimed in: “Charity!’’

Peter, who had autism, was brilliant, family friends said. He could watch someone play a melody on the piano, then recreate it note for note, O’Mannion said. He was funny, too. At Christmas, the children knew they weren’t supposed to hang their stockings before Christmas Eve, recalled Mac Collins, 66, a friend of Lucinda’s. One Christmas, Peter couldn’t wait, but couldn’t break the rules, either. So he hung one of his own little socks from the stove, with a red note that said, “Hung by the chimney with care.’’

Scott worked as a computer programmer, and Lucinda worked as a nurse at the Farren Care Center, a last-resort residential program for people with serious psychological and medical problems who had been turned away by other nursing homes.

Life wasn’t easy. Lucinda was working toward her master’s degree while working shifts at all hours. Two close friends of hers, Trish Saline, 61, and Collins, said she sometimes slept for a half hour or so in the break room before driving home. She had taken up running as a release.

But she was optimistic, they said, and devoted to her family. She loved lavender bee balm, a purple flower that attracts hummingbirds, and Saline had grown a patch for her. Lucinda had planned to plant it this spring all around her home.

She never got the chance. The Seagos took care to keep the area around their wood stove clear, O’Mannion said. But that night, something caught a spark.

From the kitchen, Scott called for his children to come downstairs, O’Mannion said. Only Vivian appeared.

Upstairs, Lucinda tried to wake the other four children, O’Mannion said. The boys were heavy sleepers, he said. She opened the windows to let out the smoke.

Scott called 911 from inside, Gates said. But the fire spread with horrifying speed. Nicholas, Martin, Demetria, and Peter were trapped, and Lucinda couldn’t leave them. Scott screamed to her from outside through the upstairs windows, Gates said.

Later, O’Mannion would give Vivian a small locking chest with a key to keep some of the ashes of her home.

‘Nobody can go in’

Bill Lyman steered Engine 1 so smoothly and quickly to the fire that it felt like he was skimming the surface of the icy dirt road.

It had only been 11 minutes since the call came in. But the house was incandescent with flame, bright against the dark-edged frame, like a lantern.

“Warwick Engine 1 on scene,’’ Lyman said evenly into his radio. “Fully involved. House is fully involved.’’

Right behind him, Joe Paul pulled up and jumped out of his truck. He had seen the glow coming down the road, and now saw three firefighters from Engine 1 unfurling the large-diameter hose. He told them to set up a portable tank and ran around the engine to tell Lyman it was OK to drive closer. Over the rise of the long driveway, he saw two figures running toward him: Scott and Vivian Seago. Lyman yelled to them to get into a truck and get warm, but they veered toward Paul.

“Everyone’s out of the house, right?’’ Paul asked.

“No,’’ Scott Seago said. “My wife and kids are still in there.’’

No sounds of screaming could be heard. Paul called a second alarm and “possible entrapment’’ over the radio, and took off running. He circled the house, looking for any opening, any path to get inside and upstairs. One of the family’s cars was also on fire, and he heard tires exploding. Flames were shooting from the windows and roof, and the propane tanks at the side of the house were another threat to explode.

He had never made this call before, but he knew. Any rescue attempt would be suicide.

“Nobody can go in,’’ he barked to Lyman as the fire crackled around him. “The building is too far gone.’’

‘I’ll come get you’

It was 6 degrees out, and Lyman was still wearing jeans and a T-shirt as he pulled hoses off the engine, which he’d parked at the corner of the house so if the walls collapsed outward they’d fall away from him.

For Lyman, one of the most meaningful parts of volunteering had long been teaching fire safety to the kids in Warwick. At the winter carnival, he showed them how to roast marshmallows without burning themselves or one another. In their classrooms, he had other firefighters dress up in their bulky bunker gear and masks. He wanted to show the children that firefighters might look sort of scary, but they were friends.

A year ago, one of his lessons took on new urgency. On March 5, 2016, Warwick firefighters responded to a house fire in Orange, where two girls, who had been playing dress-up in a closet, were trapped and killed. Lyman had been standing at the scene with Larson when another firefighter brought their bodies out of the rubble, laid them at their feet, and asked them to watch over them.

For months, Lyman swore he could still taste the smoke that choked the air.

He had to make sure the kids in town knew how to help firefighters find them. He had them practice screaming: “Help me; I’m in here!’’

“If you shout those words,’’ he promised, “I’ll come get you.’’

All the children at Warwick Community School, where Demetria, Vivian, and Peter were students, learned Lyman’s lesson. They would cry out, and firefighters would follow the sound.

That night on Richmond Road, Lyman tried to focus on the tasks at hand — pull this lever, watch this gauge, open this valve. But the image of the children kept coming back; it was as if he could hear them calling to him.

He didn’t even notice until the next day that he’d gotten frostbite.

The fire’s fury

Chief Gates followed Engine 2 to the scene, and watched Scott and Vivian Seago run past him to get into another firefighter’s vehicle as he pulled up. He called a third alarm.

Only about two minutes had elapsed since Lyman drove the first engine onto the property. Moments later, 16 fire departments and two EMS companies from Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, began arriving, swarming the scene and dumping their water into the portable tanks the Warwick firefighters had set up.

The nearest water source was only about a third of a mile away, but the road was so narrow that the huge vehicles could only travel one way. Instead of a quick out and back, firefighters were forced to drive long one-way loops, making a full trip 15 miles long.

There were so many companies that the water flowed without interruption. But it didn’t matter.

Gates was furious at their helplessness.

Like his fellow volunteers, he was fiercely devoted to the Fire Department and its mission. He had spent 15 years raising money with the rest of the firefighters to build the new station, hosting charity softball games and spaghetti dinners, selling hamburgers, and barbecued chicken, and filling local swimming pools. Gates had his eye on an addition, if they could drum up another $40,000.

By trade, Gates was a carpenter. But in Warwick, he was the fire chief.

Now, as the fire raged, he knew there was nothing they could build, nothing they could do, to save anyone inside that house.

The fire jumped to the trees surrounding the home and the cars parked in front. It lit up the night in bright white and orange. It threw giant sparks and roared like a train barreling down the tracks. Then, suddenly, the house buckled and collapsed on itself. And there was only the cold and the dark.

A promise kept

In the daylight, hours later, the search for the bodies began. Lyman insisted on helping, though others urged him to step back and go warm up. It was his duty, he said, and the people leading the search understood. State investigators and firefighters began pulling the charred beams and debris off the rubble.

They found Lucinda first, then three of her children. The team took a break, then went back to look for the fourth child.

In the days that followed, many of the firefighters would attend the funerals for Lucinda, Nicholas, Martin, Demetria, and Peter, and pray with their friends and neighbors.

Lyman was there with them. But his own private observance had come in those final moments at 405 Richmond Road. “I’m going to get you out,’’ he’d told each of the children. “I said I would.’’

Globe correspondent Nicole Fleming contributed to this report. Evan Allen can be reached at evan.allen@ globe.com.