Chapter 6

I read that line standing at a mail table in Newport News, with somebody's duffel bag against my bad leg.

She knew what I had seen.

I showed it to Clovis, and for once he didn't laugh.

"Somebody's been writing home," he said, and neither of us said who.

If she knew, she could be gone before we ever got to Chicago, and that left one job I could still do, the one I had been ducking for a year.

The Army gave us each a furlough before it would discharge us, and on Tuesday, the sixteenth of October, I got off the Pennsylvania at Johnstown with the White Owl box under my arm.

I told the fellows I'd go ahead and break it to her, and they took that for nerve.

The truth is I wanted to make a mess of it with nobody watching.

Cambria City is row houses and church steeples squeezed in between the river and the railroad, across from the mill.

She had a gold star in her front window, somebody else's sheets on the line, and a back step that looked out on the main line to Chicago.

She opened the door before I knocked, a small straight-backed woman of fifty-seven with a gray braid and her sleeves pushed up.

She looked at the uniform, and she looked at my nose, which had never gone all the way back.

"You are the painter," she said. "The big one wrote me. You eat first."

It was cabbage and potatoes and a heel of sausage that I found out later was her Sunday.

I ate it at a table with an oilcloth on it, under a picture of a thin fellow in a uniform too big for him, grinning at something off to one side.

I've eaten in some hard places, and that was the hardest.

When the plate was clean I said it to her back, because she had gone to the stove.

"Mrs. Sobczak, your son's wife isn't his wife."

I told her all of it, the husband since 1940, the man with the Buick, me and the other five, the fifty dollars and the ten thousand.

It took about a minute, the way it always did.

She moved a pot off the burner, and she stayed on her feet.

"Seven," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

She wiped her hands, took a cookie tin down from the shelf and set it on the oilcloth.

Inside was a stack of letters as thick as a loaf of bread, tied with butcher's string, in a hand I could have read from the street.

"You think I am stupid?" she said. "A girl gets my son's money. She never comes, not for the Mass, not one time. And every week she writes to an old woman who washes sheets."

"No, ma'am."

"She wants something. She wants I should not ask where is the money. So I don't ask."

She pulled out the top one and didn't look at it, because she had it by heart.

"'He talked so much about your kitchen I could find your spoons in the dark.' And she asks me. Did he always sleep with one foot out? What did he eat when he was sick?"

She put it back.

"The priest says a Mass. The neighbors cross the street. Every week this girl asks me about my son, and I get to tell."

I had gone over this from every side for a year, and I had never once thought of that.

There was a slip at the bottom of the tin, gone soft, from Gorski's Hardware, with payments marked down it in pencil.

"He asks her to pay on his bicycle, so she pays. October, November, December." Her finger stopped. "January they send her the telegram. January, nothing."

Three payments short, at a dollar and a half.

"Mr. Gorski still has it in the back," she said. "I go by."

I took out the paper Neil had drawn up, and I told her what it was: she signs, and the money comes to her by the month, for life.

"And the girl?"

"She goes to prison, ma'am, if they can catch her."

"And the letters stop."

"Yes, ma'am."

"So who writes to me?"

I looked at that oilcloth for a long time.

"I will," I said.

I wrote the dullest letters in the United States Army, and a good lieutenant had told me so.

She looked at me as if I'd offered to fix her roof with a spoon. "You. What do you know about him?"

"Nothing, ma'am."

"So sit," she said, though I was sitting, and she poured the coffee and stood with her hand on the back of the other chair.

He worked the night turn at the mill, she told me.

Old Mrs. Wrona scrubbed the mill offices, seventy years old and half blind, and she lived at the top of the hill, up more steps than you'd want.

Nobody asked him to.

He saw her one night with her bucket, and he walked her up, and then he had to come all the way down again, and the whistle had blown.

Every night he walked the old woman home, and every night he was late, and every night they docked him.

"I said, Emil, she's slow, let her be slow. He says, Ma, that's why. So he puts money down on a bicycle, so he can walk her up and ride down and punch in on time. That was my son."

I think that was the first time she had smiled since January of '44, and it didn't last.

"His father was not late one day in twenty-two years. The foreman said so at the funeral. He was on time the morning the ladle went."

The Chicago train went by the back step just then and rattled the cups.

"So Emil comes home with his pay docked, and I don't holler. Every morning I tell him the same."

She turned her cup a quarter turn on the oilcloth.

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

I don't remember opening the box.

I remember the Morrison Hotel paper, and unfolding it, and turning it around to face her with my finger under the line.

She got her glasses out of her apron and read it the way Dewey did, slowly, with her lips moving.

"That's mine," she said.