I cut the thread at the kitchen table. When I saw what my father had carried home and hidden in that blanket all those years, I had to set it down, because it was another man’s tags.
Two of them, on a beaded chain gone black. A name that was not ours. Blood type, service number, and the little notch they used to put in them.
Folded flat around the chain was a child’s drawing on butcher paper — a house, a dog, a sun in the corner with a face on it — and on the back of it, in pencil, in a woman’s hand, an address in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
And a note from my father, written on the back of a laundry slip, which by the ink and the paper he wrote sometime in the fifties and never touched again:
“Promised him I’d carry these to her myself. Drove to Latrobe in June of ’53 and sat in front of that house two hours and could not make myself walk up. I am not the man to bring a woman that news. Somebody after me will be.”
Somebody after me will be.
My father was at the Chosin Reservoir in the winter of 1950 and he said four words about it in my whole life, and two of them were “it was cold.”
The name on the tags is Corporal Dominic Rusnak. I found him in about twenty minutes on a laptop — killed in action, December 1950, body not recovered, which is the phrase that explains the whole rest of this.
Not recovered means his wife got a telegram and never got anything else. No tags. No belongings. Nothing to put in the ground.
She kept that house in Latrobe until 1994. She died in 2001.
Their daughter is seventy-six years old and lives in Greensburg, and she is the little girl who drew that dog.
I called her in March. I had a script written out and I got about halfway through the first line.
She was two years old when he left. She has one photograph and a folded flag and a story her mother told her about a man who was supposed to come see them and never did, which her mother told her without one ounce of bitterness, and which she has thought about her entire life.
I drove them out there in April. Four hours with a blanket on the passenger seat.
She held those tags in both hands at her kitchen table and rubbed her thumb across the stamping over and over, the way you do, and she said, “He was carrying my picture.”
He was. Seventy-five years, through a war and a hem and a closet shelf and my father’s whole silent life.
They’re at the veterans’ hall in Latrobe now, in a case, with the drawing beside them. She wanted it that way.
I kept the blanket. It’s on the shelf in my closet, folded, and I have not washed it and I don’t intend to.
My father was not the man to knock on that door. He just made sure somebody would be.