I slid it out, and my knees near went, because it was a roll of papers in a freezer bag, and the top one had the seal of the Department of Veterans Affairs on it.
Rating decision. My name, my service number, my claim number. Service connection granted for bilateral hearing loss and tinnitus at forty percent, effective the date of claim, with an award for the months already run.
I never filed a claim in my life. I have said for fifty years that the VA is for men who got hurt, and that I came home with all my parts, and that I was not going to stand in line with my hand out. I have said it at the Legion. I have said it to my own son.
Della filed it.
Under the decision was the whole file, in order, the way she did everything. My discharge, which I did not know she had. A statement in support of claim in her handwriting describing what it is like to live with a man who has had the television at volume 40 since 1994 and who says what four times a sentence. Two buddy letters — one from Carl Meese, who I have not laid eyes on since 1971 and who she tracked down in Sarasota, and one from a fellow named Espinoza who was on the flight line with me and who wrote three pages.
An appointment card from the county Veterans Service Office in the courthouse basement. Four visits, going back to the previous September, all of them on Wednesdays, when I go to the co-op and think nothing of where she is.
A hearing test at the VA in Chillicothe. That one I do remember. She told me it was for the insurance and I sat in a booth with headphones on for twenty minutes and grumbled the whole way home.
Her note was rolled up inside all of it.
Before you get on your high horse: this is not a handout. You earned it in 1969 with a fuel truck running six feet off your ear and no plugs because nobody gave you any. The man at the office said it took him nine months and it took me two years and I would do it again. I know you wanted a trolling motor. Buy one with the back pay and hush. — Della
Buy one with the back pay and hush.
The award letter is dated the eleventh of April. She handed me that thermos on the nineteenth. She was gone the middle of May, in the night, no goodbye, and that rating decision spent eleven months sealed in the bottom of a ten-dollar thermos on a garage shelf while I told everybody who came by that my wife’s last gift to me was a hardware store coffee jug.
I said real romantic, Della, dry as August, and she heard me, and she did not defend herself, because to defend herself she’d have had to tell me and then I’d have made her take it back.
The back pay came through in the fall. I bought the trolling motor. It’s on the boat and I have used it exactly twice and I feel like a fool every time I put my hand on it.
I go to the VA in Chillicothe now. I’ve got hearing aids, and I hear my grandbabies say things I have been nodding along to for six years.
That thermos rides in my truck. I fill it every morning. It is the best ten dollars anybody ever spent on me.