Chapter 7

"My wife," I said.

It took two words, and he wrote them down.

I'd like to say I said them for four men in a vineyard, and about half of it was.

The other half was for a quilt and a third stair.

I told him the rest, about my father's clean 9 and the crate on the dock.

"Without her original and her oath, that's a scratch on a rod," the Major said. "Will she do it?"

"I don't know, sir."

He had a seal on that crate by morning.

He also had two clerks, and the clerks ate at the diner, and by Saturday noon the whole town knew Clyde Hadley had gone to the government about the plant.

Merle kept me on.

"A man's got a right," he said from the top of the stairs, loud, and somebody dumped a bucket of steel chips on the floor I had just swept.

Saturday night about eleven a brick came through the kitchen window and landed in the sink.

I came in off the porch, and Imogene was already there in her robe with her hair down her back, sweeping up glass.

"You told him," she said.

"I told him whose number it was."

She kept sweeping.

"There's something else," I said. "My dad cut a second 9 in May, after you said you lost yours. It's clean, no nick, and it's on every rod they've shipped since you left."

She stood there holding the dustpan.

"I quit," she said.

"I know you did."

"I quit so there wouldn't be any more."

I had been home nine weeks, and I had never once seen my wife sit down at that table without a reason.

She set the dustpan on the floor and sat.

Thelma came up the walk after church on Sunday, eight months along, and she wouldn't come in.

She stood on the porch holding her pocketbook in front of her with both hands.

"Cincinnati's wired him, Clyde. Alvin says they're talking about pulling out."

Behind me Imogene was tacking cardboard over the window.

"You could have just left her. Men do. You didn't have to burn down the whole town to do it."

I didn't tell her she was wrong, because I wasn't sure she was.

On Labor Day Merle stood on the steps of the bank and said nothing was going to be done behind a closed door at his plant.

Let the Major hold his hearing Tuesday at the Legion Hall, with the whole town there to listen.

They cheered him for that too.

It was smart, because nobody in New Antrim was going to stand up in front of her neighbors and cost them their jobs.

That night I found Imogene at the kitchen table with her die on a clean dish towel.

"All he has is a rod with no paper," I said. "You could tell him you don't recall."

"I know what he has."

She moved the die a quarter inch with one finger.

"Everybody in that hall is going to be hoping I lie. I'd like one person there who isn't. Sit in the back, where I can see you."

"It's the last thing I'll do for you."

"I know."

Tuesday morning the crepe paper was gone and there were more people than chairs.

The Major sat at a table up front, with the rod on a towel and the crate on the floor beside him.

Merle had the front row, in his seersucker, with Nadine on one side of him and a lawyer from Columbus on the other.

I took the last chair in the back row in my gray work shirt, and the chairs on both sides of me stayed empty.

"Inspector Number Nine," the Major said.

Nobody had to ask who that was.

She came down the aisle in her green dress and her hat, and you could hear her heels the whole way.

"You may sit, Mrs. Hadley."

"I'll stand."

He held up the rod. "Do you know this stamp?"

She didn't look at it.

"That's my number. I passed it. I passed that one and about two thousand more. I could see the cracks, that was my job. Mr. Ketcham told me they were going to test stands and told me to stamp them, and I stamped them."

"Liar," a woman said somewhere in the middle of the hall, not loud.

Merle had turned a little in his chair to look up at her, and he was smiling.

It was the same smile, the one from my pillow, warm and in no hurry.

His lawyer got up and asked how long she had been a friend of Mr. Ketcham's.

"Eighteen months. You can say what kind. They all know what kind."

Nadine Ketcham looked at her gloves.

"And it ended when your husband came home. So here's a woman with a grudge, Major, and here's her number. Hers, on that rod and on every rod in that crate."

"Yes, sir," Imogene said. "Every rod in that crate."

She opened her pocketbook, walked the three steps to the table and set her die on the towel.

"That's my stamp. I dropped it on the concrete in '43, and it has a nick in the tail, and so does that rod from Italy. I left the bench on April 30, and his own payroll says so. I'd like you to put your glass on that crate."

The clerk broke the seal and pried up a board.

The Major held a rod to the window with his jeweler's glass, and it took him a long time.

"Made in August," he said. "No nick. Whoever cut this die cut it clean."

Three rows ahead of me my father took off his spectacles.

"I'll want the key to your desk, Mr. Ketcham."

I had waited sixty-eight days to see it.

It didn't drop. It went out a little at a time, like a furnace after you close the damper, and what was left was a man of thirty-three with nothing on his face.

The Major wasn't done with her.

"Test stands, Mrs. Hadley. When did you quit believing that?"

She didn't answer right off.

She looked down the whole length of that hall, past all of them, to the back row.

"April twenty-sixth. A letter from my husband."

She said them without looking at anything.

"Lieutenant Elwood Applegate. Lieutenant Delbert Sayre. Lieutenant Sol Mintz. Sergeant Floyd Tackett. I went up to that office and asked him where my rods went. He said, 'Where do you think?'"

I had written her those names myself, by air mail from the hospital, once the telegrams had gone to their people, and asked her to write to the pilot's mother.

I did the sum in that back row, because that's what I do.

She had known nine weeks when I came up those stairs.