Chapter 5

Neither of us touched that crust for a while.

The icebox dripped into its pan, and down the block a dog was barking at nothing.

"That's yours," I said.

"That's mine."

It was the same voice she would use to tell you the time.

"I told Merle I lost it when I left the bench. I couldn't tell you why I kept it."

She picked up the pin, because she had three pies to make, and one pass took the 9 out of the dough.

"I was good, Clyde. You ought to know that first."

She gave the crust a quarter turn.

"You put a rod in the rig, run the current through it and wet it with the black oil, and the iron gathers on a crack finer than a hair. My first six months I turned back more rods than any girl on that bench. If you weren't sure, you asked Nine."

That was the woman who wrote me that letter.

"October of '43, the man who bought our rods told Merle our rejects were too high. Thirty days, he said, or they'd pull the contract."

She laid the crust in the tin and started pressing it down with her thumbs.

"Merle called me up to the glass office and shut the door. He was so nice about it. He had a lot of forty I'd turned back, and he said those were going to test stands, engines that run on the ground at the factory and never leave it. All they needed was a stamp to get through receiving."

"And you believed that."

"I made him swear to it. He has a nice way of swearing."

Her thumbs went on working around the tin.

"He said he'd understand if I couldn't see my way. He said there were plenty of girls. He said your dad was getting on, and your allotment was running late, and the bank had asked about the note."

"So you stamped them."

"I stamped the forty, and then the next lot."

She took up the paring knife and trimmed the edge.

"He took to driving me home after second shift. He was the only one on God's earth who knew what I'd done, and I couldn't stand being alone with it. At Thanksgiving he told me he'd squared the note. At Christmas he came by to tell me what a good job I was doing."

She looked up at me then.

"That's how he got his hands on me. The first time, that was him. By spring I didn't need a reason, and you ought to know that part too."

I wanted her to cry, so that I could tell her to quit it.

She went back to the crust.

"Did you know?" I said. "What those rods were for?"

Her thumbs stopped.

"He said test stands."

"That's not what I asked you."

She looked at the table.

She looked at it so long that I took it for my answer, because it was the one answer I could stand.

A good inspector would have turned that back. I let it pass.

I rolled the rod up in its rag.

"That's four men, Imogene."

"I know how many it is," she said.

The pies went to the Methodists on Sunday, and I heard they were the best on the table.

I had two nights on that cot to add it up, and it wouldn't come out, so on Monday I quit adding and did the dumbest thing I did all year.

I had held my cards for twenty-five days.

At ten o'clock, with the floor roaring, I carried my broom up the iron stairs, shut the glass door behind me and laid that rod on Merle Ketcham's blotter.

I wanted to see that smile go.

"Left engine of a B-25," I said. "April 11, in Italy. It killed four men I flew with."

He put down his pencil and picked up the rod.

He knew steel, I'll give him that. He turned it once, looked into the crack, and his thumb found the stamp.

The smile stayed right where it was, and if anything it got kinder.

"That's a shame," he said. "So that's what you've been hunting. You ask at home yet?"

He set the rod back on the blotter, square to the edge.

"October of '43 I had thirty days to save four hundred and twelve jobs. Your dad's. Alvin's. Every girl down there whose husband's allotment doesn't buy the coal."

He nodded out through the glass at the floor.

"You remember what this town was in '33. I kept them working, soldier, and that's not a plaque, that's their rent."

He picked his pencil back up and looked at the point.

"How many missions did you fly on my rods?"

"Sixty-three."

"Sixty-three, and here you stand. You want to count the ones that held?"

I didn't have an answer for that, and I've looked for one since.

"You read about Lockland? Biggest engine plant in Ohio. A Senator from Missouri came through in '43 and hollered for a month, and then the Army looked it over and found it wasn't so bad. Who went to jail? I read the papers, and I didn't see one. And that Senator's got bigger things to read now."

He leaned back in his chair, comfortable.

"Here's what I can do. Wilma's getting on. Chief inspector comes open this fall. Your own desk, seventy a week, and I walk over to Farmers and Merchants and have that note burned in a coffee can. You'd be the man who sees it never happens again, which is what you say you want. All I'd need is that."

He looked at the rod.

I reached down and picked it up, and he let me, and that scared me worse than anything he had said.

"And if I carry it to somebody?"

"Carry it anywhere you like. Put it under your pillow. Only read them the stamp first. My name's not on a rod in this plant. I never stamped a thing in my life. That's a girl with a perfect record and her number on every one."

It may not have been just those words, but I'm sure of the next ones, because he said them so kindly.

"Alderson, West Virginia, soldier. That's where the government sends its women."