Chapter 3

It got about a quarter of a mile, to the second bend, on a road that had been swept twice that week.

I was down on one knee with the lace in my hand when I heard it, and I knew what it was, and I finished the knot.

I can't tell you why I finished the knot.

There were nine men on that truck, and every one of them had heard the letter about the wet wool.

The sergeant from Scranton was one, and the polite lieutenant from Ohio was up front with the driver.

That's all I'm going to say about that road.

The chaplain found me that night, sitting on my barracks bag.

"Why weren't you on it, son?"

"I was tying my boot, Father."

"Then God had His hand on you," he said.

I let him think so, but I knew whose hand it was.

I quit reading her letters out loud after that, because there was nobody left who had asked me to.

I didn't quit reading them.

"Dear Gen, I am fine, the weather is fine," I wrote, and a new lieutenant found nothing to cut.

I kept on paying, and I'll tell you what I would only tell a friend: by spring I had started to wait for them.

In June of '44 my own turn came, on a road north of Rome, and it was nothing to brag about.

A piece of shell the size of a house key went into my left thigh, and they shipped me back to a big Army hospital at Naples and took it out.

The surgeon gave it to me for a souvenir, and I put it in the White Owl box, with thirty-four letters and one sealed envelope.

The ward was long and white and smelled of floor soap and feet.

The man in the next bed was the happiest man I ever saw in a hospital.

His name was Clovis Tidwell, he was twenty-seven, and he fixed tanks for the Army and cotton gins in Lubbock, Texas.

He had forty stitches in his hip, and the nurses kept finding reasons to straighten his blanket.

He sang "Paper Doll" the way the Mills Brothers would have if they'd been raised by cattle.

He called me Milwaukee, and he had known me about an hour when he asked if I was married.

"Yes."

"She write?"

"Every week."

"Well, ain't that fine, so does mine," he said, as if we'd gone to the same college.

Mail came at ten, and Clovis took his in both hands and announced it to the ward.

"Y'all hush. This here's from my Jenny, in Chicago, finest woman ever drew breath."

There were three million people in Chicago, I told myself, and a man had a right to a wife there.

"I made your mother's chili off the card she sent me, and it took the finish off the pot. Now I understand you."

The whole ward laughed, and Clovis laughed hardest, and the skin went cold on the back of my neck.

It was the walk of it.

In my trade you can tell who lettered a wall from the way the letters stand, before you've read a word.

You were being polite. Now I understand you. Same walk.

I told myself plenty of women were funny.

Then he laid the envelope down on his blanket, five feet from my face, and I looked at the wall.

I looked at it hard.

Somebody had lettered WARD 14 on the door with no idea what a Roman capital was, and I gave that my full attention.

I'd like to tell you I turned back out of courage, but a sign man reads everything, the way a dog smells everything.

She crossed her t's from the wrong side, right to left, with a flick at the end like a cat's tail.

I had thirty-four samples of it under my bed.

There were two more on that envelope, right there in the word Postmaster.

"You ain't laughed once, Milwaukee," Clovis said.

"It's my leg."

"Hell, it's your wife. She don't write like mine, and you know it."

He wasn't being mean, because he didn't know how, and he'd have given you his last cigarette.

"I'd show you her picture, only it burned up with my gear," he said. "But looky here."

He went through the pages with his big cracked thumbs until he found the one he wanted.

"I keep this one for when the hip's bad. I ain't shy. Go on and read the bottom of it, that's the finest thing anybody ever said to me."

He held it out across the gap between the beds, grinning all over his face.

I could have read it from where I lay.

I took it anyway, because he was so pleased.

It was the same ruled tablet paper I had under my bed, and at the bottom of the page, in that hand, it said:

"Be late for everything, Clovis. Late is how a man gets old."