Chapter 8

I didn't wait for her after.

I walked out past all of them and went back to my cot, and for four weeks we said nothing about it.

The clerks found the clean die that afternoon in Merle's top right drawer, under a box of pencils.

He had never thought to move it, because as far as he knew her stamp was lost, and a lost stamp gets replaced.

That finished him at the plant, and Cincinnati pulled out within the week.

It didn't finish anything else.

The Major's report went down to the U.S. Attorney in Cincinnati, and for all I know it's there yet.

Nobody went to prison, not him and not her, any more than at Lockland.

The Major stopped at my back porch before he left town and handed me the rod in its rag.

"There's no paper on it, so I can't use it, and the Army doesn't want it."

He stood there turning his cap in his hand.

"I expect it belongs to somebody," he said.

I had owed that letter since April, and I had started it eleven times.

I sent a postcard instead, and on Sunday, September 16, I took two buses to Sugar Run with the rod in my duffel and walked the last mile and a half.

Lucille Applegate was fifty-six, a straight-backed widow with a gray braid pinned up and big worn hands, and she had a gold star in her front window.

She sat me down at a kitchen table with oilcloth on it and gave me buttermilk.

"You're the engineer," she said. "He wrote that you could hear a fouled plug from the next county."

I unrolled the rag on the oilcloth.

All she had ever had was a telegram and a form letter, so I told her.

I told her the left engine quit at a hundred feet, that he had maybe ten seconds, that he spent them holding her wings level, and that this was why I was sitting in her kitchen.

She asked if he said anything.

"He said, 'I've got her,' ma'am. And he nearly did."

She nodded, the way you do when somebody finally tells you the price of a thing.

"There's one more," I said. "That morning I went over that engine with a flashlight, and I put my hand on it and told him she was good."

She picked up the rod and looked into the crack.

"Could you have seen this?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then why tell me?"

"Because I told him."

She looked at me for a good while, and she didn't say it was all right.

I have always been grateful to her for that.

She got up and brought a shoebox from the pantry.

"Then you can tell me about these. I thought they were from you, till your postcard came and the hand was wrong."

There were five envelopes in it, postmarked New Antrim, one for each month since May, and in each one a ten-dollar money order with no name on it, not cashed.

Mrs. L. Applegate, R.F.D. 2, Sugar Run, Ohio.

I had carried that handwriting through sixty-three missions.

I had sent her that address myself.

Nobody you've met, she had told me, and I had been so sure.

"You know who that is," Mrs. Applegate said.

"Yes, ma'am. That's my wife. Her number's on that rod."

She took that in without any change I could see.

"Ten dollars is a lot of money out here," she said. "If I cashed them, we'd be square."

She laid the rod in the shoebox on top of the envelopes and set the lid on as far as it would go.

She wrote me every Christmas until she died in 1958, and one year she mentioned she had started a second box.

The last shift went out on Friday, September 28, and by Saturday morning there was a chain on the gate.

That was four hundred and twelve people, and I had done that as sure as anybody had.

Merle came out that morning with a carton under his arm and the plaque sticking out of it, and he put it in his Buick himself.

Nadine wasn't in the car.

He looked at me across the hood.

I had spent three months working up what I'd say to him, and some of it was good.

I didn't say it, and he didn't call me soldier.

I heard later that he sold Buicks in Fort Wayne and did well at it.

On Monday, October 1, I put on my khakis, the only good clothes I owned, and packed the duffel.

My mother's quilt was out on the line, and I left it there.

Imogene was at the kitchen table in her hat, with cardboard still over the window.

"I don't forgive you and I won't act like it," I said.

"I know."

"Those nine weeks."

She looked at the cardboard.

"I figured it was what I had coming."

There was an envelope in front of her, addressed in that hand, because it was the first of the month.

I had never told her where I went on the 16th.

"She doesn't cash them," I said.

I've never been sure whether I meant that as a kindness.

She looked at the envelope a long time, and she picked it up, turned it to what light there was and ran her thumb along the flap.

"No," she said. "I wouldn't either."

She went out the front door ahead of me with it, in front of God and everybody, and turned toward the post office.

I turned the other way.

The road to the depot goes past the plant.

My father was on the bench across from the gate, with his lunch pail on his knees.

It was the first Monday in thirty years he'd had no place to take it.

I sat down by him, and he opened the pail and handed me half a sandwich, and we ate it looking at the chain.

At the depot the agent looked at the cloth eagle on my pocket, the one the boys called the Ruptured Duck, and then up at the clock.

"You're early, soldier," he said.

He didn't mean a thing by it.

I sat down on the bench with the duffel between my feet, and it weighed about what clothes weigh.

The 2:40 from Columbus came in on time, the same train that let me off in June.

I had watched that train pull out all my life and never once wondered where it went after New Antrim.

It went north, past the water tower and the chain on the gate, and I kept my face to the window until there was nothing out there I knew.