PART 2: The Girl Who Happened By
I pulled the torn cloth back over my shoulder.
It wouldn’t stay.
« Yes, sir, » I said. « Montana. »
I didn’t understand. Nobody on that range knew. I hadn’t told one soul in the Army how I got those scars. It was written on my medical forms as an old injury, and that was all.
The general hadn’t taken his eyes off me.
« There was a cabin. On the river road, past the end of the pavement. And there was a boy. »
My mouth had gone dry. Eighty people were listening. Sergeant Bauer was looking from the general to me and back again, like a man watching tennis.
« Yes, sir. He was six. »
« He’s eleven now. » The general’s jaw worked. « He plays the trumpet. Badly. He’s my grandson. »
I think I stopped breathing.
I had wondered about that little boy every day for five years. I never knew what had become of him. I never even knew his last name. They carried us out in different trucks.
« Is he all right, sir? »
« He’s fine. He’s a fine boy. » He said it roughly. Then he remembered where he was. He looked around at eighty filthy candidates with their mouths open.
« Sergeant Bauer. Ten-minute hold. Move them down the line. »
Bauer moved them. He did it fast. He glanced back at me once, and he wasn’t laughing.
The general walked me twenty yards, into the shade of the tower. We didn’t go to any office. He just needed there to be fewer ears.
Up close, he looked older. He kept looking at the place where my jacket had torn. Then he would make himself look at my face.
« I read that report in a tent in the desert, » he said. « Four pages. My daughter was overseas as well. She’s a nurse. Our boy was staying with my mother for the autumn. It was the only place we had to put him. I must have read it a hundred times. I had it by heart. » He recited it, flat, the way you would say a prayer you didn’t care for. « An unidentified female, aged eighteen, was passing the property on foot and heard the disturbance. She entered the cabin and placed herself between the animal and the child. »
He stopped.
« I tried to find you. I wanted to shake your hand. I wanted to pay your hospital bill, at the very least. My mother told me you were a girl from down the valley. She said your people had sold up and moved away, and nobody knew where. »
I didn’t say anything. I was trying to make sense of it.
Passing the property. On foot. In November, at dusk, with snow coming, on a road with one cabin on it.
« Sir, » I said. « Is that what the report says? That I was passing by? »
« Those very words. »
« I wasn’t passing by, sir. »
He frowned. I watched him. He’s a careful man. He was waiting for the rest.
I had a choice just then, and I want you to know that I saw it. I could have let it lie. It was five years ago. He had an old mother, and she had plainly told him something that wasn’t so. It wasn’t my place to stand on a firing range and call a general’s mother a liar.
But he had asked me straight. And I was raised by a man who says a half truth is only a lie with its shoes on.
« Your mother telephoned our house that afternoon, sir. At about two o’clock. I answered it myself. »
He didn’t move.
« She needed to drive to town for her heart pills before the snow closed the road. She asked if I would come up and sit with the boy for a couple of hours. She said he’d be no trouble, and there was pie. »
« She called you. »
« Yes, sir. I walked up. It’s two miles. She showed me where the cocoa was, and she left a quarter of an hour later. » My voice wasn’t quite steady. « I wasn’t passing by. I was the babysitter. »
The general put his hand out and laid it against the leg of the tower. He stood like that for a moment.
I knew what I had just done. I felt sick about it. I had taken something away from him. For five years he had believed it was plain luck that saved his grandson. A stranger on a road.
It wasn’t luck. His own mother had left that child with a teenager and driven away. Then she had looked a deputy in the eye and said the girl just happened by.
« She promised me, » he said. He was talking to himself. « Before I left. I made her promise that she wouldn’t leave him with anyone. Not for five minutes. »
« She was seventy-nine, sir. She needed her pills. »
« Don’t defend her to me, Sergeant. »
« No, sir. »
He rubbed his face with both hands. When he took them away, he looked straight at my shoulder again.
« The report was four pages, » he said. « It gave me one paragraph on what happened inside. I have been trying to picture it for five years. I’ve had it wrong, haven’t I? »
« I don’t know what you pictured, sir. »
« Then tell me, » the general said. « All of it. I want to know what you did for that boy. »
