The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
Then he began to read it out loud, low and steady, the way you read something you know by heart but never expected to hear again.
Dear Chester. I rote this myself. It took me two hours. I am in the day room and nobody is looking. I wanted you to know I can do it now. I read the whole letter from my mother in the truck this morning with the engine running. She says she is eating better. I did not know how to say thank you, so I will say it every day of my life in how I do things. You called me Private. I will try to be one you are proud of. Your friend, Ward Olsen.
He put the page down and looked up.
“I did try,” he said. “I tried every day.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw you at the funeral. You stood at attention for the flag.”
His face broke then, and his whole thin body shook the way a boy’s does, and I came around the table and put my arms around a man I had known for two hours, in a kitchen smelling of burnt coffee and African violets, and held on.
We stayed like that a long time.
The telephone on the kitchen wall rang at four o’clock. Ward looked at it as if it might be the Army. Then he answered, and his whole face changed.
“Lena,” he said. “No, I’m fine. I’ve got company.” He listened. “Can you come Sunday? There’s something I should have told you a long time ago. No. Sunday. I want to say it to your face.”
He hung up and stood with his hand on the receiver a while.
I stayed two nights at the Ridgeview Motel out on the highway, and on Sunday I was at his table when Lena came in with a casserole dish and a grocery bag. I will not tell all he said to her. It was his to tell. When he reached the part about Charlotte’s Web, she crossed the kitchen and put her arms around his neck from behind his chair.
“Dad,” she said. “I always thought you read to me so good because you loved me.”
“I did,” Ward said. “That too.”
Lena made pot roast. Ward told me what he remembered of Chester at twenty-one, the skinny kid who whistled the same three hymns while he typed.
On Monday morning Ward carried my overnight bag to the car himself. He stood in the driveway in the brown cardigan with his hand on the door.
“Geneva. Would it be all right if I came up in March? On the day?”
“I would like that more than I can tell you.”
“I’d like to see where he is.”
“We’ll have lunch,” I said.
He gave a short, surprised laugh. “I didn’t stay for lunch last time.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been saving you a plate.”
They came on the last Saturday of the next March, Ward and Lena in the maroon Ford with Lena driving. It was the first clear morning of the spring, fifty-one degrees, the fields still brown and the first meadowlark of the year on the fence post by the cemetery gate.
He wore a new suit. Charcoal. It fit. Lena had taken him to a store in Kansas City. He stood at the gate with his hands at his sides, and I thought for a moment he might not be able to go in. Then he took my arm, and we went up the gravel path together to the third row.