The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [113]
They had not said much on this trip back from the packed foursquare church across the tracks from the Devon depot out east of Shelby, Bill busy in his head, Cloyce in extensive thoughts of her own. Try as she would, she could not get over the Prokosch boy's watery-eyed mother and father, in sagging funeral clothes that they looked like they'd been sacked into. There but for the grace of something or other—despite what the preacher said in the funeral service, she could not credit an all-wise divinity in charge of every life and death in this immense war—wept Bill and herself, if Ben had not survived Guam and those other places. Even yet she could feel fate narrowly brushing past, back at the start of this unnatural week. She had been out in the backyard coddling her roses with root food, the shade of the cottonwood trees pleasant in the already warm summer morning. Around the corner of the house came Bill, a telegram in his hand. If she had not already been kneeling, she would have been thrust to her knees by the sight of the yellow message form known for carrying the savage words: WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON—
With his head dipped to make out the dappled yard through his bifocals, Bill did not spot her soon enough, then froze at the look on her face. He fumbled out the sentences in contrite haste:
"Ben is back from the Pacific, he's all right. He has funeral duty. Twice."
"Is he coming home"—it caught in her throat to say it—"as usual?"
"Not this time, for some reason. We'll go to him. I'll work it out somehow."
Attending the Prokosch boy's funeral had been better than nothing, she gave Bill that much, even though there had not been nearly enough time afterward with Ben before he and nice Jake had to start back to East Base. Back to the madhouse of war. How she wished Ben had gotten hold of himself and made the most of the chance she'd set up so perfectly at New Year's—
"Dear?" She jumped more than a little at the surprise of her husband's voice, after the constant miles of silence. "Take something down for me, will you? There's a notepad and Eversharp in my suit coat."
Now she really was startled. Bill never did this. His work was kept so separate as to be almost holy, done either at the Gleaner office or in private in his upstairs library, and they would be home in Gros Ventre in no time if he would floor the gas pedal just a bit. She twitted him, "Isn't the usual line, 'Get me rewrite!'? Whatever are you thinking, Bill, this isn't exactly the set for The Front Page and I'm not—"
"Cloyce, will-you-please-just-do-this."
Speechless at the steel in that burst, she reached around into the backseat for the writing materials in his coat.
"Ready?" His voice bristling as much as his mustache, he started dictating at a deliberative pace. "You have seen the ready-made insignia of the home front all across our state, in our neighborhoods, on our ranches and farms, wherever there are window casements framing proud but anxious parents. The small satin banner no larger than a tea towel—cross out 'small'—hangs from the lock on the middle sash of the window. The gold-colored string, tasseled at the ends, holds a thin—no, make that 'slender'—dowel, and down from that the banner hangs like a quiet flag. Red-bordered, with a field of white, centered with a star. A blue star shows the world that a member of that family is serving in the military. A gold star testifies that the household has lost a family member in the war.
"In the trackside house where Sigmund Prokosch grew up, the blue star—let me think