The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
I walked up the steps with the tin in both hands and knocked three times on a green door with a wreath of dried hydrangea on it.
I heard slow footsteps, a chain, a lock.
The door opened.
He was shorter than I remembered, in a brown cardigan with the elbows worn through. His hair was thinner and whiter without rain on it. His eyes went to the tin box in my hands, then to my face, and then for a long moment nowhere at all.
“Mrs. Aldrich,” he said. His voice was rough and quiet and not surprised. “I figured you’d come.”
He made coffee, because there was nothing else he could think to do. That is how I knew he was the kind of man Chester would have loved. He stood with his back to me scooping Folgers into a percolator older than my daughter, and I watched his shoulders work and did not say anything.
His kitchen was small and spotless. A photograph of a woman with a good laugh and frosted hair beside the toaster. And on the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a pig, the program from my husband’s funeral.
“That’s Dolores,” he said, without turning. “My wife. Four years in July.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d have made you a pie. Sit, please.”
I sat. He sat across from me and folded his hands. “Would you mind if I said a grace?” he said. “Dolores never let me near a cup of coffee without one.” I did not mind. He bowed his head and kept it to a line: “Lord, thank you for the road, and for who is at this table.” Then neither of us touched the coffee.
“I got your letter,” he said. “I read it eleven times. I wrote you back four. I never mailed any of them. I couldn’t make the words come out the way they ought to.”
“I’m in no hurry, Mr. Olsen.”
“Ward.” He looked at the tin on the table. “You didn’t open that envelope.”
“The flap was only tucked. But it had your name on it, not mine.”
He closed his eyes a moment.
“That’s Chester’s wife, all right,” he said, and his mouth moved toward a smile. Then it didn’t. “Mrs. Aldrich, your husband taught me to read.”
I want to set down what he told me in his own order, because it was the first time in more than fifty years he had said it aloud to anyone but his wife.
He had been nineteen, a Missouri farm boy, second of six. He had gone through school the way some children do: back row, copying the boy ahead, guessing and bluffing and never caught long enough to be helped. He left at sixteen to drive for his uncle’s hauling outfit, because a truck does not ask you to read.
“I could do numbers,” he said. “Any number you put in front of me. It was words. They’d swim. I’d know the shape of a sign but I couldn’t pull it apart. I got along on shapes.”
The Army drafted him in August of 1970. He got through basic because drill sergeants shout everything. They sent him to Fort Riley, to the motor pool of Company B, to drive the big two-and-a-half-ton deuce-and-a-half, and there the trouble found him.
“Every morning you got a dispatch sheet. Where to go, what to haul, who signs. You got it from the clerk. You had to read it, sign it, bring it back.”