We went east on I-70 toward Columbia. The sun was in our eyes and he pulled the visor down and then put it back up, because he wanted to see the fields. The beans were mostly cut. A few combines were already out.
He talked more in the first hour than I had heard him talk in a year.
He told me about basic training, and about the ship over, and about the heat when they stepped off it, like walking into a laundry.
He told me about a bridge they put up across a river in 1968 in four days, with rain the whole time and no sleep.
He said he could still feel the weight of the timber on his shoulder when it rained.
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He told me about a cook from Georgia who could make pancakes out of powdered eggs and nothing, and how men from other companies would walk a mile in the mud to eat them.
And he told me about two boys from his squad who did not come home.
He said their names out loud, slowly, the way you read names off a plaque. Then he looked out the window for a long while.
We stopped in Columbia for gas and coffee. The gas came to fifty-eight dollars and some change to fill my truck, and I paid it at the pump without saying a word. Dad saw the number anyway. He did not say anything either.
At the counter, the girl asked Dad if he wanted cream and he said black, like always. Then she saw his cap and said, “Thank you for your service, sir,” and he ducked his head the way he does.
We went south on 63 after that, through Jefferson City, past the capitol dome shining white in the morning. Dad said he had driven this road every October since 1994, the year the reunion started.
“The first one, there were forty of us,” he said. “Some brought their wives. Your mother came that year. She danced with Virgil because I won’t dance.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She liked Virgil. Everybody likes Virgil.” He smiled at the window. “Last year there were eleven of us. This year I don’t know. Virgil says maybe nine.”
He did not say it sadly. He said it like a man reading a gauge.
Then he took his cap off and turned it in his hands and put it back on, and we did not talk for a few miles.
Somewhere past Vienna he fell asleep with his chin on his chest.
I turned the radio down and drove with the sun on the hayfields and the oaks starting to turn along the ridges, and I thanked God I had a foreman with a father of his own.