Chapter 6

I carried Alderson back down the iron stairs with me and picked up my broom.

That was my whole answer to him, and it lasted three weeks.

The rod went back behind the coal bin.

New rods went out the back dock every Tuesday and Friday, for boys who were headed to Japan, and I swept around the crates.

I could tell you I did that for Alvin, or for my father.

I did it because I hated my wife and I couldn't send her to West Virginia, and I didn't know what to do with both of those at once.

On Tuesday, August 14, a little after seven in the evening, the plant whistle started up and nobody let go of it.

By the time I got to Main Street the whole town was out with dishpans and church bells, and somebody had a bonfire going in front of the bank.

Merle Ketcham climbed up on a truck bed under the streetlight with his tie pulled down, and he held up one hand the way he did.

"Folks, the Army's going to cancel every rod we've got on order, maybe by morning. You're going to hear about layoffs all over this county."

He took a folded letter out of his shirt pocket.

"An outfit in Cincinnati means to sell a washing machine to every woman in America, and somebody's got to make the parts. I signed it Friday. Nobody at Antrim Tool and Die is going to miss a paycheck."

They took him down off that truck on their shoulders.

My brother-in-law had hold of one leg.

That was when I saw what had happened to me.

Up to that night I could tell myself there were boys still flying behind those rods.

Now there were only four men in a vineyard and four hundred and twelve paychecks, and you didn't need a flight engineer to add that.

I didn't see my father anywhere, so I walked out to the plant.

The gate stood open with the guard gone to town, and for the first time in my life I heard that floor quiet.

One lamp was on at the far end.

He was at his bench in his steel spectacles, wiping down his calipers with an oily rag, the way he did every night.

He looked up at me, the first time in five weeks.

"You knew," I said. "Who Nine was, and about him."

"Since that first Christmas."

"You could have written me."

"And said what? You were flying."

He coughed and looked at the rag.

"And I'm four years short, Clyde. I know what I am."

I told him what was behind my coal bin and whose engine it came out of, with the dishpans still going a long way off.

He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his apron, and it took him a while.

"War's over, son. There's not going to be another rod. Four hundred people just got told they can eat. Who does it help?"

I didn't have anything to say to that, so I turned around to go.

"He came to me in May," my father said.

He had the spectacles back on, and he was talking to the calipers.

"She'd told him she lost her stamp. He wanted another 9, because the buyer looked for it. Nobody had turned back a rod with a 9 on it in a year and a half. So I cut him a number."

He laid the calipers in their felt.

"I've looked at that 9 for two years. I know the nick in hers like I know your mother's handwriting. I could have cut the nick in, I've got the hands for it. I cut it clean."

"What good does that do?"

"None," he said. "That was all the nerve I had."

That Friday I stayed late and found a crate on the shipping dock, the last lot made before the telegram, with nowhere to go now.

I pried up a board and held a rod under my flashlight.

There was the diamond, and there was the 9, sharp and clean, on a rod made in August.

She had left that bench on April 30.

Major Virgil Treadway came up from Wright Field on Monday the 27th to settle the contract, with two clerks and a staff car, and he took the front room at the hotel.

On Wednesday I stopped at the top of the iron stairs.

"About that coffee can," I said. "You can keep it."

Merle looked at me a moment, and he looked almost sorry.

"I'd have liked you at that desk, soldier."

Thursday evening I put on my uniform and carried the rod to the hotel in its rag.

The Major was a heavy, rumpled man of forty-one, with his shoes off and a fan going on the dresser.

He listened to all of it, put on his reading glasses, took a jeweler's glass out of his shirt pocket and looked into that crack for a long time.

"That's old," he said. "Have you got any paper on this?"

"No, sir. The report says cause undetermined."

He laid it on a hotel towel.

"Mr. Ketcham had me to supper Tuesday. He told me about you, and he was very decent about it. A boy comes home to some trouble in his marriage and gets a notion about the plant. He asked me to go easy."

He rubbed his eyes under the glasses.

"So I've got a rod you could have picked up in any junkyard in Italy, from a man with a broom and a grudge. I was at Lockland in '43, Sergeant. Parts don't get up and swear. I need the inspector who held this thing, on her feet in front of me, saying who told her to pass it."

Nobody in that town had called me Sergeant since I came home.

If I said it, she went to West Virginia, and the plant went with her, and my father's bench.

If I kept my mouth shut, I could carry that rod home and nobody would ever ask me again.

He uncapped his pen.

"Who is Number Nine, Sergeant?"