I worked it loose at the kitchen table, and something slid out into my hand. When I saw what my father had hidden inside that frame for fifty years, I had to steady myself, because it was a roll of paper, and the outside sheet was a face.
Pen and ink on rice paper, thin as a moth wing, rolled tight enough to fit a tube an inch and a quarter across.
Fifty-one drawings.
All of them men. Some are three lines and a jaw and you would know him on the street. Two are asleep. One is a kid maybe nineteen with his helmet off, eating out of a can, and my father caught the exact thing a face does when nobody is looking at it.
Every one has a name and a date in the bottom corner, and about half of them have a town.
My father was a draftsman at a paving company for thirty-one years and could not be talked into so much as a Christmas card. He did not draw. That was a fact about him, like his shoe size.
On the back of the last one, which is dated three weeks before he came home, in pencil:
I have got fifty-one of them and eleven are dead. I cannot carry these home in a bag where somebody’s mother might see them and I cannot burn them either. They go in the frame. If I ever get to where I can look at these again I will get them out myself, and if I do not, then somebody else will and can do better by them than I did.
He never got them out. Fifty years that frame hung on a nail in the garage. He told four kids never to touch it, we never did, and I do not believe he ever touched it either.
My sister and I spent two years on the names.
Thirty-nine of the fifty-one are identified. Twenty-two families found. Twenty wanted the drawing and two did not, and that was their right.
A woman in Sedalia opened a mailing tube in her kitchen and found her father at twenty-three, drawn in ink by a man she had never heard of, and she called me that night and could not talk.
The eleven who did not come home went to their families first.
The rest are in a case at the veterans museum in Pierre with his name on the wall card. They did a thing in March, about ninety people came, and I had to speak and I did poorly.
I kept two. The kid with the can, and a man sitting on a footlocker with his boots off, because that one is signed in the corner with my father’s initials and it is the only one that is.
The frame hangs in my garage now. Empty tube, cap pressed back on, on a nail.
He told us never to touch it and we thought it was because the war was in there. It was, and so was he, and he could not look at it and he could not throw it away, so he rolled it up small and hung it on a nail and waited for somebody with a steadier hand than his.