The Stranger in the Next Chair
He was sitting in the second row. The same row. He stood when he saw us come around the corner from the elevators, and I will tell you what I saw, because I had been trying to picture it for two years and I had pictured it wrong.
He was young. Twenty-two, he told me later, though he looked nineteen, with a farm boy’s red neck and ears that stuck out a little under the short haircut. He was wearing a plain brown work jacket, and he was holding a ball cap in both hands in front of his belt buckle. He stood the way Harvey had said, heels together and shoulders back.
He did not step forward. He waited for us to come to him. I will not forget that either.
My father walked the last ten feet slowly, using the cane he is supposed to use and never does. He stopped about an arm’s length from the young man. They looked at each other.
“Sir,” Caleb said.
“Son,” Dad said.
I wanted to say something, to fill the quiet, but I had already learned that spring that the quiet does its own work.
“I told you I wasn’t scared,” Dad said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I lied.”
“I know, sir.” Caleb cleared his throat. “So did my granddad.”
Dad looked at him a long moment. Then he said, “Sit down, son,” and he sat in the chair on the end, and he put his cane on the floor, and Caleb sat in the next chair over, and that is where they were, in the same two seats, with Duane and me standing there like two people who had walked into the wrong church.
“Julie,” Dad said without looking up. “Go find your husband some coffee.”
“Dad.”
“Go on.”
I went. When I came back eleven minutes later with three cups of coffee, Duane behind me, I stopped at the corner of the hallway. The two of them were sitting side by side with their hands on the armrest between them, and Dad was talking. I could not hear him. But I saw my father reach over with the right hand, the one that had shaken two years ago, and put it on top of Caleb’s.
It was perfectly steady.
Caleb told me the rest while Dad was in with Dr. Haddad. We sat on the same two chairs. Duane took the end seat and kept his mouth shut, which is a thing that man does better than anyone I know.
His granddad was a man named Cecil Ballard.
“Fourth Infantry Division,” Caleb said. “Army. Pleiku, 1968 and 1969. He ran a radio.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He came home, worked at the elevator in Hallsville thirty-eight years, and I do not believe he said ten sentences about Vietnam in my whole life. But he was always the guy at the kitchen table at three in the morning. You know.”
“My folks split when I was six,” Caleb said. “My mom worked nights. I lived at Grandpa and Grandma Wanda’s place more than at ours. He taught me to drive on a county road when I was thirteen and to change a tire. He put me to work at a tire shop the summer I was sixteen so I wouldn’t turn into a no-account, and I’m still there.”