The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
“Private. Every day for thirteen months, bar that one night.” Ward gave a short cracked laugh. “Even after I made Pfc. In the Army you call a Pfc Private anyhow, so he just kept right on. When I said, ‘You can call me Ward now,’ he looked at me funny and said, ‘Aw, I don’t know. I like Private.'”
“That’s why you wrote it in the book.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned his cup a quarter turn. “I stood at that stand with the pen and couldn’t make my name come. I can write it. I’ve written it ten thousand times on bills of lading. But there was a church full of people behind me, and I looked at that page of fine names in fine handwriting, and my hand went cold. I thought, somebody will read it over my shoulder and ask how I knew Chester Aldrich. And I’d have to say it.”
“You’d never said it.”
“Not to anybody but Dolores. My own daughter doesn’t know.” “I put down the one word I was sure of. The name he gave me. It was the only thing I could think of that wasn’t mine to be ashamed of.”
Rain ticked at the window over the sink.
“That’s why I left, too. The lady in the vestibule asked how I knew him, and I got as far as ‘We were in the service,’ and my throat shut. If I’d started, I’d have kept going, in front of a room of people with ham on their plates. I couldn’t do that to your family on the day you buried him. It was your day. I just wanted to stand in the back and say thank you where he could hear.”
“He heard,” I said.
“What happened after?” I asked. “After you could read.”
“Everything.”
He finished his service in August of 1972 and went home to the farm. The first thing he did was take his mother to church and read the bulletin to her in the car. She was sick by then, though neither of them said so. She died that winter. Chester had written out the Twenty-third Psalm for him in block capitals on an index card the week he mustered out, and said, “Learn that one by sight, Private. It’s short, and your mother will want to hear it from you.” Ward read it to her from her own Bible at the bedside, the whole psalm, slowly, with his finger under the words, and she corrected him once on “restoreth” and smiled at the ceiling.
“That’s what Chester gave me,” Ward said. “That night. I can’t put a price on it.”
He bought a used truck in 1979 on a loan whose paperwork he could read. When the commercial driver’s license came in, years later, he passed the written test on the first try with a ninety-one and then sat in his truck in the parking lot of the testing station a good while with the paper on the dash. He married Dolores in 1980. She had known since the day they met and never told him she knew.
He reached to the windowsill and brought down a framed picture of a woman in her forties with his long jaw. “That’s Lena. She’s up in Belton. Comes Sundays. I read to her every night until she was eleven. Charlotte’s Web four times. I did the voices. I thought about Chester every time, and I never told her why I read so well.”
“Chester did the voices for our kids,” I said. “Every night. Ardith thought he could be a whole barnyard.”