The Cap At The Counter

“And then,” he said, “it was spring, and there was planting to do, and everybody went back to their own lives. Which is right. Which is how it should be. The town cannot stand on Main Street forever.”

“But a boy comes home from a war on the inside of his own head,” Walt said, “and nobody can see that. There is no parade for the inside of a man’s head. The parade is for the part that came back. The rest of him is still over there, and he has to walk it home alone, a day at a time.”

I did not say anything. I have learned when to pour and when to hold still. I held still.

“I did not know how to help him,” Walt said. “I was his father and I had been to a war myself and I did not have the first idea what to do with him. So I did what my own father did. I went to work.”

Walt worked the early shift at the hog plant out on the highway in those years. He was gone before dawn and back after dark.

“I told myself I was providing,” he said. “A man provides. That is the job. I told myself Danny just needed time, and I gave him all the time in the world by being gone for most of it.”

“Marie saw it,” he said. “Mothers see it. She would say, Walt, that boy is not right, that boy needs you to sit with him. And I would say, I cannot sit, Marie, I have the early shift, and I would go.”

He turned the cup another quarter turn.

“Danny took to sitting up nights,” Walt said. “He could not sleep, so he would sit at the kitchen table in the dark, and I would pass him on my way out at four thirty in the morning, and he would be sitting there, and I would say, you ought to get some sleep, son, and I would go to work.”

“I passed my own boy in the dark every morning for two years,” Walt said, “and I said get some sleep, son, and I went to work. That is the whole of what I gave him. Get some sleep, son.”

I want to tell you the kitchen got very quiet. I could hear the coffee maker tick and the cooler hum and Eli breaking down boxes out back, and I could not look away from Walt’s pale gray eyes.

“We lost him in the fall of ninety three,” Walt said. “He took the truck out early one morning before I was up, out to the river road, and he went off it into the water at the low bridge, and that was all.”

He said it plain. He did not reach for any soft words and he did not ask me for any.