The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
The VFW commander was a retired grain elevator manager named Fred Gundersen, who had a gift for knowing exactly the right person to call. He looked at the photograph in the post’s back room and said, “Big Red One. They keep a veterans’ roster. My brother-in-law’s on it. Give me a day.”
He took four.
“Three Olsens in Missouri on the roster,” Fred said on the telephone, “and two are too young. The third is a Ward. Harrisonville, south of Kansas City. No phone, just a box number. The secretary says he came to the reunion in 1989 and never again.”
“Ward Olsen,” I said, trying it in my mouth.
“Harrisonville’s about four hours from you.”
Four hours. And four hours home, in the rain, to stand one hour at the back of a church.
I wrote the letter six times and at last wrote it plain.
Dear Mr. Olsen,
My husband, Chester Aldrich, was buried in Lathrop, Nebraska, on the last Saturday of March. I believe you were there. I would like to thank you for coming, and if you are willing, to know how you knew him. I found your photograph in his footlocker and a letter you sent him. I have not read it. It seemed like yours to tell me about.
You owe me nothing. If you want to be left alone, I will leave you alone. But I would like to know.
Sincerely, Geneva Aldrich
I mailed it the first of October and told myself I would wait six weeks.
I waited twelve. Nothing came, not at Thanksgiving when the whole family sat around my table and very carefully did not mention Missouri, not at Christmas when I stood at the mailbox and thought of Chester’s truck coming up the drive every evening at ten past five.
In January I made up my mind. If I had not heard by the anniversary, I would put the tin on the seat of the car and drive south. I told only Fred, who nodded and said, “I’ll put in a word about the weather.”
The anniversary fell on a Saturday again. Forty-six degrees, a sky the color of dishwater. I put on my good coat and drove south over the Kansas line, and the rain started up again right on schedule.
A box number cannot be driven to. At the Harrisonville hardware store I asked the young man at the register for Ward Olsen, and he said he could not give out an address. “I understand,” I said. “My husband stood behind a parts counter twenty-six years. I know what a man behind a counter can and can’t say.”
His face did something kind. “Ma’am, I can’t say where Ward lives. But he’s at the co-op on Tenth every Saturday morning for the coffee. A real quiet man.”
The co-op was closed by then. But a woman loading fence posts into a trailer in the lot said, “Olsen? Oh, sure, honey. White house on Oak with blue shutters and a maroon Ford. Third on the right past the grain bin.” That is how every small town works, if you ask the right way.
The house had a porch and a flower bed somebody kept with great care, the tulip tips just showing. The maroon Ford sat in the drive with a toolbox in the bed. I sat in the car with the engine off and the rain on the roof. I knew that truck the way you know a hymn from the first bar.
I sat a minute longer. I am not a woman who prays out loud in a parked car, but I did. “Lord, I do not know what is behind that door. Let me be kind to whatever it is.”