An old man comes through with a push broom, the platform red cap, gray now, who has carried bags at this depot since [music] before the war. He knows Wayne’s face and does not make a thing of it, which is its own kind of courtesy. Wayne nods at him, asks him low about the woman by the urn, and the old red cap tells him. He stands there leaning on his broom and he tells Wayne about the winter of ’43, the troop trains, the food handed up through the windows in the cold, 3,000 a day for free for 4 years.
Boys who called her mother on their way to the ships. She fed my boy, the old man says, on his way to the Pacific. He wrote me about it. Said a lady in Arizona handed him a ham sandwich through the window at 2:00 in the morning and it was the best thing he ever ate. He stops. He works the broom a little. He didn’t come home, but he ate.
She made sure he ate. Wayne sets down his cup. Have you ever found out all at once that the quiet person in the corner of the room was once the whole reason a thousand frightened boys [music] felt like somebody back home still cared whether they lived. It rearranges a room, doesn’t it? It rearranges how you look at a woman folding a tablecloth.
He looks at Opal Maddox a long moment. He could finish his coffee. He could leave a $5 bill under the saucer for the girls and tip his hat to the old woman on his way out and call it a kindness [music] and climb back on the westbound and by Flagstaff he would have a clean conscience and a good story.
That would be charity [music] of a small and forgettable size. He puts on his hat, but he does not walk to the train. He walks to the woman by the urn. “Ma’am,” he says. He takes the hat back off. “They tell me you ran this house through the war.” Opal Mattix looks at him. She is too tired and too far inside her own goodbye to place the face.
Or maybe she places it and is too well-mannered to say so. “I ran it a long time,” she says. >> [music] >> “Through the war and before it and after. It’s done now.” She holds up the check a little and almost smiles. “They thanked me for my years.” “The trains,” Wayne says, “the boys through the windows.
” Something moves behind her eyes. “Who told you that?” “A man with a broom.” Wayne turns the hat in his hands. “Says you fed them all for free for 4 years.” “We didn’t count,” Opal says. “There was always another train.” She looks out the window at the empty platform where the troop trains used to stand.
“I fed so many of them and I never knew a single name and I think about them all the time.” Her voice does not break. It just goes very quiet. “And now they’re tearing out the kitchen.” “Who’s left to remember a sandwich handed through a window 15 years [music] ago?” “More of them than you’d think,” Wayne says. “They’ve all gone on with their lives, the ones that lived.
” She folds the cloth in her hands one more time, smaller. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago. You can’t ask people to remember a supper.” “No,” Wayne says. “But, you can call and remind them.” She looks at him. “Where’s your telephone?” he says. The phone is on the wall by the kitchen door.
A black box with a crank gone to a dial. The line is still live. The company has not had it cut yet. Wayne takes off his coat and hangs it on the hook and rolls his sleeves and gets the operator and he starts making calls. He calls the Legion post in Winslow. He calls the one in Flagstaff and the one in Holbrook and the one in Gallup over the line in New Mexico.
He calls a man he knows at a veterans hall in Phoenix and tells him to call 10 more. He does not say much on any of them. He says who he is plainly once because the name opens a door and he is not too proud to use it for this. Then he says the thing that matters. There is a woman in Winslow who fed the troop trains in the war and they are closing her house on Friday and nobody has so much as bought her a cup of coffee for it.
“She fed your men.” He says into the phone over and over to one post after another all afternoon. “On their way out, a lot of them through Winslow. Now, get this. They’re closing her kitchen and sending her home with a handshake.” A pause while he listens. “I’d take it as a kindness if some of you came to supper for Thursday.
Last night the dining room’s open. Tell the ones who came through here. Tell them Opal’s cooking one more time.” He calls [music] until his voice goes rough. He calls the local paper and tells the man at the desk there is a story here worth more than the closing notice and to put a line in tomorrow’s edition.
Troop train men come to Winslow Thursday. The Harvey House is open one last night. “Print her name.” He tells the deskman. “Not mine. Leave mine out of it.” He could have walked away after the coffee. He could have left the $5 and the clean conscience. Instead, he stood at a wall telephone in his shirt sleeves for the better part of an afternoon and rang every veterans hall within 300 miles asking nothing for himself, putting a woman’s name into one receiver after another.
When he hangs up the last call, the light is going gold in the windows. Opal Maddox is standing in the middle of her half-stripped dining room watching him. The crates of plates around her, the folded cloths in her arms. “Why would you do that?” she says. “Because a man with a broom told me what you did.” Wayne says. He takes his coat off the hook.
“And because somebody should have done it 15 years ago. Get your girls, put the cloths back on the tables.” “For what?” she says. “For who?” “For Thursday.” [music] He sets his hat on. “Cook like there’s a train coming.” 50 door. She does not believe it. She tells the girls it was a kind thing a stranger said and not to get their hopes up.
But she has them iron the cloths anyway, and she has them shine the brass back up, and she goes to the market herself on the last of the company’s account and buys hams and potatoes and the makings of 40 pies. Because if even a dozen of them come, she will not have them eat off a bare table. Thursday at 5:00, the dining room is set the way it was set in 1940.
White cloths, heavy plates, the brass shining. The coffee urns full and steaming. Opal Maddix stands at the kitchen door in a fresh apron with her hair pinned the way she has pinned it for 33 years, and she waits, and she tells herself it is all right if no one comes. At 10:05, a truck pulls up out front. Then a car with Gallup [music] plates, then two more.
The first man through the door is in his 40s, leaning on a cane the war left him with, a marine pin on his lapel. He takes off his hat in the doorway, and he looks at the room, and he looks at the woman at the kitchen door, and his face comes apart. “Ma’am,” he says, “you handed me a sandwich through a window in January of ’44. I never forgot it. I told my wife.
