Chapter 4

I took that to mean Imogene had worked beside the woman and would know her name.

She had never put her own number in a letter, because the posters at the gate said not to, and it had never crossed my mind to wonder about it.

That didn't mean I was going to ask her.

By then we had got down to about ten words a day, most of them about the icebox, and I wasn't ready to owe her anything.

My letter came on Thursday, July 19, three weeks behind me.

She set it beside my plate at supper, in my own handwriting, addressed to her, not opened.

"That's yours," I said.

She slit it with the paring knife and read it standing up, every word, the way she read everything.

I knew what it said.

I had written it on my knee in a tent in June.

It said they might have me home by fall.

It said not to go to any trouble and not to meet any train, because I wanted to walk up those stairs and surprise her.

She folded it back along its own creases.

"You said not to go to any trouble," she said.

She made a small sound that had the shape of a laugh, and she put the letter behind the clock with the rest of them.

That Saturday the town gave its Welcome Home dinner at the Legion Hall.

There was crepe paper on the rafters and fried chicken from the Auxiliary, and thirty-one of us at the long table up front, in uniforms we were already getting too old for.

Eleven more weren't coming home, and their mothers had a table of their own, with gold stars pinned to their dresses.

Imogene came in on my arm in her good green dress with all that hair pinned up.

Every man in the hall looked at her, the way they always had, and I used to enjoy that.

The mayor, who was also the druggist, didn't spend long on us.

He got up with a walnut plaque and read the brass plate on it: To Merle Ketcham, for keeping New Antrim working.

The whole hall stood up.

I want to be fair about that.

He had kept them working.

Half the people in that room had gone through the thirties on beans, and now they had four hundred and twelve paychecks and a new icebox, and they knew who had hired them.

Merle came up front with his wife, Nadine, on his arm, a quiet woman of thirty-one who kept her eyes on her gloves, and he held up one hand until they sat.

"I didn't do a thing but stay home," he said, and they laughed and loved him for it.

"The men who did something are sitting right here. I've got one of them working for me. Best-swept floor in the state of Ohio."

They laughed at that too, kindly enough.

He looked down the long table and found me.

"Stand up, soldier, let them see those ribbons."

Four hundred faces turned my way, full of thanks.

I could have stayed in my chair.

I stood up.

He came around the table with his hand out, and I shook it, and it was warm and dry, and the man from the county paper took our picture.

At the third table my father was clapping with his big hands, looking down at them.

Imogene had folded her napkin into a square and was holding it flat under her palm.

We walked home without a word.

She had promised three pies to the Methodist supper on Sunday and had been saving sugar for them since May, so at midnight she was at the kitchen table in her apron, rolling out crust under the bulb.

I washed my hand at the porch pump, and it didn't help.

I sat on the cot a long time in my undershirt, and somewhere in that hour I used up whatever had been keeping me from asking.

I went down cellar, got the rod from behind the coal bin and came up with it.

I unrolled the rag and laid the rod on her floured board, right alongside the crust.

"You worked that bench for two years," I said. "Who was Nine?"

The rolling pin stopped.

She looked at the rod for a good while.

She wiped her hands down her apron, one and then the other, and she picked it up.

She didn't ask me what it was, and she didn't ask me where I got it.

She held it up to the bulb, the way she held up cups, and her thumb went straight to the crack and along it, the dark part first.

It moved over to the stamp without her looking, the way you find a light switch in your own house.

She laid the rod back on the board so gently that it made no sound.

She went to the flour canister, pushed up her sleeve and put her arm in past the wrist.

What she brought up was about the length of her finger, and she blew it clean.

I had seen a hundred of them, in every engine shop the Army ever sent me to.

She set its face on the crust, gave it one tap with the heel of her hand and lifted it away.

A little 9 in the white dough, with a nick in its tail.