Chapter 8

I had been working on what to say to her for two years, in a lot of tents, and it had been through a lot of drafts.

"You knew," I said.

"Pietro told me in August." She was looking me over, my nose and my leg, the way you'd check a delivery. "Then six wires came to four mailboxes, naming one train. I can read, Chet."

"You kept waving."

"You could still see me," she said.

I told you she was a woman of her word.

Up the platform the man from the FBI had Ted by the elbow, and he looked at her and let her have a minute, which I've always thought was decent of him.

"Ted saw one wire, yours," she said. "I told him you'd have your mustering-out pay on you."

She looked back at him one time.

"The day the telegram came about Emil, Ted sat down at my kitchen table with his pencil, and he worked it out on an envelope. He said, you know, Gen, the dead ones pay better."

She turned around and smoothed her glove.

"So I drove in with him. I thought you fellows ought to meet."

I've never known what to do with that, so I'm just telling you.

"Why'd you come?" I said.

"To see." She went down the row one man at a time. "I knew you all better than your mothers did, and I'd never seen you stand next to each other. That's a bad hip, Clovis, you told me it was nothing. Dewey."

"Miss Genevieve," Dewey said.

I said the only thing left of all those drafts. "You stood out in the rain in your coat."

"I did. You said wet wool, and I didn't know what you meant, and I don't write what I don't know."

"For fifty dollars."

"For fifty dollars," she said, and she didn't so much as blink. "I read every word you ever sent me, Chet, all seven of you, and your dull ones were the hardest. I kept a card on every man, and I read the card before I picked up the pen. Pulaski's hip. Clovis's mother's chili. Arvid's brother who went through the ice. A wife who forgets the dog's name gets caught. That's all that was."

She looked down at my hands.

"You paint a sign for a butcher you can't stand. Do you letter it crooked?"

I didn't answer.

"You told me yourself, the second night I knew you. You cross the street and you check your letters, whoever's paying. It's the only way to do the job."

There wasn't a thing in that I could call a lie.

"That line was his mother's," I said.

"I know whose it was. It was in Emil's second letter. A line that good, you don't use it once." She looked at me a little longer. "Who's going to write to her?"

"We are."

She looked down the row at the six dullest correspondents in the United States Army, and she laughed, the only real laugh I ever heard out of her.

"God help her," she said. "Ask her things. She doesn't want to hear you're fine."

I had one thing left, and I had carried it since February of '44.

"There was a truck. Nine men. I was tying my boot."

"I know," she said. "That week you wrote me the weather was fine, and the pen went through the paper in two places."

"Your letters kept me alive."

"I know they did. I can count. Six out of seven, in that war. You show me a general with numbers like that."

She reached up and fixed my collar one more time.

"You're welcome," she said.

I've had a long time to come up with an answer to that.

The man in the gray hat walked her up the platform, and she never looked back, and I would know.

I signed first, in the Federal Building that same night, and I handed over the White Owl box, a hundred and four letters tied with sash cord.

That was the worst minute of my war, and I'm counting the ones you'd expect.

The Tribune ran it, and the Kuryer Polski ran it bigger, and a judge wrote that I had never been married at all, and my mother's friends brought soup.

In the spring a federal judge gave Genevieve five years at Alderson, West Virginia, and Ted seven, and she never told anybody she was sorry, and nobody who knew her asked.

Pietro still writes to her, and he says she answers, and when he says so Arvid gets up and goes to look at the trains.

It took the Veterans Administration fourteen months to decide that Stella Sobczak was her son's mother.

The check came by the month after that, a little late, for the rest of her life, and she bought a gas range and went on taking in wash.

The first thing we ever did together, the week after the platform, was walk into Gorski's Hardware with the slip.

Three payments at a dollar and a half came to four-fifty, and there were six of us, so it came to seventy-five cents a fool.

Mr. Gorski wheeled it out of the back with Emil's tag still on it.

Mrs. Sobczak got on that bicycle exactly once, on a dare from Clovis, in her black dress, and she was late for the ten o'clock Mass at St. Casimir's for the first time in forty years.

Neil drew up a schedule for the letters, the way he'd draw up a lease, and Irene typed it: six men, a week apiece, no exceptions.

We asked her things. Who taught him to whistle. What he was like with a fever.

Dewey's were the best, and they took him all week, and she answered every one, so he never did run out of mail.

Every October eighteenth we meet on that platform, out where the canopy quits, at twenty to four, and the one rule is that nobody's allowed to be on time.

The stationmaster asked us one year if we were a union, and Clovis said not yet.

That was the year Clovis took out his latest from Johnstown and read us the end of it.

"You are the one I worry about."

"The hell," Neil said. "That's mine."

Arvid reached inside his coat.

We laid them out on a baggage truck, six letters, the same pencil, the same stiff hand, the same sentence.

Clovis laughed until he had to sit down on the truck, and every one of us put his letter back in his pocket, and I still think she meant me.

The first week, back in 1945, was mine.

I sat down at my mother's table in Milwaukee, with Pulaski lying on my foot and a clean sheet of paper, and it took me until Sunday to get past the first line.

"Dear Mrs. Sobczak," I wrote. "It's my week, and I'm sorry this is late."

She wrote back by return mail, in pencil, one word.

"Good."