The Cap At The Counter

It took about four minutes. Then Eli wiped his face on his apron, and Walt patted his back twice and took his hand away, and he said, “There now. Flip me some eggs, I am starving,” and he walked back around and sat down on his stool.

And Eli flipped him some eggs. His hands were still shaking but he flipped them, and he slid the plate across, and Walt looked up and said, “Good eggs this morning, son,” and the morning went on.

That was the bottom of it, that morning in July. That was as close as we came. After that it started, slow, to get better.

Because word gets around a town like Weston. Not gossip, I do not mean that. I mean the good kind of knowing, the kind that moves quiet from one person to the next until a whole town has decided something without ever holding a meeting.

The town decided to hold that boy up.

I do not know exactly how it started, but by August the Hilltop at six in the morning was not just me and Walt and Eli anymore.

Pastor Lindgren from the Lutheran church started coming for coffee at six, which he had never done, being a man who likes his bed. He did not preach at Eli. He just drank coffee and talked crops and let the boy see a collar in the room.

Then Marvin Teale, who farms out east and lost a brother in Vietnam, started coming at six. Then the Hoffmans. Then a couple of the younger fellows who had done their own time in the service and never talked about it.

By September there was a whole little crowd of them at that counter at six in the morning, old veterans and young ones and a Lutheran pastor and a Methodist waitress, and in the middle of it a boy at a grill who had walked in six months earlier too thin to last a week.

Nobody ever called it anything. There was no sign, no sign up sheet, no name. It was just the six o’clock crowd. But I knew what it was. It was a parade.

It was the parade Danny Kessler never got. It was slower than a parade and quieter than a parade and it did not have a band. It had eggs and coffee and a dozen ordinary people deciding to be in a room at an ungodly hour so one young man would not have to come home alone.

And Walt sat right in the middle of it, in his VFW cap, at the end of the counter by the window, and I watched something in his face that I had not seen in all my thirty eight years of knowing him.

I watched the man set something down.