Nobody in the store has bothered him. That is the kind of town it is, and [music] he has been standing there the whole while with the knife open in his hand, not buying it, not moving, listening. Half of America would know his face on sight. The boy behind the counter has not once looked up far enough to find it. The big man closes the knife and sets it down on the glass.
He walks the length of the counter, slow. His boots loud in the quiet of the and he stops at Earl Dawson’s shoulder and looks down into the open cigar box at the Navy Cross, at the Purple Heart beside it, at the citation folded underneath with a general’s name at the bottom of it. He looks at it a long moment, then he looks up at the boy.
“Son,” he says, “do you know what that is?” The boy looks up, and then he finds the face, and his mouth comes open, and nothing at all comes out of it. “That’s the Navy Cross,” Wayne says, and his voice is low and even. “They give it for the kind of thing most men don’t come home from. There’s not many men alive who’ve got one.
” He turns his head to Earl. He does not ask the loud [music] questions. He asks one quiet one. “Tarawa?” Earl Dawson looks at the stranger who somehow knows the weight of the thing in the box, and for the first time that morning, something in his face moves. “Second Division,” he says, [music] “Tarawa, ’43.
” “I know what that cost,” Wayne says. He does not say more than that. He was not there himself. He made pictures all through the war while other men went. And he carried that fact the rest of his life, and every man in that store who reads a newspaper knows it, and he does not stand there and pretend otherwise. He just says it plain, “I know what that cost.
” And he says it as a truth and not as a claim, and Earl Dawson hears the difference. Have you ever watched a man be offered $8 for the worst and bravest thing he ever did, and watched him take it without one word of complaint because he had run clean out of any other choice? It does something to a person standing there for that. It does not leave you.
Then Wayne does the thing the boy behind that counter will tell for the rest of his life. He reaches into his coat and takes out his billfold. He does not haggle. He does not make the famous man speech the boy is bracing for. He counts money onto the glass next to the cigar box, and it is not $8. He counts it out in hundreds, flat and unhurried, until there are eight of them on the glass.
“800.” Wayne says. “That’s closer to right.” And it’s still not enough. But he does not slide the money toward the boy and pick up the medal to keep. He lifts the Navy Cross out of the cigar box and holds it a moment in his open hand, the ribbon over his fingers. Then he turns and puts it back into Earl Dawson’s hand and closes the old man’s fingers down over it.
The way you give a man back a thing that was never the world’s to put a price on in the first place. “You hold onto that.” Wayne says. Earl tries to speak. “Mister, I can’t take. You already paid for it.” Wayne’s voice does not rise. “On the beach, long before that boy read it off a card.” He folds the $800 into the cigar box where the medal had been, on top of the citation, and shuts the lid down over it, and puts the box back in Earl’s hands with the medal.
“That’s not for the cross.” He says. “Money won’t buy that. That’s wages this country owes you and was too cheap to pay. Take it.” That is the whole of the speech. That is all of it. Earl Dawson stands there with the medal in one hand and the box in the other, and he cannot make his voice work. A man can stand a great deal.
He can stand the dry years and the empty tank and the letter from the bank and the long drive into town with the box on the seat beside him. What he cannot always stand is somebody seeing it. Somebody knowing the true weight of the thing >> [music] >> and refusing to let the world set it down at $8.
That is a different kind of weight, and it comes down on a man all at once. And Earl Dawson has to look at the worn plank floor of that trading post for a moment and get his breath before he can lift his head back up. But Wayne has heard the other thing, too. The thing the old man let slip back at the start before the metal, the bank, the note called in, the mules he cannot feed through the winter.
Outside, in the dirt lot, there is a young wrangler from the picture leaning on the fender of Wayne’s car, the man who drove him into town. Wayne goes out and talks to him low for a minute. He gets the name of the bank from the boy first and the name on Earl Dawson’s note. He writes it on the back of an envelope.
He hands the wrangler a roll of bills. He could have bought the metal and felt fine about his morning and driven back out to Old Tucson for the afternoon. He could have left the old man his $800 and his dignity and called it a finer thing than almost any man would have done and it would have been. But instead, he asked for the name of the bank and he sent the money down to settle the whole note before the week was out.
Quiet, in cash, with no name on it anywhere. The difference between those two things is the entire difference and Wayne knew it. And that is the why of the whole story. Two days later, the wrangler walks into a small town bank and pays off Earl Dawson’s note in full. $3,200 and the bank account at the feed store besides.
And when the man behind the cage asks who to make the receipt out to, the young fellow says to write it to a friend and he tips his hat and walks back out into the sun. Earl Dawson drives home to his 40 acres that same afternoon with $800 in a cigar box and his Navy Cross buttoned into his shirt pocket over his heart. He does not yet know the note is about to be gone.
He does not know the mules will eat that winter. That the dying ground will be his to live on and die on in his own time and nobody else’s. He only knows a stranger walked the length of a counter, knew the weight of the thing in his hands, gave it back to him, and called the two of them square. That alone would have been enough to carry a man a long way.
The rest of it he finds out later, in pieces from the bank, and he never does learn the whole of it, and he never does learn the name for certain. Earl Dawson lived another 14 years on that place. The rains came back the way they always come back to people stubborn enough to outlast a drought.
He ran a few head again. He kept the mules. He died in 1979 in his own bed on his own paid-for ground. And because there were no children, he left the 40 acres to the county and the cigar box to nobody in particular. And the Navy Cross went into a drawer in a lawyer’s office and might have stayed there forever. It is 2005 now.
