The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
Ward looked at me, and then the two of us were laughing over a pot of bad coffee, like people who had lost the same man and just found it out.
“Why didn’t you ever go find him?” I asked when we could talk. “He would have been so glad.”
“We wrote for three years. Sunday he’d write, Friday I’d write back. But after a while every letter I sent felt like a bill I couldn’t pay. All I had to say was thank you, and I’d said it, and it never seemed enough. Every year I thought I’d drive up when I had something to show him. A truck. A house. A grown daughter. I kept waiting to be good enough to stand in front of him.” He rubbed his face. “Lena looks things up for me on the computer. This March she was checking weather and said, ‘Dad, a Chester Aldrich from Lathrop passed. Wasn’t that your Army friend?’ I’d said the name once, forty years ago, and she remembered. She read me the obituary twice.”
“And you drove.”
“She told me not to. Eight hours in the rain at my age. I said I’d been driving since before she was born. I put on the suit I wore to Dolores’s funeral. It used to fit.”
“It looked fine.”
“It looked like a scarecrow’s,” Ward said, and I laughed again, and so did he.
Then he unbuttoned the cardigan and took a red pencil stub from his shirt pocket and set it on the table between us. It was sharpened down to three inches, the paint worn off where a thumb had held it.
“Chester had one just like it for the dispatch sheets,” he said. “I wrote him in March of ’72. First thing I ever wrote start to finish. He wrote back the same week, in red, on the back of a motor pool form. I read it standing at the mail table, all by myself. First thing I ever read that nobody had to read to me first.”
“What did it say?”
“I wore the paper out. Fifty years of shirt pockets. It went through the wash in 1986 and came out a lump. I grieved that a week, but I had it by heart by then.”
He said it to the table, low and even, the way you say a prayer you learned young.
Dear Ward, I got your letter. All of it. You spelled everything right except “wrote.” I am prouder of that than of anything I did in this Army. Chester.
It sounded like him. For forty-two years he had signed my birthday cards in that same dry way, one line of praise and then his name.
I took the tin out of my purse. I had not known if I would. I laid the envelope with the block letters and the March 1972 postmark on the table beside the red pencil.
“This is yours,” I said.
He looked at it a long time, the way you look at a house you grew up in.
“Chester kept it,” he said at last. “I figured he threw it out. A man with a typewriter wouldn’t want a thing like that.”
“More than fifty years. In a locked footlocker, in a cookie tin. I never knew it was there. Open it.”
His hands trembled. He lifted the tucked flap with his thumb, and he drew out a sheet of ruled paper folded in thirds. The pencil had gone silver. He unfolded it on the table and bent his head close.