I peeled it back at the kitchen table. When I saw what my father had carried home and hidden in that tin for fifty years, I had to set it down, because there were four more sets of tags in there and not one of them said our name.
Four men. Stamped steel, chains and all, and the little notches worn smooth from being handled.
Under them, folded into a square the size of a matchbook, was a page torn out of a pay book with four addresses on it in my father’s pencil. A street in Bessemer, Alabama. A rural route in Indiana. A number in Queens. A town in West Virginia that does not exist anymore because the water came up over it in 1962.
My father never said one word about the war. Not one, not to my mother, not on any anniversary, not when I asked him in 1978 and got a look that taught me never to ask again.
He was a litter bearer. I only learned that from his discharge papers, which were in the same drawer.
What a litter bearer does is carry men who cannot walk. Sometimes he carries men who are already gone, and when the graves registration people cannot get forward, somebody takes one tag off a body so the body can be identified later and leaves the other one with him.
My father was supposed to turn those four in. That is the procedure and he knew it and he did not do it, and I have thought about why for two years now, and the letter in that tin is the closest I will ever get to an answer.
It is one page, undated, in his handwriting, and it was never mailed to anybody.
To whoever gets these — I told each of these men I would go see their people. I said it out loud, over them, because a fellow ought to be promised something. Then I came home and I could not do it. Fifty years and I have not been able to knock on one door. If I am dead and you have found this, you are not carrying what I carried. Go knock.
So I went.
It took nineteen months. Two of the four were straightforward and the funeral home in Bessemer still had the family’s file. The Queens address is a nail salon now, but the man’s niece is seventy-eight and lives in Nassau County and she cried on the telephone for a long time before she could speak.
The West Virginia one I have not found. The whole town is under a lake and I am still writing letters.
The Indiana family drove to meet me in Terre Haute. The man’s brother is ninety-four. He held that tag in his hand and rubbed his thumb across the letters and said, so somebody stayed with him.
Somebody stayed with him. That is what my father did for a living for two years and then never spoke of again.
His own tags are back in the tin. It is on my shelf, and it is a great deal lighter than it was.