The old man took the lid off the shoebox with a hand like a bundle of dry twigs. Inside lay a thick stack of photographs, an envelope of letters tied with string, and a small notebook with a green cover. He did not hurry. He laid the contents on the card table one by one, in a pattern I could tell he had made many times before. He said, “My name is Earl Kline. I was a corporal in the Second Infantry Division, in the winter of 1951. Your husband was my squad leader.” His eyes were the pale blue of washed denim. “Mrs. Rissler, I will tell it plain.”
He said, “In December we were ordered to fall back from a ridge above the Chongchon River. There was a village on the slope behind us. Forty or fifty families, mostly women and children and old men. The village was not on the map. The captain said it was not our concern. He said we had two hours to withdraw before the Chinese came through.” He stopped. His jaw worked. “Walt said, Sir, we cannot leave them. The captain said, That is an order, Sergeant. And we marched out.”
I sat very still. Across from me Earl turned a photograph over. It was a snapshot of a small boy in a quilted jacket, five or six years old, standing in the snow. “We got a mile down the road,” Earl said. “And Walt stopped the whole column. He said, I cannot do it. I am going back.” He looked up. “Seven of us went back with him. We disobeyed a direct order. We went up that slope in the dark, and we took out as many as we could carry.” His voice dropped. “We got fourteen. Fourteen children. We left the rest.”
A soldier who disobeys one order to save a child has already begun the long work of a good life.
The old man did not weep. I think he had finished weeping a long time ago. He said, “That is what we left behind, Madam. Thirty one people, because we ran out of time. The Chinese came through at dawn. We heard the guns from the road.” He pressed his finger against the photograph. “Every Tuesday night for twenty seven years, we met in this room to say their names. Walt wrote them in that notebook as they were given to us by the children, as they grew up and remembered. Thirty one names. Thirty one people. It was the only thing we could do for them.”
I opened the notebook. The handwriting was that of my husband. Each page had a name in Korean letters and in English spelling, an age, and a note. The grandfather who sold rice cakes. The girl with the blue ribbon. The midwife. I turned the pages with a trembling hand. Walt, who had never missed church, had stayed up half the night in this hall for more than a quarter of a century to keep thirty one strangers alive on paper. I put my hand flat on the page. It was warm from the lamp.
Earl said, “The fourteen children were sent to an orphanage in Busan, and then to families in America. We kept track of every one. We paid for their school. That was where the rent money went, Mrs. Rissler. Walt put a hundred and fifty dollars a month into a fund, and the others did the same. We put eleven of them through college. Two of them became teachers. One of them is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins.” He took the green notebook gently from my hand and opened to the last page. “His name is James. He was the boy in the quilted jacket.”
I did not trust my voice. I whispered, “Where is he now?” Earl lifted his chin toward the door. “He is parked outside. He has driven up every Tuesday since Walt died, and sat in his car because he did not want to intrude. He said he would wait until you came.” My husband was a deacon and a quiet man. I thought of how he had come home every Tuesday smelling of coffee and cigarettes, and sat down at our table and asked about my day, and never said a word. I started to cry.
The door opened. A tall man of seventy two stepped through, in a gray overcoat, with silver hair and a face that I knew at once, because it was the face in the photograph that Walt kept in his Bible. He stopped a few feet from me. He bowed, in the old way, from the waist. He said, “Mrs. Rissler, I am James Park. Your husband carried me down a mountain on his back.” His voice trembled. “I have wanted to thank you for fifty years. You lent him to us.”
We stayed until midnight. Earl made fresh coffee in the percolator. James told me of the orphanage, and the American family that took him in, and the day he first saw a hospital. He had become a surgeon because he wanted to be, he said, the kind of man who would go back up the hill. He opened the shoebox and found a photograph of Walt at thirty, young and lean and solemn, with a boy on his shoulders. He laid it in my hands. “Keep this,” he said. “He would want you to have it.”
We still meet on Tuesdays. I took over the hall when Earl grew too frail, and I make the coffee. The fourteen children have all come, or sent their children, and the room is full now, of faces young and old, and photographs on the wall. The notebook is open on the table. Each week we read three names aloud, one for each of the thirty one who did not come home. And each week, when we finish, James puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Walt would be pleased.” I believe he would.