Chapter 7

She kept her finger on the paper, and the clock over the stove went on for a while.

"Where does she get this?"

"From Emil, ma'am. He must have put it in a letter."

"And she sends it to you."

"To every one of us. I was late for a truck because of that line, and the truck didn't come back."

She took off her glasses and looked at the picture over the table.

"How many are alive?"

"Six."

She took my pen and signed Neil's paper in that stiff hand, and she pushed the pot back on the burner.

"Bring them," she said. "I'll make enough."

They came in on Wednesday, off three different trains.

That kitchen was built for a small family, and Arvid had to duck at the door and eat sideways.

She set a plate in front of each man and looked at him for as long as it took.

Clovis took off his cap and, for the only time in his life, had nothing to say.

Pietro kissed her hand, which nobody in Cambria City had ever done, and she let him, and she looked at his fingernails.

"You are the big one," she told Arvid. "Your spelling is a sin."

He went red to the ears, and I never saw anybody hit him harder.

When I brought my plate to the sink she said, low, "You are the one I worry about," and I'll admit it went through me like hot soup.

At eight there was a knock at the back door, and old Mrs. Wrona came in for her Wednesday soup, about the size of a coat rack.

"Somebody has to walk her home," Mrs. Sobczak said, to nobody.

All six of us stood up.

It was two hundred and some steps, and she took them one at a time on Arvid's arm, and she told me in Polish that Emil had been better at it.

We were gone an hour, and when we got back Mrs. Sobczak looked at the clock and nodded.

Pietro waited for the coffee, and his hands weren't doing anything, which I had never seen.

"I told her," he said. "In August. What you fellows were saying, the train, the last car, all of it. So she could laugh."

Arvid stood up.

"Sit," Mrs. Sobczak said. "You are in front of the stove."

He sat.

"She wrote back," Pietro said. "She said of course she'd be there, in her good hat. You'll see."

"She's had two months," Neil said, working it out on the oilcloth with a fork. "She's in California. Mrs. Sobczak gets paid off the Crown Point paper, and that platform's going to be empty."

"Then what do we go to Chicago for?" Clovis said.

Dewey looked out the window at the dark for a while.

"We told our wives we were coming," he said. "Be rude not to."

She wouldn't come to the station in the morning, because she had seen Emil off at that station.

"I'll be on the step," she said.

The seven o'clock pulled out along the river with all six of us crowded in the back door of the last car, and there she was behind the row houses in her black dress, with a dish towel.

Everybody hollered and waved, and after a minute they went in to find seats.

I stayed, and you know about my eyes.

I watched that dish towel past the steeple of St. Casimir's and past the mill stacks, until it was a speck going up and over.

I know the place where a person figures you can't see her anymore, and I watched for it.

The line bends with the river a long way out, and that was the end of what I could see.

She hadn't stopped.

We came into Union Station at twenty to four, right on time, which Clovis said was a bad sign.

A train comes in head first, so the last car stops way down at the far end of the platform, out where the canopy quits and the sun comes in.

I knew the spot.

I hung out the door and looked up the whole length of that platform, every soldier on the train pouring toward the gates and every wife in Chicago coming the other way.

I went through those hats the way I'd go through a street.

Far up by the gate, coming against the crowd, there was a small dark green one with a feather.

"She's here," I said.

"The hell she is," Clovis said.

"Good hat. Ted's behind her."

Pietro started fixing his hair.

There was no reason on God's earth for her to be there, and she came on down the platform in no hurry, with Pietro's pin on her collar, and about a hundred feet off she stopped and put up her arm.

She waved with her whole arm, up and over, the way she had two years before, and she was smiling.

I got down first, which I had said I would, and my leg took it badly.

I stood on the platform in my uniform and put up my right arm.

Clovis came down behind me, and Arvid, ducking, and Dewey, and Neil, and Pietro last, with carnations he had carried from Johnstown.

Six men in a row, and six arms going up.

The crowd was all going the other way by then, and it drained off around her like water out of a tub, until there was nothing between us but concrete and sun.

She looked down the row from one end to the other, the way you read a line of lettering.

She did not stop waving.

Ted had two fingers on their way up to his brim, and they quit halfway.

I watched him count, and for a timekeeper it took about a second.

He looked at her, and she didn't look at him, and he turned around and started for the gate, not hurrying, with his keys in his hand.

A man in a gray hat had been reading the Tribune on a baggage truck all this time, and he folded it and got down.

He was from the FBI, and he came up on Ted's left side, the bad side, and said something in an ordinary voice.

Ted stopped and turned his head.

"Praise God!" Clovis hollered, clear down the length of Union Station. "The man can hear!"

That was the end of Clovis's arm, because he needed it to hold his hip.

Neil's came down to see to his glasses.

Arvid's came down all at once, like a crane boom.

Dewey let his down slowly and touched his cap.

I looked up at mine, and this time I knew it was there, and I brought it down myself.

That left Pietro, calling "Genevieve!" the way you call somebody who's about to turn around, with the flowers in his other hand.

She looked at him then, just him, and she gave him a little nod, and his arm came down an inch at a time.

So she was the only one left, one gray glove going up and over in the empty air at the end of that platform.

Clovis says it was ten seconds, and I'd have said a year.

Then the arm came down, the way a man sets down his lunch pail at the end of a shift.

She reached up and fixed her hat, and she walked the last hundred feet with nobody behind her.

"Hello, Chet," she said. "You look thin."