The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
He had slipped out before the benediction.
The minute the family was released I went looking for him in the vestibule. I only had a feeling in my chest, the one you get when you set something down in the kitchen and cannot remember where.
The guest book sat open on its brass stand with a pen on a little chain. A teenage boy in a borrowed tie hovered beside it. That was Justin Heller, who was ushering for the first time and looked as if he had been handed a live bird.
“Mrs. Aldrich,” he said. “I’m real sorry about Mr. Aldrich.”
“Thank you, honey. Did you see a tall man in a gray suit? White hair?”
“The one who left?” He pointed with his whole hand. “Yes, ma’am. Gertrude Fisher asked him how he knew Mr. Aldrich, and he said, ‘I’ve got a long drive,’ and he went out. He didn’t even take a program.”
“Did he say from where?”
“No, ma’am. But I saw his pickup. A maroon Ford, old, toolbox in the bed. Missouri plates.”
Missouri. I knew exactly two people in Missouri, my cousin Alberta and the man who sold us our camper in 1994.
I turned to the book. Page after page of names, three hundred people who loved my husband enough to come out in a flood. And at the bottom of the last page, in the middle of the line, one word.
Private.
Not a name. Not a town. The address column was empty. The word was in block capitals, every letter separate, drawn slowly the way a child draws them, and he had pressed so hard the pen had gone through the page and left a ridge on the next. When I ran my thumb across the back I could feel the whole word.
Someone who wanted to stay unknown would have skipped the book. Someone who wanted to be found would have written his name. This man had put one word on that page as carefully as he could.
He had wanted to leave something. He had just not wanted to leave himself.
For two weeks I let it sit. There were thank-you cards to address, and Ardith and Lee both home from their cities and both trying too hard.
In April I started asking.
Pastor Dave had never seen the man. Gertrude Fisher said his hands had been shaking when she spoke to him, and that she was sorry she had pushed. Mr. Odom at the funeral home went through the memorial register and the flower cards. No card from Missouri. No donation from a Private.
I asked Melvin over coffee in Ravenna. “Chester didn’t talk about the Army,” he said. “He told me once it was mostly typing. He was the company clerk. That was the whole war for him.”
I will tell you why I did not simply pick up a phone. There was nobody to call. The man had no name, no number, no town, only a state the size of a lot of states and the cleanest handwriting you ever saw. A friend from church who works the county dispatch desk told me gently that a man who leaves on purpose cannot be found unless he lets himself be.
There was another reason I kept on, one I was a little ashamed of. I had to know whether he was owed something.