The Reception the Whole Town Gave

At noon, in the same bright light, we sent him back toward Fort Campbell from the churchyard, to report that night and ship out Monday morning. Ben’s pickup waited by the iron gate with the engine on and a duffel in the bed. Two hundred people lined the grass, not talking, the maples gold above them. The veterans saluted at the flagpole as the truck started. Lindy walked beside it down Cherry Street as far as it would let her, and then it picked up speed, and she stood in the road in her Sunday dress with her hand over her mouth.

I came up beside her. We stood there until the truck turned at the corner.

“Mama,” she said. “I’m so scared. What do I do for nine months?”

I put my arm around my daughter and said the only thing I knew. “You pray, and you let the chain carry the rest.”

Behind us a woman folded a tablecloth in the sun, and another carried the last chairs toward the school’s flatbed, and Dolores stood at the gate with her laminated card, making the first call of the week.

Harvey came home in July.

There were letters, and calls at strange hours, and a stretch in the winter when we heard nothing for nineteen days and I did not sleep. Dolores called the chain every one of those nights. There was always someone on their knees in Pell Crossing at every hour. I have wondered since whether that was the reason, or only the Army’s mail. I do not know.

Lindy stood in the airport in a green dress, and when he came through the doors she did not run. She walked, slowly, very straight, as if she were still in the aisle. He set down the duffel and opened his arms.

The next Sunday the women simply started coming to the churchyard with food.

Roone was there. He had come to church every week since the wedding, always in the back pew on the aisle, and I never saw him talk to anyone but Dolores. His hall was still open, but he had stopped taking the corporate bookings, and I heard, though I cannot say it is true, that he cooked one Sunday dinner a month at the nursing home and charged nothing and told no one.

He brought a ham to the lunch. It was a very good one.

I took a plate from him and said, “Thank you, Roone.” It was the first time I had said those words to him and meant them. Somewhere in that long fall, the prayer I made in my car with my fists on the wheel had turned inside out. It began as a curse. It ended as a ham.

Dolores keeps a second list now, behind the first on the laminated card: the soldiers of Pell County, in a column, with the dates they left.

If you have ever been told your trouble is too small, or too late, or too much bother to bring to the people who love you, do something for me. Pick up the phone. Ask one person to pray. Then let them tell you what they can do with their hands.

I learned that two days is a very long time and also no time at all, and that a churchyard in October can hold more than anyone ever planned for it.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.