The Stranger Who Signed Only Private
I saw him during the second hymn.
Chester’s brother Melvin was on my left with his hands folded over his belt buckle, and my daughter Ardith was on my right gripping a tissue she had already used up. I turned my head a few inches to find the clock over the sanctuary doors, and instead I found a man standing alone against the back wall, under the framed picture of the old Methodist church before the fire.
He was tall and thin, with white hair combed flat and wet at the edges. His gray wool suit had been bought for a bigger man, or for himself thirty pounds ago. The shoulders sat an inch past where his own shoulders stopped. The sleeves covered his knuckles. His shoes were shined and soaked through, because it had been pouring since sunup and the walk from the gravel lot was forty yards of open sky.
I had never seen him in my life.
That is not a small thing to say in Lathrop, Nebraska. The town has eleven hundred people on a good day, and my husband Chester ran the parts counter at Hanlon Implement for twenty-six years. I thought I knew every face that had ever leaned on that counter asking for a belt or a bearing.
This man was none of them. He was looking at the casket the way you look at a person who is about to leave a room.
Pastor Dave Draper had taken both my hands at the door that morning and said, “Geneva, we carry the rest of it together.” Now he opened the prayer. “Lord, we thank you for the life of your servant Chester Elbert,” he said, and the man at the back put the heel of his hand against his mouth and held it there.
I turned back around. I had a husband to bury. I told myself I would ask about him later.
I did not know “later” would take a year.
It was the last Saturday of March, forty-one degrees, and the rain came sideways off the fields. Chester was seventy-five. His heart quit on him in the garage on a Tuesday afternoon with the radio playing and a half-sanded cabinet door on the sawhorses. I found him when I came out to ask what he wanted for supper.
We had been married forty-two years. I will not tell you what that did to me. You either know, or you do not, and the ones who know already do.
The church was full. Everyone had a story about Chester handing them the right part on a bad day without writing up a ticket, or pushing a stuck car out of a ditch. The VFW honor guard from Post 3291 stood in their caps, because Chester had served in the Army and they never missed a veteran. Two of them carried the flag forward and folded it thirteen times, and a young man from the next county played taps on a bugle that cracked once on the high note and made the whole church wince and then love the boy for it.
I looked back at the wall while the flag was being folded. The man in the gray suit had come off it. He was standing straight, heels together, arms stiff at his sides, rain still dripping off his cuffs onto the carpet. He stood like a man who had learned to stand that way a long time ago and had never forgotten.
The honor guard put the flag in my arms. When I looked again the wall was empty.