The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
You think you have the whole account book after forty-two years. Then a stranger stands wet to the knees at the back of your husband’s funeral, and you realize there might have been a page you never saw. A debt. A wrong. If Chester had hurt someone, I wanted to make it right. If it was neither, I wanted to see the man’s face once in daylight and thank him for coming through that rain.
“Mom, you’re making yourself sick,” Ardith said on the phone in June. “Maybe it was somebody who read the obituary and knew Dad from the old days. People go to funerals for strangers.”
“He signed it Private, Ardith.”
“Because he didn’t want to be known.”
“Then why come?”
She had no answer for that. I did not either.
I got through the summer. I stood in Chester’s tomato bed twenty minutes, unable to decide whether to keep the stakes. The library called to ask if they could take Chester’s name off the Tuesday volunteer sheet. He had been a literacy tutor there twenty-two years, one hour every Tuesday evening, never missed for weather. I had always figured it was just something he liked. I told them to leave his name on it a while.
In September, Ardith and Lee came together for a weekend and said it was time to start on the basement. I did not argue. On Saturday morning, in the very back, behind the Christmas ornaments and Lee’s high school trophies, I found Chester’s Army footlocker.
I had never opened it in forty-two years, because it never occurred to me he had anything in it I needed to see. The key hung on his ring on the pegboard in the garage.
I sat on a paint bucket with the key in my palm for a long time. Then I turned it.
On top lay a folded set of olive green fatigues with a patch on the shoulder: a red numeral 1 on an olive green shield. The Big Red One. Under it, a canvas belt and a folder of discharge papers. Specialist Four Chester E. Aldrich, company clerk, Fort Riley, Kansas. Inducted February 1970. Released February 1972.
Typing, Melvin had said.
Under the folder was a butter cookie tin. Inside the tin were a photograph and one envelope.
The photograph was black and white, curling at the corners. Five young men stood in front of a long wooden barracks in their fatigues, squinting into the sun, arms slung over each other’s shoulders. One tall one at the end was not smiling. He had the thin face and dark eyes of the man in the gray suit, fifty years younger and a good deal better fed.
On the back, in Chester’s pencil: Riley, spring ’71. Me, Norris, Radford, Osborne, Olsen.
The envelope was addressed in careful block capitals to Specialist Chester Aldrich at his parents’ house in Lathrop, and the return address, in the same hand, read PFC W. Olsen, Co. B, Fort Riley, Kansas. It was postmarked March 1972.
The flap was tucked in, not sealed, and I could have lifted it with a fingernail. I did not. It was not mine. I put it back in the tin with both hands, the way you hold a baby bird, and carried the tin upstairs.
Ardith found me at the kitchen table staring at the photograph. “Olsen,” she said. “Missouri?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Are you going to look for him?”
“I’ve been looking for him since March, honey.”
She put her hand over mine. “Then I’ll help.”