The Welcome Home at the Elevator

Gloria

Gloria Schaefer is seventy-four years old and has run the women’s kitchen at Trinity Lutheran for thirty-one years.

She has cooked for every funeral dinner, every wedding, every hospital fundraiser in this county since the first Bush administration. If you have ever eaten a sloppy joe in Ridgeton, it came out of one of her roasters.

I called her from the truck. She answered on the first ring. I got three sentences out. I said Cole’s name, I said Saturday, and I said the word elevator. That was as far as I got.

“How many?” “A hundred and fifty, maybe.” “Hon,” she said, “that’s a hundred and fifty by Thursday noon. Then it’s three hundred.” “I can’t ask you to feed three hundred.”

“You didn’t ask.” She hung up on me. I sat there with the phone in my hand.

By Thursday evening, my kitchen table held a list in Gloria’s handwriting on a yellow legal pad. Nine roasters of sloppy joes, which the church had been saving for the Veterans Day dinner.

Fourteen casseroles. Six sheet cakes from the grocery bakery in Kenton and four homemade ones. Forty dozen rolls. Coffee for two hundred in the big church urns.

Sheila read it standing up. When she got to the bottom she set the pad down on the counter and just looked at me. “Who’s paying for all this?” “Nobody told me a number.”

“Phil.” “I know.” Later I found out the Ladies Aid had voted it a church expense in about nine minutes, with one dissent from a woman who thought the sloppy joes needed more brown sugar.

Ralph Oberly called me Thursday night. Ralph is chief of the Ridgeton Volunteer Fire Department, a plumber by trade, forty-six years old and built like a refrigerator.

“Phil. Norm told me.” “I figured he might.” “I’ve got two engines and the tanker. Saturday morning we’ll line them up along County Road 12 between the Dollar General and the elevator. We’ll run the lights.”

“Ralph, you don’t have to do that.” “Phil,” he said. “He’s ours.” I do not know how to explain what that does to a man.

I stood in my own kitchen in my sock feet, holding a phone, and turned toward the refrigerator so Maddie would not see my face.

The word

The word went through the county the way it does, from feed store to diner to church parking lot to the checkout line at the grocery.

I did not post anything. I did not call a single person except the three I have named.

A girl who works at the bank painted a banner on a bedsheet. A farmer I had adjusted a hail claim for, three summers ago, left two folding tables and a stack of chairs on my porch with no note.

The high school band director called to say six kids with brass wanted to come play the Marines’ Hymn, and could they do it from the back of a hay wagon.

I said yes. I said yes to everything. Nobody told Calvin. Cole called Thursday night from the barracks on Okinawa, a day and a half before his flight home. His voice was thick with the end of something.

“Dad, are we doing the VFW?” “There’s been a change.” “What kind of change?” “The good kind. You’ll see.” He was quiet. “Is Uncle Calvin going to be there?”

I had not told my son anything about the hall. I had not told him about the check or the blank calendar.

He was twenty-one years old and he had spent nine months in a place where people depend on each other to say what is true.

“I don’t know, bud.” “Okay.” “Does it matter to you?” He thought for a moment. “Grandpa would’ve wanted him there,” he said. I did not have an answer. I told him to get some sleep.