Chapter 3

I slept on that back porch the next four nights, on the cot we used to drag out in the heat, and I figured nobody in New Antrim knew a thing except the three of us.

On Monday, July 2, I went downtown to sign up for the Fifty-Two Twenty Club.

That's what the boys called it, twenty dollars a week for fifty-two weeks under the GI Bill, and you got it by standing in the post office lobby and telling a man at a card table that nobody would hire you.

I had worked at the garage on Main Street before the war, but it had been shut since '43 for want of tires, so the law that says your old boss has to take you back had nobody to say it to.

I was third from the card table when I saw my wife at the money-order window.

She counted out a ten-dollar bill and some change.

She addressed an envelope at the counter with the post office pen, folded her receipt very small and put the envelope through the slot herself.

"First of the month, regular as the light bill," the clerk told me afterward, when I bought a stamp I didn't need.

I didn't ask who it went to. A man doesn't ask a clerk that about his wife.

I asked her that night, across the kitchen.

"We're behind on a thirty-one-dollar note, and you're mailing somebody ten dollars a month."

She stopped with the dish towel in her hand.

"It's a debt."

"To who?"

"Nobody you've met."

I figured I had met him fine.

I had handed him his shirt.

I was so sure the money went to Merle Ketcham that I never asked again, and I read a lot of gauges wrong that summer.

Tuesday morning the draft board sat upstairs over the post office, three old men and a fan, the druggist, a farmer and a retired Methodist minister.

I sat on the bench along the wall in my uniform because my sister asked me to, with Thelma holding on to my arm and Alvin beside her working his cap around in his hands.

Merle came in ten minutes late, in a seersucker suit and a clean collar, and he called all three of those old men by their first names.

"I've given fifty-four men to the service and been glad to. But Alvin Yoakum's the only man on my second shift who can hold two-thousandths on that big Warner and Swasey. You take him, you get one more rifleman, and I ship that many fewer rods to keep our boys in the air."

He turned in his chair, found me on the bench and smiled.

"Ask the soldier there what a good rod's worth."

All three of them looked at me.

"That right, Clyde?" the druggist said.

I had a cracked one in my cellar, behind the coal bin.

I could feel Thelma's fingers through my sleeve.

"Yes, sir," I said. "A good one's worth a lot."

They gave Alvin six more months in Class II-B, and it took about four minutes, and I had helped.

Out in the hall Thelma got up on her toes and kissed Merle Ketcham on the cheek, crying.

"God bless you, Merle."

He patted her shoulder and looked at me over her hat.

"You've got plenty to be thankful for, Thelma. Your brother's home."

Twenty dollars a week wouldn't carry that note and feed a house, and you can't find out who owns a number from outside the plant gate.

So on Monday the 9th I went to the gate in a gray work shirt and asked for a job.

The owners lived in Cleveland and left the running of the place to Merle, and he came down the iron stairs from the glass office himself, so the whole floor could watch.

"A flight engineer," he said, loud enough to carry over the lathes. "I can use a man who knows engines."

He walked me the whole length of that floor, past the turret lathes and past my father's bench, to the rack by the men's room, and he put a push broom in my hands.

"Here's your ship, soldier. Sixty cents an hour. Try and keep her clean."

Nobody laughed, and that was worse.

After that it was every day.

"Soldier!" he'd holler from the top of the iron stairs, and point his pencil at a spot I had already swept.

He would drop a cigarette in front of my broom and ask after my dad's cough.

I said yes, sir. I said it every time, before I could stop it, and I never told anybody that until now.

My father's bench was forty feet from those stairs.

He sat there in his steel spectacles and shop apron, four years short of Social Security, and I swept around his feet six times a day, and he never looked up.

I took that to be about the broom.

The inspection bench ran along the north windows, thirty women in bandannas with their tanks of black oil and their little steel stamps, each with her number on a brass tag nailed to the bench.

I went down the row with my broom, reading tags: 3, 4, 7, 11, 12.

There was no 9.

At the far end, in the best light on the whole floor, sat an empty stool, and four small nail holes where a tag had been pried off.

On my second Monday I took my sandwich to the lunchroom and sat down at the bench women's table, which a sweeper doesn't do.

"Who had that end seat?" I said. "Number Nine, wasn't it?"

A dozen women had been talking.

Now they were looking at their sandwiches.

A girl named Bonnie opened her mouth, and the woman beside her put a hand on her knee.

By Tuesday Merle knew about it.

"Hear you're taking an interest in the bench, soldier," he said, and he looked pleased, and I couldn't see why.

I caught Wilma Gantz alone at the time clock that Wednesday.

She was fifty-eight, she ran that bench, and she had been at the plant since the last war.

"Mrs. Gantz, I've asked everybody in this building but you. Who was Nine?"

She hunted for her card in the rack, punched out and put it back.

"Ask at home, honey."