The Truck Driver at the VFW Breakfast
He was seventy-seven years old with two bad hips. He had his cane in one hand and the edge of the table in the other, and he pushed himself up off that folding chair one inch at a time. Nobody helped him. Nobody would have dared.
He did not say anything. He just stood, at the front of the hall, under the flag, and looked at my husband.
Then the old man next to him stood up. Then the farmer across from him, in his seed cap. Then the Auxiliary ladies, all four of them, behind the counter, the one still holding her spatula.
Then it was the whole room. Chairs scraping all across that hall. Old men with canes. Young dads holding babies. Teenagers who did not know exactly what was going on but knew to stand up. The Pagels. Our cousins. Emma, crying. Ray’s boy.
Me.
Nobody clapped. I want to tell you that. Nobody clapped, nobody whistled. They just stood up and stayed standing, a whole VFW hall full of people in the middle of breakfast, looking at a county road foreman who had never wanted any of them to know.
Mark did not stand. He did not say one word. He sat there in the middle of all of it, with his hands on the table, and I watched his chin start to go.
Then he reached up with his right hand, the scarred one, and he put it on Ray’s shoulder, and he left it there.
Ray put his free hand over it. He was still holding the syrup with the other one.
The last person to stand up was Todd.
He stood slowly. He did not look at anybody. His face had gone a color I have only seen on people in the ER who have just been told something they did not want to hear.
We stayed like that for maybe half a minute. It felt much longer.
Then Lyle said, from the front of the hall, in that big old farmer’s voice, “All right. Sit down. Eat. The cakes are getting cold.” And everybody laughed a little and sat, the way people do when they need permission to breathe again.
Ray sat down. He finally poured the syrup. He passed it to his boy.
For the next hour, men kept coming to our table. One at a time. They did not say much. A hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Thank you.” “Welcome home.” An old Korea veteran, ninety-one years old, shook his hand and said, “I drove a deuce and a half, son. Nobody ever thinks about the drivers.”
Lyle came last. He leaned down by Mark’s ear and said something I could not hear. Mark nodded. Later, in the truck, I asked him what Lyle had said.
“He said, ‘Welcome home,'” Mark told me. “He said nobody ever said it to him when he came back. So he says it to everybody now.”
Todd left the table before the rest of us. I saw him get up and get his coat and go out the side door into the sleet without a word to anybody.
When we went out about an hour later, he was standing beside our truck in the parking lot with his hands jammed in his sport coat pockets and no hat. His hair was wet. He looked older than fifty-two.
Ray and his boy came out with us. Ray stopped a little way off, by his own truck, and let us go ahead.