The Hall Light Left On for Teague

The gray car

You have seen my morning. I poured the two cups, counted thirty-seven, drank my own, and let Gus out into the cold.

Then I put my church coat on over my housecoat and went out the front door to look at the road, the way I do most mornings. A woman who has waited as long as I have gets habits.

It was just light. The sky over the cotton field was the color of a pearl, and my cut pasture lay silver with frost.

And a gray car I did not know turned off the county road and came up my gravel, slow.

The man behind the wheel wore a dark green Army uniform.

I know what a car like that means. Every woman who has ever had someone overseas has walked it through her mind at three in the morning: the gray car, the uniform, the slow turn up the drive. We do not speak of it. We carry it like a stone in a pocket.

I felt something go out of me the way water goes out of a tipped glass. My knees did something unforgivable. I held on to the mailbox, and Gus came and stood against my leg.

The engine went off. Nothing happened for what felt like a year.

Then a tall young man got out and took off his cap before he did anything else. He had a shaved head and a sunburn line at his collar, and he held the cap in front of him in both hands like a boy in church.

“Mrs. Wofford,” he said, quickly, before he had even shut the door. “Ma’am, nobody is hurt. Sergeant Wofford is fine. I am so sorry. I should have said that first.”

I do not remember sitting down. I remember I was on the bottom porch step, and he was crouched in front of me with one hand out, not quite touching my arm.

“I would like,” I said, “for you to never do that to a woman again.”

“Yes ma’am. I am Captain Amos Delgado. I command Sergeant Wofford’s company. I should have called, and I did not think. I am very sorry.”

He was a good boy. I could tell right then he had a grandmother of his own somewhere.

“Well, Captain,” I said, when I could. “You had better come in and have some coffee.”

What the captain brought

I sat him down in Ferris’s chair, the one nearest the stove, and scrambled four eggs, because he looked like a man who had eaten out of a paper sack for a year.

He had a flat package under his arm, wrapped in brown paper. He set it on the counter and did not mention it until the plate was clean.

“The battalion sends letters of appreciation to the families, ma’am. They were running late, and I was passing through Tupelo, so I thought I would bring yours by.”

It was a framed letter with a gold seal and a great many words about sacrifice and the family that stands behind the soldier. At the bottom, in blue ink, was the signature of a colonel I had never heard of.

“This is lovely, Captain. But you drove a long way for it.”

“Not so far.”

I poured him a second cup. I was beginning to feel a thing I could not name, the way an old bone feels weather.

“You have a good appetite for a man in a hurry,” I said. “That is your third egg.”

“It is a very good egg, ma’am.”

“Then eat it.”

He ate it. He asked about Gus, and Gus put his chin on the captain’s boot, which he does with about four people. He asked about the calendar on the icebox, and I told him about the red pencil and the twenty-second.